Toni Morrison: On Gender and Race
The status of women in the society has been dramatically evolving (Loutfi, 2001). This change is brought about by the increasing awareness in gender equality and gender sensitivity and the feminist movement. However, despite regulations that attempt to promote gender equality in the American society, discrimination against women is still prevalent.
Alongside women, racial minorities are also struggling for equality and justice. Although overt manifestations of racism today would be unacceptable to the majority of US citizens, the country is still struggling with ongoing racial and ethnic divisions. Major steps taken over the past 50 years to end institutionalized racism have not eliminated the inequalities which many members of racial minorities continue to face in daily life.
With this issues, artists play an important role in advancing women’s and racial minorities’ causes. Artists should manifest in their art forms the need of oppressed groups. Social realist arts such that of mural paintings by Diego Rivera, music by U2, and performances of feminists have sparked revolution in different levels. In literature, issues in society have been tackled by authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
In this essay, I will discuss a novelist’s take on feminism and racial discrimination. Toni Morrison has been championing the causes of women and African-American through her novels such as the “Beloved”
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wolford, the second of four children, in 1931 in Lorain, OH. In 1949 she left home to attend Howard University, where she was quickly disappointed by the overwhelming lack of middle-class morals. Coming from a working-class family she was surprised to learn that students were more interested in the social aspects of college rather than education. Although a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Morrison stayed focused on her studies and became interested in theater. She then joined a drama group, the Howard University Players.
She received her B.A. degree from Howard University in 1953 and her M.A. from Cornell University in 1955. She taught English at Texas Southern and Howard Universities. She is currently the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University. She is author of seven novels and five critical works. Her first novel, the Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Her most recent novel, Paradise (1998), hit the market with rave reviews.
Toni Morrison is the first African American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, the highest honor that a writer can receive in the world. She won the 1988 Pulitzer for fiction for Beloved (1987) and the 1978 National Critics’ Circle Award for Song of Solomon (1977). Morrison was the first African American women to appear on the cover of Newsweek (Peach, 1995). According to Gates & Appiah (1993), she has single handedly invented her own mode of literary representation that sets her apart and guarantees her a significant place in history.
As a single working mother, Morrison found little time for socializing or making friends. It was out of a need for companionship that she joined a creative writing group. As she united with other people who shared her interests she was able to weekly escape the loneliness resulting divorce (Hedge, 2003).
Her books resonate with her passion and commitment to racial dignity and equality, but also with her immersion in a fictional world unlike any other (Bartelme, 1998). She gives vivid expression to black bitterness, while at the same time subjecting certain middle-class aspirations based on white achievements to a subtle critique. Morrison understands the suffering, the mythology and religion of the black community in a way that few writers do and allows her great gifts to illuminate them. Even her ghosts seem alive and lively.
There are many great and well-known writers, but few take the art form to the level of leadership. Toni Morrison has taken on the task of leading a renaissance of African-American writing (Gates & Appiah, 1993). She has written more novels to date than any other African-American women writer (Peach, 1995). Peach further states that “Morrison’s innovative novels are not simply reactions to or inversions of European models, but, because of their African-American origins, attempt to pursue subjects and narrative possibilities which had not been previously realized in fiction” (p. 2). Furman (1996) adds that “Instead, her novels are instruments for transmitting cultural knowledge, filling a void once occupied by storytelling” (p.4).
In real-life and in her novels, Morrison challenges the stereotypical, conventional perceptions not only of black culture but of black people. Her fiction requires her to think about being free as an African-American women in a racialized world instead of being on the margins of the literary canon (Peach, 1995). Taking on this perspective, she virtually turned white criticism of American literature on its head (Peach, 1995).
Morrison is creative, successful, talented and most of all an influential writer. She meets and exceeds an important criterion for a successful writer, an audience that is pleased and satisfied with her work. Morrison uses her art form as a tool for feminism and against racial discrimination by reaching beyond the boundaries of literature or literary critics. Morrison’s leadership story is the restoration of the language that black people spoke to its original power (LeClair, 1993). Her cause reaches into other domains and into the hearts of people.
Morrison has taken the lead in literature and is leading a cause beyond her art. Morrison, unabashedly in her novels, writes about the persistence of racism in America. In keeping with the idea of Morrison as an artistic leader, Harris (1991) suggests that Morrison is a writer who consistently surprises us in the reconceptualization and restructuring of literary folklore. Her writing is taken seriously by people in and out of the field of literature. Black American life has been at the center of all of her novels and she speaks and lectures on issues and concerns about the black experience routinely.
Her cause or the story she articulates is about the restoration of the language that black people spoke to its original power. She states that her cause is the result of the loss of black oral traditions and appropriation of black music by the dominant culture (Peach, 1995). An interview with LeClair and McCaffery (1983) presents her opinion about why she writes what she writes.
“I am not explaining anything to anybody. My work bears witness and suggests who the outlaws were, who survived under what circumstances and why, what was legal in the community as opposed to what was legal outside it. All that is in the fabric of the story in order to do what the music used to do. My people are being devoured. Whenever I feel uneasy about my writing, I think: what would be the response of the people in the book if they read my book? That’s my way of staying on track. Those are the people for whom I write” (p.254).
Her lecture and speech of acceptance upon the award of the 1993 Nobel Prize raised the cause to another level as she used the language to express the black experience (Morrison, 1993). She immersed members of the Swedish Academy, using story, into the world of an old women depicted by Morrison as a daughter of slaves, black, blind and American. The story she weaves for the academy was a story for all humankind (Murray, 1999).
Toni Morrison is in the midst of a more than fulfilling career as a master novelist: notables from Ralph Ellison to Angela Davis have been champions of her work declaring her one of the best writers ever (Hedge, 2003). Morrison’s works are laced with traces of feminism and compassion for African-American.
Reading a Toni Morrison is like reading a history of a nation of people who have shaped the body of America since their exodus from Africa. Here, a reader is confronted with a painfully brilliant light. Painful because of the reality that American society still does not free itself of gender and racial discrimination. However, reading a Morrison provides a brilliant light because of the reader is given an optimistic future. From this point, the reader can either squint, shut the book and remain ignorant, or the reader can step into this light and become educated like never before.
References
Barteleme, E. (1998). Fantastical and true. Commonwealth, Vol. 125, October 9.
Furman, J. (1996). Toni Morrison’s fiction. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Gates, L. H. & Appiah, K. A. (1993). Toni Morrison: Critical perspectives past and present. New York: Amistad Press.
Harris, T. (1991). Fiction and folklore: The novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press.
Hedge, H. (2003). Toni Morrison. Available at [http://www.empirezine.com]. Accessed [11/12/03].
LeClair, T. (1993). The language must not sweat: A conversation with Toni Morrison. In L. H. Gates & K. A. Appiah (Eds.), Toni Morrison: Critical perspectives past and present, pp. 369-377. New York: Amistad Press.
______ (1983). Anything can happen. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Morrison, T. (1993). Toni Morrison: The Nobel lecture in literature. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Murray, G. J. (1999). Courage to Create and Courage to Lead A Case Study of Artistic Leader Toni Morrison. Journal of Leadership Studies.
Peach, L. (1995). Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
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