Root Site: Anniina’s Toni Morrison Page

Sources
http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/toni.htm;
http://www.luminarium.org/contemporary/tonimorrison/beloved.htm
http://www.oprah.com/obc/pastbooks/toni_morrison/
http://www.black-collegian.com/african/painted-voices/tonim.shtm

The Columbia Encyclopedia
Toni Morrison, 1931–, American writer, b. Lorain, Ohio, as Chloe Anthony Wofford. Her fiction is noted for its spare poetic language, emotional intensity, and sensitive observation of life. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is the story of a girl ruined by a racist society and its violence. Song of Solomon (1977; National Book Award) established her as one of America’s leading novelists. It concerns a middle-class man who achieves self-knowledge through the discovery of his rural black heritage. Her later fiction includes Beloved (1987; Pulitzer), a powerful account of the legacy of slavery, and Jazz (1992), a tale of love and murder set in Harlem in the 1920s. Her other work includes the novels Sula (1973), Tar Baby (1981), and Paradise (1997), the essay collections Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power (1992) and Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), and a children’s book, The Big Box (2000), written with her son, Slade. Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. See studies by B. W. Jones (1985) and A. I. Vinson (1985); Conversations with Toni Morrison (1994). [http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/ A0834111.html] 

Oprah’s [Winfray] Books
The volume of critical and popular acclaim that has arisen around the work of Toni Morrison is virtually unparalleled in modern letters. Her six major novels - The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Sula, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz - have collected nearly every major literary prize. Ms. Morrison received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977 for Song of Solomon. In 1987, Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her body of work was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Other major awards include: the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the Pearl Buck Award (1994), the title of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters (Paris, 1994), and 1978 Distinguished Writer Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Ms. Morrison was appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the spring of 1989. Before coming to Princeton, she held teaching posts at Yale University, Bard College, and Rutgers University. In 1990 she delivered the Clark lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University. Ms. Morrison was also a senior editor at Random House for twenty years. She has degrees from Howard and Cornell Universities.

A host of colleges and universities have given honorary degrees to Ms. Morrison. Among them are Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Sarah Lawrence College, Dartmouth, Yale, Georgetown, Columbia University and Brown University. Ms. Morrison was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in 1992 to write lyrics “Honey and Me”, an original piece of music by Andre Previn. The lyrics were sung in performance by Kathleen Battle. In 1997, she wrote the lyrics for “Sweet Talk”, which was written by Richard Danielpour and performed in concert by Jessye Norman. Ms. Morrison lives in Princeton, New Jersey and upstate New York.

Toni Morrison has earned a reputation as a gifted storyteller whose troubled characters seek to find themselves and their cultural riches in a society that warps or impedes such essential growth. According to Charles Larson in the Chicago Tribune “Book World”, each of Morrison’s novels “is as original as anything that has appeared in our literature in the last 20 years. The contemporaneity that unites them — the troubling persistence of racism in America — is infused with an urgency that only a black writer can have about our society.”

Toni Morrison On Winning the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature: “I am outrageously happy. I heard the news early this morning from a colleague here at Princeton, and I am of course profoundly honored. But what is most wonderful for me, personally, is to know that the Prize at last has been awarded to an African-American. Winning as an American is very special-but winning as a Black American is a knockout. Most important, my mother is alive to share this delight with me.” [http://www.oprah.com/obc/pastbooks/toni_morrison/]

The Black Collegian
One of the most renowned black writers, Morrison enjoys acclaim in all literary circles. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, OH on February 18, 1931, Morrison is one of the United States most significant novelists of the twentieth century.

Morrison became textbook editor for a subsidiary of Random House in 1965, then in 1968, became the senior editor in the trade department of Random-a job she kept until 1983. In her position, Morrison was instrumental in getting the works of several young black writers published. 

In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Peace Prize for Poetry and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison’s fifth novel Beloved (1987), about the legacy of slavery, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988. 

Her most successful novel, Song of Solomon, written in 1977, sold 3 million copies and was on the New York Times best seller list for 16 weeks. The novel re-emerged on the best seller list in 1996 when it was chosen by Oprah Winfrey for inclusion in Oprah’s Book Club. [http://www.black-collegian.com/african/painted-voices/tonim.shtml] 

Reviews
After publishing four novels, Toni Morrison had already established herself as one of the most popular and successful black female writers of her time. With the publication of her fifth novel, Beloved, however, critics worldwide recognized that here was an author with a depth and brilliance that made her work universal. In this tale set in Reconstruction Ohio, Morrison paints a dark and powerful portrait of the dehumanizing effects of slavery. Inspired by an actual historical incident, Beloved tells the story of a woman haunted by the daughter she murdered rather than have returned to slavery. Part ghost story, part realistic narrative, the novel examines the mental and physical trauma caused by slavery as well as the lingering damage inflicted on its survivors. In prose both stark and lyrical, Morrison addresses several of her enduring themes: the importance of family and community, the quest for individual and cultural identity, and the very nature of humanity.

Although Beloved was hailed by many reviewers as a masterpiece when it first appeared in 1987, the novel inspired considerable controversy several months after its publication. After it failed to win either the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award, accusations of racism were leveled. Demonstrating their support of the author, forty-eight prominent black writers and critics signed a tribute to Morrison’s career and published it in the January 24, 1988 edition of the New York Times Book Review. Beloved subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the secretary of the jury addressed the issue by stating that it “would be unfortunate if anyone diluted the value of Toni Morrison’s achievement by suggesting that her prize rested on anything but merit.” Despite the controversy, few have contested the excellence of the novel, and Beloved remains one of the author’s most celebrated and analyzed works. As critic John Leonard concluded in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the novel “belongs on the highest shelf of American literature, even if half a dozen canonized white boys have to be elbowed off.... Without Beloved our imagination of the nation’s self has a hole in it big enough to die from.”

Articles
In Beloved, the capitalist, racial-caste system of American slavery operates by dismembering, both figuratively and literally, the body and spirit of the slave. The subjugated system of West African beliefs and practices, in which family members who have died are kept alive in memory and through ritual observances and in which nature is an aspect of the Divine,(3) continues in its claim upon kidnaped Africans and also reaches out to their enslaved descendants. The sites at which these two systems come into conflict are the sites at which black identities are formed, maintained, and transformed. (“Beloved: ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects” (African American Review, Spring, 1999, by Arlene R. Keizer) [http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2838/mag.jhtml]

Katy Ryan: “[On the slaveships, some Igbos] wished to die on the idea that they should then get back to their own country. The captain in order to obviate this idea, thought of an expedient viz. to cut off the heads of those who died intimating to them that if determined to go, they must return without heads. […]” (qtd. in Cowley and Mannix 108). Despite the number of self-inflicted deaths in Toni Morrison’s novels and the fact that she wrote her master’s thesis on alienation and suicide in William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, there has been little critical attention given to the repetition of self-destruction in her own work. [3] In Beloved (1988), a woman jumps overboard during the Middle Passage; in Jazz (1992), Violet’s mother, Rose Dear, climbs into a well, drowning herself in 1892; in Sula (1973), the shell-shocked veteran Shadrack institutes National Suicide Day on 3 January 1920; on the opening page of Song of Solomon (1977), Robert Smith leaps from the top of Mercy Hospital on 18 February 1931; in The Bluest Eye (1970), Pecola Breedlove wills self-disappearance through a longing to possess the eyes of another face (”’Please God . . . Please make me disappear’” [59]). These bodies do not tell a history of capitulation to dominant powers but comprise one part of a larger multivalent narrative of black survival in North America. The act of self -destruction overtly participates in racial and class struggles, revealing, to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault, “a body totally imprinted by history” (148). (‘Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.’

Peggy Ochua - quotes Bible: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” (Song of Solomon, 6:3). “I AM BELOVED and she is mine.” (Toni Morrison, Beloved). “... love is as strong as death; jealousy is as cruel as the grave; ... many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it” (Song of Solomon, 8:6-7)

‘At least three recent critical works recognize Toni Morrison’s reference to and revision of Biblical passages in her 1987 novel Beloved.(1) To date, however, no one has mentioned the most developed of her Scriptural allusions, namely her revisionist narration involving Old Testament texts, especially the Song of Solomon. Although Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, drew upon a Biblical passage for the title to her 1977 novel Song of Solomon, she waited for ten years to develop, in Beloved, the deeper implications of a reference to Solomon’s Song. Allusions to this most poignant and erotic passage of the Old Testament not only inform the relationships between Morrison’s characters, but also contribute to her consideration of the relationship between black and white communities in the mid-nineteenth century United States. I will argue that Morrison’s allegorical revision of the Song of Solomon and other Biblical passages constitutes what Stephen A. Barney, in Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, terms “other-speech,” a type of minority discourse related to, but not symptomatic of, the dynamics of religious and/or cultural “othering.”

As Said observes in Orientalism, “Since the White Man, like the Orientalist, lived very close to the line of tension keeping the coloreds at bay, he felt it incumbent on him readily to define and redefine the domain he surveyed” (228). In keeping with this dominating strategy, the white slaveholder “schoolteacher” in Morrison’s Beloved instructs his nephews to study the black slaves on the ironically named Sweet Home plantation in order to catalog their “animal” and “human” characteristics. Moreover, he severely beats Sixo, a slave who dares to challenge the slaveholder’s authority, not so much for stealing and eating a pig, but more “to show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined” (190) (“Morrison’s Beloved: Allegorically Othering “White” Christianity”.)

Kimberley Chavot Davis: I do not seek simply to join the fray of critics who unequivocally claim Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved for one side or the other (postmodernist or “antipostmodernist” social protest) while leaving the text’s ambiguities and ambivalences unexplored. Deborah McDowell argues that the theory/practice hierarchy equates theory with men and marginalizes black women to the realm of social protest, and she calls for a “counterhistory . . . [that] would bring theory and practice into a productive tension that would force a reevaluation of each side” (256). I am attempting here to enact that counterhistory, to investigate how Morrison’s fiction speaks to postmodern theory and, more importantly, allows us to reevaluate this discourse. I do not aim to measure Beloved against the authority of postmodern theorists, but rather to examine how each has represented the spectre of history differently, and to suggest the difference that race can make […] (Kimberley Chavot Davis, “Postmodern blackness”: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the end of history.’,  20th C. Literature, Summer 1998.)

ENG312C2 - University of Ulster