Toni morrison contemporary critical essays

Retrieved Sep 16 from https: This New Casebook features eleven critical essays on the novels of Toni Morrison. Peach briefly yet clearly explains the origin and layers of sub-theories within each critical school.

She shows how the individual who defies social pressures can forge a self by drawing on the resources of the natural world, on a sense of continuity within the family and within the history of a people, and on dreams and other unaccountable sources of psychic power. Many of her works also confront some sort of sexual depravity that has become a controlling influence on the lives of the characters.

In the novel, the most extreme victim of these destructive ideas is Pecola, a young African American girl who finds refuge in madness after she has been thoroughly convinced of her own ugliness confirmed when she is raped by her own father, Cholly.

When she realizes the impassable gap between that ideal and her physical self she has a deformed foot and two missing teethshe also gives up any hope of maintaining a relationship with Cholly, her husband, except one of complete antagonism and opposition. Breedlove even comes to prefer the little white girl she takes care of Toni morrison contemporary critical essays work to her own daughter, Pecola, whom she has always perceived as ugly.

The ideal of unattainable physical beauty is reinforced by the sugary, unattainable world of the family depicted in school readers—of Mother and Father and Dick and Jane and their middle-class, suburban existence. The contrast between that false standard of life and the reality lived by the African American children in the novel makes them ashamed of their reality, of the physical intimacy of families in which the children have seen their fathers naked.

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison

Although Pecola is thoroughly victimized, Freida and Claudia MacTeer, schoolmates of Pecola, do survive with some integrity and richness. Freida seems to accept Shirley Temple as the ideal of cuteness, but her sister Claudia, a center of consciousness in the novel, responds with anger and defiance, dismembering the hard, cold, smirking baby dolls she receives at Christmas.

What Claudia really desires at Christmas is simply an experience of family closeness in the kitchen, an experience of flowers, fruit, and music, of security. Instead, the springs of human sympathy have been dammed up by social disapproval. Suffering from the self-hatred they have absorbed from the society around them, the members of the black community maintain inflexible social standards and achieve respectability by looking down on Pecola.

The two MacTeer sisters appeal to nature to help Pecola and her unborn baby, but nature fails them just as prayer did: No marigolds sprout and grow that year. The earth is unyielding. The baby is stillborn. Eventually, even the two girls become distanced from Pecola, whose only friend is an imaginary one, a part of herself who can see the blue eyes she was promised.

What finally flowers in Claudia is insight and a more conscious respect for her own reality. In a bitterly ironic twist, the whites take over the hillside again when they want suburban houses that will catch the breeze. In taking back the Bottom, they destroy a place, a community with its own identity.

In turn, the black community, corrupted by white society, rejects Sula for her experimenting with her life, for trying to live free like a man instead of accepting the restrictions of the traditional female role. Sula provokes the reader to question socially accepted concepts of good and evil.

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Despite her death, Sula maintains an independence that ultimately stands in proud opposition to the established network of relationships that exists within conventional society.

The novel shows that the Bottom society encompasses both good and evil. The people are accustomed to suffering and enduring evil. The community, nevertheless, cannot encompass Sula, a woman who thinks for herself without conforming to their sensibilities.

Without the witch, their goodness grows faint again.

Like Pecola, Sula is made a scapegoat. Growing up in the Bottom, Sula creates an identity for herself, first from the reality of physical experience. When she sees her mother, Hannah, burning up in front of her eyes, she feels curiosity.

Hearing her mother reject her individuality, Sula concludes that she has no one to count on except herself. In forging a self, Sula also draws on sexual experience as a means of feeling both joy and sadness and as a means of feeling her own power. Sula does not substitute a romantic dream for the reality of that physical experience.

She does finally desire a widening of that sexual experience into a continuing relationship with Ajax, but the role of nurturing and possession is fatal to her. Ajax leaves, and Sula sickens and dies. A closeness to the elemental processes of nature gives a depth to the lives of the Bottom-dwellers, although nature does not act with benevolence or even with consistency.

Chicken Little and several of those who follow Shadrack on National Suicide Day drown because acts of play go wrong and inexplicably lead to their destruction.

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The people of the Bottom live within nature and try to make some sense of it, even though their constructions are strained and self-serving. On one level, Sula refuses any connection with history and family continuity. Her grandmother Eva says that Sula should get a man and make babies, but Sula says that she would rather make herself.

On the other hand, Sula is a descendant of the independent women Eva and Hannah, both of whom did what they had to do. It is at least rumored that Eva let her leg be cut off by a train so that she could get insurance money to take care of her three children when BoyBoy, her husband, abandoned her.Race and Ethnicity in Social Sciences - Use of the Terms "Race" and "Ethnicity" in the Social Sciences Defining identity can be complex and therefore we have to investigate the factors involved that make us who we are and how we are seen by others, collectively or individually.

Essays and criticism on Toni Morrison - Critical Essays. Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or.

initiativeblog.com provides links and source material related to The Souls of Black Folk written by the African American activist, writer, and scholar: William Edward Burghardt DuBois. The research is conducted and arranged by Dr.

Robert initiativeblog.comms. Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, – December 9, ), was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor. Critical Essays Beloved and Its Forerunners Bookmark this page Manage My Reading List An offshoot of the universal literary tree, Toni Morrison — for all her feminism and her historical, cultural, and social background — shares much with the white male writers who have also delineated journeys of the spirit.