MORRISON, Toni

Born 18 February 1931, Loraine, Ohio

Daughter of George and Ramah Willis Wofford; married (divorced); children: two sons

The daughter of working-class parents, Toni Morrison reflects her Midwestern background in her novels. Educated at Howard and Cornell Universities, Morrison has taught at several universities including Harvard and Princeton, while pursuing both writing and editing. Morrison has been married and divorced and is the mother of two sons. In the 1980s, Morrison had been identified by some as the only contemporary black feminist American novelist.

Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), depicts the failed maturation of Pecola Breedlove, a black child of the 1940s who believes herself ugly as measured against white American standards of beauty. Pecola's symbol of beauty and acceptance is her intense desire for blue eyes; her search for them leads her into the hands of a charlatan sorcerer. The novel is set into two frames—the school primer, which provides misleading standards of family life, and the perceptions of Claudia MacTeer, Pecola's friend, who narrates the story. Morrison contrasts the two girls' families, providing detailed and powerful flashbacks into the histories of both Breedlove parents. The reader clearly understands that unloved, unvalued human beings cannot love wisely, for Pecola is raped by her father and hence driven into madness and total social isolation. Another important theme is the difficulty of life for Southern blacks who move north. Generally well received by critics, the novel was taken as indication of Morrison's power and potential as a writer.

In Sula (1973), Morrison explores the maturation and long friendship of Sula Peace and Nel Wright Greene, as well as the history and values of the Bottom, the black settlement in imaginary Medallion, Ohio. Sula and Nel are revealed as the products of their family backgrounds, and the book stresses the various mother-daughter relationships. Highly episodic and violent, Sula depicts a wide range of the girls' experiences—sexual awakening, black and female social roles, shared responsibility for a play-mate's death, an affair between Sub and Nel's husband—and reveals that, could their separate damaged personalities be merged, the result would be a balanced, effective woman. Thus, the real tragedy is identified when Nel realizes her greatest loss is the failure of her friendship with Sula.

Morrison's early novels are spare; two of her greatest stylistic successes are her use of foreshadowing (often connected with extensive nature symbolism) and her realistic dialogue. With Song of Solomon (1977), however, Morrison has made a conscious effort to "write it all out," and the result is a longer, more flowing novel. Song of Solomon retains some themes of Morrison's earlier works. The development and destruction of a friendship is again depicted, and again, the friends would be more nearly whole were they to share one another's traits. This is another maturation novel, and the central character—Macon "Milkman" Dead, Jr.—slowly learns to see himself not only as an individual but also as the product of his family history. The central image is Milkman's desire to fly, cleverly associated with both the maturation and family motifs. Flashbacks are used very successfully, allowing the reader to share the mystery and excitement of Macon's search for identity. The novel is panoramic, telling the stories of four generations through stunning characterization and the vivid portraits of two black communities.

In Song, as in all her work, Morrison's key theme is the effect of the presence or the absence of love, an examination of love as a liberating and nurturing (or destructive) force. In exploring various kinds of love, Morrison makes clear that the capacity for genuine love must be achieved through personal growth that includes evaluation, acceptance, or even rejection of learned patterns for loving.

As an editor, Morrison stresses high-quality writing and urges women to value their experiences enough to write effectively about them. In conceiving and editing The Black Book (by Middleton Harris, et al., 1974), Morrison has helped provide a journalistic, pictorial, personal "scrapbook" of black American life from its beginnings. Her dedication to this project is in keeping with her desire to produce—and help others produce—true, valid portraits of black Americans and their lives.

Widely considered the leading American novelist of the late 20th century, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, the first African-American woman to be thus honored. Her later novels extend Morrison's conscious effort, begun in Song of Solomon (1977), and expanded into a more discursive style. The resulting lyricism of Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), and Jazz (1992) has been widely praised. Though each of her novels has accumulated some mixed reviews, by far the majority have been very positive. Appearances of her recent titles on bestseller lists demonstrate public as well as critical admiration for her work.

Song of Solomon received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1978 and Beloved received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Beloved failed to win the National Book Award for that year although it was on the short list, prompting concern that Morrison was not receiving adequate recognition. In the 24 January 1988 issue of the New York Times Book Review, a group of black writers and critics published a "testament of thanks" to Morrison, believing her works have "advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as people." An accompanying piece by June Jordan and Houston A. Baker, Jr. suggested a parallel between Morrison's situation and that of James Baldwin, who was never nominated for the "keystones to the canon of American literature: the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize." Subsequently, when Beloved did win the Pulitzer Prize, the prize committee stressed that merit was the only standard upon which the award was granted. The controversy raised questions about the effect of racism on American life similar to the questions Morrison consistently addresses in her work.

Morrison's more recent novels extend the exploration of a key theme of her first works—the effect on the individual of the presence or the absence of love—just as they continue to examine relationships between parents and their children. From these perspectives, Morrison considers the impact of others' responses upon her characters' attitudes, emotions, and behavior. The sources of those responses are themselves crucially powerful subjects in her work, for almost all the problems that her protagonists confront stem from the racism so pervasive in American history and culture.

As Morrison brilliantly and painfully depicts it, racial injustice has not only poisoned relationships within the community but has also damaged individuals to the point that they may contribute to their own destruction. Only by confronting personal and social history and by considering—sometimes embracing—the magic, folklore, and myths that illuminate it can an individual empower themselves to face the future with more confidence than fear. Understanding eases the crippling pressure of self-blame, though sadly, not all of her characters have strength enough to achieve it.

Tar Baby, which reinvents the old tale of the fox and the rabbit, depicts intraracial as well as interracial conflict, here dramatized in the story of Jadine and Son—she beautiful, educated, nearly assimilated into the white culture, he angry, violent, at odds with her world. Passionate lovers, each is also a threat to and trap for the other. Morrison contrasts these lovers with a white couple, wealthy, "cultured" Valerian and Margaret Street, and with the Streets' butler, Sydney, and his wife.

Beloved, like Song of Solomon, is an especially powerful rendering of the control the past can exert over the present until an emotional exile achieves community with his or her own people. Based on a true story, Beloved depicts the life of Sethe, a slave who escaped to Cincinnati to find freedom for her children. When slave catchers close in, she succeeds in murdering one daughter, though three other children survive. Much later, in the guise of a grown woman, the dead daughter's ghost takes over Sethe's household, symbolizing the guilt and grief that have crippled her spirit. To survive, Sethe must come to believe what Paul D. tells her, that she is "her own best thing," as she finds her way through her surviving daughter, Denver, into the life of the community.

In Jazz, an unidentified first-person narrator recounts the story of Joe Trace, a middle-aged cosmetics peddler who murders his teenaged mistress, and of his wife, Violet, who attempts to deface the corpse in its coffin. The narrative style echoes a jazz performance, and the scene riffs fluidly from one time period to another. Though the community knows all about the murder and the attack upon the corpse, no one informs the authorities, and the Traces are left to confront one another, to acknowledge their deeds and misdeeds, and to attempt to repair their lives. More successful than Tar Baby, not so powerful as Beloved, Jazz is most effective in its bluesy evocation of New York in 1926.

By her vivid, telling depictions of African-American experience in various periods and settings, Morrison has cast new perspectives on the nation's past and even suggests—though she makes no promise—that people of strength and courage may be able to achieve a somewhat less destructive future. In a theoretical work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) she examines the impact of race, racism, and the Africanist presence on several works by prominent American writers. The book is a stimulating companion to Morrison's fiction.

Like all of Morrison's previous work, Paradise, her first post-Nobel novel, is an inquiry, and its title should be read with a question mark behind it. The familiar Morrison theme of human history—the relationship between past and present, the way history haunts—is revisited here as well, and ghosts are a given. Ruby, Oklahoma (established 1947, population 360), is based in history, literally and emotionally. The town is a transplanted rendition of another all-black community, Haven, established after the Civil War by Ruby's ancestors, former slaves. Morrison illustrates how history is both Ruby's source of strength and its fatal flaw. The history is permeated with anger and resentment springing from injustices, large and small, suffered by the ancestors at the hands of whites and light-skinned blacks. The towns-people are full of stories about these ancestors, "Testimonies to endurance, wit, skill and strength. Tales of luck and outrage," but there are no stories of themselves. In failing to move past the town's history, its leaders are paralyzed and unable to adapt to the turbulent societal changes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Critics strongly disagree on whether the novel's symbolism and sharply delineated dichotomies strengthen or weaken the book. Chief among the dichotomies is that of the town vs. the neighboring Convent. Built to be a crook's mansion and converted to a convent and boarding school for Arapaho girls, in its decrepitude it is a home for outcasts, injured women who stumble upon it, just as the Convent stumbles along the path of its own chaotic history; conversely, a history of instability requires that Ruby (that paradise) be orderly. Where there is discipline in Ruby, the Convent has strange new rituals. Ruby is engaged in denial; the Convent is a place of acceptance and healing. Where there is spiritual, carnal, and mystical love at the Convent, in Ruby the relationships between human beings and God, men and women, the elders and the youth, are curiously, tragically absent of love. And it is this lack of love—another career-long concern of Morrison's—that tears the town apart.

The town fathers don't recognize the source, but they see evidence everywhere of disintegration, and when a paradise based on isolation decays, blame must be cast outside the community. The women of the Convent are enemies because they are viewed as anarchists, the source of hellish disorder. The awful violence the men enact on these women ultimately indicts the idea of paradise, of the sort pictured here at least, a paradise whose inhabitants are the chosen people, a paranoid paradise of exclusion. Instead, Morrison suggests that the other half of the dichotomy, the inclusive, loving, history-healed Convent, has the potential to be a true earthly paradise.

In addition to her teaching duties at Princeton University, Morrison has continued to be active as an editor. She edited two volumes of James Baldwin's work as well as a collection of works by Toni Cade Bambara. In 1999 she published a children's book, Big Box, written with her son, Slade Morrison, and illustrated by Giselle Potter.

Bibliography:

Lee, D. H., "'The Quest for Self': Triumph and Failure in the Works of Toni Morrison" in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Witherspoon-Walthall, M. L., The Evolution of the Black Heroine in the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1988).

Reference works:

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia (1991). Black Writers (1989). CANR (1989). CLC (1982, 1989). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Handbook of American Women's History (1990). MTCW (1991). NBAW (1992). Negro Almanac (1989). SATA (1989). Who's Who of Writers, Editors and Poets (1989).

Other references:

American Literature (1981). Black American Literature Forum (1988). Christian Science Monitor (2 Jan. 1998). Critique (1977). Essence (Dec. 1976). MELUS (1991-92).

Modern Fiction Studies (1988). Nation (6 July 1974, 16 Jan. 1998). NY (23 Jan. 1971). NYT (11 Sept. 1994, 6 Jan. 1998). NYTBR (11 Jan. 1998). Salon (2 Feb. 1998). Southern Review (Winter 1999). Village Voice (27 Jan. 1998). WRB (Apr. 1998). WBPW (3 Feb. 1974). Marcus, J., "This Side of Paradise," www.amazon.com interview.

—JANE S. BAKERMAN,

UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN