TONI MORRISON (1931- )
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Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; a famous American novelist, editor, and professor
Recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature (Beloved) and 1988 Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction (Beloved) and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, plus multiple honorary
degrees and other awards
Growing Up:
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“I went to school with white children—they were my friends. There was no awe, no fear. Only later, when things
got … sexual…did I see how clear the lines really were. But when I was in the first grade, nobody thought I was
inferior. I was the only black in the class and the only child who could read!”
Morrison was the middle child between an older sister and two younger brothers. This led to her anonymity as a
child. She read the masterpieces of European literature and loved the great Russian novelists Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy, and the English writer Jane Austen.
o “Those books were not written for a little black girl in Lorrain, Ohio, but they were so magnificently done
that I got them anyway—they spoke directly to me out of their own specificity.”
Supernatural Influences: “As a child I was brought up on ghost stories” – her grandfather told ghost stories and
her grandmother kept a dream book
Grandfather was an ex-slave who lost 88 acres of land in Alabama to an iniquitous white “southern gentleman”;
grandmother fled the South with seven children and no money to save daughters from acts of white sexual
violence. Her father “felt he was justified in despising all whites” but her mother was a hopeful integrationist
Education:
 Attended Howard University in the 1950s, a historically black college known as “the capstone of Negro education”
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Black literary consciousness was virtually nonexistent at the time, and great African-American writers like
Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston weren’t even part of the curriculum
She wanted to study black authors but wasn’t allowed; she was persuaded to write her thesis on the 20thcentury modernists William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf
Writing Career:
 After the failure of her eight-year marriage, she began editing books at Random House in NY. She only had time
for work and taking care of her two children as a single mom—“I had no perspective, no power, no authority, no
self—just this brutal sense of irony, melancholy and a trembling respect for words.”
 She had written a short story in 1962 (when she was 30) about a little black girl who wished for blue eyes. She
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rediscovered it eight years later and developed it into her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), at the age of 39.
Since then, she has published many other highly acclaimed works: Sula, Song of Solomon, Jazz, Paradise, and
most recently, Home (2012) and God Help the Child (2015)
She criticizes white literature, especially in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992).
She states usually black characters aren’t fully developed and are only used to make the white story more clear
Beloved- Definitely her “swan song” novel
 More grotesque and less melodramatic than Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other slave narratives
 Addresses “World War II for 200 years” (i.e., the institution of slavery)
 Felt that before writing this novel, works about slavery were too wide and shallow- she couldn’t get close to them
 Never felt she had the emotional resources to write about slavery until she learned about the story of Margaret
Garner
 Opted not to focus on the physical brutality as much as the heart of the story within the slaves themselves
 Not concerned with white moral consciousness; for instance, Amy Denver is only present to further Sethe’s story
Techniques Used By Toni Morrison, Holy
“I allow the reader to come in and to experience, to work with me in the telling of the story. Black literature is
open-ended and participatory. It was a measure of my ability to make this kind of contact with the reader.” ---Toni Morrison
Morrison’s formidable technical ability as a writer that is largely responsible for the power of her novels and the way she
is able to engage the reader. Below are some of the techniques and strategies she uses in Beloved:
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Flashbacks/Fragmented Narration
o Sethe’s “rememory” of learning from Nan about her name (63)
o Paul D’s recollection of the last times he saw Halle and Sixo
o Baby Suggs’ time at Sweet Home and her coming to Ohio
Gradual revelation and layering of key events (Beloved’s death and Denver’s birth)
Multiple and shifting points of view
o Beloved’s death seen from the perspectives of a) Stamp Paid b) the slave catcher, the school teacher,
the nephew, and the sheriff (148-153), and Sethe
o The juxtopositioning of the three soliloquies by Sethe, Denver, and Beloved (200-14), the culmination of
which is a very impressionistic trialogue (which is probably at least in part unspoken) on pages 215-217
Stream-of-consciousness (pp. 201-13)
Juxtaposition of verifiable historical details about post-Civil War Cincinnati blacks with supernatural elements
Beloved’s haunting of 124, her return from the river, and her subsequent acts of control
Vivid narration, with emphasis on verbs and nouns
Use of catalogues and lists (very much in the African-American oratorical tradition found in sermon)
Repetition of both words, phrases, and actions/events
Image patterns and symbols
o “The Bit” and other metal restraints such as hooks, collars, and mouthpieces were all physical
obscenities; painful but also inhumane; treating slaves like animals. It stopped them from talking—
silence, no language, no articulation. Attempting to physically and spiritually destroy them—the essence
of the slavery institution
o Milk- The ultimate violation where they drink her milk; Halle can’t even watch it, yet Sethe’s strong
enough to endure it.
 The driving force for Sethe getting across to her kids on the other side of the river. Her babies
aren’t going to suffer as she did.
 P. 152- Denver drinks Beloved’s blood with her mother’s milk
o (the bit, blood, heat, animals, tree, water, milk, food, song and dance, and of course, Beloved herself)
Similes
o “The red hot sun dried Sethe’s dress, stiff, like rigor mortis” (153)
Metaphors
o “Roses of blood blossomed in the blanket covering Sethe’s shoulders” (93)
“Bits and pieces [of the past] leak out between the closed eyelids of her characters, or between their clenched
fingers. She twists and tortures and fractures events until they are little slivers that cut. She moves the lurid
material of melodrama into the minds of her people until it gets sifted and sorted, lived and relived, until it
acquires the enlarging outlines of myth and trauma, dream and obsession.”
Ann Snitow
“Memory is so oppressive for the novel’s characters that stifling it is a means of survival. The splintered
piecemeal revelation of the past is one of the technical wonders of Morrison’s narrative. We gradually
understand that this isn’t tricky storytelling but the intricate exploration of trauma.”
Walter Clemons