Since the publication of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, Morrison has earned increasing critical and popular acclaim. Her works are taught in courses on the novel as well as in African American literature courses, and she is a sought after commentator not only on racial issues but on American arts and culture in general. She is held in high esteem by her peers, the reading public, and critics alike.
Paradoxically, Morrison attributes the breadth of her vision to the precision of her focus. Each of her novels highlights the struggles of black people to rediscover and maintain connections to their cultural history and mythology to their ‘ancestors,’ as she put it in an essay entitled ‘Rootedness : The Ancestor as Foundation’. Morrison envisions her literature of suffering and survival functioning as did the oral storytelling of the past, reminding members of the community of their heritage and defining their roles.
Morrison has fostered these ends by teaching such courses as African American literature and techniques of fiction at various colleges and universities, as well as by using her position as a senior editor at Random House to publish other black authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, Angela Davis, and Henry Dumas. Through her teaching and editing, therefore, as well as her own writing, she has exerted unparalleled influence in the African American literary renaissance of the past several decades.
Morrison’s early life was steeped in the black folklore, music, language, myth, and history that now richly texture her fiction. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, she grew up during the Depression in the small steel-mill town of Lorain, Ohio, on Lake Erie. Her maternal grandparents, Ardelia and John Solomon Willis, had been sharecroppers in Alabama until they migrated north in 1912 to Kentucky, where John Solomon, a violinist, worked in a coal mine. Ardelia took in washing. When they discovered, however, that their daughters knew more mathematics than the one-room school-house teacher, they determined that they must move again. Continuing north, they settled in Lorain.
Morrison’s parents displayed the same resourcefulness, pride, and creativity that her grandparents had. Her father, George Wofford, was a shipyard welder who took such intense pride in his work that he would write his name in the side of a ship whenever he welded a perfect seam. A tireless worker, he held three jobs simultaneously for 17 years. Morrison’s mother, Ramah Wofford, dealt diplomatically with white bill collectors, and once when the meal the family received on relief was bug-ridden, she wrote a long letter of protest to then-U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
George and Ramah thrilled their four children with ghost stories and nourished their pride with stories of black ingenuity. In an essay in the bicentennial issue of the New York Times titled ‘Rediscovering Black History,’ Morrison captured one such instance: “Oh Mama,’ I cried, “everybody in the world must have had sense enough to wrap his feet.’ I am telling you,’ she replied, “a Negro invented shoes.” Morrison’s mother sang around the house and in the church choir, and her grandmother kept a dream book by which she played the numbers. Not surprisingly, Morrison characteristically juxtaposes riveting realism in her novels with what she calls forms of knowledge ‘discredited’ by the West: lore, gossip, magic, sentiment. Many critics agree that both the searing accuracy of her portrayals of black life in America and the fabulistic qualities for which her work has been praised clearly derive from Morrison’s own life experiences in a family of storytellers.
Morrison’s appetite for stories led her to read voraciously as a child and adolescent. When she entered the first grade she was the only black child in her class and the only child who could already read. Before she graduated with honors from Lorain High School, she had read widely among the great Nineteenth-century Russian novels and such other European classics as Madame Bovary and the works of Jane Austen. She has cited these novels as particular influences on her, justifying the cultural specificity of her own work with reference to them. These classics, Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Susan Blake quoted her as saying, “were not written for a little black girl …but they were so magnificently done that I got them anyway-they spoke directly to me.” She expanded on this comment in an interview with Walter Clemons for Newsweek: “When I write, I don’t translate for white readers….Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we’re able to read him. If I’m specific, and I don’t over explain, then anyone can overhear me.”
Morrison attended Howard University as an undergraduate, majoring in English and minoring in the classics. At Howard she changed her name to Toni because people consistently mispronounced Chloe. Howard disappointed her in many ways; she found the social life there shallow: “It was about getting married, buying clothes, and going to parties,” she related, as quoted by Blake. In the summers, Morrison traveled with the Howard University Players, a student-faculty repertory troupe that took plays on tour in the South. These tours, Blake suggested, “provided a geographical and historical focus for the sense of cultural identity her parents had instilled in her. “
After graduating from Howard, Morrison spent two years at Cornell University earning a Master’s degree in English. She wrote a thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and then went on to teach English for two years at Texas Southern University. Morrison began to write when she drifted into a writers’ group after returning to Howard in 1957 to teach English. The only rule governing this group was that everyone had to bring something to read. In a conversation with fellow African American novelist Gloria Naylor published in Southern Review, Morrison explained that when she had run out of “old junk from high school” to bring along, she wrote a short story about a little black girl who wanted blue eyes. Out of this story she developed her first novel, The Bluest Eye, a novel that Naylor credits with having inspired her to begin writing seriously.
At Howard, Morrison met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architectural student. Though she speaks very little about this difficult period in her life, she has said that the marriage suffered because of cultural differences between them, and eventually it ended in divorce. In the early 1960s, Morrison returned with her two young sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin, to her parents’ home in Lorain. After about a year and a half, she found an editing job with a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse. It was there, each night after her children were asleep, that she returned to her short story and developed it into a novel. Though it was rejected many times, Morrison eventually found an editor who read an unfinished version of The Bluest Eye and encouraged her to complete it. In 1970, Holt, Rinehart and Winston published the novel.
The plot of The Bluest Eye is as simple as its implications are staggering. Morrison illuminates the multiple levels of victimization at work in brutally racist and sexist American society by placing at the story’s center the quietly tragic figure of Pecola Breedlove, a little black girl on the verge of adolescence, who desperately wants to be loved. Barraged on all sides-from the movies, from teachers at school, from her own family-with the message that the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned appearance of Shirley Temple is beautiful, she concludes that the reason she is ridiculed and hated is that she is black and therefore ugly. Violated over and over by other characters reacting to their own victimisations, Pecola finally retreats into insanity, believing that she is the most beloved little girl of all because she has the bluest eyes of all.
The Bluest Eye received a moderate amount of attention, for the most part appreciative. The very features of Morrison’s writing that some critics selected for praise prompted negative criticism from other reviewers, and such divergence has been a hallmark of Morrison criticism ever since. For instance, though Frankell Haskell in the New York Times Book Review objected to a “fuzziness born of flights of poetic imagery” and a lack of focus in the novel, Phyllis R. Klotman praised its “lyrical yet precise” language in Black American Literature Forum.
Later in the 1960s, Morrison moved to a senior editorial position at Random House in New York City. She began to contribute articles and reviews to various journals, most notably the New York Times. At the same time she was writing her second novel, Sula, which was published in December of 1973. “I always thought of Sula,” Morrison said in an article in the Michigan Quarterly Review,”as …new world black and new world woman….Daring, disruptive, imaginative, modern, out-of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing, uncontained and uncontainable.”
Sula explores the life and death of a black community called The Bottom in the town of Medallion, Ohio, by focusing on the friendship from childhood between two very different women, Sula Peace and Nel Wright. Nel grows up to marry, have children, and otherwise conform to all that society and her community expects of her. Sula, on the other hand, embarks on what the narrator terms an “experimental life.” She becomes a pariah, defining by her rebellious violations the boundaries and social codes of the community: “Their conviction of Sula’s evil,” the narrator tells us, “make[s] the townspeople their best selves.”
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Morrison speaks of Nel and Sula as two halves of one person; the ideal, she told Bill Moyers on a segment of his PBS television show World of Ideas, would be “a Sula with some responsibilities. “Nevertheless, Morrison will not allow her readers to rest comfortably in any particular moral stance toward the events or characters in Sula: we wonder whether to admire Sula’s grandmother Eva’s bravery in allowing her leg to be cut off by a train in order to collect insurance money to feed her children, or instead to be repulsed by such self-mutilation, just as we vacillate on whether to celebrate Sula’s autonomy or to deplore her selfishness.
Sula garnered more attention than had The Bluest Eye and was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction. Sara Blackburn’s review in the New York Times Book Review caused a minor controversy because it suggested first that the novel lacked “the stinging immediacy” of Morrison’s nonfiction and then that “Toni Morrison is far too talented to remain only a marvelous recorder of the black side of provincial American life.” But Blackburn stood virtually alone in her impression that Morrison’s novel was limited by its focus on a black community.
Faith Davis’s review in the Harvard Advocate was more nearly representative in its assessment that Sula has the capacity to touch all readers: “Her citizens of the Bottom jump up from the pages vital and strong because she has made us care about the pain in their lives.”
In February of 1974, Random House published The Black Book, a volume compiled by Middleton Harris and edited by Morrison. In “Rediscovering Black History,” Morrison explains that she hopes that The Black Book, a scrapbook of 300 years of black life in America, will enable blacks to “recognize and rescue those qualities of resistance, excellence, and integrity that were so much a part of our past and so useful to us and to the generations of blacks now growing up.” Amid the photographs, patents, newspaper clippings, advertisements, recipes, etc. that make up the book, Morrison found verification of the stories of black achievement-despite slavery, racism, and sexism-that her parents and grandparents had told her when she was growing up: “I felt a renewal of pride I had not felt since 1941, when my parents told me stories of blacks who had invented airplanes, electricity, and shoes….And there it was among Spike Harris’s collection of patents: the overshoe. The airplane was also there as an airship registered in 1900 by John Pickering.” Once again, Morrison had discovered a sustaining connection between her family history and habit of storytelling, black history, and her own sense of identity.
Appropriately, Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon, charts a similar discovery. Milkman Dead sets out on a trek down south from his home in Ohio in hopes of recovering lost family treasure. What he finds is not gold, however, but the spiritual wealth of his rich family history. For Milkman, the journey becomes not only one from ignorance to knowledge, but also from selfish materialism and immaturity to joy, love, and selfless commitment to community. Morrison casts the narrative in the familiar mythological pattern of the Odyssey and specifically invokes an African American folktale about a group of African-born slaves who rise up from the plantation and fly back home across the ocean. At the end of the novel, Milkman has clearly freed himself from the confinements of materialism and entered into the realm of possibility, but whether or not he will survive his leap into that unknown remains unresolved.
Song of Solomon secured Morrison’s place as a major writer of American fiction. A critical and commercial success, it became a paperback bestseller and in 1978 won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Those critics who had reservations about the novel generally felt that Morrison failed to integrate believably the realistic with the mythic elements. Vivian Gamick wrote in the Village Voice: “At a certain point one begins to feel a manipulative ness in the book’s structure, and then to sense that the characters are moving to fulfill the requirements of that structure.” Other critics discerned, however, that in Song of Solomon Morrison extended her primary themes across a much broader spectrum of subject matter than she had previously dealt with. Song of Solomon sweeps out from one man’s quest for self-discovery to encompass his entire family history-becoming, as Claudia Tate put it in Black Women Writers at Work,” a kind of cultural epic by which black people can recall their often obscured slave heritage.” Reynolds Price summed up this evolution in the New York Times Book Review: “Here the depths of the younger work are still evident, but now they thrust outward, into wider fields, for longer intervals, encompassing many more lives.”
