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Chapter IV

Feminism and ToniMorrison

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Chapter- IV

Feminism and Toni MorrisonFeminism is a collection of social, political movements, and moral

philosophies largely motivated by or concerned with the liberation of women.

In simple terms, feminism is the belief in social, political and economic

equality of the sexes, and a movement organized around the belief that gender

should not be the pre-determinant factor shaping a person’s social identity or

socio-political or economic rights. It involves the numerous and frequently

normative meanings given to sexual difference by various cultures and

societies. It is not just a biologically based category. Furthermore, sex/gender

systems differ cross-culturally. It is a key structural principle. Therefore,

supporters of feminism squabble with that gender is a crucial category of

analysis. It is a radical notion that women are human beings. It, as a movement,

is about women living on equal terms with men. It is not revealing and

critiquing biases. It is a serious attempt to understand beliefs and practices

from the viewpoint of the women and other marginalized groups. Feminists

consider that existing disparities must be removed between dominant and

marginalized groups. Feminism is a term put in practice to cover ideas and

theories well beyond what many consider to be the ‘bra burning’ ideals often

publicized feminists of the 1960’s and 70’s. It can, in point of fact, be broken

down into three very distinct theories: Feminism, Post-Feminism and Queer

Theory.

Feminism is well known of the notion that women have been excluded,

suppressed and exploited. This criticism is feminism in its major sense. Apart

from this, it deals with all of the political and social implications of sexual

repression. It also throws light on how sexuality is dealt with in all vicinities of

culture. It also lays a hand on masculine roles and sexuality, and embraces it in

its sense of what delineates oppression.

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In the American literature, and particularly in the Black literature,

feminism and racism have played crucial roles. Both these isms perform

massive role in their lives. In fact, writers of African American literature would

base the events that were taking place in the world around them and

incorporate them into their novels. This is the strong and dominant voice in

their literature. Of course, there are many reasons that the treatment of African

Americans in America was filled with brutality and hate. However, they have

also suffered by the attempts of white slave owners to try and erase not only the

history of African Americans, but their heritage as well.

They had to work; and according to the aesthetics of

this country, they were not beautiful. But neither were

they men. Any aggressiveness or intelligence on their

part, qualities necessary for participation in the work

world, were constructed as unwomanly and tasteless

(Barbara 72).

The birth of women writers, the growth of female education, the

development of teaching as a female profession, and the intensification of a

women’s literary market are consequently the entire consistent lexis of

feminism in a capitalizing global economy. Women writers became inseparable

part of the literary backdrop, other than until the end of time as representatives

of their gender rather than as individuals. It is also true that publishing was a

balancing act for each of them.

Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel

Prize for Literature in 1993. Undoubtedly, she is “one of the finest

contemporary writers in America” (Faly 122). Her fictional world was

celebrated for its ‘epic power’ and ‘unerring ear for dialogue and richly

expressive depictions of black America’ by the Swedish Academy. Apart from

this, while investigating the difficulties of sustaining a sense of black cultural

identity in a white world particularly through her female protagonists, her

fiction considers the devastating effects of racism and sexism and integrate

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fundamentals of tradition and legends. “My attempt, although I never say any

of this until I’m done… is to deal with something that is nagging me, but, when

I think about it in a large sense, I use the phrase ‘bear witness’ to explain what

my work is for” (LeClair 25).

Beloved is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel. Published in 1987 as Morrison

was taking pleasure in growing popularity and accomplishment. Beloved

became a best seller and received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is

widely considered Morrison’s greatest novel to date. Beloved puts issues of

power and powerlessness, choice and accountability; ownership of property,

self, and others; individual action vs. communal action against the backdrop of

feminism. In 1987, it won the Pulitzer Prize. It is considered as her

masterpiece. It is about an enslaved girl who had been locked up by a white

man for sexual exploitation. It is marked as a newborn baby when she enters

the narrative. She is believed to be Sethe’s daughter, Denver’s sister. She might

also be a survivor of the Middle Passage; the traumatic journey across the

Atlantic Ocean into American slavery; a compilation of all of the enslaved

peoples who died.

Beloved’s portrayal of “men without skin” (B 248). Africans supposed

the first Europeans they saw as skinless because they didn’t have dark

complexions. Another textual detail that supports this interpretation is the

roaring of voices that Stamp Paid hears when he visits 124, but cannot not

enter, or even knock. He does not hear only one ghostly voice (Beloved’s)—he

hears many. These may be the ‘Sixty Million and more’ to whom Morrison

dedicates her novel on the page before the epigraph. Baby Suggs doesn’t

approve of extra: she claims that “good is knowing when to stop” (B 102). The

picnic feast to celebrate Sethe’s escape from slavery is described as offending

the community by its excess; further, Paul D tells Sethe that her love is “too

thick” (B 193).

Sethe is not the only mother in the novel to kill her children. When she

is a child, Sethe is told by Nan that her mother ‘threw away’ the children before

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her. Sethe is the only one she goes on for the reason that she is the only child

not born out of rape. Ella turns down to breastfeed her newborn baby, and it

dies after five days. These women kill out of abhorrence for their abusers and

rapists; Sethe, however, kills out of love. Her murder of Beloved is as an act of

too much love. She loves her children too much to allow them to be put

through the brutality of slavery in the forms of physical, mental, and emotional.

Morrison raises many unanswered questions to think over these serious

issues. In fact, what it means to be a mother generally, and what it means to be

a mother in slavery. Think about Sethe’s relationships with her biological

mother, Nan, and Baby Suggs; Baby’s relationships with her children, etc.

Beloved exists wholly beyond its own artistic merits and demerits. As a

result, this novel becomes something more than mere literature. This novel is

not solely a work of protest and advocacy, as the author herself has insisted. It

is not solely a symbol for the progress and virtue of the prestige-granting

institutions in American letters. It’s a serious creative work of art. It earns to be

the highest respect.

Beloved is a haunting and dark novel. It is full of gothic elements and

acts of terrible violence. The ghost represents the power of the legacy of

slavery. The ghost keeps on troubling Sethe eighteen years after she won her

freedom. Beloved is the fortitude of the dead baby revisited but she is also a

personification of all torment under slavery. The novelist is more anxious that

the readers apprehend why Sethe did what she did, as well as the ways that her

choice has troubled her ever since. The narrative efficiently puts into words the

cruelty and dehumanization that comes about under slavery, putting Sethe’s act

in context without unavoidably accusing it or excusing it. “To be black and

female was to be in Double Jeopardy” (Beal 90).

The structure of the novel is fragmentary, closely tied to the

consciousness of each character and weaving suddenly between past and future

through the strong thread of feminism in terms of humanism. More space is

exhausted describing past events than the current action. It strikingly brings

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forth the idea that the past lingering and shaping life in the present. It is often

monotonous, putting the same storyline of the past repeatedly, giving further

information with each repetition. All of the characters in the novel, former

slaves and the children of former slaves, undergo a distressed relationship to

their own past. Their relationships to their past frequently make it unfeasible

for them to live for the present or plan for the future, and slavery has often

smashed the ways that they experience love and think about their own worth as

human beings.

In Beloved, Morrison explores themes of love, family, and self-

possession in a world. Beloved is the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child, returned

for uncertain causes. It is personified as a full-grown woman at the age that the

baby would have been had it lived. Morrison was strained to the historical

relation, which addressed varied questions of what it meant to love and to be a

mother in a place and time where life was often devalued. The novel forcefully

renders the implications of what it means to be owned by another and the

intricacy of owning oneself.

Beloved also presents a powerful account of the foundation of black

America in the light of feminism. The novel to some extent recounts the

formation of a new people and culture, a people displaced and forced to forge a

new identity in the face of brutality and dehumanization. It reflects on the

subtle balance between individual and community, between Self and Other.

The community anger at Baby Suggs’ individual success leads them to

ignore the riders and their ‘responsibility’ as a community to warn and protect

one of their own, which in turn leads to the crawling already baby’s death. No

one sings when Sethe is taken from 124 Bluestone Road to be imprisoned for

the murder; however, the community of women comes together at the end, both

in the food donations and the thirty singing women who come to ‘baptize’

Sethe and exorcise the ghost.

Morrison puts observations on the gender and class inequities existing in

the American society. Baby Suggs and Mrs. Garner stand beside one another

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and work together at Sweet Home; Amy Denver and Sethe struggle

“appropriately and well” (B 99) during the birthing of Denver. These

relationships are not entirely idealized, on the other hand, in that both Amy and

Mrs. Garner are the children of their era: they have been formed by the racist

ideology of their communities.

Consequently, the narrative puts forth a story about a slave’s life. It

notifies of whippings, rape, hard work, and escape. However, while depicting

this narrative of enslavement and black culture, Morrison also enlightens the

personal tales of strong female slaves. “All of the learned behavior and learned

emotions on the part of a group of people towards another group; whose

physical characteristics are dissimilar to the former group behavior and

emotion that compel one group to… treat the other on the basis of its physical

characteristics alone, as if, it did not belong to the human race” (Hernton 175).

Morrison’s novel centers mainly on the female characters, Sethe, Baby

Suggs, Beloved, and their relationships. Beloved can be seen as a feminist

novel. Even though, the novel informs the story of many slaves, since of its

heart on the practical and independent women in the novel. It also constructs a

feminist statement.

Beloved herself is the fundamental pattern of the female body being

written into the discourse. Her skin is like a baby’s, she sleeps a lot, and her

faculties of speech and movement are not well developed. The novelist marks

the mother-child bond in the state of perfect identification with the mother

through the body of Beloved. Physically, she is the personification of the

discourse of motherhood for a slave. Her body is a sacrifice that gives life the

other children from schoolmaster through her death. By asking Paul D to have

sex with her, she takes away his ‘tobacco tin heart’ into her ‘inside part’ and

makes him whole again. She feeds on the attention and the maternal guilt that

has been poisoning her life from Sethe. Beloved’s body is used to write the

resolution of all the conflicts that Paul D and Sethe had because of

schoolmaster’s cruelty.

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Sethe’s murder of her baby, which the community finds as an

unforgivable crime. On the other hand, the community did not advise Sethe of

schoolteacher’s arrival for the reason that of an inconsequential suspicion.

Consequently, the community is also responsible for blame for the murder.

Contrastingly, there are characters like Stamp Paid and Paul D, who do what

good they can, and try to survive in their post-enslavement world. As a result,

the readers can explore the binaries of good and evil against the backdrop of

feminist ideas.

The novel offers the narration of painful experiences of a female slave

by writing her body itself into the text. Its storyline is fluid, non linear, and it

preserves the difference between the many opposing units, giving them room

for free play. It monitors the enormity of the events that took place, and the

depth of its emotional experience. At the end of the book, Morrison’s character

says that ‘this is not a story to pass on’. This manifests the serious tone of the

novel. Nobody can deny the fact that it is a feminine text, and that by itself is a

rare occurrence the writing of a woman’s body and experience into a text. The

past is unknown that is mocked out through the rememorize of the characters in

the present. It is a centre around which the storyline unveils; leaping in and out

of the timeline in twists of revelation till it is laid out in all its horror. The

reading of the story becomes similar to the unraveling of a mess of

metaphorical threads.

The characters in the story are unconscious of their past. The storyline is

a continuous learning process where the characters learn more about

themselves. Sethe did not identify the fate of Halle, until Paul D tells her. She

does not retain information about her own mother until Beloved asks her about

it. The community is not aware of Beloved, or the strange ‘thick love’ that

Sethe has for her children. The characters also most often cannot divorce from

the past and live in the present.

The character of Beloved herself is the very essence of the past and

present intertwined in a consciousness. Her behavior puts her as a baby. Her

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supernatural sign is the consequence of unresolved inconsistency in the mother-

child bond between Sethe and Beloved. The character of Beloved is a position

of play where the slavery of the past, and the state of freedom in the present

collapse. She is murdered by her mother to set aside her from the dreadfulness

of slavery. Her death is because of by one side of the binary. When she gets

there at 124 in the form of the young woman, she causes the temporal binary to

collapse. She makes Sethe keep in mind her mother, and the forgotten African

language of her childhood. Sethe’s at first declines to accept Beloved as her

dead baby and accordingly refuses the past for the reason that of her maternal

guilt. But in doing so, she is in this world where she is preoccupied by the past.

For the period of her time at 124, Beloved outlines a kind of bubble inside

which the past and the present are one, and old harms are called forth,

remembered and put to rest. She is an embodiment or a ghost of the past,

walking in the present, effecting the exorcism of the horrors of the very past

that she embodies. In terms of the feminism of the novel readers can observe

the binaries of good/evil in the novel.

Jazz is full of orphans-parentless children whose parents die. “First

reduced the human self of his black slave to a body and then the body to a

thing; he dehumanized his slave, made him quantifiable, and thereby absorbed

him into a rising world market of productive exchange” (Kovel 18). Dorcas’s

parents are killed in the riots; Vera Louise is disowned, and so her parents are

dead to her; Rose Dear and May lose their mother when Vera Louise chooses

to take True Belle away; Rose Dear, who is Violet’s mother, commits suicide.

Ultimately, Violet’s and Joe’s demons look as if to get exorcised. They

both get themselves in the symbolic company of their mothers: while they are

in bed together, Joe observes a shape in the darkness that “forms itself into a

bird with a blade of red on the wing. Meanwhile Violet rests her hand on his

chest as though it were the sunlit rim of a well and down there somebody is

gathering gifts […] to distribute to them all” (J 225). In turn, the couple can

become sort of surrogate parents to Felice. Violet teaches her to look at trees

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and make up the world the way she wants it, and Felice compares Joe more

favorably to her father (J 214).

Nevertheless, Morrison moves toward to what the blues and jazz signify

in the larger cultural context of early twentieth-century African American

urban culture, which is a multifaceted interlinking of tropes of the blues, jazz,

and Harlem itself. That is worthy of a more thorough discovery. The readers

can perceive how Morrison’s innovative narrative strategies make articulate a

heretofore repressed and silenced black female’s story and voice. In the case of

Jazz, ‘voice’ as referring to the cultural object by which black women’s

narratives have been and are still commonly ‘heard’; the novel both cites what

Houston Baker, Jr. calls the ‘blues matrix’. It also evinces how it fails to

account for the migration experiences of African American women by looking

back to the cultural moment between the blues and jazz. Of course, that gives a

new way to the recording and stylization of the ‘classic blues,’ a specifically

female cultural form largely disseminated through the ‘race record’ market.

Such context is indispensable in reading Morrison’s intricately layered text.

Her all-encompassing implication on blues, jazz, and Harlem imagery, as well

as her figurative use of the narrator as technological composite of the

phonograph and record to ‘play’ cultural narratives which its characters both

retort to and refuse to agree to create an African American female ‘crossroads.’

The narration of Jazz is an impersonal. It enlightens stories not only

about its characters, but about itself as a cultural form as well. The narratives

personified in the sign of the blues to which the novel’s title submits are turned

into in the narrator’s onomatopoeic descriptions of the characters’ exchanges

with the urban landscape. This analogy appeals to the material conditions of

African American men and women who migrated to Northern cities in the early

twentieth century, and turns ‘unreliability’ into a cause for celebration. At the

end of the novel, the narrator, allegorically ‘playing’ a record on a phonograph.

The narrator of the novel deals with how these recent migrants must

have felt at arriving in a Harlem whose population was comprised almost

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wholly of African Americans, and she does so with specific reference to the

city’s sidewalks and streets:

However they came, when or why, the minute the

leather of their soles hit the pavement--there was no

turning around. Even if the room they rented was

smaller than the heifer's stall and darker than a

morning privy, they stayed to look at their number,

hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves

moving down the street among hundreds of others who

moved the way they did (J 32-33).

It is clear from this passage those only direct references to the often crowded

and expensive living conditions encountered by black migrants, however, also

metaphorical encodings of the material circumstances of their survival before

migrating to the city.

Violet is the main character in Jazz. The narrator’s depiction of her

‘private cracks’ is a montage of images that question her. It is perhaps African

American women’s in general, relationship to the Harlem community and to

the social world:

I call them cracks because that is what they were. Not

openings of breaks, but dark fissures in the globe light

of the day. She wakes up in the morning and sees with

perfect clarity a string of small, well lit scenes. In each

one something specific is being done: food things,

work things; customers and acquaintances are

encountered, places entered. But she does not see

herself doing these things. She sees them being done.

The globe light holds and bathes each scene, and it can

be assumed that at the curve where the light stops is a

solid foundation. In truth, there is no foundation at all,

but alleyways, crevices one steps across all the time.

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But the globe light is imperfect too. Closely examined

it shows seams, ill-glued cracks and weak places

beyond which is anything. Anything at all. Sometimes

when Violet isn’t paying attention she stumbles onto

these cracks, like the time when, instead of putting her

left heel forward, she stepped back and folded her legs

in order to sit in the street (J 22-23).

The mind gaps Violet faces are equal to the gap in a record that make it bounce

consequently it is incapable to carry on its playing, a relationship that puts

forward the intricacy of the relationship between African American women’s

lives and diverse deterministic cultural narratives.

Violet is treated as ‘crazy’ by her community for sitting in the street, as

well as for ‘stealing’ a baby and later attempting to disfigure Dorcas’s body at

the funeral. Rodrigues thinks Violet as ‘the one whose psyche has been

deformed by twenty years in the City, so that people call her ‘Violent.’’ The

sidewalks of Harlem are stood for in a way that exclusively calls notice to the

blues narratives against which the characters struggle. That during Joe’s search

for Dorcas country trails turn to railroad, then city pavement ‘tracks,’ which

Morrison also relates to the grooves of a record, suggests that the fatalism often

attributed to the City has its roots in the South and the economic, cultural, and

psychological impacts of slavery. When Alice inquires Violet if Joe had ever

beaten her, anybody can get a unique reference to this narrative intersection:

“Joe? No. He never hurt nothing.”

“Except Dorcas.”

“And squirrels.”

“What?”

“Rabbits too. Deer. Possum. Pheasant. We ate good down home.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Landowner didn’t want rabbit. He want soft money.”

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“They want money here, too.”

“But there’s a way to get it here. I did day work when I first came here.

Three houses a day got me good money. Joe cleaned fish at night. Took

a while before he got hotel work. I got into hairdressing, and Joe . . .”

“I don’t want to hear about all that.”

Violet shut up and stared at the photograph. Alice gave it to her to get

her out of the house (J 81-82).

This manifests the historical, economic, and social conditions of African

American women. The novelist through the narrative trope of the race record

encodes in the storyline especially the complicated, often jealous and

sometimes violent responses of both men and women to their post-

emancipation freedom of choice in sexual partners. The author’s motivation for

the photograph of Dorcas, whom Violet stabs out of sexual jealousy, came

from a photograph taken by James Van Der Zee of a young woman shot by her

lover at a party with a gun that had a silencer: ‘As she lay dying, the young

woman refused to identify the person who shot her.’

Violet’s own relationship to reproduction has been over-determined by

the financial matter of slavery. Her response to Rose Dear being tipped out of

her chair by the men who took almost all of her family’s property is crucial.

Like many traveling female blues singers, motherhood was simply not

something she considered as a possibility: “The important thing, the biggest

thing Violet got out of that was never to have children. Whatever happened, no

small dark foot would rest on another while a hungry mouth said, Mama?”

(J 102).

Violet’s marginal position in the salon community functions as an

analogue both for women such as Alice and Gertrude. Alice denouncing the

disorderly, raucous, and now and then vengeful lyrics of female blues singers

like Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey and Bessie Smith, as well as for women’s peripheral

involvement in early jazz performance. Violet is an unlicensed hairdresser, and

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thus not privy to the talk that takes place among the legally licensed beauticians

and their customers at the salon, until she goes to find out “what kind of lip

rouge the girl [Dorcas] wore; the marcelling iron they used on her . . . the band

the girl liked best (Slim Bates’ Ebony Keys which is pretty good except for his

vocalist who must be his woman since why else would he let her insult his

band)” (J 5). The narrator’s remark on the female vocalist unities with Linda

Dahl's claim that family bands permissible virtually the only opportunity for

women to participate in jazz, most bands being ‘made up completely of men.’

These circumstances are similar to Violet’s denied access, because of her

crazy, ‘unlicensed’ behavior, not only to the salon's communal discourse but to

almost any kind of voice in her community.

Violet’s “wayward mouth” (J 24) ostracizes her from mainstream

community circles of women and men long with her ‘crazy’ actions. Her

leaning to form “[w]ords connected only to themselves” (J 23) could also refer

to criticisms of women’s classic blues being progressively standardized in their

recording and dissemination, and thus not ‘authentic’ in their loss of specific

regional qualities. Her position as outcast, on the other hand, permits her an

intracultural ‘double-consciousness.’ Therefore, she is imposition to identify

with both Alice, an upstanding member of the community, and the prostitutes

at the same time for the reason that much as the sexually charged women's

classic blues tolerable for the expression and survival of an African American

female communal voice, the prostitutes, Violet is aware of, are important to her

own survival:

“They were good to me when nobody else was. Me and Joe

eat because of them.”

“Don’t tell me about it.”

“Anytime I come close to borrowing or needing extra, I can

work all day any week on their heads.”

“Don’t tell me, I said. I don’t want to hear about it and where

their money comes from” (J 84).

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Alice does not want to pay attention to the connection between sexuality

and violence in the urban African American community. When Violet asks

Alice why she does not want to hear about these women, she replies:

“Oh. The men. The nasty life. Don’t they fight all the time? When they

do your hair, you’re not afraid they might start fighting?”

“Only when they sober.” Violet smiled.

“Oh, well.”

“They share men, fight them and fight over them, too.”

“No woman should live like that.”

“No. No woman should have to” (J 84).

Women arming themselves, especially with knives, invoke the existence of the

theme in women’s classic blues of violent revenge.

Both Violet and Alice have been subject to sexual jealousy of other

women and the desire for revenge. During their exchange of thoughts Violet

remarks Alice that she ‘wasn’t born with a knife,’ asking if she had never

“picked one up” (J 85). Alice acknowledges to herself that she had been

“starving for [the] blood” of her husband’s lover: “Her craving settled on the

red liquid coursing through the other woman’s veins.” Alice’s fantasies of

satisfying this craving include a “clothesline rope circling her neck,” (J 86) an

image which radiates multiple meanings. It discloses the killing in the South

which contributed to “the wave of black people running from want and

violence” that “crested in the 1870’s; the 1880’s’ the 90’s but was a steady

stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined in” (J 33). Up till now it is also a

feminine-coded ‘tool,’ suggestive of the domestic realm which slavery, both

during and after, denied black women by forcing them to mother white families

instead of their own. “Both are motivated by similar economic, social and

psychological forces, it is only logical that those who sought to undermine

Blacks were also most virulent anti-feminists. The means of oppression

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differed across race and sex lines, but the wellspring of that oppression was the

same” (Giddings 6).

As Alice is waiting for one of Violet’s visit. That is no longer

frightening her denial of her culture’s history marked itself in her ponderings

on the violence in which Violet and Joe have participated:

. . . Alice Manfred knew the kind of Negro that couple

was: the kind she trained Dorcas from. The

embarrassing kind. More than unappealing, they were

dangerous. The husband shot; the wife stabbed.

Nothing. Nothing her niece did or tried could equal the

violence done to her. And where there was violence

wasn’t there also vice? Gambling. Cursing. A terrible

and nasty closeness. Red dresses. Yellow shoes. And,

of course, race music to urge them on (J 79).

Paradise (1998) is the first novel by Toni Morrison after winning the

Nobel Prize in Literature (1997). It is a part of the trilogy (Beloved, Paradise

and Jazz). It is about love. It sets in the history of African-Americans. It is

penetratingly about racism, and other troubles that African-Americans had to

face. It depicts about the love of God, and the followers. It is in addition about

farthest patriarchy. It comprises people of two communities: an all-black town

called Ruby and the women in Convent.

Paradise deals with an overachieving parent with an underachieving

child. It is very painful, difficult and complicated. The very first line: ‘They

shoot the white girl first’ shows the intensity and intention of the novel.

Therefore, critics think that it is most difficult and complicated of Morrison’s

books. The novel is higher-level math, perhaps magical realist math. The

beginning of the second paragraph of the book is, “They are nine, over twice

the number of the women they were obliged to stampede or kill and they have

the paraphernalia for either requirement . . .” (P 3). ‘They are nine.’ What

would nine be more than half of? Four. How many women are there? Five.

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Who are we missing? The narration shows disappearing women, sometimes

them being shot. Consolata is shot in the forehead. The white girl is killed.

The novelist frequently uses magical realism. That is a concept that’s

often associated with Latin American writers. There is some debate about

whether this actually applies to Morrison. It is a freeing up of notions of time

and space in what appear to be realistic events or a realistic novel/narrative.

In the novel, the community of Ruby deals with the disappearance of the

women. Roger goes out, sees no bodies, and reports there’s nobody out there.

People are confused at first and seek to come up with rational explanations.

Promptly they begin thinking about their self-interest. If there aren’t any

bodies, then we don’t have to report anything. We don’t have to bring the

police into this. If there are no bodies, our men are not criminals. Instead of a

profound mystery, it turns into a part of the luck of Ruby.

Feminism is a major theme. People kill each other in the name of

tradition, culture and slavery since the beginning of time. Morrison points out

the humanistic attitude in her feminism. Fascinatingly, Morrison asserts that

she has inspired to write this novel by an event she heard about while traveling

in Brazil. At that time, several black nuns were murdered by a group of local

Catholic men because the women were rumored to be practicing candomblé, an

Afro-Brazilian religion. That brings together aspects of Judeo-Christianity with

traditional West African beliefs. The narrative becomes to be a myth.

Although, the novelist was captivated by the idea of this assault on the

feminine, on the black, on the African, on the anti-establishment.

Morrison describes how collective groups ritualize and symbolize the

concept of community. For example, there is the oven, and all the issues around

the oven. By the time the oven is located in Ruby, it has ceased to be

functional. It has turned out to be a symbol of the community. “As in the

ancestral African tradition place is as important as the human actors. For the

land is a participant in the maintenance of folk tradition. It is one of the

necessary constants through which the folk dramatize the meaning of life, as it

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is passed on from one generation to the next. Setting then is organic to the

characters’ view of themselves. And a change in a place drastically alters the

traditional values that give their life coherence” (Bischoff 22).

The storyline seeks to explore the feminist concepts and patriarchy in

Paradise, in search of a reason for the attack. It declares that in Ruby,

patriarchy and feminist awareness are in contrast that eventually lead to the

massacre. Even though the racist matters are exceptional as well. Other than

feminist issues and the associated struggles among two opposed groups of

people give sufficient clarification for the massacre. “Each, viewing the other’s

world as impoverished and unsafe, sees it as an occasion to ‘rescue’ the other”

(Nkrumah 29). The novel is a multi-layered novel, which engages several

characters in the historical background of African American black people, who

a long ago determined to put up their own community. They did their best to

put off it from any harm. Their thought was crucially embedded on a reversed

racism, and hatred of white people.

The novel depicts a story of a community in 1990s in Oklahoma, who

built and lived in a town called Ruby. The town was near a convent, in which

some women lived together; free and playfully. Again, the story of a quarrel

between these two communities; people of Ruby and women in the convent. It

commences with a shocking opening: “they shoot the white girl first. With the

rest, they can take their time. No need to hurry out here” (P 3). Then moves

backward, more than eight years ago, and starts from the beginning of the

story; the story of Ruby and its people, as well as the story of the convent and

its residents.

The fact is that, in 1890, black people from Mississippi and Louisiana

gathered together to found a new town, called Haven. Some of them were poor

and slaves, while others were not. But they had all suffered from racism. They

attempted to build this all-black town to have a better life and future. In 1950, a

group of them, many have recently returned from World War II, moved from

Haven to build another town, to start again and triumph over their adversity.

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This is new town called Ruby. They perceive some people, and they look the

complexities. They would not seek to recognize or deal with the obstruction,

but massacre women, to put an end to the problem and start their lives again.

Another important figure in the story in a feminine length is a building

called convent. Convent is a mansion seventeen miles away from Ruby. It was

once a convent for Catholics, with schools and nuns, but turned to a mere

house. Convent women live free and peaceful together. They are away from

anything, and from patriarchal and racist ideologies. Connie is one of them who

have lived there from the time it was a convent, and other women join there

after that, in a period of eight years. “The point is that freedom is choosing

your responsibility. It is not having no responsibilities; it is choosing the ones

you want” (Naylor Gloria and Morrison 573).

Therefore, the storyline moves around the convent. It performs like the

role of the protagonist of the novel. It appears to be about Ruby, but turn to be

more about the convent. During the story and at the end, readers point out the

similarities between ‘paradise’ and the convent. Paradise is a like a thousand-

piece jigsaw puzzle, and includes about seventy names and characters.

However, the foremost characters are convent women, and a couple of Ruby

men who rule the town. They are sons of the founders of Ruby, who have the

direction of Ruby men.

Convent Women Connie is the principal character and the longtime

resident of the convent. She was nine years old when she was rescued by a nun.

She was brought to the Catholic school in the convent. “For thirty years she

offered her body and her soul to God’s Son and His Mother” (P 225). It was

prior to meeting Deacon Morgan. Once they saw each other, they fell in love.

Clandestinely and candidly, they were together till when in a love-making

scene, Connie bites Deacon’s lips and licks the blood. Deacon is acquainted

with the sexually unrestricted woman. He loves her loving action. But points

out this incident and breaks off their relationship, as he cannot face the basic

rules of Ruby. He was informed even before that about this relationship and its

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prospect. Connie lives in the mansion, where the doors are open to all men and

women, regardless of their race or color. She takes care of others and has a

maternal figure. She be familiar with how to mix herbs to make medicine, and

has also a kind of super-natural power. Even though Ruby town may regard as

her a witch, he is just helpful and maybe lucky enough to rescue others from

death. Mavis is a neglectful twenty-seven-year-old woman with a patriarchal

abusive husband, Frank. She is friendless in her life because of him. She

throttles her twin babies in their car, and flees from the house. Thinking that

her husband and the other three children are planning to kill her, she escapes.

She compels to her mother’s house. After overhearing her mother calling

Frank, she drives away again. She runs out of gas and finds the convent. Gigi is

a sensual liberated woman. Her mother is missed and her father is near death.

Mickey, her boyfriend is in jail but they have arranged a date in a town called

Wish, where there is a rock that looks like “a black man and woman fucking

forever.” (P 6) Her search to get the place is fruitless, and she ends up at the

convent. She is a sexually enchanting woman, the one who stepped in Ruby,

“in pants so tight, heels so high, [and] earrings so large” (P 63). Seneca is a

twenty years old woman. She was left alone by her mother, when she was five.

She is houseless or family. She is submissive. Before joining the convent

women, she was picked up by a wealthy woman, and lived as a prostitute for

three months. In her childhood, and after the abusive, sexual intercourses with

her foster brother, she got the habit of hurting herself, to seek other’s pity. She

yet has this masochistic habit. Pallas Truelove, sixteen years old, whose father

is a wealthy lawyer, and always busy of his job. Her mother is a painter, who

left them when she was 3 years old. Pallas lacks a kind of parental care in her

life. Her relationship with her father is so weak. As a result, she makes a

decision to run way with his boyfriend Carlos. She is willing to lead her life in

peace together. Both plan to visit her after so many years. They take pleasure in

the trip and the company, until Pallas finds her mother and Carlos making love.

She leaves shocked and drives away. Her car wrecks, assaulted by men who

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chase her into a lake and rape her. She ends up in a clinic, and then comes to

the convent.

Ruby Men Zechariah Morgan who is known as Big Papa. He was one of

the founders of Haven. Anybody retains information him, however, a few racist

and patriarchal ideas about him. Rector Morgan (Big Daddy) is Zechariah’s

son, helped his father in foundation of the town, Haven. Deacon Morgan and

Steward Morgan are the twins of Rector Morgan. They are of the leaders of

Ruby. Both like to live in and re-member their past. They cannot bear any

change to their life-styles and ideas. They are dogmatic and may die, or kill for

this. Arnold Fleetwood is one of the leaders of Ruby, too. Fleetwood family

along with Morgan family plays an important role in Ruby. They have the most

strategic positions and jobs, they belong to the founders of Ruby, and they have

the right to decide or control the town, or its people.

Reverend Richard Misner is one of the reverends in Ruby. He aims to

advise people in his sermons. He is considered an outsider in Ruby’s men point

of view. People of Ruby suppose that an outsider potentially means an enemy,

also. He talks about God and God’s grace. He is an educated man. He tries to

survive the town from its isolation. He faces the persistence of people of Ruby

and its leaders. The day Ruby men attacked and shot the convent women,

Reverend Misner was away with his girlfriend Anna Flood. He decides to

move somewhere else. Later he changes his mind, when he sees the regretful

Deacon who comes to talk. He feels that the town would need him.

A feminist reading of the novel is based on reversed racism and

patriarchal ideologies. Their history and their personal experiences of racism,

move towards an all-black town, and create a basis their hatred of white people.

It is a large amount general and severe that they even differ between dark black

and light black skins. At the end, the convent looks like more to be like the

mentioned paradise, which acknowledges and cares whoever comes forth, even

if they are “crying women, staring women, scowling, lip-biting women, or

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women just plain lost” (P 270). Their standpoint of women and feminine issue

is yet worse that racism in Ruby.

In the novel, there are two contrasts, the Convent women who have gone

through these phase, and the women in Ruby, who are going to be aware of

their social role and their personal life. Men of Ruby are anxious of their

consciousness. They make an effort to disregard women’s freedom, sexuality

and social roles. Their minds are worried with these concepts, but they are in

fear of them at the same time. Patriarchal society and the ruling men of Ruby

who defend these circumstances is just a half of the problem. The other half is

Ruby women’s mentality, which is lost in thought with men’s superiority and

patriarchal ideologies. Kristeva deems that women are blameworthy and guilty

for their passiveness. According to McAfee, she endorses the fact that women

held back themselves. They are now and again willing to be addressed

patriarchally. In Ruby, women are passive and never think of their state of

affairs. They perceive the contrast at the convent, but not at all seek to ask for

their rights in Ruby. They admit, whatever comes from their husbands or their

fathers. It is clear that they will be side tracked if they ask any questions, but

they never even try to insist.

Feminist reading manifests that Ruby is established on some anti-

feminist issues. It brings about their sharp contrast with the convent women.

The contrast is clear, but initially Ruby residents cannot perceive. When time

moves, they just undergo the strange disparities between themselves and the

convent women. They can notice some uncertainties in the eyes of Ruby

people, by and large the new generation of Ruby teenagers. Ruling men of

Ruby make a decision to get rid of everything, to conceal their fault, and the

flaw of their traditional beliefs. They do such a massacre to continue their

supremacy, as well as their pride and happiness.

The narrative puts forth the feminist inclinations as inferiority and

superiority, the question of power, dependency and freedom, and the role of

religion, and discusses them in both communities of Ruby and the convent

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women. This reveals the differences, and the standing point of each community

toward women, and social fact to women. In Ruby, women are treated as

inferior. Their responsibility is limited to cook and please their husbands in

bed. Even they do not make complaint about it. The society has turned them as

submissive.

These women cannot divorce from their past. This fact is well known to

the rulers. The men also are conscious us that they will lose their statue, the

leadership when will realize the fact. The convent women have suffered from

the same patriarchy as well. They are more often than not run away from their

past lives, and started a new life at the convent. Mavis’ past life is full with fear

of pleasing a husband who is so ignorant that he is never pleased. The most

private moment of their relationship, which should be equally pleasant and

enjoyable, would only bring this question to her mind that, whether their sex

would “be quick like most always or long, wandering, collapsing in wordless

fatigue?” (P 26). And she gets that “it was neither. [As] he didn’t penetrate –

just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the

nightgown that covered her face” (P 26). This takes place in reality, while

Mavis experiences not good.

In the patriarchal relationship, there is no emotion, no caring or loving

even between a husband and wife. Sex is a prime duty, which she should offer,

even if she is not involved in it. Mavis and other women run away to the

convent to seek the freedom, love, peace, parental care and attention. They get

away from a traditional patriarchal society to find themselves. They are all free

in the convent. They accept anyone, black or white, man or woman, and would

help each other to lead the life in peace. They are even free to leave. The

convent women make a decision to live their lives there. They are not

responsible of their ‘husbands’ or ‘boyfriends’ pleasure, neither for patriarchal

morality of the whole male-dominated society.

In Ruby, women are subdued. Nobody talks about women rights and

their opinion. But about Ruby, men of Ruby, their past and patriarchy. Even

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when Deacon Morgan talks to his wife about the town and its problems, it is

not in a consulting or even informing manner. He just says something, for his

own sake. If she says “I don’t understand,” his reaction is repressive and

patriarchal: “‘I do’. He smile[s] up at her ‘You don’t need to [understand]’” (P

107). Gigi, like other women in the convent, commits to memory that her past

life, before coming to the convent, was the same. “Neither a high school, nor a

college student, no one, not even the other girls took her seriousness seriously”

(P 257). It gives the impression that the women in convent runaway from their

past lives, in search of their paradise, their heaven. And when they enter to the

convent, they experience something gifted there. Pallas thought that, “The

whole house felt permeated with a blessed malelessness, like a protected

domain, free of hunters but exciting too. As though, she might meet herself

here; an unbridled, authentic self, but which she thought of as a ‘cool’ self” (P

177). Another sign to the inferiority and weakness of women, as the people of

Ruby consider, would be the name of their town. They have once named their

town Ruby, to immortalize Ruby Morgan, sister of Deacon and Steward, who

died because of white people’s racism. They declined to believe the black

patient and sent for a veterinarian, she died in the meantime. And now, this

name can associate the idea of safeguard in Ruby. Ruby men should guard the

Ruby, and it may in a straight line indicate their town, or in some way the

women in their town. Their two issues are the main factors of men in Ruby.

In a male dominated society, a man is courteous due to his power. He

would be a woman, if there is no power. Apart from this, women are far away

from power. They cannot act or decide. They cannot think or speak by their

own. Patriarchal society keeps the right to speak for men. Society can make the

blind eyes to their existence and their identity. In Ruby, men make a decision

for women. They have even the power to pay no attention to or accept people.

They can make Menus Jury “return the woman he brought home to marry; the

pretty sandy-haired girl from Virginia.” (P 195).Or when, Jeff is asked about

her daughter’s attendance in college, he says without any hesitation, that “I’m

her father. I’ll arrange her mind” (P 61). The main issue of the ruling powers

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in Ruby, who are ill-treated by racism, is to segregate and save from harm

women. It is very difficult to distinguish between these two, or set a priority

between them. In Ruby, protection has in point of fact the same meaning as

control. Despite the women in Ruby, the convent women have the power. They

can think freely and seriously for themselves. They can live alone and do what

they want. At this juncture the question is that, “whose power is stronger?” (P

276).

Women are scarified in order to inform the people of Ruby. Even the

new generation, about the power of tradition, to terrify them to do as you are

told their rulers, tradition and patriarchy. Ruby is centered upon a patriarchal

ideology. Women in the convent, on other hand, are all free of their past, this

history. They have once escaped from it, and would never come back again.

Ruby rules state that “they don’t need men,” (P 276). But they all are familiar

with that they don’t require patriarchy. The door of convent is open to all

people, without any restrictions. But patriarchy becomes Ruby’s history. As a

result they frighten and may do anything. This is taken as a part of their rights.

If it is not that Ruby is reliant on some of their products, like medicine and

herbs, pepper and hot spices, women in convent are free and they can live their

own life. In Ruby no woman drives, they have a Cadillac and can drive

anywhere. This car is a characteristic of freedom for the convent women, which

brings almost all of the women to the convent. The convent women have their

own business. And they have done all of these things without men. Therefore,

Ruby men believe of them as witches.

The circumstances are different in patriarchal town of Ruby. Women are

always connected to their fathers or their husbands. No one can live or survive

alone without men. Reviewing the family trees in Ruby, Patricia finds some

last names, without any other references, of “women whose identity rested on

the men they married – if marriage applied” (P 187). If not, they have no name

for themselves. Patricia, who and educated woman in Ruby, acting as a teacher

and historian as well, looks like to be free by her own. She is acquainted with

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approximately all about men of Ruby. She discerns about their past and history.

She is willing to keep these records for next generation and put in black and

white for them as the story of Ruby. But she is still in leap of Ruby men. She is

psychologically strained to destroy by fire her papers and all the documents. In

the convent, women are free and independent. The first thing they come across

is the individualism, free of social patriarchy. They meet themselves, alone,

and for the first time they find the opportunity to discover and quest with this

self. Moving from this stage, they can walk their life by their own. In Ruby,

people describe them strong women, for the reason that they, Ruby people,

have no self-confidence or power by themselves.

The elder generation has never experienced the individualism, and can

never accept that. They have fought in World War IInd, and they have built a

town. But all of their actions belong to the whole town, to the whole black

people of Ruby. There is nothing individual in that community. They cannot

think losing the power, the control of the town, and the control over its people.

Religion plays key role regarding women. Patriarchal interpretation of

religion may propose the loneliness and suppression of women. In Ruby one of

the Reverends is an enlightened man, but the other one and the function of

church is for all time to hold patriarchy of Ruby people. It gives the impression

that it is incapable to transform anything. This is an instrument in the hands of

leaders to restrain women and make them submissive. Reverend Misner, who

attempts his best to alert people of their secluded condition, and discourses of

God’s love. In the entire novel, he cannot change a person, or bring a better

situation.

In contrast, in the convent, women have their own big kitchen, forever

full of food and drink. They don’t want an oven. They require no church or

reverend to preach them or confine them. They live in a house which was

previously belonged to the nuns, and was a Christian school for Native

Americans. Currently they live there in peace by their own. Ruby men cannot

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imagine it, they perceive it as if “they don’t need God,” (P 276) or believe that

they are witches geared up to destruction.

In fact, patriarchy is the soul of Ruby. The deep-seated underlying

structure of the town is based on a traditional and patriarchal ideology. There is

no scope for women. Initially they were blind, later they realize their

neighborhood. Even the Ruby rulers cannot tolerate the convent and the women

in it, who live free of patriarchy and are triumphant and unbeaten. They

frightened the Convent women; therefore they cannot face the awareness of

women in Ruby. They also think that Ruby women presence may lead them to

a revolt against tradition and patriarchy. Men of Ruby are fearful of losing their

stature, the power and the control over people. Their patriarchy averts them

from considerate their neighbors. They are controlled by several traditional

creeds. This is the “helplessness” that makes them “want to shoot somebody,”

(P 96) as Steward declares in the novel.

The writer embarks on a complete reconsideration of normative

Christian theology through the inclusion and integration of Gnostic scripture.

The storyline portrays the all-black town, Ruby, whose citizens are proud,

confident, and self-sufficient. They equate with racial purity. They are a

community of African Americans isolated from the white world. However,

purity and isolation happen to the justification for the violence they enact on

five women living in a nearby ‘Convent.’ Through her portrayal of Ruby and

its men, the novelist confronts separatist ideologies that romanticize

communities based on isolation and exclusion. Morrison takes effort to create

new myths that could afford the base for social change.

The novel is about the relationship between two communities, the town

of Ruby, Oklahoma, and a very small but largely self-sufficient group of

women who live in what has come to be known as the Convent, located on the

outskirts of Ruby. The people of Ruby were once replete with a common idea.

Of course, they trusted, needed, and relied upon each other. Now the town feels

threatened, and in their anxiety to find some kind of solution. The town people

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blame and attack the women in the Convent. The women become easily victim

for all the unresolved emotions pent up in the prominent men of Ruby, who

have felt powerless to halt the unraveling of their homes.

The novel has interwoven portraits. They are not just portraits of people,

places, or of periods of time. But they are portraits of determined and conflict.

The portraits rest on all of the things that are done to save from harm what has

been worked for and sacrificed for, to remain the town safe from the power of

destruction.

The relationship between Ruby and The Convent is brought forth by

tension and mistrust. The men and some of the women in Ruby look down on

what they suppose takes place at the Convent. Satirically, none of the men have

actually been inside the Convent before the day of the raid. On the other hand,

they have preconceived ideas about the Convent that cause them to abuse and

mistrust the women who live there. They are puzzled by the bond that these

women seem to have with each other, and the effect their power is having on

the town of Ruby. The male citizens of Ruby start to feel endangered by the

presence of Ruby women. The supposed threat is at the bottom on nothing

more than fear of the mysterious. To the women in the Convent, Ruby stands

for the patriarchal society that they are running away. They have no wish to be

a part of the town, just as the town looks for to keep them.

The novel begins on the significant date of July 1976 as nine men from

Ruby prepare to kill five women who live in the nearby Convent. The Morgan

twins, Deacon and Steward, personify unified authority. They contribute to one

memory, one purpose, and one belief until the murders that July day divide

them. They take to mean the words inscribed on the sacred Oven as per their

privileged relationship to the originator of the inscription: “The twins believed

it was when he discovered how narrow the path of righteousness could be that

their grandfather chose the words for the Oven’s lip.” (P 14). The author makes

profusely clear the dangers of both narrow interpretations and a belief in one’s

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own righteousness as the men stalk the unarmed women. The description of the

women at the end of the first chapter clarifies the irony of the men’s actions.

The novel seeds of feminism in Ruth’s relationship with Macon, the

opportunities obtainable to First Corinthians and Magdalene, Lena’s criticism

of Milkman and the privilege that accompanies his “hog’s gut,” (P 215) and

Hagar’s relationship with Milkman.

Morrison puts the reader into the unstable juxtaposition of race and

gender in the novel. She establishes a method of revelation that is best grasped

as a vision of the many layers of history, ideology and desire. In numerous

ways, her literary endeavor has acted as a bridge between Black writing and the

American literature. She also throws light on the Black migration under the veil

of feminism. The forced migration of enslaved peoples from Africa to the

Americas during the slave trade and also voluntary migration in terms of

escapes from slavery. The huge mass of people who moved from the South to

northern cities during the Great Migration. In the Foreword to Song of

Solomon, Morrison casts light on a lot about migration.

In the novel, when Pilate takes the knife. She holds it to the man’s heart

after he’s beaten up Reba. There’s talk about women being weak and foolish:

“Women are foolish, you know, and mamas are the most foolish of all….

Mamas get hurt and nervous when somebody don’t like they children…. We do

the best we can, but we ain’t go the strength you men got. That’s why it makes

us so sad if a grown man start beating up on one of us” (P 94). Pilate strikes the

shielding love of parents for children, particularly mothers for children.

However, the novel also portrays strong bonds between fathers and children,

such as the existences that persist to haunt both Ruth’s and Pilate’s lives. Note

all of these varied patterns. Does love mean related to someone? When Hagar

falls apart, Guitar informs her that love is not holding someone. Love does not

connote belonging to someone. “It’s a bad word, ‘belong,’” (P 305). Love does

not mean that you fall apart when the person leaves you.

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Sula is the principal character in the novel Sula. She is independent girl.

She goes off on her own. She doesn’t take care what other people think about

her. She can just walk away as per her own norms. She is willing to take on

people. Of course, she is ready to encounter with a group of boys. She is the

typical creation of Morrison. Sula is always ready to challenge the gender

notions. She’s already challenging what we might call gender essentialism. In

fact gender essentialisms a particular kind of way and men have to be a

particular kind of way.

Undoubtedly, Morrison is one of the gifted writers. The opening

paragraph of Sula manifests everything:

In that place, where they tore the night shade and

blackberry patches from those roots to make room for

the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a

neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley

town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river.

It is called the suburbs now, but when black people

lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded

by beeches, oaks, maples, and chestnuts, connected it

to the valley. The beeches are gone now and so are the

pear trees where children sat and yelled down through

the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been

allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that

clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course.

They’re going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall,

where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from

chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene’s

Palace of Cosmetology, where women used to lean

their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene

lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work

clothes will pry loose the slats of Reba’s Grill, where

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the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn’t

remember the ingredients without it (S 3).

As a matter of fact, it’s a story looks like very simple and easily structured. The

chapter titles are years, basically, the years between the first and second world

wars. They’re designated. Rather comes about in each of those chapters that are

related with that date.

In the novel Sula, in which the character of Sula doesn’t come into sight

for about forty pages. The readers get a score of other stories and in due course

the readers get around to the title character. It’s very obvious that the stories in

the early chapters are in any obscurely connected to the character of Sula. Nel

is connected to Sula. However, the story that is told before we meet to the

character Sula is not in any way in a straight line related to the character Sula

herself. “Yet Sula and Nel are very much alike. They complement each other.

They support each other. I suppose the two of them together could have made a

wonderful single human being” (Parker 253).

This is a novel about the relationship between the community and the

individual against the backdrop of feminism. Paradise operates by a course of

exclusion and careful inclusion, although what happens in Sula is that

approximately anybody can be included. That’s one of the characteristics of

these early chapters.

Perhaps, this is one of the novels in which the writer constructs extreme

characterization. In Paradise the novelist succeeds to create extreme situations,

other than she doesn’t essentially form extreme characters. At this juncture we

have extreme characters: a man, who has gone through the World War I, is

fearful of his own hands. He doesn’t quite unfamiliar with what to do with the

face he sees in the toilet, and creates National Suicide Day. There is also a

woman who it seems that has her own leg cut off because to save her children

and then sets herself up as a type of queen. She afterward sets her own son on

fire. Her daughter will have sexual intercourse with any man but won’t sleep

with them consequently sleeping entails trust. She gets a little loving every day

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in the pantry and nobody minds. At that moment she ends up getting set on fire

and burnt to death on top of the fire.

Eva turns out to be a part of the life of the community with her

completely weird house that has several rooms that are all doors and some

rooms that have no doors. She sits up on the third floor and all the men come to

her like a queen. Hannah is element of the community. In due course, the

women come to have no problem with Hannah’s sexual behavior, for the

reason that they perceive it as a mark of respect. She respects their men. Helene

believes she is black Creole however most likely isn’t. She’s from New

Orleans. One and all turns her into Helen as a way of putting together her into

the community. Everybody can be put up in a number of ways without giving

up their strangeness and their authentic character.

The novel is about the relationship between community and the

individual in part. The relationship between Sula and Nel is the story that

people in all probability like best in this book. These very different young

women are fast friends. Sula loves the order of Helene’s house, and Nel loves

the liveliness of Eva’s house. They obtain what they want from each other.

They are not friends since they are alike. They are friends because they’re

balancing. They give each other a form and figure.

Sula and Ajax are friends. They are people who appreciate each other.

One of the things that is frequently unnoticed with Ajax is that his relationship

to his mother. His mother was an influential personality in his life. He gains

knowledge of the worth of free will and identity from his mother. There are

two things with the relationship between Sula and Ajax. One is by glancing at

Ajax and uttering when Sula begins constructing this nest for him he desires to

get away from it. He couldn’t deal with it. It’s moreover detaining. It’s too

preventive. Sula has done is to fall into the trap of conventional gender roles.

Sula supposes she needs at that moment is somewhat that is absolutely secure,

incredible that is normal. Of course, something like what Nel has.

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Sula’s fault is that at several levels what she wishes is to make one Ajax.

Ajax doesn’t require it and neither does Sula. It’s the model that’s there. She is

ready to give and take her sense of self in order to move toward that. He puts,

‘No.’ One of the things that show that for us is when she distinguishes his

driver's license after he’s gone. She’s misnamed him all along. She thought he

was Ajax when he was A. Jacks. Apart from this, she was turning him into all-

powerful male. That’s not what he was. He was A. Jacks. The friendship

between Ajax and Sula moves forward to talk about the relationship between

freedom and responsibility. It’s a typical set of oppositions. In other words,

Sula equals free will; Nel equals accountability.

Sula has more interesting life. She is the one who has seen the larger

world. She is conscious of things that Nel can never know. However, Sula is

alone. “So when they met, first in those chocolate halls and next through the

ropes of the swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Because each

had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all

freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating

something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other

to grow on” (S 52).

Sula is typical of all those students who goes to college and then come

home and nobody quite knows what to do with them. They don’t moderately

equal any longer. They don’t think like their families. They don’t fit with their

friends. They just don’t quite fit.

Eva is the woman who speaks that she has to kill Plum, because what he

is attempting to do is come back to her womb. She experiences she has a right

to wipe out him, because, in spite of everything, she brought him into the world

and saved his life. At this time he has discarded that life. She takes him out of

the world. Subsequently, in what might be inferred as a sort of justice, Eva has

to sit and watch as Hannah burns up. Because she doesn’t have her leg, which

she gave up for her children, she cannot save her daughter.

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Shadrack, the man who notices the face of his fellow soldier blown off

as he’s running and the body keeps running. He has to eat on plates that keep

the food cautiously separated. When Sula calls his shack for the only time,

what hits her is not that it’s a shack but that it’s exceedingly neat. It’s as neat as

Helene’s house. Shadrack loves order. He loves order; as a result he’s seen

disorder. Plum is the victim of war. He’s a man who goes backward in his life

because he can’t deal with the world as it is. Jude seems to feel that the world is

at war against him personally until Sula, in a wonderful act of signifying, says,

“What are you talking about? The whole world loves black men.” She laughs:

“[White men] spend so much time worrying about your penis they forget their

own. […. White women] chase you all to every corner of the earth, feel for you

under every bed [….] Colored women worry themselves into bad health just

trying to hang on to your cuffs. [….] And if that ain’t enough, […] Nothing in

this world loves a black man more than another black man. [….] So. It looks to

me like you the envy of the world” (S 103-04).

In the novel, Morrison actually describes acts of sex. She uses language

about sex. She makes broad observations about sex—that Hannah wanted to be

touched every day and that it took place in the pantry. Then she turns it into

this little joke about not sleeping with anyone. We require thinking that. We in

addition want to believe Sula’s defense and whether we ought to take Sula’s

defense acutely. People dismiss it out of hand. Sula says nobody owns anybody

else. ‘You don’t own Jude; he doesn’t own you.’ She posits that we are all free

agents. If we don’t believe of people as property, then it lifts all kinds of

queries about how we illustrate human relationships. The only thing commonly

associated in the novel; with women are domestic household work in spite of

the changing tides in the working place.

The characters like Eva, Helene, Sula and Hannah stand for the

matriarchal authorities women, emasculating the male characters. Women

oblige the action in the narrative and give their substance in the family. They

give their significance in the Black community and their existence in uniting it

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collectively. Sula in addition sets up the closeness and interdependence of the

community with its members. Each member provides the community a positive

zest, an excitement that is vital to give it flavor. All the characters in Sula,

including Shadrack, and the Deweys, give significance to the individual in the

community.

Morrison published Tar Baby in 1981. In the foreword to Tar Baby,

Morrison remembers the significance of storytelling in her childhood. She grew

up listening to the adults in her family entertain one another with tales. She

developed the desire to spin yarns as well. Morrison eventually dedicated Tar

Baby to the many women at whose feet she first learned both to listen and to

tell stories, including her mother and grandmothers. The novel itself

reinterprets a folktale that almost certainly originated in Ghana however, which

became exceptionally American through retellings on Southern plantations. It

deals with aspects of a distinctly African American experience. She puts in the

black vernacular, borrowing phrases and figures of speech unique to the

community in which she was raised. Her work obtains ideas and cadences from

the blues, jazz, gospel, and spirituals to walk around such issues as the

inheritance of slavery.

The novel touches the current feminist movements. Particularly, her two

characters touch this sensitive issue delicately. With the help of patron

Valerian Street, Jadine Childs has assimilated into the white world as an

educated fashion model. Son, in contrast, was raised in an all-black community

in rural Florida. Much of the novel’s dramatic tension originates from the

power struggles between these two vastly different characters.

Morrison’s interest in feminism is evident in her creation of an active

workshop at Princeton University, the Princeton Atelier, which promotes

collaborations across the arts, and her active participation with Oprah’s Book

Club. Her diverse accomplishments have secured her an enduring place in

literary history. The novelist narrates the story realistically and interestingly.

Soon before Christmas, an unknown sailor jumps overboard and swims toward

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the harbor of Queen of France in the middle of the night. He is unable to reach

shore, therefore, he climbs aboard a small yacht and stows away. When the

yacht lands, he lands on a small island called Isle des Chevaliers, and he puts

out of sight again, this time at a house called L’Arbe de la Croix. Valerian

Street and his wife, Margaret, live in the house, along with their servants,

Ondine and Sydney. Jadine Childs, the niece of Ondine and Sydney, has come

to visit. Before coming back to the island, she studied at the Sorbonne, an

education for which Valerian paid, and employed as a model in Paris.

Margaret and Valerian come to blows because Margaret has invited a

number of guests to come stay, against Valerian’s wishes. One of these guests

is the Streets’ son, Michael, but Valerian suspicious that he will really come.

After a mostly ferocious dispute at dinner one night, Margaret goes to her

room, but she quickly returns to the dining room earsplitting. Sydney runs to

Margaret’s room and returns to declare that there is a man hiding in her closet.

Everyone but Valerian is terrified. Valerian invites the man, whose name is

Son, to stay the night.

The next morning, Margaret, who is enormously disappointed with

Valerian. She locks herself in her room. Meanwhile Jadine’s rich, white

boyfriend, Ryk, has sent her a luxurious sealskin coat. Son shows up in her

room as she tries on the coat, and they talk in an enticing way that sooner or

later starts to terrify Jadine. After Son makes some sexually crude remarks,

Jadine threatens to report him to Valerian, after which she goes to find

Valerian.

As another servant, Thérèse, does laundry, she thinks about Son, who

had been in the house for several days earlier to his detection and whom

Thérèse had been nourishing. With Jadine gone to find Valerian, Son showers

in her bathroom. When he is clean, he looks much smarter. He finds Valerian

before Jadine does, and he electrifies Valerian with his comprehension of

gardening and his sense of humor. Valerian informs Sydney to assist Son get

new clothes, and Gideon, another servant, and Thérèse take him shopping in a

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town near L’Arbe de la Croix. When Jadine sees the cleaned-up Son, she

comes to a decision not to tell Valerian about his behavior in her bedroom. As a

substitute, she requests Son on a picnic at the beach, and they share their time

and views. Despite their differences, they appear to unite on some level. On the

way back from the picnic, their car runs out of gas, and Son leaves to retrieve

gas from a pump at the pier. While Jadine remains, she makes her mind up to

seek shelter from the sun and abandons the car. On her way to some nearby

trees, she gets stuck in a flood but control to escape. Ondine is upset that Jadine

and Son appear to be getting closer; however, she does not interfere.

Michael fails to show up, and the other guests get delayed because of

bad weather when Christmas arrives. Margaret’s spirits sink, and she discards

her intricate cooking projects and leaves Ondine to end them. Valerian upsets

Ondine, Sydney, and Son when he announces that he fired Gideon and Thérèse

for stealing apples. A heated argument breaks out at Christmas dinner. At the

end of it, Ondine discloses that Margaret ill-treated Michael when he was a

boy. Valerian goes into shock, and Son and Jadine leave the table and go to bed

together.

Almost immediately, Jadine and Son leave the island. They go to New

York. They become carefree time as lovers. They live in a borrowed apartment,

and neither of them has a permanent job, but they don’t seem to care very much

about money. In the meantime, back on the island, things are much more

subdued, and Valerian declines to let Margaret gives details her actions to him.

Ondine and Sydney are anxious that they will be fired.

Jadine and Son visit his hometown of Eloe, Florida when spring arrives.

The trip is a disaster for their relationship, because Jadine hates Eloe, and Son

loves it. Here much dissimilarity between Jadine and Son come to the surface.

Their divisions tear them apart when they end up back in New York. They

clash frequently. Above all violent confrontation, Jadine leaves Son and New

York behind. She is determined to return to Paris, but first she stops at Isle des

Chevaliers to retrieve her sealskin coat. Ondine is upset that Jadine gives the

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impression to care more about the coat than about either Ondine or Sydney, but

her annoyance does not hold Jadine. Eventually she heads to Paris, telling

Ondine and Sydney not to tell Son where she has gone. Before long after she

quits, Son arrives in Queen of France, and Thérèse agrees to take him to Isle

des Chevaliers by boat, so he can look for Jadine. But instead of piloting him to

L’Arbe de la Croix as she had promised, Thérèse leaves Son on a foggy part of

the island, and she suggests that he still has a choice. He can either keep

searching for Jadine, or he can join the race of wild horsemen on the island,

descendants of the first slaves brought there. The island opens to provide

accommodation Son as he joins the horsemen.

In this narrative, it is clear that how a feminist perspective works. As a

result this novel explores the problems that arise when women consider that

they are the stereotypes permeating literature. She puts in action similar

techniques that undermine and deconstruct the stereotypical roles of men and

women.

The Bluest Eye is about gender specific. Morrison focused on

community, both for its intimacy and its support network. It is also the

disturbance caused by people who seek out and speak the unspeakable. She

mentions the anxiety. She talks extensively about African American culture are

the songs, myths, stories, oral histories, and riddles. She laments the loss of

these traditions.

Her major focus is on gender therefore gender identity, gender roles, and

sexuality play important role. While discussing gender, some people focus only

on women, but the writer is conscious to discuss how men and women are

shaped by family, communities, and the larger society. “First and foremost it

serves as a synopsis of the tale that is to follow revealing the psychic confusion

of the novel. It also serves as an ironic comment on a society which educates

and unconsciously socializes its children like Pecola with callous regard for the

culture richness and diversity of its people” (Phyllis 124). She examines the

history of African American migration throughout her fictional world.

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It had occurred to Pecola sometime ago that if her

eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the

rights – if those eyes of hers were different, that is to

say, beautiful she herself would be different. Each

night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently

for a year she had prayed. (BE 34)

Morrison sets her novel in the middle of the century.

The top part of Blue’s text reads: “Appearance and money determine

how much power I can really possess. And so I use these values in movies,

magazines, newspapers, music, and television as mirrors to learn about me, my

story, and my culture. What I am learning about is the power of a culture’s

persuasive mass-media techniques and, conversely, the power and ability of

people to challenge that authority” (BE 26). Blue tries to reveal how the media

shapes our ideas of who we are and how we healthy in.

The white couple is very bright, while the photo of the black couple is

very dark in photo. Here she brings an attention towards the lighting. In

looking at gender and how gender roles are enforced, in the picture of the white

couple the man is prevailing in his physical posture, from his holding of the

woman, down to the visibility of his facial appearance—he’s totally uncovered.

In the other picture there is a symbolic scoring through of the black man’s face

and identity.

The novel comes forward as first contemporary female bildungsroman,

or coming-of-age narratives. Later it has become a classroom staple. It has

flourished from a number of perspectives. It succeeds to focus on the novel’s

ability to replicate African American vernacular patterns and musical rhythms.

Many critics think that the novel is the rise of African American writers,

assigning significance to their revision of American history with their own

cultural materials and folk traditions. But the other side is it alludes to earlier

black writings in order to communicate the traditionally silenced female point

of view and utilizes conventional grotesque imagery as an instrument for social

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protest. It also attracts the attention to its deconstruction of ‘whiteness’ along

racial, gender, and economic lines, while feminists have equated the violence

of the narrative with self-hatred wrought by a wide range of illusions about

white American society and African American women’s place in it.

The existence of a feminist movement was an essential to Morrison.

There is no political movement to provide muscle to those who desire to

scrutinize Black women’s experience through understanding their history,

literature, and culture. There is no political charisma that asks a least rank of

consciousness and respect from those who write or talk about our lives. In

conclusion, there is not a developed body of Black feminist political theory

whose hypotheses could be used in the study of Black women’s art. When

Black women’s books are dealt with at all, it is usually in the context of Black

literature, which basically pays no attention to the propositions of sexual

politics. When white women go through Black women’s writings they are of

course badly equipped to deal with the intricacies of racial politics. “Just as

male was universal but female was limited, white was universal but black was

limited” (Steinem 7).

A Black feminist approach to literature that represents the awareness

that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are fatefully

knitting aspects in the works of Black women writers is an unconditional

stipulation. Until a Black feminist criticism exists the readers will not yet be

familiar with what these writers stand for. The credentials from several of

critics which track attest that without a Black feminist critical perspective not

only are books by Black women misinterpreted, they are shattered and ruined

in the process.

Blackness and feminism are to her mind mutually exclusive and

peripheral to the act of writing fiction. Morrison is gifted writer to present

marvelous record of the black side of provincial American life, who are

neglected. As a result, she comes to forward as serious black woman writer. A

remark by Alice Walker capsulizes what all the preceding examples indicate

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about the position of Black women writers and the reasons for the damaging

criticism about them.

There are two reasons why the black woman writer is not taken as

seriously as the black male writer. One is that she is a woman. Critics seem

unusually ill-equipped to intelligently discuss and analyze the works of black

women. Normally, they do not yet make the effort; they desire, rather, to talk

about the lives of black women writers, not about what they write. And, since

black women writers are not, it would seem-very likable-until recently they

were the least willing worshippers of male supremacy, comments about them

tend to be cruel.

Some critics find the seed of Black feminist approach. But the novel

explores both sexual and racial politics and Black and female identities are

inextricable elements in Black women’s writings. Here the expectation of the

novelist is Black women writers constitute an identifiable literary tradition. She

desires strongly that these writers must express forcefully of their indigenous

voice without any hesitation. The way, for example, that Zora Neale Hurston,

Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker integrate the traditional

Black female activities of root working, herbal medicine, conjure, and

midwifery into the structure of their narrations is not mere accident, but they do

deliberately.

The use of Black women’s language and cultural experience in their

literary world by Black women about Black women outcomes in a

astonishingly rich uniting of form and content and also takes their writing far

beyond the confines of white/male literary structures. The Black feminist critic

would find innumerable common qualities in works by Black women.

Morrison writes:

... for it was in dreams that the two girls had met. Long

before Edna Finch's Mellow House opened, even

before they marched through the chocolate halls of

Garfield Primary School . . . they had already made

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each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon

dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness

was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them

stumbling into Technicolor visions that always

included a presence, a someone who, quite like the

dreamer, shared the delight of the dream. When Nel,

an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch

surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s

incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing

at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into

a picture of herself lying on a flower bed, tangled in

her own hair waiting for some fiery prince. He

approached but never quite arrived. But always,

watching the dream along with her, were some smiling

sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself

in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the

mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below

her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs. Similarly, Sula,

also an only child, but wedged into a household of

throbbing disorder constantly awry with things,

people, voices and the slamming of doors, spent hours

in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through

her own mind on a gray-and-white horse tasting sugar

and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared

both the taste and the speed. So when they met, first in

those chocolate halls and next through the ropes of the

swing, they felt the ease and comfort of old friends.

Because each had discovered years before that they

were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and

triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about

creating something else to be. Their meeting was

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fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on.

Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible

fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he

wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy

they were looking for (BE 51-52).

As this passage manifests, their relationship, from the very beginning, is

covered with an erotic romanticism. The dreams in which they are at the outset

drawn to each other are actually harmonizing aspects of the same sensuous

fairy tale. Nel imagines a ‘fiery prince’ who never quite arrives while Sula

gallops like a prince ‘on a gray-and-white borse.’ The ‘real world’ of patriarchy

requires, however, that they channel this energy away from each other to the

opposite sex.

In the novel, the readers find the influence of environment on the

characters. But the writer’s achievement lies in the portrayal of female

characters and free and open descriptions of intracranial racism in the African

American community. Subsequently, it makes an impact to the emotional

precocity of prepucent girls.

Sometimes their words move in lofty spirals; other

times they take strident leaps, and all of it is

punctuated with warm-pulsed laughter [….] We do

not, cannot, know the meanings of all their words, for

we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces,

their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre

(BE 15).

The idea of listening for ‘truth in timbre’ and attempting to go through all of

these signs that they don’t unavoidably have direct access to is significant.

There are several illustrations in the novel where there are minor

misinterpretations of what is going on; for example, the whole thing with

Pecola’s first menstruation: Pecola asks “Am I going to die?” (BE 28). And

Claudia wonders whether her mother is going to drown the bleeding girl. It’s

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very humorous but also speaks to their inability to completely see and

understand.

If anybody considers feminism is about independence and resistance to

unjust authority, all her novels are feminist. If anybody thinks, feminism is

about group consciousness, asserting female solidarity in the face of male

tyranny, then the novels’ advocacy of mutual respect. Perhaps, most women’s

novels avoid radical feminist plots for the reason of their readers, who were

young, white, and middle class.

Consequently, feminist scholarship has an approved and established

political dimension. While the assurance to feminist politics and organized

feminist movements will not be equally strained in all pieces of scholarship.

The political goal of feminist work is larger than basically a stronger stress on

women. Of course, it is an important part of it. “The first class-oppression

coincides with that of female sex by the male” (Engels 69).

The order of importance in American society was clearly mapped out

during the times of slavery. First came white males, next white women, then

black males, and finally black women. Both white and black women faced the

struggle of feminism. On the other hand, nothing can measure up to the

conduct African American women faced from not only white males, but black

males as well. They positioned on the bottom step of society's social ranking.

They most of the times lived extremely hard lives. They had to suffer the same

harsh and unbearable treatment from black men, as they would white. Physical

abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual assault were all the elements of the

everyday lives of African American women during the age of slavery. “There

are no women; there are only dependent and exploited classes in which women

make one” (Stead 205).

The Bluest Eye presents the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a poverty-

stricken black child. Pocola longs for the blue eyes and blond hair that are

prized by the society in which she lives. The novel is considered among her

best known novels. Substantiated by the supremacy displayed by light-skinned

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black characters in the novel—as well as the self-loathing of those, like Pecola,

whose dark skin and African characteristics score them as unsightly and

unlovable. The narrative discovers black acceptance of white standards of

female beauty. “A woman whose occupation is to spin participates in the

whirling movement of creation. She who has chosen herself, who defines her

Self, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified

is a Spinster, a whirling dervish, spinning in a new time/space” (Daly 3).

Morrison published Sula, a novel chronicling the lives of two women in

1973. One woman believes in a traditional role in the community; the other

leaves her hometown, returning merely to refuse to accept conventional female

roles and to affirm her own standards and free will. Song of Solomon (1977)

puts together the strains experienced by black families that experiences forced

to incorporate into mainstream culture with their reluctance to desert a typical

African American heritage. Here the writer integrates mythical and

supernatural aspects into the novel’s narrative as a way for characters to go

beyond their everyday lives. Tar Baby, published in 1981 and set in the

Caribbean, over again make use of myth and ghostly presences to diminish the

harshness of lives in which all relationships are adversarial—above all in

cultures where blacks are opposed to whites and women are opposed to men. In

1987 Morrison published Beloved, a novel based on the realistic story of a

slave who killed her child to save it from a life of slavery; the book won the

Pulitzer Prize. Jazz (1992) characterizes dual narratives: of course, one set

during Reconstruction, the other during the Jazz Age. The novel walks around

the lasting effects of slavery and oppression on successive generations of

African Americans. Morrison’s most recent novels are Paradise (1998),

featuring the lives of nine black families who settle a tiny farming community

in Oklahoma in the 1940s, and Love (2003) is a story that depicts the owner of

a once-popular East Coast seaside resort for African Americans.

The Bluest Eye received a remarkable attention for a first novel. Sula

met with more accepted reviews, it was serialized in Redbook magazine, and

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was shortlisted for the 1975 National Book Award. By the time Song of

Solomon came out, Morrison succeeded a dominant place as one of America’s

famous novelists. Morrison’s reputation was further enhanced by receipt of the

Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Morrison is often burdened for her demonstrations of a matriarchal culture that

puts poor, uneducated black females, with a small number of positive black

male characters and approximately no white characters. Some critics think that

this is to a certain extent because of her endeavor to construct an idea that is

exclusively black and distinctively feminist.

The Bluest Eye is a critique not only of the standards of female beauty

approved by the prevailing white culture, however, acceptance of those

standards by blacks themselves. Pecola is unsuccessful in the test specifically

because of her unconditional internalization of the dominant ideology. Apart

from this, Morrison reiterates black female representation within her fiction,

particularly in The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved.

In the conclusion, one can agree with “One is not born, but rather

becomes woman… it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature,

intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine”

(Beauvoir 16). However, in the fictional world of Morrison feminism keeps the

tone of humanism. It becomes a strong weapon in the hands of suppressed and

marginalized. She tries to give the equal justice but naturally her inclination is

towards the black women in which she was born and brought up.

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Works Cited:

Barbara, Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women

Writers, New York: Pergamon Press, 1985, Print.

Beal, Frances, “Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female,” The Black

Women: An Anthology (New York: Signet, 1970), Print.

Beauvoir, Simon de. The Second Sex ((London: Picador, 1988), Print.

Bischoff, Joan “The Novels of Toni Morrison: Studies in Thwarted

Sensitivity,” Studies in Black Literature, 6, 3 (1975), Print.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1978) Print.

Engels, Frederick. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973) Print.

Faly, Chadwell, Review of Jazz, Library Journal, 15 April 1992, Print.

Giddings, Pania, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on

Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, 1984), Print.

Hernton, Calvin, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press, 1965),

Print.

Kovel, Joel White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1984), Print.

LeClair, Thomas “The Language Must Not Sweat: A Conversation with Toni

Morrison,” New Republic, 21 March 1981. Print.

Morrison, Toni, Beloved, London: Vintage, 1987. Print.

---. Sula (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), Print.

---. The Bluest Eye (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979). Print.

---. Jazz, London: Picador, 1992. Print.

---. Paradise, London: Chatto and Windus, 1997. Print.

Naylor Gloria and Toni Morrison, “A Conversation,” Southern Quarterly, 21

(1985). Print.

Nkrumah, Kwame. Class Struggle in Africa (New York: International

Publishers, 1970). Print.

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Parker, Betty. “Complexity, Toni Morrison’s Women-An interview Essay,”

Study Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Garden

city: Doubleday, 1979). Print.

Phyllis, Klotman “Dick and Jane and Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest

Eye,” Black American Literature Forum, 13(1979), Print.

Stead, Christina. Seven Poor Men of Sydney (London: Avon, 1965), Print.

Steinem, Gloria. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (London: Fontana,

1984). Print.