Feminism in Toni Morrison’s Works

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International Journal in Commerce, IT & Social Sciences (Impact Factor: 4.218)

Feminism in Toni Morrison’s Works

Dr. Kamlesh Saharan

The attempt to become "white" intensifies rather than mitigates the Negro woman's frustration in white world. No amount of pain, powder, and hair straightner can erase all the things in the black woman's background that make her feminity and aesthetic appreciation of herself as a beauty capable of attracting men. The Negro woman becomes ashamed of what she is. . . .

William Grier and Price Cobbs, Black Rage

In his famous essay, "Blueprint for Negro Literature," Richard Wright asserts that a Marxist black

male-oriented aesthetic and politic against racism and capitalism should be the all-consuming

perspective of the Negro writer. Accordingly, the central character in all his novels and stories is a young

black male, ensnared in the nightmare of a white racist, capitalistic world. Furthermore, the masculine

perspective itself, concerning the manhood of the black race, has always occupied central stage in the

drama of African-American literature. The African-American male writers have been machoistic in their

treatment of black women as fully debased creatures, evil castrators and immoral beings. They also

portrayed black women as sex-objects or merely an extension of the male ego with no autonomous

individual self. In other words, black male writers have been no different from their white counterparts

in their treatment of black women.

It is this hegemony of the masculine perspective, along with its male-centered aesthetic, that is

now being challenged in and through the writings of Black American women. Black women in America

being at once black, female and poor; have been victimized by the mountains of racism, sexism, and

capitalism, not only from the white world but also from the men of the black world. Black women are

bearers of what Barbara Smith calls "geometric oppression." They are, therefore, bearers of a triple

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Small wonder, therefore, if a black feminist perspective pervades contemporary

African-American literature. Happily, the perspective governs the aesthetic and the aesthetic informs the

landscape and the vision. The status of the black women writers is no longer relegated below the status

of the males. Instead of being secondary to the literary dominance of black males, the literature of black

women is expansive and, what is more, liberating. Unlike in the past when women were supposed to be

seen but not heard, the women of today are recognized writers in all fields and genres. Most

importantly, black women are dealing with the political machinations of the racial and sexual beliefs,

feelings and actions that black men writers have maintained towards black females, in the street, in the

family, and in the bedroom. Their perspective, which is consistent with the aesthetic, is faithful to the

actual experiences of black women in America. As a result, we have in their works a woman-to-woman

approach rather than a woman-to-man approach. It is, in brief, a black feminist aesthetic in which the

form, language, syntax, sequence and metaphoric rendering of experience are markedly different and

expansive in comparison to that of male-authored literature. This can be meaningfully witnessed in the

works of Toni Morrison, the richly deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.

Toni Morrison is, perhaps, the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of

African-American literature, whose work has been described as "amazingly high." She astutely describes aspects

of the blacks' lives and especially of blacks as the people, they are. There are many writers who are

willing to describe the ugliness of the world as ugly, but the uniqueness of Toni Morrison lies in revealing

the beauty and the hope beneath the surface of the black America. Combining the aims of the Black

Freedom Movement and Women's Liberation, she seeks to produce literature, which is irrevocably and

indisputably black. However, the artistic excellence of Morrison's fiction lies in achieving a balance

be-tween writing a truly black literature and writing what is truly universal literature. Although firmly

grounded in the cultural heritage and social concerns of black Americans, her work transcends narrowly

prescribed conceptions of ethnic literature, exhibiting universal mythic patterns and overtones. To put it

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The signal accomplishment of Toni Morrison as a writer is that she has managed uncannily to

invert her own mode of literary representation. Her themes are often those expected of naturalist

fiction-the burdens of history, the determining social effects of race, gender or class-but they are also

the great themes of lyrical modernism-love, death, betrayal, and burden of individual responsibility for

her or his own fate. Like Golding's, her novels have a fabulist quality as she has been directly influenced

by Afro-American folktales. Like George Eliot, she has a rare gift for characterization. She can compel her

readers to learn about themselves by experiencing through her characters, states of mind, which they

would ordinarily disavow. Morrison's extraordinary distinction as a novelist also lies in restoring the

language the black people speak to its original power.

As a result of her literary and artistic abilities and competence, Toni Morrison stands in the

vanguard of contemporary writers of fiction, transcending both her racial identity and gender. Her

acclaim is international as her novels are translated into many languages. Scholars and doctoral

candidates the world over critique and assess her works, seeking to unravel the complexity that

Morrison prides herself upon. An astute scholar as well as a uniquely creative writer, Morrison has won

the deepest respect and admiration of both her fellow writers and populace at large. In addition to the

feature coverage she has received from the popular media, from major national magazines and journals,

she has been the recipient of several honorary degrees, literary awards, and domestic recognitions. The

numerous awards she has received, culminating in the Nobel Prize awarded to her in 1993 for her

distinctive writing, bear testimony to her genius as a writer. With her powerful narratives set against a

historical as well as mythical backdrop, Morrison has captivated the hearts of the common reader as

well as scholars of literature. She enjoys today the unique distinction of being both a popular writer and

an outstanding literary figure.

Black women literary tradition can be traced back to Phillis Weatley in the eighteenth century

down to the boom period-the seventies and the eighties with its remarkable talented writers like Paule

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the forties. Barbara Christian calls it the "Development of a Tradition" meaning that it has been a

continuously evolving process, if one can trace the development of the black women's self from its

infantile stage of invisibility to its present stage of self-definition and self-assertion. A survey of black

women writers’ tradition reveals that women writers could discover the positive-self in women and give

a true picture of womanhood in all its density and complexity.

Women writers took it up as their bounden duty to discover black women's self-entrapped in

the white society. The urge to discover one's self and its relation to the world have become the

important thrusts of these novelists. About this Alexis De Veau says, "I see a greater commitment among

black women writers to understand self multiplied in terms of the community, the community

multiplied in terms of the world."(55)

Barbara Christian explains how difficult it has been for them to achieve such "an overtly

self-centered point of view", because of the way in which they have been conceptualized by black as well as

white society. She says, "The extent to which Afro-American woman writers like Alice Walker, Paule

Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Alexis De Veau, in the seventies and eighties have been able to make a

commitment to an exploration of self, as central rather than marginal, is a tribute to the insights they

have called in a century or so of literary activity”(234). Their predecessors were not permitted to

contemplate and express their views on their self, because their self was not their own but something

gravely affected by other complex issues. They had to struggle hard to evolve a self, which was deeply

afflicted by racism and sexism. They found it even harder to give self-expression to the unheard voice of

their self.

Early African-American women novelists like Frances Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen and Ann

Petry indicate their stated intentions and their primary reasons for writing their works. Frances Harper

in her preface to Iola Leroy makes her purpose clear when she writes, "her story's mission would not be

in vain if it awakens in the hearts of our countrymen a strong sense of justice and a more Christian like

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being lynched, burned out, raped, and deprived of their rights as citizens in the wake of the failure of

Reconstruction. However, her intention is to impress and to please the white readers by creating a

lady-like version of the heroine, Iola Leroy, whom the Americans are expected to respect even though she is

black. Jessie Redmon Fauset, a woman novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, also writes with a craving for

white acceptance. She wants to correct the impression most white people have about black people. In

her preface to The China-Berry Tree (1931), she says that her novel is about "those breathing spells

in-between spaces where coloured men and women work and live and go their ways in no thought of the

problem."(Fauset ix) Both Harper and Fauset were thus, aware of the negative images of the black

people that predominated in the minds of white Americans.

Nella Larsen (1893-1963) too creates such heroines who wish to 'pass' for whites. They look like

whites and act like whites. She felt that creation of assimilated women and a new bourgeois class in the

black community would take the race closer to power and white acceptance. For example, her heroine,

Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928), identifies herself with the white value structure so much so that she

gets herself alienated from the common Negro mass socially and culturally. Ann Petry (1908) continues

the tradition of the heroines who want to 'pass' for white. For example, Lu-tie Johnson in The Street

(1946) is frustrated and alienated from self because she tries to live by the female version of the

American Dream as pure, protected and well-provided for. However, Perry's contribution to the

development of black women's literary tradition is that she presents women and mothers struggling

against the social and economic hostilities stacked against them.

We have, however, one notable exception to this trend in early African-American women

writers' works in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). It appeared eight years

after Nella Larsen's Passing and new winds began to blow across the black women's fictional landscape.

Hurston was not only the group's best woman writer, but one of the first black women writers to

attempt serious study of the black folklore and folk history. The major themes that emerge in the novels

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relationship between man and woman, black sisterhood, and significance of fidelity in interpersonal

relationships.

Hurston not only preserves black folk culture but also even contributes to the definition of

woman's selfhood. Like Jessie Fauset or Nella Larsen, Hurston does not employ the 'passing' theme or

the white emulative motif, nor does she show crude bitterness toward the white society, nor any

extrovert reaction to the external forces, but rather an "opposition to various forms of repression which

are more generally human, and sometimes self-manufactured."(Nellie139). Unlike her predecessors'

heroines, Hurston's women continually quest for personal freedom and self-love by placing themselves

in relation to the community they live in. By presenting black women with all the ordinariness of their

lives, their aspirations, their dreams, Hurston not only rescues them from the stereotypical upper

middle-class bourgeois traps, but comes close to probing the dimensions representing the general

female condition as well. Thus, in its radical envisioning of the self as central, and "in its use of language

as a means of exploring the self as female and black, Their Eyes Were Watching God is a forerunner of

fiction of the seventies and eighties." (Christian, Trajectories 236) A 'transitional' writer, Hurston, shows

considerable talent in revising the preceding models of black womanhood and leading the way a bit

further up. Her writings signaled that the dawn was not far off and the 'new black woman' would soon

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International Journal in Commerce, IT & Social Sciences (Impact Factor: 4.218) WORKS CITED

 Brien, John O', Interviews with Black Writers (New York: Liveright, 1973), 192

 Christian, Barbara. "Trajectories of Self-definition: Placing Contemporary Afro-

American Women's Fiction," Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary

Tradition, ed. Pryse Marjorie and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1985), 234.

 Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition 1892-1976 (West Port,

Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980), 70-71.

 Dowling, Colette "The Song of Toni Morrison," New York Times, 20 May 1971, 42.

 Nellie, Mckay. "Ann Petry's The Street and the Narrow”. A Study of the Influences of Race and

Gender on African-American Women's Lives. Diedrich and Fisher Hormung, 139.