A Mercy

by Toni Morrison

A Mercy


At a glance:

Throughout Toni Morrison’s nine novels, certain key themes consistently appear, marking each book regardless of differences of setting, plot, character, and historical period. No issue is more significant to Morrison than the relationship between mother and daughter. Her most famous rendering of this remains Beloved (1987), in which a mother chooses to cut her daughter’s throat rather than allow her to be returned to a life of slavery. Morrison’s novel A Mercy has as its defining moment a similar horrible choice for a mother to make about her...

(The entire page is 2031 words.)

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