• CRITICAL RECEPTION
• ART IMITATING LIFE
• MORRISON AND THE MOVIES
• NOTES

The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

In a 1984 essay titled “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Morrison wrote, “I want my fiction to urge the reader into active participation in the non-narrative, nonliterary experience of the text, which makes it difficult for the reader to confine himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data.“¹ Her concern is writing novels that cannot easily be consumed and then discarded. She wants her readers to look beneath the surface of her stories, which often are quite simple, and to focus on the experience of reading in much the same way she believes a person experiences works of art or musical compositions; that is, without having to rely on prior literary knowledge. She therefore structures her novels in such a way that the bits and pieces from which she develops her stories are related in a nonlinear manner. In an effort to clarify what she means, she describes the form of her first novel, The Bluest Eye:

The form becomes the exact interpretation of the idea the story is meant to express. There is nothing more traditional than that—but the sources of the images are not the traditional novelistic or readerly ones. The visual image of a splintered mirror, or the corridor of split mirrors in blue eyes, is the form as well as the content of The Bluest Eye.²

She attempts to convey through the form or structure of her novel the splintering of the life of a young African American girl, Pecola Breedlove, whose victimization is so complete that she goes insane.

The Bluest Eye is divided into four parts, each representing a season of the year. It begins with a version of the Dick and Jane primer, which once was required reading for elementary school children. The Dick and Jane story presents an ideal (white) American family in a perfect setting. The story is repeated three times, with the second and third repetitions suggesting the disintegration of the idea of a nuclear family, one of the organizing themes of the novel. Although Claudia MacTeer, the principal narrator of the novel, and her sister, Frieda, enjoy a nurturing environment and loving parents, their physical environment is far

removed from that of Dick and Jane. Morrison deconstructs the American ideal by presenting families whose lives are conditioned by racism and poverty and, in the case of the Breedloves, by deep pathology.

The Bluest Eye is set in the small, insular, African American community of Lorain, Ohio, where Claudia and Frieda MacTeer try to find an explanation for two extraordinary events: that the marigold seeds they planted did not grow—in fact, “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941”—and that their friend Pecola Breedlove was raped and impregnated by her father, Cholly Breedlove.³ When Pecola’s baby dies, Claudia and Frieda blame each other for having planted their seeds incorrectly. For many readers, the theme of incest and the graphic description in the section titled “Winter” of the rape scene over shadow some of the more humorous sections of the novel. For example, Claudia’s reaction in “Autumn” to the child star Shirley Temple, her comments about her mother’s blues lyrics and incessant “fussing,” and her and Frieda’s efforts to hide from their mother that Pecola has started “ministratin” offer comic relief from the bleakness that otherwise characterizes Pecola Breedlove’s existence.⁴ Likewise, Pauline Breedlove’s first-person account of how she tried to emulate the movie star Jean Harlow offers a humorous side to Morrison’s critique of popular standards of beauty and their effect on young and vulnerable African American girls. Pauline’s narrative offers an explanation of how the love between her and Cholly Breedlove ended in hate. In “Spring” a third-person narrator states emphatically that “Pauline and Cholly loved each other.”⁵ Unlike the MacTeers, how-ever, their love for each other and for their children is not strong enough to sustain them against the external forces of racism and poverty. The family becomes increasingly dysfunctional and finally disintegrates with Cholly’s brutal assault on his daughter.

Although Morrison generally is regarded as a modernist, The Bluest Eye is an example of writing in the tradition of literary realism. Morrison’s depiction of Lorain, Ohio; her emphasis on the cultural specificity of the community in which she sets her novel; and her accuracy in portraying the speech, behavior, and attitudes of poor African American people are examples of her use of realist technique. Morrison’s modernism, however, is evident in her use of a shifting narrative point of view. The point of view shifts between that of young Claudia MacTeer; that of a more mature voice that narrates the histories of Cholly Breedlove, Soaphead Church, and the other minor characters; and that of the first-person narrative voices of Pauline and Pecola Breedlove. Pecola’s voice is rarely heard. Almost all of her thoughts and actions are presented from a thirdperson point of view. After her baby dies, she communicates only with herself, “walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear.”⁶

Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Two common traits of Morrison’s novels are the use of settings in small African American communities and a focus on women. Most of her novels are set in the Midwest. The setting of Sula is a place called the Bottom, an African American neighborhood in the hills of the fictional Ohio River Valley town of Medallion. The novel spans five decades, from 1919, when World War I veteran Shadrack returns to the Bottom and establishes National Suicide Day, to 1965, when all but a handful of the original residents of the Bottom either have died or moved elsewhere. The linear structure of the novel is complicated by the shifts in narrative time from the present to the past. For example, in order to understand the behavior of Sula Peace’s one-legged grandmother, Eva Peace, the reader is taken back to 1895 when Eva Peace’s husband, Boy Boy, deserts her and their three children, Pearl, Plum, and Hannah—later Sula’s mother. Shortly afterward, Eva leaves the three children with a neighbor. She returns to Medallion eighteen months later with only one leg and enough money to build a large and rambling house. She shares her house with several eccentric characters, including a drunken blonde-haired white man whom she names “Tar Baby”; three young boys all named Dewey; her son, Plum; her daughter, Hannah; and her granddaughter, Sula.

At the center of Sula is the relationship between the title character and her friend Nel. Morrison has said that the theme of Sula is the “nature and quality of forgiveness”⁷ she believes characterizes friendship between women. The friendship between Sula and Nel is traced from 1922—when they both were twelve years old—to Sula’s death in 1940. Among the things that bind them together throughout their adolescence are their solitariness, their delight in daydreaming, and their culpability for the death in 1922 of a little boy known in the neighborhood as Chicken Little. Their relationship is disrupted by Nel’s marriage to Jude Green. After the wedding, Sula leaves the Bottom. She returns ten years later amid a “plague of robins,” seduces Nel’s husband, and then abandons him.⁸ Forgiveness does not come easily for Nel after her husband leaves her for her best friend. She does not admit to herself until 1965 that Sula, rather than her husband, Jude, is the one whom she misses the most.

Morrison’s treatment in Sula of the themes of forgiveness, mother love, and good and evil are as unsettling as the rape scene in The Bluest Eye. She explains in “Memory, Creation, and Writing” that her early efforts as a novelist were focused on subverting her reader’s “traditional comfort so that he may experience an unorthodox one: that of being in the company of his own solitary imagination.”⁹ In order to do so, she invented characters that most readers had not previously encountered in African American fiction. Eva Peace is a murderer. She kills Plum by dousing him with kerosene and setting him afire. Sula watches calmly as her mother, Hannah, burns to death; and Nel, despite her association with the maternal, remains throughout her life indifferent to the death of Chicken Little.

Although it retains some elements of realism, the fictional world depicted in Sula borders on the surreal. The surreal qualities of the novel are reinforced by the horrifying actions of characters that inhabit that world and by the inexplicability of natural events. Only days before Hannah’s accidental death in August 1923, a series of five “strange” things occur and are later recognized by Eva Peace as omens. The “second strange thing,” Eva and Hannah Peace’s one-sided discussion about mother love and murder, is preceded the night before by the first strange thing that the people of the Bottom remember as an ominous sign: a powerful wind that “tore over the hills rattling roofs and loosening doors,” then dissipated without so much as a “crack of lightening” or a drop of the rain for which they had hoped.¹⁰ The third strange thing is Hannah’s dream about a red wedding dress. The dream disturbs Eva as much as the next strange thing: Sula’s “acting up.”¹¹ Sula, who is thirteen years old and has a rose-like birthmark darkening over her eye, “was dropping things and eating food that belonged to the newly married couple”—roomers in the Peace house—and threatening to give the three Deweys a much needed bath.¹² The fifth strange thing is Hannah’s death. Morrison invokes the supernatural by suggesting that Hannah foresaw her own death by fire in her dream of the red dress. The inexplicable plague of robins that coincides with Sula’s unannounced return to the Bottom and the drastic changes in the weather that precede Shadrack’s fatal January 1941 celebration of National Suicide Day are other indicators that with Sula Morrison had begun to give the realm of the supernatural a more prominent role in her fiction.

Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977.

In this novel Morrison explores more fully the literary possibilities of the supernatural, African mythology, and African American folklore. Contrary to her insistence that she self-consciously tries to avoid striking “literary postures,” Morrison uses many literary allusions in Song of Solomon, thus revealing the breadth of her knowledge of Western literature.¹³ The title is an allusion to the Old Testament love story about King Solomon and a Shulamite girl.¹⁴ Less obvious, especially to readers unfamiliar with the classics of Western literature, are allusions to Homer’s Odyssey and to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922). Similar to the latter work, Song of Solomon is a bildungsroman; that is, the education and development of the protagonist is traced from his childhood to maturity. Song of Solomon differs from Morrison’s first two novels in that the narrative centers around the experiences of a male protagonist, Milkman Dead, whose quest for gold ultimately becomes a journey of personal discovery. That journey takes Milkman from his hometown in Michigan to Danville, Pennsylvania, where his father, Macon, and Pilate, Macon’s sister, were born. Milkman’s journey ends in Shalimar, Virginia. In Shalimar, Milkman, much like the questing heroes of modern bildungsromans, finally finds his spiritual home, revealed to him through the “Sugarman” song that the children of Shalimar sing during a ring game. The song is based on the myth of the flying Africans and records the lineage of Milkman’s ancestors.

Morrison discusses the importance of the role of the African American ancestor in “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984). She describes Song of Solomon as her effort to “blend the acceptance of the supernatural and a profound rootedness in the real world at the same time with neither taking precedence over the other.”¹⁵The supernatural events that occur are not questioned by characters in the novel. They see these events as natural phenomena that need no rational explanations.

As with Morrison’s previous two novels, the complex structure of Song of Solomon requires that readers be attentive to shifts in the narrative points of view and to shifts from the present to past, particularly as the principal characters tell Milkman their versions of their family history. That history refers to Solomon, the flying African, and his son Jake, the father of Macon and Pilate. Morrison introduces a West African cosmology: Jake regularly appears to Pilate as a guiding spirit after his death. Jake acts as an ancestor who keeps Pilate rooted in the beliefs and traditions that sustain her throughout her life. Part of the mystery of the Dead family is what Jake means when he appears and says to his daughter, “Sing.” Another mystery that unravels over the course of the narrative is that of a secret society called the Seven Days. Milkman learns from his friend Guitar why a former member of the society, Robert Smith, committed suicide by leaping from the roof of a hospital while wearing a pair of homemade blue silk wings. The novel comes full circle when Milkman returns to Shalimar and leaps from the place where, according to the “Sugarman” song, his great-grandfather one day flew away.

Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Morrison continues her explorations of myth and the supernatural in Tar Baby. Set on a Caribbean island, Tar Baby is the first novel by Morrison that does not focus exclusively on a small community of African Americans living in the Midwest. For the first time Morrison places white characters at the center of her narrative. Valerian and Margaret Street are wealthy Philadelphians who take up residence on the sparsely populated Isle des Chevaliers with their servants, Sydney and Ondine. Structurally one of Morrison’s more accessible novels, Tar Baby is an account of the relationships between the Streets; Sydney and Ondine; their niece, Jadine, a successful fashion model; and Son, the young African American man who Margaret finds hiding in her closet one evening after dinner.

Two other employees of Valerian Margaret Street are Therese and Gideon. They are the ancestral figures through whom Morrison communicates the myths of the blind African horsemen, after whom Isle des Chevaliers is named. As ancestral figures, they remain close to their folk roots. They share with the people of Eloe, Florida (Son’s birthplace), a respect for ordinary black people, a respect that Sydney, Ondine, and Jadine have lost. Son feels close to them and leads the mutiny that occurs during Christmas dinner after Valerian tells his dinner guests that he has fired Therese and Gideon for stealing some of the apples he had shipped to the island from the United States. During the ensuing arguments between Valerian and Son and the fight between Ondine and Margaret, Ondine reveals to Valerian a long-kept secret about Margaret’s relationship with her son, Michael. Valerian never recovers from what he hears. Son and Jadine leave for New York where they try—but fail—to make a life together. After Jadine leaves him, Son turns to Therese and Gideon for help in finding her. Gideon refuses and urges him to “Let her leave, man. Let her go.”¹⁶ Son finally gets Therese to take him to L’Arbe de la Croix by boat. They set out at night and arrive at Isle des Chevaliers during a heavy fog. As he climbs out of the boat and up the rocky slope toward the shore, Therese whispers to him, “Small boy … don’t go to L’Arbe de la Croix…. Forget her. There is nothing in her parts for you. She has forgotten her ancient properties,” indicating to Son that Jadine no longer identifies with her ancestral roots.¹⁷ To help him free himself from his obsession with Jadine, Therese takes him to the wrong side of the island so that he can join the mythical horsemen of Isle de Chevaliers. The novel ends in ambiguity. Morrison leaves it up to her readers to decide what happens to Son once he reaches the shore.

Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Morrison makes even greater demands on her readers in Beloved. In addition to the complex structure of the novel, readers are confronted with the problem of plausibility. Slavery in the United States is an historical fact. Novelists who write about slavery usually work from historically accurate documents and are careful to realistically present their topic. In Beloved, Morrison breaks with the realism of slave narratives and historical fiction by making a ghost a principal character. Readers therefore are required to suspend their expectations and disbelief and free their imaginations as they would with any other ghost story.

Sethe, a former fugitive slave, and her daughter Denver live at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. Their house is haunted by a baby’s “spiteful” spirit. The spite is so intense that by 1873 Sethe’s other two children, Howard and Bugler, have run away, never to be heard from again, and Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law, has died of grief. Sethe and Denver’s attempts to exorcize the baby fail because its spell is too powerful. Equally powerful are the memories that filter though Sethe’s consciousness as she goes about her daily routines. Despite her attempts to suppress them, Sethe’s memories haunt her. The baby’s powerful spell is unbroken until Paul D, “the last of the Sweet Home men,” comes to 124 Bluestone Road and chases the spirit out.¹⁸

Shortly after Paul D rids the house of the raging spirit, a beautiful young girl appears in the yard. She calls herself “Beloved.” Denver recognizes her right away as the reincarnation of the sister murdered by Sethe almost eighteen years earlier. For Sethe, recognition comes almost too late. Beloved’s possessiveness and her desire to avenge her death nearly destroy Sethe. The African American women in the community bond together to help Sethe and Denver. They bring them food and then conduct an exorcism of 124 Bluestone Road. Under the women’s powerful songs and prayers, Beloved briefly appears in the doorway and then vanishes, leaving the women wondering if they saw her at all.

Although some of the narrative techniques Morrison uses to present her characters’ histories are similar to those in Song of Solomon, in Beloved she experiments more fully with interior monologues, stream of consciousness, shifting narrative points of view, and flashbacks. This kind of narrative fragmentation best expresses her characters’ efforts to suppress their memories of slavery and the psychological pain they suffered as they tried to rebuild their lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, where they hoped to be free.

Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Whereas in Beloved the narrative voices are identifiable with the characters whose history and memories they recount, in Jazz readers are faced with the question, “Who is speaking?” The opening sentence of the novel, “Sth, I know that woman,” establishes a first-person, omniscient narrative voice from whose perspective the story of Joe and Violet Trace begins to unfold. The narrator presents the facts in the first paragraph.¹⁹ Joe Trace shot his eighteen-year-old lover, Dorcas Manfred. His wife, Violet, goes to the funeral and attempts to slash the dead girl’s face. The perspective of the narrative voice shifts from Violet and Joe to a panoramic view of the City after the narrator discloses that by spring of 1926, the year Dorcas Manfred died, another young girl enters the lives of Joe and Violet Trace, creating a “scandalizing threesome on Lenox Avenue.”²⁰

In Jazz Morrison is more preoccupied with the narrative voice than she is in her previous novels. The narrating voice that introduces the Harlem cityscape by claiming “I’mcrazy about this City” takes center stage and comments on everything from the social changes occurring in the City to the behavior and attitudes of the people whom it claims to know well.²¹ In this sense, the voice functions as an omniscient narrator. It knows everything about the characters. It knows their histories, what they think and feel, and what motivates their behavior. For example, at one point in the novel, the gossipy narrative voice describes the effect of springtime in the City on its inhabitants, before focusing on a rainy afternoon in the spring of 1926, and on Joe, who sits in his apartment window, crying like a child and wiping his eyes and nose with the red handkerchiefs Violet so assiduously washes and irons for him. The narrator claims to know him well. The narrative perspective is such that the reader gets the impression that the narrator is close by, watching as Joe leaves his apartment and moves about the city selling his cosmetics. The narrator cautions the reader to be wary of a “faithful man near fifty” who has “never messed with another woman” and who selects “a young girl to love” because “he thinks he is free … to do something wild.”²² After the narrative voice says what it thinks about this kind of man, Joe Trace takes over and tells his side of the story. The stories of other principal characters follow.

This emphasis in Jazz on the act of narrating, and the narrator’s self-reflection is typical of postmodern fiction, which is often self-reflexive. The postmodern novel is as much a commentary on the act of writing, the essence of language, and on the narrative voice as it is a commentary on whatever reality the novelist attempts to represent.

Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998.

In Paradise Morrison’s mode of presentation is less experimental.²³ Although she continues to work within a nonlinear narrative framework, the nine titled sections of the novel and the more reliable narrative voices places fewer demands on the reader than does Jazz. Similar to her other novels, the basic plot of Paradise is presented in the opening pages. The opening sentence, “They shoot the white girl first,” announces the murderous rampage of nine men intent on wiping out a group of women living in an old convent near the western Oklahoma town of Ruby.²⁴

Each chapter of the novel is named after a woman, four of whom are residents of the Convent. With the exception of Consolata, who was brought from Brazil to the Convent when she was a child, each woman was headed elsewhere and ended up in the Convent by accident. Among the things they have in common is their inability or unwillingness to conform to the expectations of others. All of the women either are in search of something or trying to escape a painful experience. At the Convent they find shelter from whatever ails them and the freedom to be themselves. The men of Ruby find that freedom from conformity threatening. The section titled “Patricia” is helpful in explaining the relations between the Ruby families, their intraracial prejudice, and why they find outsiders so intolerable.

Although intraracial racism and intergenerational conflict are themes Morrison deals with in her earlier novels, none of her previous treatments of these conflicts include the kind of organized and preplanned violence against women encountered in Paradise. The violence is made palatable for sensitive readers by Morrison’s use of the supernatural. As is her custom with her later novels, Morrison leaves her readers wondering what actually happens at the end of the novel. When undertaker Roger Best arrives at the Convent after the massacre, expecting to find the bodies of five women, there are none. He looks all over the Convent and the surrounding fields. All that was left of the massacre was “a sheet and a folded raincoat” on the kitchen table, “the only sign that a body had been there.”²⁵ There is nothing else: “No bodies. Nothing.”²⁶ Perhaps of even greater significance is what the Reverend Richard Misner and his fiancée, Anna Flood, see or sense when they go to the Convent a few weeks after the massacre. Standing on the edge of the garden near the house, they think they see either a door or a window, although there is “nothing to see.”²⁷ The questions they each have but do not express aloud as they stand transfixed seeing or sensing an invisible object are, “Whether through a door needing to be opened or a beckoning window already raised, what would happen if you entered? What would be on the other side?” “What on earth would it be? What on earth?”²⁸ The women of the Convent may have found out what was on the other side. With the exception of Consolata, they each reappear—for a fleeting moment—before the person whom they loved the most. For Morrison’s readers the ending poses a problem in interpretation. She does not allow the comfort of closure. As in Song of Solomon, the ending is whatever readers make of it.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

As is often the case with a novelist’s early efforts, reviews of The Bluest Eye were mixed. The novel has since been reevaluated many times and now is considered an important literary achievement. As a featured novel for Oprah Winfrey’s April 2000 televised book club, it has been brought to the attention—along with Sula—of a new generation of readers whose literary tastes have been conditioned by the recent successes of African American women writers of popular fiction such as Terry McMillan.

Morrison fared better with Sula (1973). Jerry H. Bryant, a reviewer for The Nation, felt that something new was happening with black fiction in terms of the characterization of black women. In his 1974 review of Sula, Bryant noted “a fierceness bordering on the demonic” in the characters of writers such as Ed Bullins, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. He wrote that Morrison’s “originality and power emerge in characters like Sula, that we have seldom seen before and that do not fit the familiar black image.”²⁹ He mentioned all of the women in Sula as examples of characters who threaten to make “our old buildings unsafe.”³⁰ Astute readers such as Bryant could not, after the publication of Sula, return to comforting and assuring fictional commonplaces.³¹

For other reviewers of Sula, Morrison already had taken her place among writers whom they considered “important and talented.” Both Barbara Smith and Roseann P. Bell praised Morrison for the beauty of her writing and for offering black women a fictional universe that was both familiar and frightening. Although Smith admittedly found Sula’s insensitivity toward her friend Nel in one instance “unbearable,” she wrote, “Morrison is a virtuoso writer. The music and paintings she makes with words stun the reader’s senses at the same time that they convince her of their totally natural rightness … Morrison’s exquisite language and subject matter embody Black experience in a way rarely achieved by Black novelists, except for masters like Hurston and Toomer.”³² Bell, who made Sula’s grandmother Eva the focus of her review, described Sula as “an important statement in the contemporary discussions on the Black Aesthetic.”³³ Bell defined the Black Aesthetic as “what we are and what we perceive to be true, good, beautiful and useful.”³⁴ Morrison’s freeing of the mind in the interest of “a more realistic human existence.”³⁵

Nellie Y. McKay, in the introduction to Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (1998), suggests that Morrison’s first two novels received “limited, mixed and/or unfavorable attention” because most of the early reviewers and critics were “white Americans who were uncomfortable” with Morrison’s characterizations of African American women.³⁶ Despite the mixed reviews it received, Sula helped to strengthen Morrison’s presence on the American literary landscape as a novelist worth serious critical consideration. The literary establishment did indeed begin to pay attention. In 1975 Sula won the Ohioana Book Award and was nominated for the National Book Award for fiction. Morrison did not achieve national prominence, however, until the publication of Song of Solomon.

Published in 1977, Song of Solomon was widely acclaimed as an American epic. The novelist Reynolds Price, in a 1977 review for The New York Times Book Review, described the novel as “a long prose tale that surveys nearly a century of American history as it impinges upon a single family. In short, this is a full-novel … not the two-hour penny dreadful which is again in vogue nor one of the airless cat’s cradles customwoven for the delight and job assistance of graduate students of all ages.”³⁷ Susan Lardner described the novel as “a domestic epic—a rhapsodic work, demonstrating the virtues of the spoken word and the abiding presence in certain corners of the world of a lively oral tradition.”³⁸ Charles Larson wrote that Song of Solomon is “the most substantial piece of fiction since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man…. So marvelously orchestrated is Morrison’s narrative that it not only excels on all of its respective levels, not only works for all of its interlocking components, but also—in the end—says something about life (and death) for all of us…. Her affinities with Faulkner are, in fact, not limited to the comic bawdy but also embrace his darker, more profound recesses; and I imagine if your greatest American novelist were alive today he would herald Toni Morrison’s emergence as a kindred spirit.”³⁹

Many other reviewers also commented on Morrison’s rendering of an oral tradition and the skill with which she weaves myth, folklore, and history into her story about an African American family in a small, unnamed Michigan town. In a 1978 review, Samuel Alien, commenting on the array of stylistic devices Morrison uses in her efforts to capture the complexity of the African American experience, wrote, “The extensive array includes inversion, paradox, the play of opposites, criss-crossing conversations and an appropriately masculine metaphorical language…. The novel most notably excels, however, in its imaginative use of myth and folklore. There is an achieved fusion of fantasy and fact, of ancient myth and Virginia coon hunt.”⁴⁰ Melvin Dixon wrote in a review for Callaloo, “The complexity of events in the novel forms an extremely rich mosaic of narrative and point of view. But it is only part of the full beauty of the work. What finally takes hold of the reader is the sustained metaphor of flight which unfolds in a taut pattern of images like the suspended strings of a parachute, holding the reader absolutely breathless.”⁴¹

Morrison earned major awards for Song of Solomon. The novel was selected as a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club for 1977 and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for that year. In 1978 Morrison was presented with an award in literature by the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters for her achievements in Song of Solomon. By 1979 Song of Solomon was a paperback best-seller. In a 1977 interview with Karen De Witt for The Washington Post, Morrison admitted that the paperback rights to Song of Solomon had made her rich. Accustomed to “living closer to the edge,” as she put it, Morrison recalled that the auction of the paperback rights to Song of Solomon was one of the more exciting moments of her new fame. The sale of the rights garnered her something “well up in the six-figure area.”⁴²

With the publication of Song of Solomon, Morrison’s artistry had begun to flourish; her technical skill and command of her craft had matured, and her imagination seemed to enrich and rejuvenate itself contantly. Four years after the publication of Song of Solomon, Morrison published TarBaby and was featured on the cover of the 30 March 1981 Newsweek.

One of the possible reasons for the great success of Tar Baby is that—unlike in her previous novels in which whites, if they appear at all, are on the periphery of the lives of Morrison’s African American characters—a white couple, Valerian and Margaret Street, take center stage. Tar Baby was also supported by an aggressive publicity campaign. In her feature article for Newsweek, titled “Toni Morrison’s Black Magic,” Jean Strouse wrote that Morrison “has produced a truly public novel about the condition of society, examining the relations between blacks and whites, men and women, civilization and nature circa 1981 … Tar Baby keeps you turning pages as if to find out who killed J. R.: a melodrama full of sex, violence, myth, wit, wry wisdom and the extraordinary sense of place that distinguishes all Morrison’s writing, it wraps its urgent messages in a highly potent love story.”⁴³ As this review and others suggest, Tar Baby is a novel that places readers, particularly white ones, on familiar ground.

Writing about the lush and animated tropical landscape in which most of the novel is set, Maureen Howard commented in her 1981 New Republic review, “Though it can come perilously close to Disney, the animation works most of the time in this novel to reinforce our sense of the storybook island on which the wealthy white liberals, the chic, educated black beauty, and the Uncle Toms can face each other simply.”⁴⁴ Howard also described the novel as “so much fun: the rich in the sun; the snappy talk in the servants’ quarters; the glamour of Jadine Childs, a sort of honey-colored Rosalind Russell, bored with her success … Then we get our hero, a big black man who’s jumped ship, young, handsome—tarnished but sterling.”⁴⁵ Morrison offers readers the comfort of characters with whom they could more closely identify. Howard compared some of the scenes between Valerian and Margaret Street with those familiar to fans of Noel Coward and August Strindberg. “We seem to be involved not only in a tale of wonders but in a brittle comedy of manners, a smart script.”⁴⁶ Howard is not without her criticism, however. She pointed out that there are parts of the novel that are decidedly melodramatic and dull. But her overall assessment was that “Tar Baby is a good American novel in which we can discern a new lightness and brilliance in Toni Morrison’s enchantment with language and in her curiously polyphonic stories that echo life.”⁴⁷

Robert G. O’Meally made similar observations in his 1981 review of Tar Baby for Callaloo. He began his review by describing the “stunning show" that greeted the novel’s release:

For a book that promised to be not just a good read for this season but Literature of Lasting Value, the Madison Avenue machinery spun into highest gear. Certain book stores displayed signed advance copies: trade edition and the illustrated Franklin, leather-bound; key publications featured front page coverage, full reviews…. And—never mind that nobody in the subway seemed to have put down the usual romances and mysteries for Tar Baby—the books were selling: by August Tar Baby was selling out of its sixth edition. When it appears in paperback, it will, one supposes, take the next step toward permanence in the Lasting Value market place of Faulkners and Ellisons: it will be taught in universities; it will attract scholarly attention.

All this hyping puts pressure on the scholar in the field of black literature. But what is the book’s real value? I found it to contain a sheaf of images and scenes not quickly to be forgotten. Like a pretty and intricate geometric design and proof, Tar Baby is often very intriguing. Yet I also found Tar Baby deeply flawed: somehow it has all the makings of a good novel; what’s missing is the spark of life that makes a good novel not a formula but vibrant art.⁴⁸

O’Meally followed his none-too-careful summary of Tar Baby by directing his readers to “Morrison’s better novels: Sula and the masterful Song of Solomon,” which he considered “utterly uncontrived and lively" examples of Morrison’s gift for “sheer storytelling.”⁴⁹

Perhaps because he is a well-respected scholar in the field of African American literature, O’Meally showed restraint in his review, whereas Anatole Broyard, writing for The New York Times, was blunt. After offering a brief summary of the novel, Broyard criticized Morrison’s excessive use of descriptive terms, which he felt were void of meaning, and her representations, especially of her white characters. He wrote,

Some readers may ask what ’Tar Baby’ means. They may feel that black folks should sit down with white folks for a frank exchange about the reading and writing of fiction. Though Tar Baby’ may be described as a protest novel, the reader may have a few protests, too. He may wonder why the black characters in Tar Baby’ have all the passion while the white ones are fit only for sitting in greenhouses, manufacturing candy and sticking pins into their babies. He may question those unqualified fields that are spongy and those pavements that are slick with the blood of the best people. He may be puzzled by reined-in dark dogs with silver feet and by dreams of ice houses. He may not understand why the black girls are crying in New York City and why their men don’t look to the right or left. And, finally, the reader may ask himself why Miss Morrison, who won an important award with her last novel, has written so poorly in this one.⁵⁰

John Irving made similar remarks about what he calls Morrison’s “dramatic exaggeration" in Tar Baby. He criticized her for the lavishness of her descriptions of nature, although he found them more tolerable than did Broyard.⁵¹ What he couldn’t tolerate was her “excessive use of dialogue,” examples of which are the arguments between the black characters, which Irving found “lengthy” and “tedious.” Irving tempered his critique by drawing parallels between Morrison’s excessiveness and that of Thomas Hardy. He ended his review by writing, “This judgment is as sympathetic as it is severe. Thomas Hardy, full of his own instructions to damaged mankind, would have loved this book.”⁵²

Morrison did not seem particularly disturbed by the negative reviews, and for good reason. Tar Baby remained on The New York Times hardcover best-seller list for weeks. She explained to Jacqueline Trescott what she tried to accomplish with her fourth novel: “I got very ambitious, very avant-garde and used the world of natural things. It caused some a great deal of misadventure among the critics, all of whom hate it.”⁵³

Whereas Tar Baby was greeted with relief by some reviewers and caused others consternation, Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved, was upon its publication in 1987 almost universally praised as a major literary achievement. An executive editor for the Book-of-the-Month Club, Joseph Savago, wrote about Beloved in his reader’s report to the Club’s editorial committee six months before the book was published:

I don’t want to throw around the word “masterpiece,” not just yet anyway (even though I’ve waited over a week, since finishing BELOVED, to write this report) (a whole week), but I will declare that this is the most extraordinary, mesmerizing, soul-provoking thing I’ve read in a long, long time, the closest thing to “genius” I’ve run across in a long, long time.⁵⁴

The novelist and critic John Leonard, admitting that Morrison “seemed to falter with Tar Baby,” described Beloved as a “masterwork,” a “splendid novel” that “belongs on the highest shelf of American literature, even if half a dozen canonized white boys have to be elbowed off. The thing is, now I can’t imagine American literature without it. Without Beloved, our imagination of the nation’s self has a hole in it big enough to die from.”⁵⁵ A. S. Byatt, whose headline for a 16 October 1987 London Guardian review announced “An American Masterpiece,” wrote of the title character, “If Beloved represents the terrible pain and suffering of a people whose very mother-love is warped by torture into murder, she is no thin allegory or shrill tract. This is a huge, generous, humane and gripping novel.”⁵⁶ Byatt placed Morrison in the ranks of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, each of whom “wrote riddling allegories about the nature of evil, the haunting of unappeased spirits, the inverted opposition of blackness and whiteness. Toni Morrison has with plainness and grace and terror—and judgement—solved the riddle, and showed us the world which haunted theirs.”⁵⁷

Morrison’s “unappeased spirits” did not fully satisfy a few of her critics. Ann Snitow, in a long review for the Village Voice Literary Supplement, admitted to having difficulty with the appearance of a ghost in a novel that “staggers under the terror of its material”—slavery.⁵⁸ She called the novel “airless” and wondered, “How could this happen to a writer this skillful, working with material this full and important? In the reading, the novel’s accomplishments seem driven to the periphery by Morrison’s key decision to be literal about her metaphor, to make the dead baby a character whose flesh-and-bone existence takes up a great deal of narrative space.”⁵⁹ Snitow also commented on Morrison’s “unconvincing reliance on the supernatural” in Song of Solomon and Tar Baby. Her preference for Morrison’s first two books The Bluest Eye and Sula, in which she claimed Morrison works her “best magic,” strongly suggests that she favors fiction that is more realistic. However, Snitow was able to put aside her biases and concede that “If Beloved fails in its ambitions, it is still a novel by Toni Morrison, still therefore full of beautiful prose, dialogue as rhythmically satisfying as music, delicious characters with names like Grandma Baby and Stamp Paid, and the scenes so clearly etched they’re like hallucinations.”⁶⁰

In a 13 September 1987 review for New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood compared Morrison’s treatment of the supernatural to that in Wuthering Heights. She argued that it is not the Amityville Horror kind of supernatural but that of a “magnificent practicality” that is consistent with the characters’ belief in ghosts.⁶¹ Rather than the airlessness that Ann Snitow found in Beloved as a result of Morrison’s use of the supernatural, Atwood focused on the ways it is integrated into this story of the horror of slavery:

Morrison blends a knowledge of folklore—for instance, in many traditions, the dead cannot return from the grave unless called, and it’s the passions of the living that keep them alive-with a highly original treatment. The reader is kept guessing, there’s a lot more to Beloved than any one character can see, and she manages to be many things to several people. She is a catalyst for revelations as well as self-revelations; through her we come to know not only how, but why, the original child Beloved was killed. And through her also Sethe achieves, finally, her own form of self-exorcism, her own self-accepting peace.⁶²

Stanley Crouch wrote a hostile review of Beloved for The New Republic. He labeled it a “blackface holocaust novel” and called the principal character, Sethe, “Aunt Medea.” He wrote that the book “is designed to placate sentimental feminist ideology, and to make sure that the vision of black woman as the most scorned and rebuked of the victims doesn’t weaken.”⁶³ He accused Morrison of lacking “a true sense of the tragic” and argued that “nothing is more contrived than the figure of Beloved herself, who is the reincarnated force of the malevolent ghost.”⁶⁴ He gave Morrison credit for having “real talent” but felt she should rid herself of the sentimentality that he finds so objectionable in her work if she is to achieve that of which he thinks her capable.⁶⁵ Then, as an afterthought, he asked, “But why should she try to achieve anything? The position of literary conjure woman has paid off quite well.”⁶⁶

Despite Morrison’s achievements, the overwhelmingly positive articles and reviews about Beloved, and her stature as an internationally renowned novelist—by 1987 her novels had been translated into several languages and increasingly were being taught in colleges and universities in the United States and abroad—the novel was nominated but not selected for two prestigious American literary awards: the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Beloved also was nominated along with Toronto novelist Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and South African novelist Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature (1987) for the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award, the largest international cash award for a novel in English.⁶⁷ The 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award went to Philip Roth for The Counterlife (1987); Larry Heinemann won the National Book Award for Paco’s Story (1986).

After the National Book Award was announced on 9 November 1987, many people asked the question that Michiko Kakutani raised in a 16 November 1987 New York Times article titled “Did ’Paco’s Story’ Deserve Its Award?”⁶⁸ She started her article by asking, “What happened?” Why did the three-member jury select a novel by this relatively unknown novelist over that of the “widely regarded” Toni Morrison and Philip Roth, whose The Counterlife also was considered a “strong contender” for the award? Kakutani surmised that the judges wanted to give less well-known novelists a chance. They also may have been swayed by the growing interest among Americans in the Vietnam War, which is the theme of Heinemann’s novel. In her assessment, Kakutani felt that although Paco’s Story is “a well-crafted, often admirable novel,” it does not succeed as well as other novels about Vietnam and certainly does not measure up to Beloved. Conceding that it may be unfair to compare a novelist’s second work with that of a writer of Morrison’s stature, Kakutani argued that a great flaw in Heinemann’s novel is that the title character “never emerges as a distinct individual; he comes across as much a vague representative soldier as the generic voice that tells us his story. At the same time, Mr. Heinemann’s writing is insufficiently powerful, his vision too myopic, to effectively turn” Paco “into the sort of mythic Lazarus-like figure that might otherwise engage our passions. ’Beloved,’ on the other hand, remains a work of mature imagination…. the novel shakes up all our preconceptions, makes us grapple with the moral chiaroscuro that shades each of the characters’ decisions. It does not merely give us a portrait of one individual’s loss of innocence, but also reveals the myriad ways in which families and strangers and families can hurt and redeem one another.”⁶⁹

While some critics similarly questioned the National Book Award jury decision, others, following the African American poet June Jordan, protested. According to Elizabeth Kastor, a Washington Post staff writer, Jordan decided, after having a lunch with Morrison during which they discussed the National Book and National Book Critics Circle Awards, to do something about the two awards committees’ oversights. What Jordan did was write a tribute to Morrison that included criticism of the literary establishment for not recognizing Morrison. The statement, which was signed by Jordan and forty-seven other writers and scholars, also paid tribute to the recently deceased novelist James Baldwin, who, “celebrated worldwide and posthumously designated as ’immortal’ and as the ’conscience of his generation’… never received the honor of these keystones to the canon of American literature: the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: never.”⁷⁰

John Leonard, upon hearing that the statement was about to be published in The New York Times, wrote in the 21 January 1988 Newsday,” Forty-Eight black writers and critics, all of whom think Toni Morrison has been so far stiffed in the dispensation of literary prizes, wrote a letter of collective protest that will be published on Sunday in the Times Book Review, and I wish they hadn’t.”⁷¹ He listed among his reasons the fact that Beloved had become a political issue, “a hot potato in race relations” among the American literati rather than a novel that could stand on its own merits. His greater concern was with the “forthcoming Pulitzers” and the impact the letter might have on its panelists. Leonard’s fear was that as a result of the statement, everyone would be “arguing everybody’s politics instead of the novel.”⁷²

In an article published in the 14 February 1988 Los Angeles Times, one of the three jurors for the National Book Award, Richard Eder (the others were the novelists Gloria Naylor and Hilma Wolitzer), defended the jury’s decision by stating, “No oversight was involved when we chose five finalists, including Heinemann and Morrison, and none of us felt whimsical when two of us then chose Heinemann and one of us chose another of the five as winner. The final vote involved neither compromise nor lobbying. Whatever uncertainties any of us had about who should be No. 1—there were some—these were resolved by each of us alone, and on the night shift.”⁷³ Eder accused John Leonard of spreading a rumor in his Newsday article that Naylor had not voted for Beloved. Jordan, who was then teaching at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, reportedly wrote Naylor suggesting that “it would be ’embarrassing and morally elliptical’ for her to take up the month’s residency in creative writing at Stony Brook that had been arranged. Naylor replied, in effect, that she would not go where she was not welcome.”⁷⁴ The often turbulent waters of the New York literary establishment were becoming muddy indeed as other people had their say about the awards and what some felt was a serious game of racial politics played in the field of literature.

By most accounts, the most prestigious of the American awards for literature is the Pulitzer Prize. It was established by Joseph Pulitzer, an American journalist, as an “incentive to excellence" in journalism, letters and drama, and music. Pulitzer made provisions for the prizes in his 1904 will. The first prizes were awarded in 1917, six years after his death.⁷⁵ According to Edwin McDowell, one of the reasons the Pulitzer i s such a coveted award is that it “is regarded by publishers as the one book award that can actually help sell books.” McDowell reported that Beloved was on The New York Times hardcover list for more than thirty-one weeks after it was announced that Morrison had won the prize for 1988.⁷⁶ Morrison told a Los Angeles Times writer that she was “terribly happy that the merits of the book surfaced, that things outside the book did not interfere with the judgment of the committee. It was too upsetting to have my work considered as an affirmative action award.”⁷⁷ Members of the Pulitzer panel insisted that the controversy did not affect their decision. Likewise, Walter Chafe, a judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards, insisted that their committee’s choice of Morrison for their award, which was presented to her on 13 May 1988, had nothing to do with the controversy. He admitted, however, that this instance was the first time the award had been given for a work of fiction. Chafe explained, “We felt her book was such an eloquent and vivid portrayal of the interior experience of the black community, it helped all of us understand better the black experience.”⁷⁸

At the Kennedy Awards ceremony, Morrison received a $2,500 cash award and a bronze bust of Robert Kennedy. She reportedly explained why the awards are so important for black writers: “Black literature needs the authentication of the establishment in order to be taken seriously by people who are keepers of the flame…. It has nothing to do with what’s personal. No writer in the world could write for a prize. I began by saying, ’I will write as powerfully and as seductively as I can,’ and I never in my wildest dreams ever expected large numbers of people to share my vision.”⁷⁹

Equally important as prizes for such authentication are the amount and quality of scholarship generated by a writer’s work. The amount of serious scholarship on Morrison continues to grow. In 1977, the year Song of Solomon was published, the Modern Language Association International Bibliography included two items on Morrison.⁸⁰ In 1981, there were eight entries for Morrison. The 1988 index listed thirty-four scholarly articles and essays and one dissertation.⁸¹ In 1990 five dissertations were devoted exclusively to Morrison’s work, and countless articles and essays were listed that dealt with Morrison’s fiction in relation to works by other writers. By 1992, when Morrison published Jazz and Playing in the Dark, there was much speculation that she might become the first African American to win a Nobel Prize in literature.

Arguably her most difficult novel stylistically, Jazz received mixed reviews, although it stayed on The New Yorh Times bestseller list for weeks. Michael Wood, in a review-essay of Jazz and Playing in the Dark for The New York Review of Books, and John Leonard, writing for The Nation, placed Jazz within the context of Morrison’s other novels to show the extent to which she had begun to experiment with narrative voices and points of view.⁸² Henry Louis Gates Jr. compared Morrison’s use of several narrators and points of view in Jazz to William Faulkner’s narrative devices in As I Lay Dying (1930) and proclaimed her “one of the truly original novelists at work in the world today.”⁸³ Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature.

Most people—literary scholars and general readers alike—rejoiced when the award was announced. A few expressed the opinion that she did not deserve it. The dissenting views were mainly lined up along the gender divide, judging from the negative comments that made it to the mainstream press. A former high-school English teacher from Houston who described himself as a bald black man proclaimed, “I wept when I found out that Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yep, there I was at a subway station in Boston, clutching the ’New York Times’ and weeping like a big baby.”⁸⁴ Other African American men questioned the choice, thereby reigniting ongoing debates between African American male and female writers about issues of the representations of African Americans, especially African American men, in recent literature by African American women writers. The African American novelist Charles Johnson reportedly told a Seattle Times reporter, “I think Morrison has been the recipient of a tremendous amount of good will by readers and academics who wanted to see a particular race and gender represented in what we call the American literary canon.” He is quoted as having said that Morrison is “a remarkably talented and hard-working prose stylist,” but that “intellectually (her works are) middle-brow fiction; intellectually, there are no breakthroughs.”⁸⁵

The 20 October 1993 London Guardian article titled “Nobel Backlash,” written by Steven Moore, an assistant professor of English at Vassar College, generated “many letters” according to a Guardian article that was published ten days later. In his article Moore suggested that Johnson “was right when he charged that granting the prize to Toni Morrison is ’a triumph of political correctness.’” He argued that Morrison, by creating “images of black people who seem to court self-destruction as a means of escaping horrible conditions” perpetuates negative stereotypes of blacks—particularly of black men—that “blacks once found menacing in works by white writers.” Those images allow the reader “to take comfort in her character’s self-mutilation” rather than to challenge negative perceptions of black people in the minds of whites. With regard to the Nobel Prize, Moore expressed concern that by offering it to writers such as the playwright Wole Soyinka and the poet Derek Walcott (who once took a course with Morrison while studying at Howard University), “and now novelist Toni Morrison,” rather than Chinua Achebe, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire, or George Lamming, all of whom, in Moore’s opinion, represent “writers and poets of genuine accomplishment,” the Nobel Committee was playing it safe so as not to “offend European sensibilities.”⁸⁶ Moore’s article and the exchange between him and Cheryl-Ann Michael, and Ato Quayson, are examples of how politically charged the debates about Morrison, her work, and her prizes had become, both nationally and internationally.⁸⁷

The African American playwright Pearl Cleage wrote a response to the charges against Morrison of “male-bashing” in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution:

I was stunned when I heard that the words “male bashing" had even come up with Toni Morrison. At a time when celebration should be the order of the day, not only for black women writers but for anybody who values the complex, mysterious, fragile, incendiary nature of good writing, why were some black men using the moment for rehashing charges of inappropriate male critique in the work of their sister writers?⁸⁸

Throwing down the gauntlet, she stated, “I am tired of this discussion. Dignifying with debate the whole idea of ’male bashing’ in the work of African-American women writers gives it a weight and importance it does not deserve. So this is the last time I will focus my writing on defending myself and my sisters against charges of ’male-bashing, creating negative images, stirring up trouble, making a disturbance’ or generally behaving in a way that can only be described as ’free womanish.’”⁸⁹

Despite the discordance raging across the African American male/female gender divide and on both sides of the Atlantic about Morrison and her work, sales of her books soared after she won the Nobel Prize. On the day the prize was announced, three hundred thousand copies of Jazz reportedly were sold in Germany alone.⁹⁰ Sales of Morrison’s books again rose dramatically in 1996 when Song of Solomon was picked as the second selection of Oprah Winfrey’s television book club. Much to Morrison’s astonishment, the sales of Paradise and The Bluest Eye continued to rise after Winfrey’s announcements.

Among the many reviews of Paradise, Patricia Storace’s “The Scripture of Utopia" stands out as exemplary.⁹¹ Storace presents an historical overview of the “Redemption,” as the period right after the Civil War was known in the South. She also discusses an 1880 report on African American migrations during that period. Her careful reading of Paradise reveals the extent to which Morrison in this particular novel revises the history of the Oklahoma territory in the post–Civil War era. Regarding Morrison’s choice to confine her novel to a small, provincial African American community, Storace wrote, “Paradise subverts a kind of unspoken literary class distinction, the assumption that a story told with African-Americans or women in the foreground will necessarily be a story of impenetrably special experience and concerns, its subject somehow provincial, confined exclusively to itself, or to its response as a community to the power of the dominant community, a shadowy adjunct to the ’real’ normative story of national life.”⁹² Obviously making a reference to Sara Blackburn’s 1973 review of Sula in which she argued that Morrison, in order to “take her place among the most serious, important and talented American novelists now working,” needed to move beyond “the black side of provincial life,”⁹³ Storace concluded her essay by praising Morrison for “relighting the angles from which we view American history" and for creating work that allows her readers “to witness something unprece-dented, an invitation to a literature to become what it has claimed to be, a truly American literature.”⁹⁴

ART IMITATING LIFE

Toni Morrison is fiercely protective of her privacy. She shares little personal information about herself in her novels or in the many interviews she has given over the years. As she has stated time and again, her life is not what interests her as a novelist. Neither is she interested in writing about the lives of people she knows. She considers it an intrusion, “an infringement” of the “copyright” that each person holds on his or her life.⁹⁵ What interests Morrison is imaginative invention, the creation of a fictional world that is not a carbon copy of the real one. This belief, however, does not prevent Morrison from using the autobiographical information she stores in her mind. Most novelists write from what they know. Their writing therefore is likely to include autobiographical moments that might not immediately be apparent as such.

Morrison’s autobiographical moments are strongest in her first novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel, set in Morrison’s hometown of Lorain, Ohio, takes place in the neighborhood in which Morrison lived until she left for college at age seventeen. She told Robert Stepto in a 1976 interview that Lorain is the one place she did not invent; she re-created it from her childhood memories of that neighborhood.⁹⁶ The people inhabiting that fiction are drawn from the fragments of her memories of people she knew. What she takes from those fragments, or “pieces,” as she calls them in “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” is whatever she needs “to evoke a character.”⁹⁷ More often than not, that character is far removed from its referent in reality. That is, with the possible exception of Mr. MacTeer in The Bluest Eye, he or she is not easily identifiable with someone in Morrison’s life. The scene in The Bluest Eye that comes closest to art imitating life occurs in the section titled “Spring.” After Frieda tells her parents that their roomer, Mr. Henry, molested her, Mr. MacTeer throws a tricycle at him and knocks him off the porch.⁹⁸ That scene is based on an actual event that, as Morrison explained in a 1983 interview, left a very strong impression on her about what her father would do to protect his family:

I do remember a white man following my sister and me into our house, and up the stairs. We lived in an apartment on the second floor. My father was there, and he picked him up and threw him down the stairs, and then picked up our tricycle and threw the tricycle down after him.

My father was not a tall man and this man loomed large. All he knew was that this man was behind his girls and he was, you know, defending the household and all of that. But for me, it was interesting because I had not seen abusive, physically abusive white people as many people have in the United States, so the first racial encounter I had as a child was one in which my father was triumphant, physically triumphant, and it’s important that what I first saw was that kind of assertion on the part of my father.”⁹⁹

Other characters in the novel derive from the bits and pieces of Morrison’s recollections of the movements, gestures, habits, and names of people she knew during her childhood.

Morrison explains in “Memory, Creation, and Writing” that by knowing, she does not mean that she has personal knowledge of the people from whom she draws those pieces.¹⁰⁰ She uses as an example a woman named Hannah Peace who lived in her town when she was about four years old. Morrison knew her in the sense that the woman was around her long enough to leave an impression—a memory—on her mind. The purplish color of the woman’s skin, the aloof manner in which she carried herself, her half-closed eyes, and the way people pronounced her name, “never Hannah or Miss Peace. Always Hannah Peace,” is what Morrison knew about the woman. That memory, captured by her four-year-old mind, was enough to evoke many years later a character in Sula: the title character’s mother, Hannah Peace.¹⁰¹ In contrast, the physical qualities—the body—of the young girl who told her that she “prayed” for blue eyes was less important for Morrison than the emotions that confession aroused in her at the time. The Pecola who appears in The Bluest Eye is not the same little girl. She has been transmogrified, through Morrison’s imagination, into one of the most pitiable and memorable little girls in African American fiction.

Likewise, other characters in the novel are composites rather than representations of distinct and identifiable people from Morrison’s life. Mrs. MacTeer undoubtedly emerged from Morrison’s memory of her

mother and the many other African American mothers in her neighborhood who “meddled in your lives a lot” because they felt they had the right to “raise everybody’s child.”¹⁰² It is interesting to note that in the 1981 hardcover edition of Tar Baby one of the names in Morrison’s dedication is Mrs. Millie MacTeer.¹⁰³

MORRISON AND THE MOVIES

Shortly after Song of Solomon was published in 1977, Morrison mentioned to a reporter for The Washington Post that the “movies” were interested in it. She said that “Nobody had bought the book” yet, “But all the right people have called.” For a while she had lunch with some of them. After two of those people on different occasions told her that the book reminded them of “King Lear,” she figured that others on the West Coast had that same feeling and decided to let her agent handle “that stuff.”¹⁰⁴ The novel was never adapted for film, and by 1983, Morrison seemed to have no interest in seeing her books made into movies. In her 1983 interview with Claudia Tate she said, “My students ask me when I’m going to make my books into movies. I tell them I’m not terribly interested in that because the film would not be mine. The book is my work. I don’t want to write scripts; I don’t want artistic ’control’ of a film. I don’t mean that it shouldn’t be done, just that I don’t have to do it. What’s alarming to me is the notion that the book is what you do before the film, that the final outcome is the film.”¹⁰⁵

A year later, Morrison was talking about working on the screenplays for Tar Baby and for Song of Solomon. The former book reportedly had been sold to Brooksfilm, a production company established in 1979 by Mel Brooks to produce good low-budget movies as an alternative to the usual Holly-wood fare. The Brooksfilm projects got as far as the selection of Joseph Strick as director for Song of Solomon and Howard E. Rollins Jr. as “the leading contender for the starring role in ‘Tar Baby.’”¹⁰⁶ Strick had directed several adaptations of literary works, including The Balcony (1963), Ulysses (1967), and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1979). Rollins, who died of cancer in 1996, received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as Coalhouse Walker Jr. in Ragtime (1981). From 1988 to 1994 he played the role of Detective Virgil Tibbs in the television series In the Heat of the Night. Morrison does not say in her interviews what happened with these projects, although she has mentioned that she isn’t interested in screenwriting because she doesn’t know how to do it and doesn’t want to take time from writing “interesting and compelling novels” to learn.¹⁰⁷

In 1987 Oprah Winfrey read Beloved. Winfrey finished the book on a Saturday afternoon and immediately tried to contact Morrison to discuss turning it into a movie. None of the people Winfrey knew had Morrison’s home phone number, so Winfrey called the local fire department and enlisted them to help her contact Morrison. They did and Morrison agreed to “talk about it.” Winfrey then called her attorney and told him, “whatever she asks for, give it to her. I don’t want negotiations or to get lawyers involved. Whatever she wants, let’s just sign the check. And he said, ’That’s not the way it’s done.’ But I said that’s the way this will be done. I signed the check and was thrilled to do so. The day I signed it was one of the happiest days of my life.”¹⁰⁸

In a 1998 feature article by Richard Corliss for Time titled “Bewitching Beloved,” Morrison recalls receiving the check from Win-frey: “She said, and this is kind of charming, ’I am going in my pocket-book and write a check.’ I wasn’t talking to a studio or a lawyer but to another human being. … it reminded me of myself. A single, black woman who said, ’Well, I’m doing this. It’s going to be hard for me, but that’s beside the point.’ This was a big project and, for her, a big deal. And she was deadly serious about every aspect of it.”¹⁰⁹ The project, which took almost a decade to accomplish, was big for Winfrey, both financially and personally. She produced the movie and cast herself in the starring role of Sethe. Her costars were Danny Glover as Paul D; Kimberly Elise as Denver; and Thandie Newton as Beloved. The legendary actress Beah Richards played Baby Suggs. Jason Robards made a cameo appearance as Mr. Bodwin. The movie was directed by Jonathan Demme, who won an Oscar in 1991 for best director for The Silence of the Lambs. The screen-play for Beloved was written by Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese, and Adam Brooks.

Winfrey, who has always “dreamed of acting,” made her acting debut in 1985 as Sophia in the movie version of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, for which she received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress.¹¹⁰ In 1986 she played Bigger Thomas’s mother in a movie adaptation of Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son. Her made-for-television movie credits include the role of Mattie Michael in a 1990 adaptation of Gloria Naylor’s novel, The Women of Brewster Place (1982). These movies gave Winfrey the opportunity to gain the experience and training she needed to fulfill the more emotionally demanding role of a woman—a fugitive slave—whose committing of infanticide is motivated by her deep and abiding love for her children and her memory of the horrors of enslavement. Winfrey documents her experiences with the filming of Beloved in her book Journey to Beloved (1998).¹¹¹

The movie opened on 16 October 1998 to much fanfare and the high expectation that it would be an Oscar—winning production. Early reviews of the movie generally were good. Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, praised it and called Demme and Winfrey brave for having faced “this difficult material head on” and for not trying “to dumb it down into a more accessible, less evocative form.”¹¹² New York Times writer Margo Jefferson gave Beloved a favorable review and singled out Elise and Newton for giving “the most fascinating performances.”¹¹³

Quentin Curits’s review for the London Daily Telegraph was less enthusiastic. He pronounced the movie a failure. He felt that it was both a mistake to play Morrison’s 275-page text as an epic that lasts almost three hours and to have Winfrey in the starring role—as a condition of hiring a director— when there were more capable actresses from which to choose. He wrote, “Competent though Oprah is, I couldn’t help wonder-ing—and wishing for—what a great actress such as Angela Bassett would have made of Sethe.”¹¹⁴ Curits concluded his review by commenting on what became a theme in reviews of Beloved written after its opening week: the movie cost $53 million to make,$30 million to market, but earned only $8.5 million during its first weekend.¹¹⁵

By Thanksgiving week, most reviewers were calling Beloved a failure based mainly on its poor box-office receipts. Carrie Rickey’s review for The Buffalo News is typi — cal. She wrote, “In the five weeks since its Oct. 16 release, the $65 million picture … earned a disappointing $22.5 million. Its failure, just 10 months after the fast fade of Steven Spielberg’s ’Amistad,’ another harrowing film about the slave experience, has prompted a rethinking of the market for prestigious black-theme films.”¹¹⁶ Rickey’s review also included comments from African American filmmakers and producers, in which they objected to the death knell the media had begun to ring for movies by and about African Americans dealing with serious topics such as slavery. In a review in Newsday, Gene Seymour tried to put things into perspective. Similar to many critics whose concern was with artistic merit, Seymour felt that “the movie was so faithful to the book (or, more accurately, to the experience of reading the book), that its characters, instead of connecting with each other, seemed to be speaking at each other from their respective outposts of solitude.”¹¹⁷

Seymour also pointed out that “in a time when financial success is more conspicuously—and thoughtlessly—linked to artistic success …numbers don’t lie: A $55 million movie, coming in with all the hype and hoopla that its ubiquitous and powerful producer-star can muster on its behalf, makes only $21 million in a month” is a failure. However, he cautioned against letting the “success or failure of any one movie … set the table for what comes afterwards.”¹¹⁸ On 24 December 2001, an abbreviated version of the movie aired on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). It received mixed reviews.

Morrison seems to have been undaunted by the fact that the movie did not rise to the expectations of reviewers and audiences. In a 1 November 1998 radio conversation between Michael Silverblatt and Morrison, Morrison was diffident about the movie and the discussions it generated in the media about the state of African American filmmaking. After making several observations about the limitations of movies when it comes to literary adaptations, she dwelled on her book, Beloved, and on what she hopes to achieve for herself as a writer and for the many mil-lions of people who continue to read her novels.¹¹⁹

NOTES

1. Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” Thought, 59 (December 1984): 387.

2. Ibid., p. 388.

3. The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1994), p. 5.

4. Ibid, p. 27.

5. Ibid., p. 115.

6. Ibid., p. 205.

7. Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” p. 387.

8. Sula (New York: Signet, 1978), p. 89.

9. Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” p. 387.

10. Sula, p. 73.

11. Ibid., p. 74.

12. Ibid.

13. Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” p. 387.

14. “Song of Solomon,” in The New Schofield Reference Bible, edited by C. I. Schofield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 705-710.

15. Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Man Evans (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), p. 342.

16. Tar Baby (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 298.

17. Ibid., p. 305.

18. Beloved (New York: Plume, 1988), p. 6.

19. Jazz (New York: Plume, 1993), p. 3.

20. Ibid., p. 6.

21. Ibid., p. 7.

22. Ibid.

23. Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998).

24. Ibid., p. 13.

25. Ibid., p. 292.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., p. 305.

28. Ibid.

29. Jerry H. Bryant, untitled review in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), p. 9.

30. Ibid., p. 8.

31. Ibid., p. 9.

32. Barbara Smith, “Beautiful, Needed, Mysterious,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: Hall, 1988), p. 22.

33. Roseann P. Bell, untitled review in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, p. 26.

34. Ibid., p. 26.

35. Ibid., p. 27.

36. McKay, “Introduction,” p. 5.

37. Reynolds Price, “The Black Family Chronicle,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 11.

38. Susan Lardner, “Word of Mouth,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 13.

39. Charles Larson, “Hymning the Black Past,” Washington Post, 4 September 1977, p. El.

40. Samuel Allen, untitled review in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, p. 31.

41. Melvin Dixon, “If You Surrender to the Air….” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, p. 28.

42. Karen De Witt, “Toni Morrison’s Saga Praised in All the Proper Places,” Washington Post, 30 September 1977, p. C3.

43. Jean Strouse, “Toni Morrison’s Black Magic,” Newsweek, 97 (March 1981): 52.

44. Maureen Howard, “A Novel of Exile and Home,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 18.

45. Ibid., p. 18.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid., p. 20.

48. Robert G. O’ Meally, “Tar Baby, She Don’ Say Nothin’,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, p. 33.

49. Ibid., p. 37.

50. Anatole Broyard, “Books of The Times,” New York Times, 21 March 1981,1: 10.

51. John Irving, “Morrison’s Black Fable,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 22.

52. Ibid., p. 25.

53. Jacqueline Trescott, Washington Post, 8 April 1981, p. Bl.

54. Joseph Savago, quoted in Janice A. Radway, A Feeling For Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 114-115.

55. John Leonard, “’Beloved’ by Toni Morrison,” Los Angeles Times, 30 August 1987, p. 1.

56. A. S. Byatt, “Books: An American Masterpiece/Review of ’Beloved’ by Toni Morrison,” Guardian Unlimited (16 October 1987) <http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,9... >.

57. Ibid.

58. Ann Snitow, “Death Duties: Toni Morrison Looks Back in Sorrow,” in Toni Morrison:Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 26.

59. Ibid., p. 28.

60. Ibid., p. 29.

61. Margaret Atwood, “Haunted by Their Nightmares,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 33.

62. Ibid., p. 35.

63. Stanley Crouch, “Aunt Medea,” in Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 205.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid., p. 209.

66. Ibid.

67. Anonymous, “Book Contest Undecided Money Goes to Charity,” Toronto Star, 25 March 1988, p. E22.

68. Michiko Kakutani, “Did ’Paco’s Story’ Deserve Its Award?” New York Times, 16 November 1987, p. C15.

69. Ibid.

70. Elizabeth Kastor, “’Beloved’ and the Protest: Why Black Writers Decried Book Award ’Oversight,’” Washington Post, 21 January 1988, p. Bl.

71. Leonard, “In Person,” Newsday, 21 January 1988: II: 6.

72. Ibid.

73. Richard Eder, “Endpapers: Black Prizes, Black Protests,” Los Angeles Times, 14 February 1988, book review: p. 15.

74. Ibid.

75. Seymore Topping, “Joseph Pulitzer and The Pulitzer Prizes."

76. Edwin McDowell, New York Times, 3 June 1988, p. C28.

77. John J. Goldman, “Charlotte Observer Tops Pulitzer List for PTL Coverage,” Los Angeles Times, 1 April 1988,1: 1.

78. Kastor, “Eyes on the RFK Prizes; Author Toni Morrison Picks up Another Award,” Washington Post, 14 May 1988, p. Cl.

79. Ibid.

80. Chikwenge Okonjo Ogunyemi, “Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” Critique, 19 (1977): 112-120, and Robert Stepto’s interview with Morrison titled “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” Massachusetts Review, 18 (1977): 473-489.

81. Anne Elizabeth Berkman, “The Quest for Authenticity: The Novels of Toni Morrison.”

82. Michael Wood, “Life Studies, New York Review of Books, 19 November 1992, pp. 7-11;John Leonard, “Her Soul’s High Song,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, pp. 36-49.

83. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 55.

84. James Withers, “Enough to Make a Man Weep Like a Baby in a Boston Subway Station,” Houston Chronicle, 7 November 1993, “Outlook” section, p. 5.

85. Donna Fry, “Nobel Prize for Morrison Is a Bolt From the Blue,” Seattle Times, 7 October 1993, p. El.

86. Steven Moore, “Nobel Backlash,” Guardian (London), 20 October 1993, “Features” section, p. 4.

87. Cheryl-Ann Michael and Moore, “Prize and Prejudice,” Guardian (London), 30 October 1993, “Features” section, p. 30.

88. Pearl Cleage, “Male-Bashing? Toni Morrison?” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 24 October 1993, p. G5.

89. Ibid.

90. Anonymous, “Racism’s ’Avenging Angel’ Soars with Nobel Prize,” Toronto Star, 17 October 1993, p. Dl.

91. Patricia Storace, “The Scripture of Utopia,” New York Review of Books, 11 June 1998, pp. 64-69.

92. Ibid., p. 65.

93. Sara Blackburn, untitled review in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, p. 8.

94. Storace, p. 69.

95. Elissa Schappell and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV,” Paris Review, 35 (Fall 1993): 105.

96. Stepto, “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 10.

97. Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” pp. 385-390.

98. Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1994), p. 100.

99. Rosemarie K. Lester, “An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt, West Germany,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, p. 50.

100. Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing,” pp. 385-386.

101. Ibid.

102. Stepto, in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 11.

103. Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Knopf, 1981). In the 1994 Knopf hardcover edition, the name is spelled “Mrs. Millie McTyeire.”

104. De Witt, p. Cl.

105. Claudia Tate, “Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 170.

106. Janet Maslin, “’Footloose’ Sets off Furor,” San Diego Union-Tribune, 23 March 1984, p. A21.

107. Morrison, “Oprah On-Line,” Oprah.com (23 May 2000) <http://oprah.com/com/chat/transcript/obc/chat_trans_tmorris... >.

108. Ibid.

109. Richard Corliss, “Bewitching Beloved,” Time, 152 (October 1998): 76.

110. Oprah!, 1 (April 2000): 43.

111. Oprah Winfre, journey to Beloved (New York: Hyperion, 1998).

112. Roger Ebert, “Grand Oprah,” Chicago Sun-Times, 16 October 1998, p. 29.

113. Margo Jefferson, “Revisions; Slavery Echoes in the Prism of a Film,” New York Times, 19 October 1998, p. El.

114. Quentin Curits, “The Arts: Oprah’s Great Movie Mission,” Daily Telegraph (London), 22 October 1998, p. 27.

115. Ibid. See also Bernard Weinraub, “’Beloved’ Appeals Mainly in Big Cities,” New York Times, 19 October 1998, p. E2.

116. Carrie Rickey, “After ’Beloved,’ What Next for Black-Theme Films?” Buffalo News, 29 November 1998, p. F3.

117. Gene Seymour, “On Movies/Black Films Affected by Color of Money,” Newsday, 22 November 1998, p. 5.

118. Ibid.

119. Michael Silverblatt, “The Writing Life,” Los Angeles Times, 1 November 1998, p. 3.