SOURCE: Furman, Jan. “Black Girlhood and Black Womanhood: The Bluest Eye and Sula.” In Toni Morrison's Fiction, pp. 12-33. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Furman examines the significance of family and community to developing a personal sense of African-American female identity in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula.]

From the beginning of her writing career Morrison has exercised a keen scrutiny of women's lives. The Bluest Eye and Sula, Morrison's first and second novels, are to varying extents about black girlhood and black womanhood, about women's connections to their families, their communities, to the larger social networks outside the community, to men, and to each other. Lending themselves to a reading as companion works, the novels complement one another thematically and may, in several ways, be viewed sequentially.¹ (Morrison calls her first four novels “evolutionary. One comes out of the other.”² In The Bluest Eye she was “interested in talking about black girlhood,” and in Sula she “wanted to move to the other part of their life.” She wanted to ask, “what … do those feisty little girls grow up to be?”)³The Bluest Eye directs a critical gaze at the process and symbols of imprinting the self during childhood and at what happens to the self when the process is askew and the symbols are defective. In Sula, Morrison builds on the knowledge gained in the first novel, revisits childhood, and then moves her characters and readers a step forward into women's struggles to change delimiting symbols and take control of their lives. But excavating an identity that has been long buried beneath stereotype and convention is a wrenching endeavor, and Morrison demonstrates in Sula that although recasting one's role in the community is possible, there is a price to be paid for change.

THE BLUEST EYE (1970)

The opening lines of The Bluest Eye incorporate two signifying aspects of Morrison's fiction. The first sentence, “Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941,”⁴ emanates from the African-American community, capturing the milieu of “black women conversing with one another; telling a story, an anecdote, gossip[ing] about some one or event within the circle, the family, the neighborhood.”⁵ The line also demonstrates Morrison's urge to connect with her reader by choosing “speakerly” phrasing that has a “back fence connotation.” Morrison explains:

The intimacy I was aiming for, the intimacy between the reader and the page, could start up immediately because the secret is being shared at best, and eavesdropped upon, at the least. Sudden familiarity or instant intimacy seemed crucial to me then, writing my first novel. I did not want the reader to have time to wonder “what do I have to do, to give up, in order to read this? What defense do I need, what distance maintain?” Because I know (and the reader does not—he or she has to wait for the second sentence) that this is a terrible story about things one would rather not know anything about.⁶

The line's foreboding aura charitably prepares the reader for powerful truths soon to be revealed. The pervading absence of flowers in 1941 sets that year off from all others and produces a prophetic and ominous quality which unfolds in the second line: “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow” (3). Exploiting the child speaker's naive but poignant logic, Morrison requires the reader, during this first encounter, to be accountable, to acknowledge a dreadful deed and respond to its dreadful consequences. “If the conspiracy that the opening words announce is entered into by the reader,” Morrison explains, “then the book can be seen to open with its close: a speculation on the disruption of ‘nature’ as being a social disruption with tragic individual consequences in which the reader, as part of the population of the text, is implicated.”⁷ This three-way collaboration between author, speaker, and reader is the effect for which Morrison strives in all her novels.

From this profoundly stirring beginning Morrison advances to an equally moving examination of Pecola's life—her unloving childhood, her repudiation by nearly everyone she encounters, and finally the complete disintegration of self. Through it all Morrison exposes and indicts those who promulgate standards of beauty and behavior that devalue Pecola's sensitivities and contribute to her marginalized existence.

The search for culprits is not arduous. The storekeeper who sells Mary Jane candies to Pecola avoids touching her hand when she pays and barely disguises his contempt for her: “She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. … The total absence of human recognition—the glazed separateness. … It has an edge; somewhere in the bottom lid is the distaste. … The distaste must be for her, her blackness … and it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distance in white eyes” (36-37). The white Yacobowski is condemned for his cultural blindness, but he is not the only one responsible for Pecola's pain. Responsibility must be shared by blacks who assuage their own insults from society by oppressing those like Pecola who are vulnerable. Little black boys jeer and taunt her with “Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked” (50), defensively ignoring the color of their own skins. But “it was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seem to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds …” (50).

Teachers ignore Pecola in the classroom, giving their attention instead to a “high-yellow dream child with long brown hair” (47) and “sloe green eyes” (48). And when this same high-yellow Maureen Peal declares to Pecola and the MacTeer sisters “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos” (56), she is dangerously affirming intraracial acceptance of the world's denigration of blackness. “Respectable,” “milk-brown” women like Geraldine see Pecola's torn dress and uncombed hair and are confronted with the blackness they have spent lifetimes rejecting. For Morrison these women are antithetical to the village culture she respects. They attend to the “careful development of thrift, patience, high morals and good manners” (64) as these are defined by white society. And they fear “the dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions” (64) because these qualities are defined by black society. They are shamed by the “laugh that is too loud, the enunciation a little too round; the gesture a little too generous. They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair” (64). As one of these women, Geraldine executes the tyranny of standardized beauty that enthralls some in the black community and terrorizes too many others.

When Pecola stands in Geraldine's house—tricked there by Geraldine's hateful son—she transgresses a line demarking “colored people” from “niggers,” light-skinned from dark, hand-me-down whiteness from genuine culture. In her innocence Pecola does not perceive the transgression or its consequences. To her, Geraldine's world and house are beautiful. The house's ordered prettiness sharply contrasts the shabby makedo appearance of the Breedloves' storefront. Geraldine, however, does perceive Pecola's outrageous breech, and the hurting child that Pecola is becomes a “nasty little black bitch” (72) in Geraldine's mouth. Geraldine sets her teeth against any recognition of some part of who she is in Pecola. To Pecola, Geraldine is “the pretty milk-brown lady in the pretty gold and green house” (72). To Morrison, she is a shadow image of the Dick-and-Jane life, a sadistic approximation of the storybook people. Through her Morrison demonstrates that such a life as Geraldine's is only validated by exclusion of others.

Michael Awkward discusses this “purgative abuse” of Pecola in terms of the black community's guilt about its own inability to measure up to some external ideal of beauty and behavior. Pecola objectifies this failure (which results in self-hatred) and must be purged. She becomes the black community's shadow of evil (even as the black community is the white community's evil). “In combating the shadow … the group is able to rid itself ceremonially of the veil that exists within both the individual member and the community at large. To be fully successful, such exorcism requires a visibly imperfect, shadow-consumed scapegoat” like Pecola.⁸

Even her parents, Cholly and Pauline Breedlove, relate to Pecola in this way. Ironically named since they breed not love but violence and misery, Cholly and Pauline eventually destroy their daughter, whose victimization is a bold symbol of their own despair and frustrations. In the pathos of their defeated lives, Morrison demonstrates the process by which self-hatred becomes scapegoating.

Pauline's lame foot makes her pitiable and invisible until she marries Cholly. But pleasure in marriage lasts only until she moves from Kentucky to Ohio and confronts northern standards of physical beauty and style. She is despised by snooty black women who snicker at her lameness, her unstraightened hair, and her provincial speech. In the movie theaters she seeks relief from these shortcomings through daydreams of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. But even in high heels, makeup, and a Harlow hairstyle Pauline is a failure. “In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap,” (95) which she deposits on her husband and children who fail by “the scale of absolute beauty … she absorbed in full from the silver screen” (95). Eventually, Pauline gives up on her own family and takes refuge in the soft beauty surrounding her in the Fisher home, where she works—the crisp linens, white towels, the little Fisher girl's yellow hair. She cannot afford such beauty and style. In the Fisher house, however, she has dominion over creditors and service people “who humiliated her when she went to them on her own behalf [but] respected her, were even intimidated by her, when she spoke for the Fishers” (101). With the Fishers she had what she could not have at home—“power, praise, and luxury” (99). By the time Pecola finds herself awkwardly standing in the Fisher's kitchen, responsible for the spilled remains of a freshly baked pie at her feet, Pauline is incapable of a mother's love and forgiveness. Her best response is knocking Pecola to the floor and running to console the crying Fisher child.

In substituting fierce intolerance of her family for love, Pauline refuses what she cannot transform. Her husband is an irresponsible drunk; the son and daughter are sloven. Only she has order and beauty and only in the Fisher house. Under these conditions Pauline is reborn as self-righteous martyr with no time for movies, unfulfilled dreams, and foolish notions of romantic love. “All the meaningfulness of her life was in her work. … She was an active church woman … defended herself mightily against Cholly … and felt she was fulfilling a mother's role conscientiously when she pointed out their father's faults to keep them from having them, or punished them when they showed any slovenliness, no matter how slight, when she worked twelve to sixteen hours a day to support them” (100).

Like Pauline, Cholly too is driven by personal demons which he attempts to purge in violence against his family. Pauline does not see or understand Cholly's hurts, but Morrison represents them as remarkably egregious. Callously abandoned on a garbage dump by his mother, years later Cholly searches for the father who also discards him. His response to his father's angry denunciations—crying and soiling his pants—eclipses any opportunity for emotional maturity and returns him, in a sense, to the helplessness of his abandonment in infancy. After the rejection, in a nearby river he seeks relief, even rebirth, curled for hours in the fetal position with fists in eyes. For a while he finds consolation in “the dark, the warmth, the quiet … [engulfing him] like the skin and flesh of an elderberry protecting its own seed” (124). Protection is short-lived, however. There is no prelapsarian innocence available to Cholly.

In marrying Pauline, Cholly seems fully recovered from these earlier traumas. Initially, he is kind, compassionate, protective, but these feelings too are fleeting. He retreats from her emotional dependence, he is humiliated by economic powerlessness, and he mitigates his frustrations in drink and abuse. In turning on Pauline, Cholly fights whom he can and not whom he should. This is the lesson of childhood learned when he is forced by armed white men who discover him with Darlene in the woods to continue his first act of sexual intimacy while they watch and ridicule. When the men leave in search of other prey, Cholly realizes that hating them is futile, and he decides instead to hate Darlene for witnessing his degradation. He could not protect her so he settles for despising her. Later Pauline comes to stand for Darlene in Cholly's mind: “He poured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury and aborted desires” (37). Cholly, then, needs Pauline to objectify his failure.

His treatment of Pecola may also be seen in terms of scapegoating but not entirely. While Pecola's ugliness is an affront to Pauline's surreptitious creation of beauty in the Fisher house, it is a sad reminder to Cholly of not only his unhappiness but Pecola's as well. Such concern makes him a somewhat sympathetic character. He is one of Morrison's traveling men, one whose freedom to do as he pleases is jeopardized by dependent, possessive women. He has roamed around dangerously, carelessly, irresponsibly, lovingly. The appealing contradiction of his life could find expression only in black music. “Only a musician would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free. Dangerously free” (125). After his mother's abandonment and his father's rejection, Cholly has little to loose, and his behavior is disdainful of consequences. “It was in this godlike state that he met Pauline Williams,” (126) and marriage to her threatens to conquer him.

In romanticizing Cholly, Morrison defies the unflattering orthodoxy of black maleness and makes peace with the conflict between responsibility to family and freedom to leave. Morrison respects the freedom even as she embraces the responsibility. In the freedom she sees “tremendous possibility for masculinity among black men.”⁹ Sometimes such men are unemployed or in prison, but they have a spirit of adventure and a deep complexity that interests Morrison. No doubt she views their freedom as a residue of the “incredible … magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out.”¹⁰ Cholly exercises his freedom, but not before he commits a heinous crime against Pecola. Even his crime, however, is tempered by the author's compassion for Cholly. Coming home drunk and full of self-pity, Cholly sees Pecola and is overcome with love and regret that he has nothing to relieve her hopelessness. “Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duct. What could he do for her—ever? What give her? What say to her? What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter?” (127). His answer is rape—in spite of himself. In rendering this incomprehensible instance, Morrison captures the curious mixture of hate and tenderness that consumes Cholly. “The hatred would not let him pick her up” when the violation is over; “the tenderness forced him to cover her” (129). The awful irony of his position is overwhelming. In the end Cholly's complexity dominates the moment. Having never been parented, “he could not even comprehend what such a relationship should be” (126). And being dangerously free, he has no restraints.

Morrison does have sympathy for Cholly (she admits that she connects “Cholly's ‘rape’ by the white men to his own of his daughter”¹¹), but he is not absolved; he dies soon after in a workhouse. And Morrison does not minimize his crime against his daughter. Pecola's childlike “stunned silence,” “the tightness of her vagina,” the painfully “gigantic thrust,” her “fingers clinching,” her “shocked body,” and finally her unconsciousness bear witness to Morrison's aim in the novel to represent Pecola's perspective, to translate her heartbreak. “This most masculine act of aggression becomes feminized in my language,” Morrison says. It is “passive,” she continues, “and, I think, more accurately repellent when deprived of the male ‘glamor of shame’ rape is (or once was) routinely given.”¹²

Feminizing language does not lead Morrison to comfortable binary oppositions of good and evil, feminine and masculine. Rather, it leads to a sensitive treatment of the complex emotions that determine character, male and female. In Morrison's writing there are no easy villains to hate; there are no predictable behaviors.

Just as Cholly is not as reprehensible as he might be, Pauline is not as sympathetic as she might be if she were stereotypically portrayed as an abused wife and as a mother. In fact, Pauline in some sense is as culpable as Cholly for Pecola's suffering. Cholly's love is corrupt and tainted, but Pauline is unloving. After the rape Morrison subtly alludes to the difference: “So when the child regained consciousness, she was lying on the kitchen floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with the face of her mother looming over her” (129). Is Pauline associated with the pain? She did not physically rape Pecola, but she has ravaged the child's self-worth and left her vulnerable to assaults of various proportions.

With single-minded determination Pauline survives, but Pecola withdraws into the refuge of insanity. Like the dandelions whose familiar yellow heads she thinks are pretty, Pecola is poisoned by rejection. But unlike the dandelions, she does not have the strength to persist, and in madness she simply substitutes her inchoate reality with a better one: she has blue eyes which everyone admires and envies. In pathetic conversations with an imaginary friend, Pecola repeatedly elicits confirmation that hers are “the bluest eyes in the whole world” (161), that they are “much prettier than the sky. Prettier than Alice-and-Jerry Storybook eyes” (159).

Pecola's sad fantasy expresses Morrison's strongest criticism of a white standard of beauty that excludes most black women and that destroys those who strive to measure up but cannot. Everywhere there are reminders of this failure: the coveted blond-haired, blue-eyed dolls that arrive at Christmas, Shirley Temple movies, high-yellow dream children like Maureen Peal. And for Pecola the smiling white face of little Mary Jane on the candy wrapper, “blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort” (38). In desperation Pecola believes that nothing bad could be viewed by such eyes. Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove (Pecola's name for her mother) would not fight; her teachers and classmates would not despise her; she would be safe. And, ironically, perhaps Pecola is right. With the blue eyes of her distorted reality comes the awful safety of oblivion.

Pecola's tragedy exposes the fallacy of happily-ever-after storybook life. Morrison repeatedly calls attention to this falseness. In the prologue and chapter headings are recounted the elementary story of Dick and Jane, mother and father:

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane. The kitten will not play. See Mother. Mother is very nice. Mother, will you play with Jane? Mother laughs. Laugh, Mother, laugh. See Father. He is big and strong. Father, will you play with Jane? Father is smiling. Smile, Father, smile. See the dog. Bowwow goes the dog. Do you want to play with Jane? See the dog run. Run, dog, run. Look, look. Here comes a friend. The friend will play with Jane. They will play a good game. Play, Jane, play.

(1)

In two subsequent versions Morrison distorts the Dick-and-Jane text. In bold print with no spacing between words, these latter passages take on a frenetic tone that signals perversion of communal perfection for Morrison's characters, who do not blithely run and play and live happily ever after. In removing standard grammatical codes, symbols of Western culture, Morrison expurgates the white text as she constructs the black. Timothy Bell aptly points out that “Morrison is literally deconstructing the essential white text, removing capitalizations, punctuation, and finally the spacing until the white text is nothing more than a fragmentation of its former self at the beginning of the chapter.”¹³ Home for Pecola is not the green and white picture-perfect house of white myth. Home is a storefront where mother and father curse and fight, brother runs away from home, and sister wishes with all her soul for blue eyes. Pecola appropriates the storybook version of life because her own is too gruesome. In her life she is subject to other people's cruel whims to which she can offer no voice of protest.

Indeed, she has no voice in this text at all, a condition which loudly echoes her entire existence. She has no control over the events in her life and no authority over the narrative of those events. That authority goes to twelve-year-old Claudia, who narrates major portions of Pecola's story with compassion and understanding. Claudia and her older sister Frieda are the “we” of the opening paragraph. They witness Pecola's despair and try to save her. “Her pain agonized me,” Claudia says, “I wanted to open her up, crisp her edges, ram a stick down that hunched and curving spine, force her to stand erect and spit the misery out on the streets” (61). But the sisters fail. They do not save Pecola from her breakup. As the girls mourn their failure, Morrison chronicles the loss of their innocence. But unlike Pecola's short-circuited innocence, their loss is part of a natural ritual of growing up.

Morrison proffers Claudia and Frieda as foils to Pecola. They are strong and sturdy; Pecola is not. Claudia's independence and confidence especially throw Pecola's helplessness into stark relief. For Claudia, blue-eyed dolls at Christmas and Shirley Temple dancing with Bojangles Robinson are unappealing and even insulting. With youthful but penetrating insight, she declares her exemption from “the universal love of white dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals” (148).

Claudia and her sister traverse Morrison's landscape of black girlhood. Bound by a social environment that is hostile to their kind, they have “become headstrong, devious and arrogant” (150) enough to dismiss limitations and believe that they can “change the course of events and alter a human life” (150). With ingenious faith in themselves, Claudia and Frieda attempt to rescue Pecola and her baby. They would make beauty where only ugliness resided by planting marigolds deep in the earth and receiving the magic of their beauty as a sign of Pecola's salvation. When neither marigolds nor Pecola survive, the girls blame a community that is seduced by a white standard of beauty and that makes Pecola its scapegoat: “All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. … We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (160).

For the most part their parents, Mr. and Mrs. MacTeer, save Claudia and Frieda from this sort of persecution. Mr. MacTeer (unlike Cholly) acts as a father should in protecting his daughter from a lecherous boarder. Mrs. MacTeer's place is not in a white family's kitchen, but in her own, where familiar smells hold sway and where her singing about “hard times, bad times and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times” (28) proclaims that pain is endurable, even sweet. To her daughters she bequeaths a legacy of compassion for others and defiance in the face of opposition. Her love for them was “thick and dark as Alaga syrup” (7). The MacTeers embody the communal resiliency at the heart of black culture.

Mrs. MacTeer is not one of Morrison's ancestors—a person wise in the ways of life who transmits that wisdom and knowledge of self to the uninitiated. She is, however, one of Morrison's nurturers. Claudia remembers the feel of her mother's hands on her forehead and chest when she is sick: “I think,” she says, “of somebody with hands who does not want me to die” (7). Mrs. MacTeer takes Pecola in when Cholly burns his family out. She presides over Pecola's first menses, hugging her reassuringly (the only hug the adolescent Pecola ever receives; Mrs. Breedlove's hugs and assurances are reserved for the little Fisher girl). But Mrs. MacTeer's influence in Pecola's life is short in duration. With no one else available Pecola turns to the whores who live upstairs over the storefront for instruction given lovingly. China, Marie, and Poland stand in opposition to the Geraldines in the community. They are not pretentious heirs to false puritanical values, and Morrison respects their unvarnished natures. “Three merry gargoyles. Three merry harridans,” they are quick to laugh or sing. Defying all stereotypes of pitiable women gone wrong, they make no apologies for themselves and seek no sympathy. “They were not young girls in whores' clothing, or whores regretting their loss of innocence. They were whores in whores' clothes, whores who had never been young and had no word for innocence” (43). Pecola loves these women, and they are more than willing to share the lessons they've learned, but their lessons are wrong for Pecola. They can tell her stories that are breezy and rough about lawless men and audacious women. But they cannot teach her what she wants most to know: how to be loved by a mother and father, by a community, and by a society.

For that she turns in the end to Soaphead Church, the itinerant spiritualist and flawed human being. A pedophile and con man, Soaphead has not transcended the pain of life's humiliations and is deeply scarred. Morrison describes him as “that kind of black”¹⁴ for whom blackness is a burden to be borne with self-righteous indignation. Of West Indian and colonial English ancestry that has long been in social decline, Soaphead, existing at the bottom of the descent, is “wholly convinced that if black people were more like white people they would be better off.”¹⁵ He, therefore, appreciates Pecola's yearning for blue eyes. But Soaphead's powers are fraudulent as are his claims to have helped Pecola by “giving” her blue eyes; he does little more than use her in his own schemes of revenge against God and man. With no one to help her counteract the love of white dolls with blue eyes, Pecola cannot help herself, and she is obliged to be the victim—always.

Indeed the effects of Pecola's devastation are unrelenting as measured in the passing of time in the novel—season after season: Morrison names each of the novel's sections after a season of the year, beginning with autumn and ending with summer. The headings are ironically prophetic preludes to the story segments. They stand out as perverse contradictions of Pecola's experiences: thematic progression is not from dormancy to rebirth as the autumn to spring movement would suggest. There is no renewal for Pecola. In spring she is violated; by summer she is annihilated. Morrison uses this disruption of nature to signal the cosmic proportion of Pecola's injury.

SULA (1973)

The Bluest Eye was not commercially successful at the time of its publication (its popularity has risen in tandem with Morrison's reputation). Yet, it did inaugurate its author's public literary life. After writing it, Morrison became a frequent reviewer in the New York Times and an authoritative commentator on black culture and women's concerns. Three years later Sula was both a commercial and critical triumph. It was excerpted in Redbook and widely reviewed. The Book-of-the-Month Club selected it as an alternate, and in 1975 it was nominated for the National Book Award.

If The Bluest Eye chronicles to some extent an annihilation of self, Sula, on the contrary, validates resiliency in the human spirit and celebrates the self. In Sula Morrison returns to the concerns of girlhood explored in her first novel, but this time she approaches her subject in celebration, as if to see what miracles love and friendship may accomplish for Sula and Nel that they could not for Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda.

Sula Peace and Nel Wright are each the only daughter of mothers whose distance leaves the young girls alone with dreams of someone to erase the solitude. When they first met, “they felt the ease and comfort of old friends.”¹⁶ Indeed “their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on” (44). Sula's spontaneous intensity is relieved by Nel's passive reserve. Sula loves the ordered neatness of Nel's home and her life, and Nel likes Sula's “household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of doors …” (44). Over the years “they found relief in each other's personality” (45).

In examining their friendship, Morrison tests its endurance. As she says, not much had been done with women as friends; men's relationships are often the subject of fiction, but what about women's strongest bonds? As perfect complements, one incomplete without the other, Sula and Nel together face life, death, and marriage, and eventually they also must face separation. Throughout, Morrison affirms the necessity of their collaboration.

Adolescence for Nel and Sula is marked not by individuation, but by merger, as a single, provocative play scene illustrates. In the summer of their twelfth year, with thoughts of boys and with “their small breasts just now beginning to create some pleasant discomfort when they were lying on their stomachs” (49), the girls escape to the park. In silence and without looking at each other, they begin to play in the grass, stroking the blades. “Nel found a thick twig and, with her thumbnail, pulled away its bark until it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence” (49). Sula does the same. Soon they begin poking “rhythmically and intensely into the earth,” making small neat holes. “Nel began a more strenuous digging and, rising to her knee, was careful to scoop out the dirt as she made her hole deeper. Together they worked until the two holes were one and the same” (50). In their symbolic sexual play, Nel and Sula, unlike Pecola, have absolute control in this necessary right of passage (without the intrusion of a masculine presence) which conjoins them until, like the holes, they are one and the same.

Two other significant moments define their intimacy as well. The first is Sula's cutting off the tip of her finger in response to a threat by a group of white boys whose menacing bodies block the girl's route home. If she could do that to herself, what would she do to them, Sula asks the shocked boys. The second is the death of Chicken Little, the little boy whose body Sula swings around and around in play until her hands slip, and he flies out over the river and drowns. Nel watches, and no one discovers their culpability. At the graveside they hold hands. “At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter” (56-57).

Not even Nel's marriage dissolves their “friendship [that] was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one's thoughts from the other's” (72). They are both happy; Nel becomes a wife, and Sula goes to college. Ten years later Sula's return imparts a magic to Nel's days that marriage had not. “Her old friend had come home. … Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself” (82). Their lives resume an easy rhythm until Nel walks into her bedroom and finds her husband and Sula naked. Not surprisingly, this episode supersedes the women's friendship. Jude leaves town, Nel, and their children, and Nel blames Sula. Three years later, when Nel visits a dying Sula, she asks, “Why you didn't love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away” (125). Sula replies, “What you mean take him away? … If we were such good friends, how come you couldn't get over it?” (125).

With Sula's question Morrison calls into doubt the primacy of Nel's marriage over the women's friendship, intimating that their friendship may even supplant the marriage. Years after Sula's death, Nel comes to this realization at her friend's grave. “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude. … We was girls together. … O Lord, Sula … girl, girl, girlgirlgirl” (149).

Nel and Sula's estrangement offers Morrison an opportunity to examine women's lives in and out of marriage. As girls Nel and Sula had cunningly authored the dimensions of their own existence without the permission or approval of their families or the community. “Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be” (44). Morrison does not elaborate further on the specific nature of their creation, but clearly each positions herself just outside the village perspective, thinking and behaving with a certain independence. “In the safe harbor of each other's company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things” (47).

The experience that determines Nel's perspective is a train ride with her mother. The two travel for days from Ohio to New Orleans for Nel's great-grandmother's funeral. Her mother's shuffling acquiescence in the face of the white conductor's hostility during the trip, the sullen black male passengers whose refusal to help her mother reflects their own helpless humiliation, the indignity of squatting to relieve themselves in the brush in full view of the train, her mother's stiff shame of her own creole mother's life as a prostitute—all these experiences teach Nel lessons about other people's vulnerabilities. Back home in the safety of her bedroom she resolves to develop her strengths. Looking in the mirror, she whispers to herself “I'm me. … I'm me. I'm not their daughter. I'm not Nel. I'm me. Me …” (24). Adopting me-ness as her mantra, Nel gathers power and joy, and the “strength to cultivate a friend [Sula] in spite of her mother” (25). Nel's daring is eclipsed, however, by marriage to Jude. For Helene Wright, Nel's mother, marriage is one of the neat conditions of living that defines a woman's place, and Nel accepts a similar arrangement for herself. Nel does not choose Jude; she accepts his choosing her as a way of completing himself. Without Nel, Jude is an enraged “waiter hanging around a kitchen like a woman” (71) because bigotry keeps him from doing better. “With her he was head of a household pinned to an unsatisfactory job out of necessity. The two of them together would make one Jude” (71). In marrying Jude, Nel gives up her youthful dreams (before she met Sula) of being “wonderful” and of “trips she would take, alone … to faraway places” (25). In marrying Jude, she gives up her me-ness.

Predictably, when Jude leaves, after his betrayal with Sula, Nel suffers psychic disintegration, and later, after a necessary recovery, she endures shrinkage of the self. She considers the release that may come with death, but that will have to wait because she has three children to raise. In this condition Nel wraps herself in the conventional mantle of sacrifice and martyrdom and takes her place with the rest of the women in the community. Although Nel does not discover it until after Sula's death and she is old, the real loss in her life is that of Sula and not Jude. And the real tragedy is that she has allowed herself to become less than she was.

Sula is different from Nel. It is Sula's rebellious spirit that fuels the intermittent moments of originality that Nel manages to have. In Sula's presence Nel has “sparkle or sputter” (618). Sula resists any authority or controls, and Morrison offers her as one of the lawless individuals whose life she is so fond of examining. From Sula's days in childhood when she retreated to the attic, she rebels against conventionality. She is surprised and saddened by Nel's rejection of her over Jude. She had not expected Nel to behave “the way the others would have” (635). But nothing, not even her closest and only friend's censures will force Sula to abridge herself.

Even near death Sula will have none of Nel's limitations. To the end she proclaims, “I sure did live in this world. … I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me” (645). Sula's me-ness remains intact; she has not betrayed herself as Nel has, and any loneliness she feels is a price she is willing to pay for freedom.

By and large, Sula's assessment of her past is credible. Only once has she come close to subsuming herself to some other, named Ajax. Shortly after Ajax shows up at her door with a quart of milk tucked under each arm, Sula begins to think of settling down with him. All of the men in her past had, over the years, “merged into one large personality” (104) of sameness. “She had been looking … for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be—for a woman” (104). But those thoughts exist before she meets Ajax; he is different in some ways. He brings her beautiful and impractical gifts: “clusters of black berries still on their branches, four meal-fried porgies wrapped in a salmon-colored sheet of the Pittsburgh Courier, a handful of jacks, two boxes of lime Jell-Well, a hunk of ice-wagon ice …” (104). Sula is most interested in him, however, because he talks to her and is never condescending in conversation. “His refusal to baby or protect her, his assumption that she was both tough and wise—all that coupled with a wide generosity of spirit … sustained Sula's interest and enthusiasm” (110).

Their interlude ends when Ajax discovers Sula's possessiveness. For the first time Sula wants to be responsible for a man and to protect him from the dangers of life. Giving in to a nesting instinct that is new for her, she is on the verge of making his life her own. But before that happens Ajax leaves, and Sula has only his driver's license as proof of his ever having been there. Sula's sorrow is intense, but short-lived, unlike Nel's enduring suffering for Jude. In the end, when Nel accuses her of never being able to keep a man, Sula counters that she would never waste life trying to keep a man: “They ain't worth more than me. And besides, I never loved no man because he was worth it. Worth didn't have nothing to do with it. … My mind did. That's all” (124). Sula had needed Nel, but she had never needed a man to extend herself. Even in lovemaking she had manufactured her own satisfaction, “in the postcoital privateness in which she met herself, welcomed herself, and joined herself in matchless harmony” (107). With Ajax those private moments had not been necessary, but without him Sula abides. The self, Morrison instructs, should not be liable in its own betrayal.

Sula is, without doubt, a manifesto of freedom, and that fact in large part accounts for its popularity with readers and critics who champion its triumphant chronicle of a black woman's heroism. That does not mean, however, that the novel approximates the ideal or that Sula's character is not flawed. Morrison describes her as an artist without a medium. “Her strangeness … was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for” (105). An art form augments life by giving it purpose; perhaps it teaches the individual compassion, but without it someone like Sula is, as Morrison describes her, strange, naive, and dangerous.

In this view Sula is without an essential quality of humanity. She has taken little from others, but more important she has given little.¹⁷ She does not mean others harm: “She had no thought at all of causing Nel pain when she bedded down with Jude” (103), but without the moderating and mediating influence of her own humanity, Sula is unthinking and childlike. It is as if some crucial element of consciousness had been arrested in childhood when she overheard her mother say to a friend that she loved Sula but did not like her or when “her major feeling of responsibility [for Chicken Little's death] had been exorcised” (102). After that, “she had no center, no speck around which to grow” (103). The most bizarre episodes of her conduct may be understood in this context: feeling no emotion but curiosity while watching her mother burn to death, putting her grandmother in a nursing home for no good reason, and, of course, having sex with her best friend's husband.

Imperfect as she is, however, Sula does escape the falseness and emptiness of Nel's life. As Nel takes her place beside the other women in the community, she and they are identified with spiders, whose limitations keep them dangling “in the dark dry places … terrified of the free fall” (104). And if they do fall, they envision themselves as victims of someone else's evil. Sula, on the other hand, is one of Morrison's characters who is associated with flight, the metaphor for freedom. Sula is not afraid to use her wings fully to “surrender to the downward flight” (104). She is unafraid of the free fall.

Flight in Morrison is usually associated with men and not with women, who are more often than not Morrison's nurturers. Of course, Morrison offers neither quality by itself as the archetypal model; in the best scenarios the individual is capable of both nurturance and flight. Indeed, Nel and Sula are incomplete without each other. As Morrison says, “Nel knows and believes in all the laws of that community. She is the community. She believes in its values. Sula does not. She does not believe in any of those laws and breaks them all. Or ignores them.”¹⁸ But both positions are problematic, Morrison continues: “Nel does not make that ‘leap’—she doesn't know about herself [she does not discover until too late, for example that she had watched Chicken Little's drowning with excitement]. … Sula, on the other hand, knows all there is to know about herself. … But she has trouble making a connection with other people and just feeling that lovely sense of accomplishment of being close in a very strong way.”¹⁹ Nurturance without invention and imagination is analogous to flight without responsibility. Ajax is the only other character in the novel who is identified with flying. He loves airplanes, and he thinks often of airplanes, pilots, “and the deep sky that held them both” (109). When he takes long trips to big cities, other people imagine him pursuing some exotic fun that is unavailable to them; in truth, he is indulging his obsession with flying by standing around airports watching planes take off.

Metaphorically, Ajax is always in flight—from conventionality. Without work, but willing to be responsible for himself, Ajax does not take cover in domesticity. Unlike Jude, who is only half a man without Nel as his refuge from life's injustices, Ajax does not need Sula to kiss his hurts and make them better. Unlike Jude, Ajax has self-esteem that is not diminished by white men's refusal of work, and unlike Jude, he does not run away and leave behind a wife and children. Ajax does leave Sula, but his action is not a betrayal. Ajax and Sula had come together, not as fractional individuals in need of the other to be complete, but as whole people, and when that equation is threatened by Sula's possessiveness, Ajax leaves for Dayton and airplanes. Of men like Ajax Morrison writes:

They are the misunderstood people in the world. There's a wildness that they have, a nice wildness. It has bad effects in a society such as the one in which we live. It's pre-Christ in the best sense. It's Eve. When I see this wildness gone in a person, it's sad. This special lack of restraint, which is a part of human life and is best typified in certain black males, is of particular interest to me. … Everybody knows who “that man” is, and they may give him bad names and call him a “street nigger”; but when you take away the vocabulary of denigration, what you have is somebody who is fearless and who is comfortable with that fearlessness. It's not about meanness. It's a kind of self-flagellant resistance to certain kinds of control, which is fascinating. Opposed to accepted notions of progress, the lock step life, they live in the world unreconstructed and that's it.²⁰

As characters in flight both Ajax and Sula stand in opposition to the community that is firmly rooted in ritual and tradition. As the devoted son of “an evil conjure woman” (109), whom most regarded as a neglectful mother, Ajax is accustomed to rebuffing public opinion, and as a man he is given a license to do so. As a woman Sula must take that license, and in the fray she alienates the community. Sula returns to town after ten years and refuses to honor the town's ceremonies: “She came to their church suppers without underwear, bought their steaming platters of food and merely picked at it—relishing nothing, exclaiming over no one's ribs or cobbler. They believed that she was laughing at their God” (99). Soon the town names her a devil and prepares to live with its discovery. In fact, Morrison says, the town's toleration of Sula is in some way a measure of their generosity: “She would have been destroyed by any other place; she was permitted to ‘be’ only in that context, and no one stoned her or killed her or threw her out.”²¹

Clearly, however, the town needs Sula as much as or perhaps more than she needs it. In giving the novel an extraordinary sense of place,²² Morrison builds the community's character around its defense against this internal threat. Sula is not the only danger, but for a time she is the most compelling. Her defiance unifies the community by objectifying its danger. Women protected their husbands; husbands embraced their wives and children. “In general [everyone] band[ed] together against the devil in their midst” (102). No one considered destroying Sula or running her out of town. They had lived with evil and misfortune all of their lives; it “was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over” (102).

The predominant evil in their lives, more pervasive and enduring than Sula, is the external force of oppression. Morrison's characteristic treatment of bigotry is not to delineate the defining episodes of white hatred but instead to direct attention to the black community's ingenious methods of coping: using humor, garnering strength from folk traditions, and perversely refusing to be surprised or defeated by experience. Residents of the Bottom waste little time complaining and get on with the business of their lives. Morrison captures here, as she does elsewhere, the rhythms of the black community: men on the street corner, in pool halls; women shelling peas, cooking dinner, at the beauty parlor, in church, interpreting dreams, and playing the numbers, working roots.

Yet, Morrison says, the music and dance belie the pain of men without work and of families living on the frayed edges of the prosperous white town below. Each contact with life beyond the borders of the Bottom recalls the isolating constraints of race prejudice: Helene's brutal reminder by the train conductor that her place is in the car with the other blacks; Sula and Nel's encounter with the four white teenagers who determine the physical boundaries of the girl's world by forcing them to walk in roundabout circuitous routes home from school; Shadrack's arrest by police who find him “wandering” in the white part of town. Even dead Chicken Little's space is designated by the bargeman who drays the child's body from the river, dumps it into a burlap sack, and tosses it in a corner. The sheriff's reports that “they didn't have no niggers in their country, but that some lived in those hills “cross the river, up above Medallion,” (54) underscores the expectation that black life will not spill out of the hills. Morrison acknowledges the destructiveness of this enforced separation, but she also treats the isolation ironically by converting its negative meaning into a positive one. Cordoned off as they are, the people are self-sufficient; they create a neighborhood within those hills “which they could not break”²³ because it gives continuity to their past and present.

In assigning character to the Bottom, Morrison establishes worth in terms of human relationships. As she says:

there was this life-giving very, very strong sustenance that people got from the neighborhood. … All the responsibilities that agencies now have were the responsibilities of the neighborhood. So that people were taken care of, or locked up or whatever. If they were sick, other people took care of them; if they were old, other people took care of them; if they needed something to eat, other people took care of them; if they were mad, other people provided a small space for them, or related to their madness or tried to find out the limits of their madness.²⁴

Shadrack's presence in the Bottom is evidence of the community's willingness to absorb the most bizarre of its own. When Shadrack returns from World War I and does not know “who or what he was … with no past, no language, no tribe” (10), he struggles “to order and focus experience” (12) and to conquer his fear of death. The result is National Suicide Day, which Shadrack establishes as the third of January, believing “that if one day a year were devoted to it [death] everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free” (586). At first frightened of him, in time people embrace him and his day. Once they “understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him, so to speak, into the scheme of things” (13). That is, according to Morrison, the black community's way.

Sula's mother, Hannah, and grandmother Eva had borne their share of these community responsibilities in the big house where youth, old age, disease, and insanity kept company. (Eva takes the life of her son, Plum, but Morrison treats it as an act of compassion, not of selfishness.) Sula is different, however. In refusing to become a part of the community, she refuses a part of her cultural and personal history. Her determination to define herself and to redefine a woman's role places her at odds with the community. And yet, the community makes room for her in a way perhaps that no other place would. There are both variety and cohesiveness in the Bottom, where characters as unlike as Sula, Nel, Ajax, and Shadrack coexist. “There are hundreds of small towns” like Medallion, Morrison explains, “and that's where most black people live. … And that's where the juices came from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.”²⁵

Morrison suggests that this quality of neighborhood life is endangered. As the buildings and trees are leveled in the Bottom to make room for a new golf course and as blacks leave the hills to occupy spaces vacated by whites in the valley below, Morrison wonders if economic and social gains are worth the sacrifice of community, because without community the cultural traditions that inform character are lost to future generations.

Notes

1. I am using the term sequel broadly to suggest a continuation of theme rather than a continuation of plot and identifiable characters. The novels reflect Morrison's desire to follow up her exploration of female friendships in childhood and adulthood.

2. Nellie Y. McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Contemporary Literature 24 (Winter 1983): 413-29. Rpt. in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 399.

3. Robert B. Stepto, “‘Intimate Things in Place’”: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” Massachusetts Review 18 (Autumn 1977): 473-89. Rpt. in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 386.

4. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) 3. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses in the text.

5. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989): 20.

6. Morrison, “Unspeakable” 21.

7. Morrison, “Unspeakable” 22.

8. Michael Awkward, “‘The Evil of Fulfillment’: Scapegoating and Narration in The Bluest Eye,” Inspiriting Influences, Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 75. See also Chikwenye Ogunyemi's “Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye,” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 19 (1977): 112-20.

9. Stepto 386.

10. Stepto 384.

11. Morrison, “Unspeakable” 23.

12. Morrison “Unspeakable” 23.

13. Timothy B. Powell, “Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page,” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Winter 1990): 752. For other clever readings of the Dick and Jane story in The Bluest Eye, see Shelly Wong, “Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye,” Callaloo 13 (Summer 1990): 471-81; Phyllis Klotman, “Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in The Bluest Eye,” Black American Literature Forum 13 (Winter 1979): 123-25; and others.

14. Stepto 389.

15. Stepto 388.

16. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973) 44. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses in the text.

17. Maureen T. Reddy (“The Tripled Plot and Center of Sula,” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Spring 1988) 29-45) enlarges this view of Sula's deficiencies. Reddy, surprisingly, labels Sula a woman with “no true inner core of self [who] tries to appropriate Nel's by doing what Nel does, including having sex with Jude” (37). According to Reddy, “In spite of her deathbed claim that she ‘sure did live in this world’ and her insistence that she owns herself, Sula never reaches real self understanding because she has no abiding self to understand nor any way of creating a self …” (37). Reddy's interpretation does not negate the view that Sula inspires Nel to act imaginatively. What Sula does not have and what Nel offers her is definition and order. Each has something that the other needs.

18. Stepto 381.

19. Stepto 382.

20. Claudia Tate, “Conversation with Toni Morrison,” Black Women Writers at Work, ed. Claudia Tate (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1983) 125-26.

21. Tate 343.

22. All of Morrison's novels have an extraordinary sense of place, but in Sula the author says she felt place “very strongly, not in terms of the country or the state, but in terms of the details, the feeling, the mood of the community, of the town.” See Stepto 378.

23. Stepto 379.

24. Stepto 379.

25. Stepto 380.

Selected Bibliography

Novels

The Bluest Eye. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979.

Sula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. London: Allen Lane, 1974.

Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. London: Chatto & Windus, 1978.

Tar Baby. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. London: Chatto & Windus, 1981.

Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. London: Chatto & Windus, 1987.

Jazz. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. London: Chatto & Windus, 1992.

Literary Criticism

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Edited Volume

Race[ing] Justice, [En]gender[ing] Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

Selected Uncollected Essays

“What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib.” New York Times Magazine 22 August 1971: 14ff.

“Behind the Making of the Black Book.” Black World 23 (February 1974): 86-90.

“Rediscovering Black History.” New York Times Magazine 11 August 1974: 14ff.

“A Slow Walk of Trees.” New York Times Magazine 4 July 1976: 104ff

“Memory, Creation, and Writing.” Thought 59 (December 1984): 385-90.

“Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.” Black Women Writers (1950-1980). Ed. Marie Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984. 339-45.

“The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinsser. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 101-24.

“Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (Winter 1989): 1-34.

“Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, Upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Lecture in Literature. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

Selected Interviews

Carabi, Angels. “Toni Morrison.” Belle Lettres (Winter 1994): 38-39; 86-90.

Davis, Christina. “Interview with Toni Morrison.” Presence Africaine (First Quarterly, 1988). Rpt. in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Jones, Bessie W. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” The World of Toni Morrison. Ed. Bessie W. Jones and Audrey L. Vinson. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1985.

LeClair, Thomas. “‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” New Republic 184 (21 March 1981): 25-30.

Lester, Rosemarie K. “An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt, West Germany.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Ed. Nellie Y. McKay. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1988. 47-54.

McKay, Nellie Y. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Contemporary Literature 24 (Winter 1983): 413-29. Rpt. in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. “A Conversation.” Southern Review 21 (1985): 567-93.

Schappell, Elissa, and Claudia Brodsky Lacour. “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction.” Paris Review 128 (Fall 1993): 83-125.

Stepto, Robert B. “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Massachusetts Review 18 (Autumn 1977): 473-89. Rpt. in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993.

Tate, Claudia. “Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Black Women Writers at Work. Ed. Claudia Tate. New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1983. 117-31.

Selected Critical Books, Collected Articles, and Special Journal Editions

Bjork, Patrick. The Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place within the Community. New York: Lang, 1992. Discusses five novels and examines how cultural and communal values, beliefs, and customs contribute to the protagonists' search for identity and place.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Volume of reviews, interviews, previously published and new critical essays on Morrison's work. Extensive bibliography of critical books and essays.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. Examines the folk traditions in Morrison's novels and proposes that Morrison goes beyond the casual use of folklore to a replication of the culture that gives rise to folk traditions. Devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's first five novels.

Heinz, Denise. The Dilemma of “Double-Consciousness”: Toni Morrison's Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Describes an ever-enlarging artistic perspective in Morrison's work which expands from the individual, to the family, community, and then to society.

Holloway, Karla F. C. and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulous. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1987. A subjective approach to a scholarly reading of Morrison's texts. Each author takes a turn interpreting novels in terms of her academic and cultural background.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1991. Devotes a chapter to each of Morrison's novels, except Jazz. Treats each novel as a solution to some aspect of “oppression afflicting African people” and defines each novel as a reflection of Morrison's growing social consciousness.

McKay, Nellie, ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988. Interviews with Morrison, essays on her fiction, and selected reviews of her first four novels.

Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989. Compact and thoughtful examination of Morrison's evolving moral vision.

Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Examines Morrison's narrative style and her theme of self-discovery.

Selected Critical Articles

Awkward, Michael. “‘Unruly and Let Loose’: Myth, Ideaology, and Gender in Song of Solomon.” Callaloo 13 (Summer 1990): 482-98. Discusses Morrison's revision of African and Western myths in Song of Solomon which is seen to reflect, to an extent, feminist ideology.

———. “‘The Evil of Fulfillment’: Scapegoating and Narration in The Bluest Eye.” Inspiriting Influences, Tradition, Revision, and Afro-American Women's Novels. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. 57-95. Thoughtful discussion of Morrison's placement within the African American literary tradition.

Bakerman, Jane S. “Failures of Love: Female Initiation in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” American Literature 52 (January 1981): 543-63. A problematic reading of female failure in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon.

Blake, Susan L. “Folklore and Community in Song of Solomon.” Melus 7 (1980): 77-82. Sees Milkman's journey in Song of Solomon as not only a discovery of individual and family identity but as an essential discovery of community.

Bryant, Cedric Gael. “The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrison's Sula.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Winter 1990): 731-45. Discussion of the balanced tension between unsocialized individuals—those who are crazy, mentally deficient, evil—and the communities that keep them.

Christian, Barbara. “Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 7 (February 1980): 65-78. Examines Morrison's use of Nature (the land) to define community (place, setting) and character in Sula, The Bluest Eye, and Song of Solomon.

Coleman, Alisha R. “One and One Make One: A Metacritical and Psychoanalytic Reading of Friendship in Toni Morrison's Sula.” CLA Journal 37 (December 1993): 145-55.

Coleman, James W. “The Quest for Wholeness in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby.” Black American Literature Forum 20 (Spring/Summer 1986): 63-73. General discussion of the quest for identity in Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby.

Cowart, David. “Faulkner and Joyce in Morrison's Song of Solomon.” American Literature 62 (March 1990): 87-100. Locates Morrison's accomplishment within a larger literary tradition.

Guerrero, Edward. “Tracking ‘The Look’ in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Winter 1990): 761-73. Explores Morrison's delineation of white male standards of beauty in her first five novels.

Halloway, Karla F. C. “Beloved: A Spiritual.” Callaloo 13 (1990): 516-25. Sees Beloved as a revision of the historical record of black women's experiences. Examines the literary devices Morrison uses to transform one woman's history into cultural myth.

Harris, A. Leslie. “Myth and Structure in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.” Melus 7 (Fall 1980): 69-76. Finds myth in Song of Solomon to be a universalizing force which broadens the novel's appeal.

Lee, Dorothy H. “The Quest for Self: Triumph and Failure in the Works of Toni Morrison.” In Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Marie Evans; Intro. Stephen E. Henderson. (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984): 346-60. Approaches each of Morrison's first four novels as a variation on Morrison's singular concern with the relationship between community and the individual quest for identity; sees the quest as an organizing principle in Morrison's work.

Montgomery, Maxin Lavon. “A Pilgrimage to the Origins: The Apocalypse as Structure and Theme in Toni Morrison's Sula.” Black American Literature Forum 23 (Spring 1989): 127-37. Proposes that although catastrophe abounds in Sula, it is not a signal of defeat as it is in the Western apocalyptic vision, but is an opportunity for self-definition and rebirth.

Munro, C. Lynn. “The Tattooed Heart and The Serpentine Eye: Morrison's Choice of an Epigraph for Sula.” Black American Literature Forum 18 (Winter 1984): 150-54. Treats Tennessee Williams's play The Rose Tattoo as an analog to Sula.

Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. “The Ancestor as Foundation in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tar Baby.” Callaloo 13 (1990): 499-515. Discusses Hurston's and Morrison's novels as evidence of the authors' belief in the restorative significance of folk myth and knowledge of ancestry.

Powell, Timothy B. “Toni Morrison: The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page.” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Winter 1990): 747-60. Working with her first three novels, defines Morrison's success in resurrecting the black self, black culture, the black text which have, since slavery, been systematically repressed.

Reddy, Maureen T. “The Tripled Plot and Center of Sula.” Black American Literature Forum 22 (Spring 1988): 29-45. Proposes that Sula has not one but three protagonists: Sula/Nel, Shadrack, and the black community. Each of their stories contribute to a central antiwar theme in the novel.

Rosenburg, Ruth. “Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye.” Black American Literature Forum 21 (Winter 1987): 435-45. General discussion of The Bluest Eye as a long-delayed chronicle of black girlhood.

Schmudde, Carol E. “Knowing When to Stop: A Reading of Toni Morrison' Beloved.” CLA Journal 37 (December 1993): 121-35. Discusses the novel's treatment of cultural significance in defining the limits of human suffering.

Smith, Valerie. “The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.” Southern Review 21 (Summer 1985): 721-32. Examines Song of Solomon as “the only one of Morrison's [first three] novels in which her protagonist completes successfully his/her search for psychological autonomy” (721).

Stein, Karen F. “Toni Morrison's Sula: A Black Woman's Epic.” Black American Literature Forum 18 (Winter 1984): 146-50. Summary reading of Sula as a heroic tale about the black woman's experience.

Story, Ralph. “An Excursion into the Black World: The ‘Seven Days’ in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon.” Black American Literature Forum 23 (Spring 1989): 149-58. Focuses on the Seven Days organization in Song of Solomon as grounded in contemporary and nineteenth-century black history.

Traylor, Eleanor W. “The Fabulous World of Toni Morrison: Tar Baby.” Confirmation. Creative and very general reading of Tar Baby as a modern fable.

Turner, Darwin T. “Theme, Characterization and Style in the Works of Toni Morrison.” In Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, Ed. Mari Evans; Intro. Stephen E. Henderson (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1984): 361-69.

Wong, Shelley. “Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye.” Callaloo 13 (Summer 1990): 471-81. Traces the technical strategies Morrison uses in The Bluest Eye to deconstruct European American cultural values that are hostile to blackness and examines the textual strategies used to combat that hostility.

Secondary Bibliography

Middleton, David L. Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1987. Two hundred and twenty-three annotations of anthologies, recordings, reviews, interviews, books, and articles on Morrison. Also lists Morrison's awards, honors, and memberships.