Toni Morrison's Fiction: Revised and Expanded Edition

Chapter 1 Understanding Toni Morrison

chapter 1 Understanding Toni Morrison In a writing life that spans more than four decades, Toni Morrison has produced ten novels, a significant book of literary criticism, two plays, two edited essay volumes on sociopolitical themes, a libretto, lyrics for two productions of song cycles performed by the American operatic soprano Jessye Norman and another song collection performed by the American soprano Kathleen Battle. She has coauthored nine children’s books, published numerous essays on literature and culture, and played an international role in supporting and encouraging art and artists. Morrison is also a poet and public intellectual.1 Hers is the “dancing mind,” a term Morrison uses to describe “the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open mind . . . most often in the reading/writing world we live in.”2 The metaphor of an enlightened mind in dance form is taken from Morrison ’s acceptance speech for the Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 1996 National Book Awards. In her talk, Morrison recalled an encounter with a writer in Strasbourg, Germany, where they were both attending a meeting of the Parliament of Writers. At the end of one symposium, the writer approached Morrison with an impassioned plea for help. “They are shooting us [women writers] down in the street,” she said. “You must help. . . . There isn’t anybody else.”3 Morrison offered the story as a cautionary note for her audience and to insist in that particularly relevant setting that the writing/reading space must be free, “that no encroachment of private wealth, government control, or cultural expediency . . . [should] interfere with what gets written or published.”4 Language is agency for Morrison , and she champions its role in shaping creative possibilities. Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931. The name Toni and its origin are the subject of some conjecture.5 Morrison has 2 toni morrison’s fiction said she changed her name in college because people found Chloe difficult to pronounce; as a “nickname” she adopted a version of St. Anthony, her baptismal name. When her first book was published, Morrison notes that she “called the publisher to say I put the wrong name. But it was too late. [The book] had already gone to the Library of Congress.”6 She adds that “Chloe is my sister’s sister. She is my niece’s aunt. She is a girl I know and private. It pleases me to have these two names. . . . It’s useful for me. Toni Morrison is a kind of invention. A nice invention.”7 Morrison grew up in Lorain, Ohio, a Lake Erie town of about forty-five thousand people,8 with her parents, George and Ramah Wofford, an older sister, and two younger brothers. She left Lorain in 1949 to attend Howard University but revisits community as she experienced it growing up by locating many of her stories in Ohio and other parts of the Midwest. In 1953 she earned a B.A. in English at Howard and two years later an M.A. from Cornell University. After Cornell, Morrison went to Houston, where for two years she taught English at Texas Southern University before returning to Howard as an instructor (1957–64). During this seven-year interim she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican-born architect and fellow faculty member. They had two sons, Harold Ford and Kevin Slade, before the marriage ended in divorce, in 1964, and Morrison moved to New York.9 She worked there for a year as an editor at the textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse before going to its trade division in New York City, where she remained until 1983. As senior editor at Random House, Morrison nourished the careers of several writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Gayle Jones, Angela Davis, and Henry Dumas. Morrison’s literary honors include both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Song of Solomon (1977). Beloved (1987) won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and in 2006 was selected by the New York Times Book Review as the best novel of the preceding twenty-five years. For her collective achievements Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993. In its statement the Swedish Academy praised her as one who, “in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”10 In 2012 President Barack Obama, celebrating Morrison as having “had an amazing...