Molly OConnell

Mr. Newman
English 101: Rhetoric
13 November 2014
Class Conflict between Two Childhood Friends
Marxism is a theory of how the economy is set up, more specifically about how the class
system in America is set up. The short story Recitatif, by Toni Morrison is about two girls who
similarly relate when they first meet at an orphanage, but seem to change as they grow older and
go their separate ways. There is not much background information on the story, but I do know
that the girls names are Twyla and Roberta and they are both of different races, (black and
white) but the narrator never states who is black and who is white. Also, Twyla is the narrator of
the story. From a Marxist perspective, I feel that the conflict of the story is happening between
the two girls because they are both from different classes. According to Lois Tysons Critical
Theory Today Marxist Criticism chapter, she discusses how Marxism relates to the American
class which I feel is the main conflict of the short story Recitatif by Toni Morrison.
The short story Recitatif begins with the two girls Twyla and Roberta meeting in an
orphanage, based on how the setting is described the story starts out in the 1950s. Both the girls
related in the story because they were the only ones in the orphanage who were basically
dropped by their mothers, Nobody else wanted to play with us because we werent real orphans
with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped (Morrison 1). Twyla describes her
mothers job as dancing all night (1) while Roberta describes her mother as sick (1). From a
Marxist perspective class wise, the girls relate because they were both put into an orphanage

because their mothers did not have enough money to take care of them. When Twyla explains
that her mother is dancing all night, that implies that her mother is a stripper and doesnt have
enough money to take care of her daughter, while Roberta says her mother is sick, which implies
that she doesnt have enough money to take care of her daughter because she has to pay all of her
medical bills. In the Critical Theory Today book by Lois Tyson, she talks about the different
socioeconomic groups between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat according to her statement,
The poor, whose limited educational and career opportunities keep them struggling to support
their families and living in fear of becoming homeless (55) relates to both Twyla and Robertas
class. The girls get along so well in the beginning of the story because they are from the same
class and can relate to each other.
After the girls leave the orphanage and go their separate ways, they meet up again a few
years later at a Howard Johnson restaurant where Twyla was working at the time and Roberta
stopped in to eat on her way to go to a Jimi Hendrix concert with some friends. The way Roberta
was acting showed that she was high while at the restaurant, Roberta? Roberta Fisk? She
looked up. Yeah? Twyla. She squinted for a second and then said, Wow. Remember
me? Sure. Hey. Wow. (Morrison 4). I did some research about Jimi Hendrix and the Howard
Johnson restaurant and found that Hendrix was at the peak of his career in the late 1960s and
that Howard Johnsons was the largest restaurant chain throughout the 1960s and 70s. From a
Marxist perspective, it seems that the girls have gone down very different paths since they left
the orphanage. Based on the fact that the time era was in the late 1960s that would mean that the
girls would have been in their late teen years maybe even early twenties. Since Twyla was
working at a popular restaurant at the time shows that she was actually thinking of her future,
while Roberta seemed to be more of a hippie at the time, which is an ideology according to

Tyson, An ideology is a belief system, and all belief systems are products of cultural
conditioning (56). While Twyla seems to be living a middle class lifestyle, Roberta is living a
lower class lifestyle which shows why the girls arent getting along because of the two different
lifestyles they are living.
As the girls grow older, Twyla seems to continue to lead a middle class life and Roberta
changes her hippie days for the better by getting married to an upper middle class man. While the
girls meet up only a few more times in the story, there are some issues at first due to the different
classes that they come from but in the end, as they grew older they decide not to dwell on the
past. The main conflicts that happened in the story were definitely due to the classes that the two
girls decided to live from a Marxist perspective.