CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON

Mrs. J. Sasirekha, Research Scholar, Kongunadu Arts and Science College, Coimbatore.
e-mail Id: sasi.janarthanan@gmail.com Mob Num: 9894211967
Dr. R. Santhakumari, Associate Professor and HoD, Kongunadu Arts and Science
College, Coimbatore.
ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to study the conceptual analysis in the novels of Toni Morrison –
The Bluest Eye, Sula, The Song of Solomon, Tar Baby and Beloved. Toni Morrison has dealt
with the themes of gender identity, racial tension, sexism, and lustful desire, violence, oppression
and sacrifice in all her novels. The subject of gender identity in African-American culture,
slavery has become an unfortunate issue of the past and still haunts the present. Two major
reason of suppression in that culture is being black and a woman. Women strive hard to assert
their identity as human beings. Whites or any man could not relinquish the racist opportunity or
the gender rights. The conflict between the black and the white communities, the victimisation of
the blacks by the dominant whites, the violence and bloodshed within the black communities
have been presented nowhere so effectively in the entire American fiction. Though all her works
are suffused with violence, Morrison has dealt with violence in each novel in a unique way.

Keywords: gender analysis, racial tension, sexism, lustful desire, violence, oppression,
community, culture

INTRODUCTION
Toni Morrison uses many themes in her works to create deeper meaning as well as
dynamic plots. One of the most obvious themes in Morrison’s novels is the idea of gender
analysis, violence, oppression and sacrifice. In Morrison’s novels violence exhibits its various
forms. In her famous novel Beloved and Sula, Gender is significant in the description of the self.
It is the condition of being man and a woman. The term gender may be mystified with the term
sex. The issue of gender will be analysed with reference to feminism. Feminist theories focus on
gender politics, gender relations and sexuality. Gender tension prevails when woman are
traditionally subordinated to man. Man does not intend to relinquish gender advantage.
Similarly, white would not intend to eradicate racist advantage.
With the portrayal of Afro-American culture, the condition of women and humiliating
effects of slavery are explored in the gender biased society. In Sula, three generations of women
i.e. Sula, Hannah, Eva represents economically and sexually independent ladies who gain
strength from each other in the absence of male member. Sula is presented as a domineering
female, intending to live her life as a free being. She refuses to take any responsibility in the
name of marriage and her mother dislikes it. In Beloved, Sethe is a major character who
interlinks the past with the present. Life of free slaves is presented to be haunted by the traumatic
experiences of the past. Sethe works in a Sweet home but being a slave woman she is treated
brutally and raped. She escapes with her two children but lost her husband during this escape.
Halle turns mad on witnessing the rape of his wife. Sethe, delivers a daughter on her escape.
Amy Denvar, is a white character and she nurses Sethe and her daughter. Sethe has the time of
bliss at the house of her mother-in law but this lasts by the arrival of a school teacher. On the
sight of School teacher, Sethe resigns to back into slavery and plans to kill her children but she
could take life of her elder daughter only, whom she called as Beloved. Sethe’s attempt to
infanticide is similar to the killing of Plum in Sula.
In both the novel, mothers try to kill their children from love and not hatred. Ghost of
Beloved makes life of Sethe miserable. Afterwards, Sethe realises that Children are integral part
of herself. Beloved and Sula embodies the gender relations of black African American people.
Historical experiences of black African American are used as a background in both the novels.
Beloved represents the era of civil war i.e. the time before and after the abolishment of slavery.
Whereas, in Sula characters tend to cope with the haunted pasts and troubled present. In Beloved
woman is under the burden of patriarchy and slavery while in Sula characters have a disparity in
their personality. They are trying to manifest the subjective effects consciousness by struggling
hard to cope with their free self. Issues of family, identity and possession are explored by
Morrison in a world where slavery is apparent.
The narrative structure of theses novels is related to the character’s struggle for the path
of discovery. It portrays the intricacy in lives of characters. Morrison characterizes mutability
and shifting in perspective of characters in time, space and composition. Gyetavi expresses:
Beloved’s narrative structure is constantly shifting perspective of character’s mind i.e. mutable,
non sequential and with no convention. It has mutability of boundaries and constitutive dialogue
between self and other. Nancy presents that fluidity is distinctive in woman and opposed to
man’s mode of perception as well as expression. The monologue of Sethe, Beloved and Dener
presents seriousness rather than the flexibility in the boundaries, the complete breakdown of the
border between self and the other. For example, Sethe expresses, “Beloved, She my daughter,
She mine” (200). While, Beloved speaks, “I am Beloved and she is mine” (210). These lines
highlight the merging of self with other. These lines are without punctuation. Further, Beloved
expresses: “I am not separate from her, there is no place where I stop her face is my own” (202).
Her words reveal her psychological urge for tending to merge into the other. These characters
articulate as indistinct as well as segregated. They speak but not with one another which
highlight’s the urge of characters to submerge.
One of the most obvious themes in Morrison’s novels is the idea of racial tension
between whites and African Americans. Morrison presents a thorough spectrum of perspectives
of African Americans by bluntly voicing the opinions many characters of race. For example, she
comments on the social position of blacks in Song of Solomon through Macon Dead, “He knew
as a Negro he wasn’t going to get a big slice of pie” (63). Many of the characters in Morrison’s
novels have this same attitude that the whites of society dominate the system, which may also
link to historical happenings of the time periods in which the novels take place. In addition to
feelings of inferiority, Morrison also suggests a general, bitter sentiment felt by blacks toward
whites. These feelings arise from stereotypes and prejudices, and an example can be seen in The
Bluest Eye when young Cholly Breedlove is disrupted from his first sexual encounter by two
men: “There was no mistake about their being white he could smell it” (147) which proves the
reputation Cholly had learned about whites. Another way racial discrimination was weaved into
Morrison’s novels was through concrete examples of segregation, such as in Jazz where there
were groups formed for “Colored Boy Scouts” (58) and where “there were no high schools in
[the] district a colored girl could attend” (6). Obviously, racial discrimination is an issue of great
importance to this author; thus she incorporates this theme into many of her writings.
  Another common theme Morrison uses is society’s view on the difference between men
and women, or, to put it more simply, sexism. She openly displays the sexism present in the
communities in which the characters of her novels reside. For instance, in Song of Solomon,
shortly after Pilate threatens Reba’s lover by stabbing him, Milkman comments to Hagar about
Pilate’s strength. It is then that Hagar responds, “We are weak” (95), referring to the entire
population (with few exceptions such as Pilate.) Even Pilate herself admitted that “Women are
foolish, ya know” (94) which reflects the attitudes and views of the society in which these
characters live. In another of Morrison’s work, The Bluest Eye, the females regard the opposite
sex with a different reputation: “Some men just dogs” (13). Similarly, in Jazz, some of the
women such as one who speaks to Violet claim that, “Men wear you down to a sharp piece of
gristle if you let them” (14), further proving that women are “weak” and can be easily persuaded.
Morrison purposely includes this theme of sexism to point out the unnecessary assumptions
made by society and the effects these generalizations have on the community and its members.
  Morrison also includes the theme of lust and desire in many of her novels. This presence
of temptation implies an even deeper theme of giving in to pleasures. It appears in Song of
Solomon when Milkman’s car suddenly breaks down in front of Solomon’s General Store in
Shalimar, Virginia. Milkman walks outside, observes the women there, and decides that “He
wanted one of them bad” (263), which clearly implies a craving that he desires to fulfill. Another
example of this same sexual desire surfaces in The Bluest Eye when Polly Breedlove is fifteen
and still exploring her sexuality: “Fantasies about men and love and touching were drawing her
mind and hands away from her work” (113), and this passage even goes as far as implying
distraction from typical daily tasks because she is so intent upon her “fantasies”. Violet
in Jazz also experiences this feeling of desire when she longs for her husband: “By and by
longing became heavier than sex: a panting, unmanageable craving” (108), which shows her
extreme devotion to getting what she wants. While some of this described desire may be
completely healthy, this same desire also has a negative consequence in Morrison’s works as
well. The intense sexual desire experienced by many of her characters leads to abuse of some
sort, mainly sexual. Examples include Milkman in Song of Solomon, Cholly and Soaphead
from The Bluest Eye, and Joe Trace from Jazz. The presence of lust and desire appears many
times in Morrison’s novels to present the cultural aspects of the characters and to inflict emotion
upon the readers.
At the same time, in her first novel The Bluest Eye, she begins with Pecola Breedlove’s
sufferings and psychological disintegration. There is guilt, a sense of hopelessness and an image
of the wasteland all around. “Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that
year. . . . It never occurred to us that the earth itself might be unyielding . . . . What is clear now
is that of all that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding
earth” (9).
The very first chapter describes the violent pasts of Pecola Breedlove’s mother and father
and ends with the rape of a daughter by her own father, the story of a pedophile-Soaphead
Church and the destruction of a wretched dog. The second chapter depicts only violence,
madness and oppression of the blacks by the dominant whites. This violence is motivated by
self-loathing and self-hatred that expresses itself and seeks liberation in the sacrifice of a young
girl, Pecola Breedlove. The originary violence is repeated time and again as Pecola is victimised
not only by her mother and father but by other members of the black community in Lorain who
identify themselves not with their own community but with their oppressors. All this reveals how
a young girl Pecola Breedlove becomes the victim of an entire community’s frustration, hatred
and humiliation. The Bluest Eye tries to start several times to name the trauma, yet each fails.
Claudia identifies the cause of the trauma and the condition of the community for which the
sterility of the ground is an apt metaphor. Yet the real cause of their agony and violence in the
community remains unnamable. The origin of violence in oppression is so difficult to uncover
because of the scapegoat system prevalent in the community.
The purpose of the scapegoat is to darken the root causes of violence and to reassign
blame for everything to one defenseless girl, in Lorain’s case, Pecola Breedlove. Violence in
Sula is more destructive than that of The Bluest Eye. Here it is unmistakable, graphic and
undeniable. More than one character is burnt alive and large numbers are buried alive and
drowned. There are fights, plagues of robins, ice storms, collapsing bridges and casual
humiliations. The novel, infact, is a chronicle of the slow destruction over time of the entire
community of the bottom. Many critics of Sula believe that oppression is at the heart of the
violence. And the oppression, the community suffers can easily be attributed to the community’s
origins in “a nigger joke”. But the “nigger joke” that opens this novel acts merely as a metonymy
for oppression by the dominant whites and does not name that oppression as the source of
violence within the community. Reddy aligns Jude’s marriage to Nel with the death of Nel’s
inner self and asserts that it is merely an escape from one form of oppression to another:
Both have internalised the racist and sexist attitudes of the white capitalist society that
says that one’s value as a man is determined by one’s work and by that work’s economic
rewards, including ownership of a woman and children, and that one’s value as a woman is
determined by one’s ability to attract a man and to provide that man with children (35).
The economic and political powerlessness of the black community makes it vulnerable to
white society’s “exploitative self aggrandizement”. However, violence among the blacks stems
not only directly from their economic oppression, but also from their willingness to adopt the
dominant culture’s values and to align themselves with their oppressors. The violence ultimately
leads to guilt and anger like that witnessed in Lorain in The Bluest Eye and to the community’s
search for a scapegoat. After Sula’s death the community is worse off than it was. Rene Girard
writes that “acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same
family but throughout the community” (48). He defines the sacrificial crisis as a “crisis of
distinctions—that is, a crisis affecting the cultural order. This cultural order is nothing more than
a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to
establish their identity and their mutual relationships” (49). Sula predicts the escalation of the
crisis of difference in the future.
In Song of Solomon, Morrison’s third novel violence is less pervasive than it is in her two
previous novels. Here too violence stems from the pressure that the white society places on the
black community to abandon their traditional values and to adopt white values of materialism.
Here the familiar pattern of revenge and mutual violence emerge in obvious terms with the
introduction of ‘Seven Days’ a group of seven black men sworn to kill a white person for every
black murdered by the whites. As in all Morrison’s other novels, this violence within the society
leads to sacrifice. Heremis Pilate another defenceless girl who becomes scapegoat for the
society.
Tar Baby marks a subtle departure from the more physical violence of Morrison’s earlier
novels to the psychological torment, child abuse, abandonment and discrimination. Still violence
is here in the shape of Valerian Street’s inhuman behaviour who keeps berating and
embarrassing his wife. His wife is too guilty of physically tormenting their infant son. Once
again, through Jadine and Son, Morrison depicts the characters who represent two sides of a
culture question. This novel too emphasises the question more effectively without giving any
solution. Though Tar Baby comes much nearer to naming the source of violence it fails naming a
way to overcome it.
 In Beloved Morrison’s fifth novel, violence emerges from slavery and oppression.
Beloved departs from Morrison’s earlier works in its willingness to identify violence among
blacks as a direct response to oppression by the dominant white culture. Here Morrison presents
a society once bonded through love and mutual respect, ripped apart by violence and envy but
violence enters long before Sethe murders her daughter. Whipping, shootings and other physical
abuse dominate the scenes Paul D. and Sethe describe from their lives as slaves. In Beloved there
is a solution as the members of the oppressed communities realize that they can survive only
through a revival of communal values.
Dorothea Mbalia describes Beloved as the “personification of individual needs and
desires” (90). She argues that Paul D’s presence “sets in motion the necessary purgative
confrontation between Sethe, Beloved and the Cincinnati African community” (91).Thus the
struggle in the novel becomes the community’s struggle for coherence and solidarity in the face
of individual need. In Beloved, Mbalia says, “Life is hell but togetherness, shared experience,
and brotherly/sisterly love help the characters to survive, If not to forge better lives for
themselves” (91).
In Beloved and Sula gender issues play a major role in the definition of self. Women are
oppressed on multitudes level due to the reason of gender politics. Firstly, women are oppressed ,
double burden and the brutal institute of slavery robs them from the right of motherhood as well
as womanhood. Women have strived hard under the institution of slavery to fulfill their roles as
mothers. This realisation of self identity is the main craving of feminists and it becomes their
predicament in societies where woman are taken as an inferior beings, as commodities with a
prize tags. In order to come to terms with themselves, black women, fight for their rights and are
cherished members of the black societies. The effects and motivation for violence in Morrison’s
novels are as distinct in each case as her variations in narrative strategy. In The Bluest Eye the
narrators tell their story through flashbacks, backward-looking stories within the forward moving
plot. A different use emerges in Sula. Here Morrison titles the chapters according to a particular
year, i.e., 1929, 1932, 1931 etc. However those chapters tell events from characters’ past-events
which take in the place leading up to title years. Linda Wagner frequently makes reference to the
repetition of patterns in Morrison’s novels, especially The Bluest Eye and Sula. Wagner notices
that not only is National Suicide Day a recurrent motif in the novel, but also that Morrison
repeats the metaphor[s] of confinement, possession, security” (198). In Tar Baby, Morrison uses
the recursive narrative strategy in a less obvious way. Infact the narrative strategy in all of
Morrison’s novels echoes the narrative element in the psychoanalytic process. The narrative
pattern in Beloved too closely resembles the story telling in the psychoanalytic process.
CONCLUSION
While numerous themes can be found woven deep into each of Morrison’s novels, some
of the most prevalent are racism, sexism, and desire. She effectively ties her themes into the plots
of her stories so that the reader can actually obtain an overall message that teaches a lesson or
makes a comment about society. Undoubtedly, the themes in Morrison’s works can connect and
relate to more people lives than she probably ever intended, and that is what makes her literature
strong. 

References
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye.New York: Washington Square Press, 1972.
---. Sula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
---. Song of Solomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
---. Tar Baby. London: Picador, 1991.
---.Beloved.New York: Penguin, 1988.
Christian, Barbara. “Community and Nature: The novels of Toni Morrison.”Journal of
Ethnic Studies 7.4 (1980): 65-78. Print.
Clark, Norris. “Flying Black: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of
Solomon.”Minority Voices: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature and Arts 4.2
(1980): 51-63. Print.
Hilfer, Anthony C. “Toni Morrison’s Critical Indeterminacies.”Texas Studies in
Literature 33.1 (1991): 91-95. Print.
Holloway, Karla F. C and Stephanie Demetrakopoulos. “New Dimensions of
Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison.”
New York: Greenwood, 1987. Print.
Irving, John. “Morrison’s Black Fable.” The New York Times Book Review (1981): 30-31. Print.
Tate, Claudia ed. Black Women Writers At Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Print.