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Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, wasn’t what many people expected to read for class, I however expected to read about incest because of reading another Toni Morrison novel called The Bluest Eye. When I first read the other novel, I wasn’t really close reading what Toni Morrison was actually trying to convey with the novel. From this experience, I learned that I enjoy reading a Morrison novel when I am reading through some type of critical lens. It is reading a novel through a critical lens that makes someone pay closer attention to what the author is conveying through the novel. I was more engaged with the novel than I usually would because I was reading with the purpose of analyzing it with the psychoanalytical lens.
As I read Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, I will be looking at the book through the psychoanalytical lens. I chose to use this lens because I find it interesting in the idea of going into the mind of the characters that they are not out right expressing. Also, I chose psychoanalytical lens over the other lenses because I wanted to challenge myself. For me, reading a book through the race, gender, and social class lens is pretty easy because I do it all the time when I read a book. Furthermore, I was thinking about choosing to look at the book through the feminist lens or race and culture lens because I know that the book will have a lot of parts relating to those lenses.
Self-discovery and becoming a better person are something that anyone can do if they really want to. If someone is going on a journey like that, it will most likely occur in three different stages. In Toni Morrison’s novel “Song of Solomon”, Milkman embarks on a three-step journey toward self-discovery. We are introduced to Milkman as someone who is very arrogant and narcissistic. In the second stage, we see small changes in Milkman's personality and finally, we see the big change for Milkman.
In the novel All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Remarque displays the various situations the soldiers experienced throughout World War I from a German perspective. The characters in the novel endure unforeseen hardships and face severe adversity during their time at the front. Through the use of imagery, Remarque challenges the preconceived notions of war, bravery, and honor that were used as an incentive for the youth to join the war. In the scene where the first bombardment occurs, imagery is used to emphasize the antithesis of the previous romanticized notions based on what the characters encountered at the front.
Toni Morrison’s Sula celebrates liberation from society’s constraints on individuality and self-discovery, and illustrates the negative impact of conformity. The novel follows the lives of several members of The Bottom’s community who refuse to relinquish their identities to fit the expectations of how a certain race or gender should act and the impact it has on their lives and their society. This society, influenced by the 1900’s racial segregation in America, enforces specific standards, and ostracizes whoever defies the cultural norm. Although certain characters choose to retain individuality and isolate themselves, they never fully establish their identities and desperately search for something in order to do so. The characters cling to
The desire to escape can be overwhelming. Such desires are present in the common African American folklore about “the flying Africans”, where a select few enslaved Africans are able to escape from slavery through their ability to fly. Escapist desires such as those are also present in Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon. Morrison’s, Song of Solomon, follows the path of one such family of “flying Africans” as they discover their family history and their abilities of flight. She utilizes the motif of flight to prove man’s escapist desires in regards to the avoidance of responsibility, abandonment of women and freedom from burdens of racial inequality.
She could possibly be more corrupt and blind than MacBeth. Once MacBeth sent her a letter telling her what the sisters said she was already planning to kill Duncan, a the test says, “King you shalt be.” She was instrumental in the assassination of the King, she got the guards drunk so MacBeth could carry out the deed. Afterward she was trying to calm him down she said “what’s done is done,” which could mean that it's too late and they should just see where it goes.
Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is a multiply narrated story of having to come to terms with the past to be able to move forward. Set after the Civil War in 1870s, the novel centers on the experiences of the family of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D and on how they try to confront their past with the arrival of Beloved. Two narrative perspectives are main, that of the third-person omniscient and of the third person limited, and there is also a perspective of the first-person. The novel’s narrators shift constantly and most of the times without notifying at all, and these narratives of limited perspectives of different characters help us understand the interiority, the sufferings and memories, of several different characters better and in their diversity.
1. Beloved, the novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison is a collection of memories of the characters presented in the novel. Most characters in the novel are living with repressed painful memories and hence they are not able to move ahead in their lives and are somewhere stuck. The novel, in a way, becomes a guide for people with painful memories because it is in a way providing solutions to get rid of those memories and move ahead in life. The novel is divided into three parts; each part becomes a step in the healing ritual of painful repressed memories.
Some of the most famous writers reach a point in their lives where they are stuck or where their brains cannot develop any ideas or any new material. Writer's block state in which an author does not have the ability to create new work. Sometimes they have difficulty coming up with new ideas; sometimes it results in not being able to create work for many years. There are several writers claiming that “writer’s block” is nonexistent, and they comment that this argument in all in the mind. They describe this as an excuse people make to not get anything done.
Jonathan Hernandez Mrs. Franklin English 11 September 9, 2014 The Male Overcast Widely renowned Toni Morrison, is an award winning author and a Nobel recipient; within her novel A Mercy (2008), reveals the effects of hierarchy from a physiological standpoint. She supports her revealing by first introducing a female character that comes to power in a male dominant world, then the character (Rebekka) strikes tragedy as her only male support dies leaving the female with a mantle solely made for men which causes Rebekka to lose a place in her mentality of social hierchy; as such she turns to God as a replacement which can only be seen as a replacement for the vast hole in her heart for a male representative. Morrison’s purpose is to give her readers of a new perspective based on the social stratifiction so heavily influenced by the difference in gender during the late 1600’s in order to educate the minds of those that predominantly view the gender social order as a petty argument for the wealthy. She adapts the reading to revolve around a general tone of consequence and repentance.
Throughout the course of African American Experience in Literature, various cultural, historical, and social aspects are explored. Starting in the 16th century, Africa prior to Colonization, to the Black Arts Movement and Contemporary voice, it touches the development and contributions of African American writers from several genres of literature. Thru these developments, certain themes are constantly showing up and repeating as a way to reinforce their significances. Few of the prominent ideas in the readings offer in this this course are the act of be caution and the warnings the authors try to portray. The big message is for the readers to live and learn from experiences.
Toni Morrison´s The Bluest Eye (1970) conveys the Marxist idealism that social and economic realities are the factors that determine the culture and consciousness of a particular group. The struggle within the context of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the rejection of African American people is displayed in Morrison´s work, showing the author´s consciousness. Thus, in this paper I will try to show the author´s belief that human self-realisation is determined and delimited by the dominant class at every level. For this purpose I will focus on the relation between wealth and social class, on how the dominant class, in this case the white one, imposes its values over the black community, reducing its personality and leading its members to lose their identity. I will also try to show how the victims of the capitalist system see themselves trapped in an order from which it is very difficult to escape, and find themselves forced to give up and accept their current condition.
Afro-American women writers present how racism permeates the innermost recesses of the mind and heart of the blacks and affects even the most intimate human relationships. While depicting the corrosive impact of racism from social as well as psychological perspectives, they highlight the human cost black people have to pay in terms of their personal relationships, particularly the one between mother and daughter. Women novelists’ treatment of motherhood brings out black mothers’ pressures and challenges for survival and also reveals their different strategies and mechanisms to deal with these challenges. Along with this, the challenges black mothers have to face in dealing with their adolescent daughters, who suffer due to racism and are heavily influenced by the dominant value system, are also underlined by these writers. They portray how a black mother teaches her daughter to negotiate the hostile, wider world, and prepares her to face the problems and challenges boldly and confidently.
CHAPTER-V THE HEALING POWER OF FOLK CULTURE Images of women healing ill or injured women, or of women healing themselves, have become one of the central tropes in contemporary African American women’s novels. Authors such as Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison utilise the trope of healing to measure past and present oppressions of women of color and to discuss what can and what cannot be healed, forgotten and forgiven. Much focus is put on how healing could be accomplished. Some hurt, they say, is so distant that it cannot be reached; other hurt goes so deep that there may be no possibility of healing... some pain can only be healed through a reconnection to the African American community and culture (Gunilla T. Kester 114)
