Toni Morrison Research Paper

Hanan Al-Shaykh and Toni Morrison are two women authors that have made such an impact in literature that they are in The Norton Anthology World Literature book they have given the world a glance into their lives and culture. The main focus of these women works is to gives you a glimpse into the culture of each woman’s background. While each woman are from different parts of the world and comes from different cultures, they both have encounter conflicts with the justice system. Each author uses experiences that have had to write while most is fiction you can see each woman in their work. Hana Al-Shaykh is a Lebanese writer that “explores the conflicts between tradition and modernity as they affect women in the Arab worlds” (pg. 1165). In her

1172).Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, she later changed her name to the saints name of Anthony then later shorten to Toni when she converted to Catholicism. Her writing has a “combination of techniques resembles at times the magic realism of the Latin American Boom; at other times, Morrison’s concern with the border between fiction and history seems post-modernist” (pg.1172). Her first novel was The Bluest Eye, which was about a young African American named Pecola Breedlove who wants to be in the image of a white woman. It is not just the young girl who has this twisted idea about beauty, they thought the lighter you were the prettier you were. Her masterpiece novel Beloved published in 1987 earned her the Pulitzer Prize. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. According to The Norton Anthology World Literature book, “Inspires in part by the modernists, but equally by jazz music and African American oral tradition, Morrison has expanded the possibilities of contemporary American fiction”(pg.

The young girl yearns to go swimming in the ocean to cool off, since women cannot show off their bodies they cannot really go swimming. The grandmother wants to make the young girl dream come true about swimming and takes her into town in a village where there is a pool that is only for women. As the long bus rides happens you can see that the young girl is understanding more and more about traditional customs and why her grandmother still holds on to them. At the end of the story we see that the young girl goes into the pool area but her grandmother does not. While she entered her grandmother starts to pray. The young girl seems to finally understand her grandmother and her