ANALYSIS OF THE LIFE AND CREATIVITY OF TONI MORRISON

ANALYSIS OF THE LIFE AND CREATIVITY OF TONI MORRISON

Djabbarova Sitora Bahodirovna

Assistant teacher of Department of Languages

Samarkand State Medical University

Abstract: The article provides detailed information about the life of Toni Morrison and his work. At the same time, Toni Morrison describes the period of writing of the works and the period-related aspects of the works. Toni Morrison's views on twentieth-century culture, its development, and radical democracy are highlighted. Toni Morrison's views on the developmental stages of critical realism are also cited. Details of what Toni Morrison did during his lifetime are also provided.

Key words: Toni Morrison, period of writing, critical realism.

Introduction

Toni Morrison, original name Chloe Anthony Wofford, (born February 18, 1931, Lorain, Ohio, U.S.—died August 5, 2019, Bronx, New York), American writer noted for her examination of Black experience (particularly Black female experience) within the Black community. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Morrison grew up in the American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for Black culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. She attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964. In 1965 Morrison became a fiction editor at Random House, where she worked for a number of years. In 1984 she began teaching writing at the State University of New York at Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University; she retired in 2006.

Morrison’s first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent Black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes. In 1973 a second novel, Sula, was published; it examines (among other issues) the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex [1].

The critically acclaimed Beloved (1987), which won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. A film adaptation of the novel was released in 1998 and starred Oprah Winfrey. In addition, Morrison wrote the libretto for Margaret Garner (2005), an opera about the same story that inspired Beloved [2].

Literature review

In 1992 Morrison released Jazz, a story of violence and passion set in New York City’s Harlem during the 1920s. Subsequent novels were Paradise (1998), a richly detailed portrait of a Black utopian community in Oklahoma, and Love (2003), an intricate family story that reveals the myriad facets of love and its ostensible opposite. A Mercy (2008) deals with slavery in 17th-century America. In the redemptive Home (2012), a traumatized Korean War veteran encounters racism after returning home and later overcomes apathy to rescue his sister. In God Help the Child (2015), Morrison chronicled the ramifications of child abuse and neglect through the tale of Bride, a Black girl with dark skin who is born to light-skinned parents [3].

A work of criticism, playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was published in 1992. Many of Morrison’s essays and speeches were collected in What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (2008; edited by Carolyn C. Denard) and The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019). She and her son, Slade Morrison, co wrote a number of children’s books, including the Who’s Got Game? Series, The Book About Mean People (2002), and Please, Louise (2014). She also penned Remember (2004), which chronicles the hardships of Black students during the integration of the American public school system; aimed at children, it uses archival photographs juxtaposed with captions speculating on the thoughts of their subjects. For that work, Morrison won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2005.

The central theme of Morrison’s novels is the Black American experience; in an unjust society, her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture. In 2010 Morrison was made an officer of the French Legion of Honor. Two years later she was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019) is a documentary about her life and career [4].

Research methodology

Morrison’s parents instilled a sense of heritage and language through folktales, ghost stories, and songs traditional to the African-American heritage. As a result, she developed a love for literature and read frequently as a child. She had many favorite authors, including Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy [5].

Her childhood influenced her style of writing

Morrison started her writing career as an undergrad with a workshop at Howard University. Growing up, Morrison says that her family was “intimate with the supernatural” and that they frequently used visions and signs to predict the future.

Morrison’s parent made storytelling an important part of their household and was filled with storytelling among the children and the adults. As a result of her childhood, she felt that her writing was influenced by the storytelling in her past [6].

‘Toni’ was actually a nickname

At the age of 12, Morrison became a Catholic and took on the baptismal name Anthony after Anthony of Padua. Years later when Morrison was a student at Howard University, people had a hard time pronouncing the name Chloe. From then on, she started going by her nickname, Toni, to avoid any further confusion with pronunciation.

She didn’t believe she was a good mother

Morrison married Harold Morrison, an architect she met while studying at Howard University. They divorced in 1964, leaving her to care for their two sons alone. She often felt as though she wasn’t a good mother because she wanted to focus on her writing. “I did it ad hoc, like any working mother does,” she said [7].

She developed a habit of waking up at four in the morning to write, which led to the completion of her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Here is a recording of a 2015 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, in which she spoke about the regrets she carried about her personal life.

Analysis and results

Toni Morrison never remarried after divorce.

Though she has never discussed the reason for her divorce, she hinted in the past that her ex-husband wanted a more subservient wife. She said “he didn’t need me making judgments about him, which I did. A lot.” She never remarried after they parted ways [8].

Her father witnessed a lynching

Morrison’s father grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. At the age of 15, he witnessed white people lynching two Black businessmen who lived on his street. Soon after the lynching, her father moved to Lorain, Ohio, a racially integrated town, in hopes of escaping racism and gain better employment in Ohio’s industrial economy rather than sharecropping.

Speaking of her father’s experience with the lynching, Morrison said “He never told us that he’d seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.”

She was one of the first Black editors at Random House

In 1965, Morrison started working as a fiction editor at Random House in Syracuse, New York and was among one of the very few Black editors at the company.

As an editor, Morrison was highly influential in introducing Black literature into mainstream publishing. She acquired and edited books by Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, Huey Newton, Gayl Jones, and others. One of the most successful titles she edited was The Greatest: My Own Story by Muhammed Ali [9].

First glimpse of racism

As the second oldest of four children, Morrison was well aware of the issues that her family faced because of their race. When her father lived in Cartersville Georgia as a teenager, he witnessed two black businessmen who lived on his street get lynched by white people. Morrison said “He never told us that he’d seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.”

At the age of two, her house was set on fire by the family’s landlord while they inside because her parents were unable to pay rent. Rather than getting extremely angry, Morrison’s mother simply laughed at the landlord, calling his actions a “bizarre form of evil.” It was from that moment that Morrison became aware of her family’s ability to remain calm and not let racial actions get the best of them [10].

Conclusion

In summary, the article provides detailed information about the life of Toni Morrison and his work. At the same time, we have received detailed information about the period of writing of Toni Morrison's works and aspects of the works related to the period. We got acquainted with Toni Morrison’s views on twentieth-century culture, its development, and radical democracy. We are introduced to Toni Morrison’s views on the developmental stages of critical realism. We also learned a lot about what Toni Morrison did during his lifetime.

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