To Hope against Hope: Post-Civil Rights Children Running Lickety-Split in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (original) (raw)
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“He Mought, en Den Again He Moughtent”: The Ambiguous Man in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
American Studies in Scandinavia
In this article, I discuss Toni Morrison’s 1981 novel, Tar Baby, through the lens of a trickster tale on which the novel is loosely based. Tar Baby invites one to choose sides between Jadine, the African American female protagonist with a European education and worldviews, or Son, the bearer of a more traditional African American cultural heritage and values. Son is initially constructed as other, and his representation is based on negative stereotypical notions of the African American male. First impressions need to be revised later, as the text plays with the readers’ sympathies about Son. Even his survival is left open at the end of the novel and the range of options of how to categorize Son would seem to reflect the readers’ perceptions back on themselves. In this way, Morrison sets up a trap in which any reader making too easy or essentialist definitions of the character will fall. Thus, the most important expression of the trickster tale is the novel’s name: the novel itself i...
Eye of the Beholder: Black Femininity as Explored in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby
The Foundationalist, 2020
{Jaede Shillingford, McGill University} As scholars of English Literature, or even casual observers of the craft, we have long understood the works of woman authors—Austen, Woolf, Brontë and all their equally inclined colleagues—to be intrinsic cornerstones of feminist literary thought. This is not necessarily because the women centered in this fiction were any less marginalized by oppressive hegemonic ideology than the minds from which they came, but rather, the importance of these authors within the canon stems from the boundaries they broke simply through their courageous wielding of the pen.
SIGNIFYIN(G) UPON TONI MORRISON'S POSTBLACKNESS: Moveable Black Identities and Festivitiesb>GIFNI, 2017
Linked to the metaphors Ariel, Calibán and Esu, the three concepts Negriceness, Negritude and Negriticeness are used in the study of Pecola Breedlove, Milkman Dead and Jadine Childs in Toni Morrison’s fiction. Pecola’s assimilationist identity is visible in her relation with negriceness and Ariel, as she allies herself to white values by wishing to have blue eyes; Milkman’s nationalist identity appears in his proximity to negritude and Calibán as he searches for his family’s ancestors in the Southern US; finally, Jadine’s catalyst identity happens in her alliance with negriticeness and Esu, as she mediates the human ties between the white Streets and the Black Childs. Key-words: Negriceness; Negritude; Negriticeness; Identity; Culture.