Toni Morrison was born Chloe
Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio.
Her mother’s family had come to Ohio from Alabama via Kentucky,
and her father had migrated from Georgia. Morrison grew up with
a love of literature and received her undergraduate degree from Howard
University. She received a master’s degree from Cornell University,
completing a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. Afterward,
she taught at Texas Southern University and then at Howard, in Washington, D.C.,
where she met Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica. The marriage
lasted six years, and Morrison gave birth to two sons. She and her
husband divorced while she was pregnant with her second son, and
she returned to Lorain to give birth. She then moved to New York
and became an editor at Random House, specializing in black fiction.
During this difficult and somewhat lonely time, she began working
on her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which was published
in 1970.
Morrison’s first novel was not an immediate success,
but she continued to write. Sula, which appeared
in 1973, was more successful, earning a nomination
for the National Book Award. In 1977, Song of
Solomon launched Morrison’s national reputation, winning
her the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Her most well-known work, Beloved, appeared
in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Her other
novels include Tar Baby (1981), Jazz (1992),
and Paradise (1998). Meanwhile,
Morrison returned to teaching and was a professor at Yale and the
State University of New York at Albany. Today, she is the Robert
F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University,
where she teaches creative writing. In 1993,
Morrison became the first African-American woman to receive the
Nobel Prize in literature.
The Bluest Eye contains a number of
autobiographical elements. It is set in the town where Morrison
grew up, and it is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old,
the age Morrison would have been the year the novel takes place
(1941). Like the MacTeer family, Morrison’s
family struggled to make ends meet during the Great Depression.
Morrison grew up listening to her mother singing and her grandfather
playing the violin, just as Claudia does. In the novel’s afterword,
Morrison explains that the story developed out of a conversation
she had had in elementary school with a little girl, who longed
for blue eyes. She was still thinking about this conversation in
the 1960s, when the Black is Beautiful movement
was working to reclaim African-American beauty, and she began her first
novel.
While its historical context is clear, the literary context
of The Bluest Eye is more complex. Faulkner and
Woolf, whose work Morrison knew well, influenced her style. She
uses the modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple
perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. But Morrison understands
her work more fundamentally as part of a black cultural tradition
and strives to create a distinctively black literature. Her prose
is infused with black musical traditions such as the spirituals,
gospel, jazz and the blues. She writes in a black vernacular, full
of turns of phrase and figures of speech unique to the community
in which she grew up, with the hope that if she is true to her own
particular experience, it will be universally meaningful. In this
way, she attempts to create what she calls a “race-specific yet
race-free prose.”
In the afterword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison
explains her goal in writing the novel. She wants to make a statement
about the damage that internalized racism can do to the most vulnerable
member of a community—a young girl. At the same time, she does not
want to dehumanize the people who wound this girl, because that
would simply repeat their mistake. Also, she wants to protect this
girl from “the weight of the novel’s inquiry,” and thus decides
to tell the story from multiple perspectives. In this way, as she
puts it, she “shape[s] a silence while breaking it,” keeping the
girl’s dignity intact.
