The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
—Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”
<-- 1:17-31 to 1:21:55 Oprah Winfrey speaks at Toni Morrison's celebration of life, commenting on how Winfrey looks to writers as rock stars; when she first met Morrison (at the banquet for her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature), and including quotes from her essays. (posted here on 2 April 2022)
Motivation for writing The Bluest Eye. **MUST WATCH!! (5 min)
0:00-2:40 Morrison's motivation; 3:06 Instant beauty for some and instant ugliness for others; 3:43 Center stage for the least important (focusing the novel on Pecola); 4:30 Other characters telling her story
Toni Morrison—Biography: Brief Bio
--Information borrowed from "Distinguished Women of the Past and Present: Biographies"
Toni Morrison, the first black woman to receive Nobel Prize in Literature, was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, U.S.A. She was the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder and Ramah Willis Wofford. Her parents moved to Ohio from the South to escape racism and to find better opportunities in the North. Her father was a hardworking and dignified man. While the children were growing up, he worked three jobs at the same time for almost 17 years. He took a great deal of pride in the quality of his work, so that each time he welded a perfect seam he'd also weld his name onto the side of the ship. He also made sure to be well-dressed, even during the Depression. Her mother was a church-going woman and she sang in the choir. At home, Chloe heard many songs and tales of Southern black folklore. The Woffords were proud of their heritage.
Toni Morrison—Biography: Education
--Information borrowed from "Distinguished Women of the Past and Present: Biographies"
Lorain was a small industrial town populated with immigrant Europeans, Mexicans and Southern blacks who lived next to each other. Chloe attended an integrated school. In her first grade, she was the only black student in her class and the only one who could read. She was friends with many of her white schoolmates and did not encounter discrimination until she started dating. She hoped one day to become a dancer like her favorite ballerina, Maria Tallchief, and she also loved to read. Her early favorites were the Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, French author Gustave Flaubert and English novelist Jane Austen. She was an excellent student and she graduated with honors from Lorain High School in 1949.
Chloe Wofford then attended the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in English with a minor in classics. Since many people couldn't pronounce her first name correctly, she changed it to Toni, a shortened version of her middle name. She joined a repertory company, the Howard University Players, with whom she made several tours of the South. She saw firsthand the life of the blacks there, the life her parents had escaped by moving north. Toni Wofford graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She then attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and received a master's degree in 1955.
After graduating, Toni was offered a job at Texas Southern University in Houston, where she taught introductory English. Unlike Howard University, where black culture was neglected or minimized, at Texas Southern they "always had Negro history week" and introduced to her the idea of black culture as a discipline rather than just personal family reminiscences. In 1957 she returned to Howard University as a member of faculty. This was a time of civil rights movement and she met several people who were later active in the struggle. She met the poet Amiri Baraka (at that time called LeRoi Jones) and Andrew Young (who later worked with Dr. Martin Luther King, and later still, became a mayor of Atlanta, Georgia). One of her students was Stokely Carmichael, who then became a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Another of her students, Claude Brown, wrote Manchild in the Promised Land which was published in 1965 and became a classic of African-American literature.
Toni Morrison—Biography: Marriage
--Information borrowed from "Distinguished Women of the Past and Present: Biographies"
At Howard University she met and fell in love with a young Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. They married in 1958 and their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1961. Toni continued teaching while helping take care of her family. She also joined a small writer's group as a temporary escape from an unhappy married life. She needed company of other people who appreciated literature as much as she did. Each member was required to bring a story or poem for discussion. One week, having nothing to bring, she quickly wrote a story loosely based on a girl she knew in childhood who had prayed to God for blue eyes. The story was well-received by the group and then Toni put it away thinking she was done with it. Her marriage deteriorated, and while pregnant with their second child she left her husband, left her job at the university, and took her son on a trip to Europe. Later, she divorced her husband and returned to her parents' house in Lorain with her two sons.
Toni Morrison—Biography: Mother, Editor, Author
--Information borrowed from "Distinguished Women of the Past and Present: Biographies"
In the fall of 1964 Morrison obtained a job with a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, New York as an associate editor. Her hope was to be transferred soon to New York City. While working all day, her sons were taken care of by the housekeeper and in the evening Morrison cooked dinner and played with the boys until their bedtime. When her sons were asleep, she started writing. She dusted off the story she had written for the writer's group and decided to make it into a novel. She drew on her memories from childhood and expanded them with her imagination so that the characters developed a life of their own. She found writing exciting and challenging. Other than parenting, she found everything else boring by comparison.
In 1967 she was transferred to New York and became a senior editor at Random House. While editing books by prominent black Americans like Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young and Angela Davis, she was busy sending her own novel to various publishers. The Bluest Eye was eventually published in 1970 to much critical acclaim, although it was not commercially successful. From 1971-1972 Morrison was the associate professor of English at the State University of New York at Purchase while she continued working at Random House. In addition, she soon started writing her second novel where she focused on a friendship between two adult black women. Sula was published in 1973. It became an alternate selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Excerpts were published in the Redbook magazine and it was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award in fiction.
From 1976-1977, she was a visiting lecturer at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She was also writing her third novel. This time she focused on strong black male characters. Her insight into male world came from watching her sons. Song of Solomon was published in 1977. It won the National Book Critic's Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Morrison was also appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on the Arts. In 1981 she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby, where for the first time she describes interaction between black and white characters. Her picture appeared on the cover of the March 30, 1981 issue of the Newsweek magazine.
In 1983, Morrison left her position at Random House, having worked there for almost twenty years. In 1984 she was named the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York in Albany. While living in Albany, she started writing her first play, Dreaming Emmett. It was based on the true story of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed by racist whites in 1955 after being accused of whistling at a white woman. The play premiered January 4, 1986 at the Marketplace Theater in Albany. Morrison's next novel, Beloved, was influenced by a published story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children to Ohio from her master in Kentucky. When she was about to be re-captured, she tried to kill her children rather than return them to life of slavery. Only one of her children died and Margaret was imprisoned for her deed. She refused to show remorse, saying she was "unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done." Beloved was published in 1987 and was a bestseller. In 1988 it won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.
In 1987, Toni Morrison was named the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. She became the first black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League University. While accepting, Morrison said, "I take teaching as seriously as I do my writing." She taught creative writing and also took part in the African-American studies, American studies and women's studies programs. She also started her next novel, Jazz, about life in the 1920's. The book was published in 1992. In 1993, Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth woman and the first black woman to do so.
Historical Context
--Information borrowed from "AP Lit Teaching Unit, by Rhonda Carwell"
The Great Migration: African American Migration to the North
Between 1916 and 1920, approximately 500,000 African Americans migrated to northern
cities from the South. This exodus occurred for many reasons, among them the failure
and destruction of the cotton crop causing a fall in prices, an economic depression in the
South, and the “Jim Crow” laws(links to wikipedia), which limited the freedom of black Americans in schools, hotels, restaurants, train cars, hospitals, and government. Most African Americans flocked to larger cities, believing that these northern cities held employment and opportunities for advancement that the South did not. However, this was not always the case, and oftentimes, African Americans found themselves facing hardships they were not prepared for. Many of the prejudices that were held in the South existed in the North as well. African Americans were believed to be lower in intelligence and ability than their white counterparts. African Americans were believed to be less reliable workers than were European immigrants who had also traveled great distances for a chance at better lives. Oftentimes, African Americans found themselves used as “scabs” to replace workers on strike, thus endangering themselves for work and further alienating them from their potential future co-workers.
With the onset of World War I, foreign immigration was limited, and the pool of cheap labor dried up. Factories and businesses turned to African Americans to fill labor vacancies, knowing that blacks, grateful for work, would not demand the high wages and tolerable working conditions demanded by white laborers. World War II again provided more opportunities for employment as white laborers were shipped overseas as soldiers. Word spread quickly in the South that there were more jobs and higher wages in northern cities. Some African Americans sought to escape life in the South, hoping to find material success in the North. Others hoped to earn and save and eventually return to their southern homes and families. Still others were encouraged by family who wanted to remain in the South while they benefited from the “transplant’s” success.
Whatever the reasons for the migration, African Americans found that they were, by and large, no more welcome in the North than they had been in the South, and they faced new sets of challenges as a result. Despite the occasional individual success, the situation for blacks in both the North and the South did not begin to improve significantly until the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s, and the aftermath of a series of Supreme Court decisions and Congressional acts.
Loneliness, Solitude, and Unhappiness in Writing --> **Watch 4:03-9:40
"unhappy child[ren] make good writers"
Toni Morrison Beautifully Answers an "Illegitimate" Question on Race (Jan. 19, 1998) | Charlie Rose
Obama Presents Toni Morrison with Presidential Medal of Freedom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ICSvbzZGVE
"A Mercy, a historical book set in the late 17th c; a novel set in 1682, the "period before there was a united states before there was even an idea of America...there was nothing going on that ... a time before slavery and black became married...before racism became established but when slavery was the most common experience...with white servants and a free black man who pays for his labor...white and blacks worked together on plantations at that time so it wasn't exotic...Native Americans were in and out ofall of those areas so divinding up the world ethnically and racially was an even that grew but before that i wanted to suggest what it could have been like ...." 00:30-3:01
Oprah Winfrey Talks About Toni Morrison On 50th Anniversary Of ‘The Bluest Eye’ | TODAY (2020)
<--This year (2020) marks the 50th anniversary of “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison’s first novel, chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her book club 30 years ago. TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager spoke with Oprah about their mutual love of the book and this trying year. “To be able to read Toni Morrison … is one of the greatest joys in life,” Oprah says.
NBC's reporter Melissa Harris-Perry rebuts Ohio's Board of Education President's Decision to Ban TBE
“... home is an idea rather than a place. It’s where you feel safe. Where you’re among people who are kind to you – they’re not after you; they don’t have to like you – but they’ll not hurt you. And if you’re in trouble they’ll help you… It’s community – that’s another word for what I’ve described.” —Toni Morrison
“The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films—that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”—Toni Morrison
“My name is Chloe. And the rest is … that other person. Who is able to feel, or pretends to feel, or maybe really feels, or at least reacts to celebrityhood.”—Toni Morrison
“All the books that were being published by African American guys were saying 'screw whitey', or some variation of that. Not the scholars but the pop books. And the other thing they said was, 'You have to confront the oppressor.' I understand that. But you don't have to look at the world through his eyes. I'm not a stereotype; I'm not somebody else's version of who I am.”—Toni Morrison
“The pop stuff – it’s – it’s so low. People used to stand around and watch lynchings. And clap and laugh and have picnics. And they used to watch hangings. We don’t do that anymore. But we do watch these other car crashes. ... Like those Housewives. Do you really think that your life is bigger, deeper, more profound because your life is on television? And they do.”—Toni Morrison
“We are born already and we are going to die. You really have to do something you respect in between.”—Toni Morrison
“If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”—Toni Morrison