In the text “Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Psychological Reading” author Sandra Mayfield, compares two of Toni Morrison's most famous novels Beloved, and Playing in the Dark. In Playing in the Dark, “Morrison analyzed the works of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Willa Cather” concluding that “the works of those writers deemed most valuable in American literature at that time, there was a blindness to an Africanist discourse, to the mind and spirit of Africans inhabiting these works of American writers.” Morrison is saying there was an absence of African history and the hardships they faced all throughout the history of America. Morrison goes to claim that the largest that the absence of “ understanding of Africanism” is essential “in order to complete the history of literary criticism in America...”. The African discourse, as Morrison describes it, has definitely been left out of modern literature. Morrison used this to write her book Beloved. She uses this situation of under representation to make people more aware of the reality. Morrison uses the main female character Sethe to depict her message. Throughout the novel, Morrison makes it clear the hardship these African American men and women faced.
Many authors these days are transforming literature as a way to express thoughts and feelings in a written manner. Mayfield writes, “Morrison claims that in the early decades of American literature… White American authors were disturbed, confused, unsettled by the Africanist presences....” It is very surprising to see authors be so against about the African discourse that occurred on a mere 200 years ago. However, reading the book Beloved, though fiction, has brought me to realize the expanse of this issue. It is not 1 person, or 1 community, it is a whole race that was affected; it was more than the 60 million Toni Morrison dedicated her novel to.
No comments:
Post a Comment