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The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison
Morrison's Education
When Morrison first started elementary school, she was ahead of most of her white peers. That is, as a first grader, because she was extremely gifted and considering that her parents concentrated a majority of her childhood on story-telling and emphasizing the importance of education, it was no surprise that Morrison was not only the only student who could read but also the only African American student in the classroom. Moreover, because her parents instilled the importance and richness of black culture into her life, Morrison developed a great sense of African American cultural awareness in all of her academic settings. By the time Morrison reached high school, she had already developed her love for reading French, American, and Russian novels; her favorite authors ranged from Leo Tolstoy to Gustave Flaubert (McKay 414). She loved the way there writers were able to utilize their familiarity with certain subjects and encompass it into their fictional novels and theories. In fact, by reading these authors and other various works, Morrison learned how to incorporate black culture into her works.
After graduating highschool with an honors from high school, in 1949, with the financial aid she recieved from her parents, Morrison went on to attend Howard University where she graduated with an honors and received a B.A. in English as well as a minor in classics in 1953. It was here that she not only changed her first name but she also narrowed her interests after unearthing her love of literature (McKay 414). Furthermore, while Morrison attended Howard University she was able to experience the hardships of the lives of black people as well as interact with her counterparts which offered her the opportunity to comprehend the reality of the African American population. After graduating from Howard, six years later, she received her master’s degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York by completing a thesis on William Faulkner and Virginia Wolffe. Wolffe's work on an individual's stream-of-consciousness can be seen in alot of Morrison's writing especially in The Bluest Eye.
However, Morrison started off her career at Texas Southern University where she taught English. She soon returned to Howard University to teach English which is where she met her husband, a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison; Morrison married him in 1958. They had two sons until they divorced in 1964 when he decided to move back to Jamaica. It was after this that she began working on her first novel with a group of other upcoming writers at Howard. As a single, pregnant mother, Morrison decided to go back to Ohio and live with her family until the birth of her second son; soon after Slade was born she sooned moved to Syracuse, New York, where she worked for a textbook publisher as a senior editor. Despite her limitations as a black woman in antebellum America, Morrison, nevertheless, provided for her sons and managed to hire a housekeeper to look after them while she started writing it her first novel, The Bluest Eye. In order to truly speak from the heart, Morrison "drew on her memories from childhood and expanded them with her imagination so that the characters developed a life of their own" (McKay 421). She ended up publishing The Bluest Eye in 1970. Though this novel was not an immediate success, she soon published another one which addressed the issue of slavery within the United States- Sula. Not surprisingly, Morrison's was a greater success.
Literary Achievments
Morrison's Sula was very popular in surprisingly, Morrison's was a greater success and was nominated for the 1975 National Book Award for fiction. Although both The Bluest Eye and Sula primarily discuss the roles of black women and their limitations in society, her third novel, The Song of Solomon, describes a narrator attempting to discover himself through various encounters and adventures. This third novel won the National Book Critic's Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. In addition to this, Morrison was also appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on the Arts. In 1981, she published her fourth novel, Tar Baby which highlights the conflicts of race, class, and sex by illustrating the interaction between black and white characters. It was in with this novel that Morrison attempted to break down the barriers surrounding people in the 1930s especially considering the fact that she had not truly experienced racsim herself until she reach college (Wall 800).
As the years progressed, Morrison began to work on more controversial subject matter. For example, about three years later, in 1984, Morrison worked on a play which she named, Dreaming Emmett. Her play was actualy based on the true story of Emmett Till, a fourteen a year old African American boy was brutally murdered by two white males after being accussed of at a white woman in a convenience store. On January 4, 1986 at the Marketplace Theater in Albany her play was shown to the public. Morrison's next novel, Beloved, was influenced by a published story about a slave, Margaret Garner, who tried to escape to Ohio with her children in order to escape slavery. When she realized that they were going to be returned, she tried to kill her children rather than return them to life of slavery. Morrison's Beloved was published in 1987 and was considered a bestseller. In 1988, it also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
In 1987, Toni Morrison was named the first African American woman to be named the chair at Princeton University. It was here that she taught creative writing and also took part in the African-American studies, American studies and women's studies programs. She also started her sixth novel, Jazz, which is essentially about life in the 1920's. In 1993, Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the eighth woman and the first black woman to do so. Her seventh and most recent novel, Paradise, was also published early in 1998 (Wall 796).
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