CHAPTER IV
COLLECTIVE VOICES
Toni Morrison reveals the silence of women and African-Americans by providing a voice to individuals, the community, and collective voices. The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon provide a voice to African-American children, men, and women, and in Beloved and Paradise, Morrison provides a voice to women who have been silenced by the community. By creating these voices, Morrison endorses the process of recognition, forcing the dominant culture to recognize the validity of the subculture’s voice, and forms a bridge between different narratives in her own works and with other texts in American and World literature. With these narratives, Morrison creates the spaces where the silence laced between and within the voices could be heard in American literature. Each of the individual voices forms a voice for the community, and, in turn, the community’s voice forms a collective voice for America.
Silence Spoken
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses traditional myths to invert the traditional culture’s ideals and values. Morrison, through her non-traditional narratives, shows how the African-American community acquiesced to these standards and how there was a choice to reject these ideals. Morrison suggests that the African-American community can create and change ideals and values in American culture.
In all of her novels, Morrison’s language constructs and reflects reality in America rather than a fairy tale. The representation and function of non-traditional voices presents an opposing language system to the master narrative, thus providing a new narrative for the formation of personal and social identity. She uses the traditional American culture’s myths, African-American folklore and African myths in all of her novels—the Dick and Jane fairy tale, the Cinderella fairy tale, and the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, the Shirley Temple persona, the American Dream myth, the ‘Us and Them’ myth, and the African-American flying myth—because they effectively imply absent and unspoken realities. By using these myths, Morrison demystifies the language to expose the truth about white, middle class ideals and values in American literature. Morrison shows how white society’s beliefs operate to oppress African-Americans.
In Song of Solomon, Morrison not only represents the African-Americans’ search for identity, but American culture’s search for an identity as a group. Morrison’s use of language and narration techniques provides a voice to those that have been silenced. Morrison develops an individual and social identity for her characters as well as her readers. She effectively achieves the goal of giving a voice to the silenced through her use of fairy tales and myths, characters’ identities, and the community’s actions. The function of language in Morrison’s novels is to provide a voice to those that have been silenced; thus Toni Morrison breaks African-American silence in American literature.
In all of her novels, Morrison uses language to question the concept of who has the power of naming people and things, as well as who is the source of that power. The deliberate refusal of the African-American community to accept arbitrarily imposed names constitutes an act of defiance toward an oppressive white power structure and a concomitant act of collective self-love. The power to name as well as to define reality and perception is reclaimed by Morrison’s characters. Her novels validate and enrich African American culture that has long been under attack by both external and internal forces. Now, African-Americans can name themselves.
In Beloved, Morrison uses language to provide a voice to those that have been silenced in traditional American literature by dismantling the traditional myths and stereotypes. By dismantling the traditional literary narrative, Morrison provides a change for women and African-Americans “to create and re-create an imagination of self that male history or white story has effectively denied them” (Plasa 25). Many of Morrison’s characters forge a voice and a new identity by the end of her novels. Morrison provides different narratives and identities, which are strong, independent, and intelligent rather than weak, dependent, and stupid. Morrison helps women repossess their identities by creating characters that not only go against typical white American stereotypes of African-American females, but who also illustrate many of the overlooked strengths and characteristics of womanhood. Morrison empowers the black woman to take control of her destiny and her family because it is her right and duty.
In Paradise, Morrison ‘s use of language “achieves the feat of distancing and demystifying the dominant culture and at the same time creating and re-motivating her culture” (Harding 171). Many of her novels look at the African-American rural life of an oppressed woman, which upset her contemporaries, but inspired readers and writers. These narratives needed to be written in order to “counter centuries of denial and misrepresentation” (Peach 2) in the traditional American literary canon. Morrison controls the language in order to provide other perspectives in her novels than the traditional master narrative. According to Peach, through this action, Morrison “restores black narratives to history” (Peach 23). By exposing the master narrative, Morrison removes the veil that covered American history and rewrites history with a non-traditional narrative. This forces those in society blinded by the traditional culture’s beliefs to face the truth and try to make positive changes for the future.
Morrison effectively “writes both from and about a zone that is ‘outside’ of literacy conventions, that disrupts traditional Western ideology that confirms and modifies patriarchal inscriptions” (Hill-Rigney 1). Morrison achieves this in her literary criticism Playing in the Dark and in her novels. She is inside the zone because she has been educated by the Western ideology in high school and college. She is an outsider because she is an African-American female. These two qualities provide Morrison with the knowledge of the non-traditional narrative. Even though Morrison is writing from an African-American woman’s perspective, her intentions and use of language in the novels are clear to any race and gender.
In Morrison’s novels, the narrator’s function is to “recover facts, illustrate the continuity between past and present, rewrite history, and the process of accumulating multiple stories” (Harding 169). Morrison recovers facts by using multiple voices and perspectives of the story that fill in the gaps and make it a unified whole, which is parallel to the unified communities in the end of the novels. Her narrators are mostly women, with only a few male perspectives. Her first two novels present two narrators of the story; then she moves to multiple voices. The irony is that Morrison’s narrative technique represents a method of reclaiming a personal, racial and cultural history and identity through a language that often has attempted to silence it.
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