Toni Morrison on critics: “I tend not explain things very much, but I long for a critic who will know what I mean when I say ‘church’ or ‘community,’ or when I say ‘ancestor’ or ‘chorus’” (Atkinson 12).

Morrison is a prolific writer who achieved a milestone by being the “first African American writer, male or female,” to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Sula, published in 1974, received a nomination for the National Book Award in fiction; Song of Solomon (1979) won the National Books Critics Circle Award; Tar Baby (1981) was on the New York Times Best Sellers List for four months and Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (Iyasere xiii).

Literary critics credit Morrison with “bearing witness for the voiceless” (Atkinson 12). According to Elizabeth B. House, Morrison’s appeal resides in her “extraordinary ability to create beautiful language and striking characters” (Iyasere xii). Her works represent something “beloved, lost and familiar to the African American reader” (Johnson 3). Morrison’s popularity extends to both national and international audiences and her appeal transcends race.

One of the tenets of Morrison’s fiction springs from her ability to capture the essence of African American folklore, namely the music of the blues, which permeates her novels. She also incorporates supernatural elements and the trickster character, which can be seen in the ghost of Beloved. In Song of Solomon, music serves as an integral part of the story, acting as a connective thread that binds the community over a period of time. According to Wahneema Lubiano, “while a particular story is being told in vernacular culture, the ways of distributing information throughout a community are also passed on” (95-6). The blues, which stem from the slave songs, serve as the vehicle to finding a voice in a state of oppression. Slaves transformed the language of their oppressors into a distinctive form, which provided the freedom of expression and communication. This is a critical piece that Morrison employs in her novels.

The negative critical analysis that surrounds Morrison’s work largely stems from placing her solely in a restrictive African American writer category, failing to judge her work based on its merits outside of the black experience; however, this is not to suggest that her contribution to the African American literature should be ignored, but it is a limiting stance to judge her solely on this category. The problem is that critics like Stanley Crouch view her novel, Beloved, as having “no serious artistic vision or real artistic integrity” because they look at it through jaded lenses; however, before one writes off Toni Morrison based on Crouch’s observations, it is critical to consider that Crouch classified the novel as a “blackface holocaust novel” which was “written in order to enter slavery into the big time martyr ratings contest” (67). Therein lies the problem with generalizations.

In a Salon interview, Morrison responds to the critics typecasting of African American writers: Once I was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, with two other black writers. The three of us, who don't write anything alike, were lumped together by color, and then the reviewer ended by deciding which of the three books was the best. And she chose one, which could have been [the best], but the reason it was the best was because it was more like "real" black people. That's really discouraging. So if you have that kind of reduction to the absurd, you just have to keep on trying.

Although, it is necessary to look at the black experience as one way to view her work, the point is that it is certainly not the only way.

Sula, according to Maureen T. Reddy, “can be, and has been, read as, among other things, a fable, a lesbian novel, a black bildungsroman, a novel of heroic questing, and a historical novel that captures a crucial change in black living patterns” (Iyasere xvi). The relationship between the themes is what makes Morrison’s Sula so unique. What is striking about the novel, Sula, is the connection that binds the women-Nel and Sula-together and the strength that emanates from the Peace household, which includes Eva, Hannah and Sula. Morrison’s ability to capture the uniqueness of each woman and her focus on the bonds between women as evidenced through “Recitatif.”

Eusebio L. Rodrigues writes that in Beloved, “Toni Morrison fuses arts that belong to black oral folk tradition with strategies that are sophistically modern in order to create the blues mode in fiction and tell a tale thick in texture and richly complex in meaning” (Iyasere xviii). Set at the time of Reconstruction, Beloved offers a disturbing picture of the hardships that each African American endured, while demonstrating the will to survive. One of the aspects of the Black Aesthetic delves into the past—the middle passage and slavery—as a way to understand your present.

In her essay, “The Grotesque in Morrison’s Beloved,” Susan Corey identifies both a “comic” grotesque and an “uncanny” grotesque, positing that “Morrison establishes a dialectic between these two poles of the grotesque to maintain a tension between the interior and exterior experiences of slavery and between the historical past and the realm of the uncanny” (33). Morrison’s Beloved superbly illustrates how the past affects and influences the present, infusing elements of supernatural, as mentioned earlier, through the baby ghost that comes back as a full grown woman to reclaim the mother she lost. The same mother who murdered her when confronted with losing her to the slave system. Morrison powerfully illustrates the emotional bonds between mothers and daughters, demonstrating that the relationship can be volatile (Sula) and survive death (Beloved). This dilemma of choosing death for your child over a life of oppression is a theme that many African American writers have dealt with.

Morrison’s storytelling is steeped in African oral tradition; however, it also has a feminist perspective. She utilizes the African American blues vernacular as a vehicle to give voice to the silenced and infuses elements of African folklore—supernatural and the trickster character to delineate her stories from the mainstream. Her ability to combine spirituality, sexuality, memory, and female identity forms a distinct black aesthetic within her texts.

Crouch, Stanley. “Aunt Medea.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. 64-71.

Iyasere, Solomon O., and Marla W. Iyasere. Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula. New York: Whitston, 2000.

Jaffrey, Zia. “The Salon Interview—Toni Morrison.” Salon.com. Feb. 1998. 2 June 2005 .

Lubiano, Wahneema. "The Postmodernist Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of Solomon: New Essays on Song of Solomon.

Valerie Smith, Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.