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The Theme Of Identity In Toni Morrison's Beloved

930 Words4 Pages

“If there’s book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it” (Toni Morrison). This quote written by Morrison best describes her desire to write books for the African-American community. The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison, it is set in 1941 and centers around the life of a young African-American girl named Pecola. Pecola is constantly called ugly due to her dark skin color as a result, she develops an inferiority complex, which fuels her desire for the blue eyes she considers equal to beauty. In 1987 Toni Morrison published Beloved, a novel set after the American civil war, in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the protagonist Sethe, a former slave has been living with her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver along with a malevolent presence of an abusive ghost that has been hunting their house at 124 Bluestone Road for many years. A close reading of both novels results in the discovery of common themes utilized by Toni Morrison such as, family shaping and constituting identity, the impact of racism on one’s identify and the notion of community.
In both books Morrison affirms the notion of family shaping identity through first Denver’s paranoid behavior that stems from Sethe’s possessive smothering of her after the loss of her first daughter Beloved, and also the dysfunctional sense of identity that Pecola Breedlove has because of her mother. In Beloved, Sethe’s idea of motherhood leads to her murdering her first born daughter, in an

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