Voices of Toni Morrison

This examination of Toni Morrison's work is informed by both feminist and African-American critical theory. In her analysis of Morrison's five novels - Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Tar Baby - Rigney defines a black feminine/feminist aesthetic. The many voices of Toni Morrison, she argues, are manifested in her radical use of language, her reformulations of self and identity, her reinterpretations of history as both fact and mythology, and her images of female desire. As Rigney describes Morrison's texts, they are characterised by deliberate and meaningful silences, by the movement beyond language into music and by representations of magic realism. While Morrison's fictions disrupt traditional chronologies and diffuse linearity, they also bear historical witness to the realities and brutalities of slavery, reconstruction, depression and war, and thus, Rigney documents, they are always profoundly political.