Toni Morrison

Abstract

A psychoanalytic interpretation of any literary work reveals a lot about motivations for human actions. Since Freud announced that human actions are determined more by unconscious factors, analysts have modified some of his theories and emerged with interesting new ones. The paper focuses on the life experiences of Toni Morrison in light of the psychological, social theories and the professional literature. The focus is on the success and challenges faced by Toni and how her ethnic makeup and early development influenced her life decisions.

Toni Morrison

Introduction

Toni Morrison, the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. She has done so with impressive results is attested to by her popularity with white and black readers alike, her place on university syllabi across the country, and her literary awards. She also received American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon (1976), along with nominations for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Keeping in view her achievements, this paper highlights her success and challenges in light of the theories and literature.

Toni's Lifespan Development

Toni's lifespan development will be viewed in light of the motivational theory of lifespan development. The idea is that a person changes through life. It can be relayed to Eric Erikson's theory if we look at it from personality development point of view. Like all theories of lifespan, Maslow's theory works on the same basis; people resolve the bottom most and then go on to next. Piaget's theory says a child cannot get to formal operational stage before going through the others. Similarly one cannot be thinking of (for e.g.) Beauty and Harmony if they are worried about their safety (Wright, 1998).

During the 19th century, generations of African American women made their way in college as their peers white were excluded. "The educated black was not a threat to anyone-says-and so I found myself in a privileged position, when my friends were Italian and Jewish struggle to not end up locked in a convent or victims of a marriage already arranged." So today, it is easy to find a black family with five women received. "If our black men are less educated, because the community is protected."

Toni Morrison was twelve years old when he began to reading Nabokov and Jane Austen. "I do not remember my life before the books. Was my sister Lois, two years older than me, who introduced me to reading before school primary school there were only two people who could read: the teacher and I. “Home of the Morrison, the books were sacred.”My grandfather was proud of having read the Bible three times from start to finish. To Emancipation, whoever taught the alphabet to blacks risked going to jail." The current indifference to reading is unworthy. "I think of my ancestors who had school in the woods, sitting on the trunks of the trees to teach the alphabet to children (Segal, ...