0000000000753811
AUTHOR
Manuela López Ramírez
showing 3 related works from this author
“What you do to Children Matters”: Motherhood in Toni Morrison's God Help the Child
2015
Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child, explores the damaging effects of racism on motherhood and the dramatic impact of toxic mothering upon children. The institution of patriarchal motherhood fails to enact the critical tasks of motherwork —preservation, nurturance and cultural bearing, while mothering is a potential site of empowerment of black children and African American culture. African American authoritarian parenting style, associated with patriarchal motherhood, has a correlation with diverse factors, such as the legacy of slavery and its survival strategies, low-income and/or single-parent households and the disruption of the motherline. Motherhood distorted by racism c…
Icarus and Daedalus in Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon"
2012
In Song of Solomon Toni Morrison rewrites the legend of the Flying Africans and the Myth of Icarus to create her own Myth. Her depiction of the black hero’s search for identity has strong mythical overtones. Morrison rescues those elements of mythology black culture which are still relevant to blacks and fuses them with evident allusions to Greek mythology. She reinterprets old images and myths of flight, the main mythical motif in the story. Her Icarus engages on an archetypical journey to the South, to his family past, led by his Daedalic guide, on which he finally recovers his ancestral ability to fly. His flight signals a spiritual epiphany in the hero’s quest for self-definition in the…
Gothic chiaroscuro in nathaniel hawthorne's the house of the seven gables and Toni Morrison's Beloved
2010
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables and Toni Morrison’s Beloved share some important elements of the gothic tradition. One of the most complex themes of these two gothic romances is the past and its haunting. Whereas in Seven Gables the theme of the past is linked with the decline of “aristocracy” (colonialism) and growth of democracy; in Beloved it is closely associated with the theme of race. Both stories are haunted by the ghosts of the colonial past, addressing the connections between colonialism and the Negro. While Africanism is subtly woven into Seven Gables, Beloved focuses on the historical effect that slavery had on African-Americans. Both Hawthorne and Morrison de…