Abstract
In God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s latest novel, set in our contemporary times, her oeuvre seems to have come full circle when she revisits the main themes she dealt with in The Bluest Eye, child abuse and aesthetics relativism. Like her prime novel, her latest narrative is a modern-day fairy tale, a re-interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Ugly Duckling”. Morrison shows how destructive hegemonic female beauty standards and materialistic values are for black females. Lula Ann, like Pecola, their protagonists, illustrate racialized beauty and how African Americans have been colonized by white cultural definitions of beauty, even when the notion “black is beautiful” is commodified. In God Help the Child, Morrison devaluates the myth of racialized beauty and materialism, stressing the need to find your own definitions and self-worth. Like “The Ugly Duckling”, Morrison’s latest novel is a powerful and inspirational metaphor about transformation and self-discovery. At the end of God Help the Child, the signs of hope in The Bluest Eye become an almost fairy-tale ending in Lula Ann’s cathartic journey, her love story and pregnancy.
Highlights
Morrison critiques the American system of patriarchal racism, sexism and classism, which is currently in place, exposing issues of race and how this society has denied African Americans’ racial identity
Morrison uses fairy-tale intertexts to unfold the connection between white aesthetics, internalized racism and self-affirming image
Hopeful Ending In God Help the Child, Morrison shows how by conforming to white aesthetics, African Americans deny and renounce their own culture and their own selves, while cooperating in their victimization and in keeping white supremacy
Summary
In the tradition of postcolonial writing, Toni Morrison’s novels counter and challenge dominant ideologies and representations. Pecola and Lula Ann suffer constant verbal and physical abuse because they are ‘ugly.’ like the ugly duckling, Lula Ann undergoes a radical transformation In both novels, Morrison uses fairy-tale intertexts to unfold the connection between white aesthetics, internalized racism and self-affirming image. Lula Ann embodies the black individual’s history of oppression and exclusion as a result of African Americans’ conformity to Western standards of beauty She is despised and ostracized by family and community. Their names, Breedloves or Sweetness (Lula Ann’s mother), are ironic, since they are neither loving nor sweet In these narratives, as Awkward asserts, Morrison deconstructs “the bourgeois myths of ideal family life”, unveiling “her refusal to allow white standards to arbitrate the success or failure of the black experience” (1988: 59). Lula Ann inherits a feeling of inferiority from her parents and community that lead her to a life marked by white definitions
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