Abstract
Toni Morrison, as many think, is a feminist writer or an African-American writer and so on. When we read her novels, she does not confine herself with feminism, or Africanism, or Americanism, or a writer for pleasure reading. Morrison is a serious writer and deals with matters that are universal and each character that she develops speaks about the nature of love, passion, and they all are life-giving.
 Morrison gives many oppositional structures in her novels – characters, plots, incidents, and ideologies – to show the readers that the world (and each one of us) is surrounded with so many “opposites” which are inevitable and it is the duty of the human beings to cull the best out of them.
 Her characters and themes are life-affirming / life-denying or life-affording / death-dealing or having positive / negative attitudes. However, they all describe that love for oneself and others are the only measure that would make the world move.
Highlights
Toni Morrison says that anyone can get life from anything - it is not merely the survival of the fittest, and fitting into the survival as well
In the “Romancing the Shadow” in Playing in the Dark, she writes to those tiresome Africans on their Africanism as follows: Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical, not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfilment of destiny (52)
As Michael Ackward writes in “Roadblocks and Relatives: Critical Revision in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye”: “Morrison returns to an earlier practice of the white voice introducing the black text – to demonstrate her refusal to allow white standards to arbitrate the success or failure of the black experience” (59)
Summary
Toni Morrison says that anyone can get life from anything - it is not merely the survival of the fittest, and fitting into the survival as well. Another white female character Amy Denver in Beloved helped Sethe to a greater extent at the time Sethe delivered her baby in the jungle while Sethe was a runaway slave from the Sweet Home. True Belle gave life to her own blood – her granddaughters, and brought up the mulatto child Golden Gray for eighteen years with care and love.
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