27 July 2022: Finished up my entry on The Awakening today, so it's on my mind this evening, particularly Joyce Dyer's superb reading of the novel through the lens of Toni Morrison and Playing in the Dark. This passage, from the piece's final paragraph, sums it up pretty well:
"In her novel and in her stories, Chopin knows there can be no freedom--in the South, anywhere in the nation, not in a single heart--without the recognition that black servitude in any form dare not remain. And there can be no artistic freedom without finding a way--perhaps encoded, nuanced, contradictory, hidden in the shadows of black Americans--to say this. The message is full of danger and the potential for sabotage, but it is vital to the identity of America's history and of American literature itself. The black presence is never on the edges of a text by white writers, because it lives powerfully at the center of the white imagination. The subject of the dream is the dreamer. This is the message Toni Morrison forces us to hear" (Dyer 152-153).
Work Cited
Dyer, Joyce. “Reading The Awakening with Toni Morrison.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 35, no. 1, 2002, pp. 138–54. EBSCOhost.
No comments:
Post a Comment