Toni Morrison and motherhood: a politics of the heart

Abstract

While sorting through mountains of articles and books about the works of Toni Morrison, I realized there existed a glaring omission in the literature: there was yet to be published a single volume that solely addressed the characterization of mothers in Morrison's narrative. Given that I compare portraits of maternity in novels by women authors of the Americas in my doctoral work, I was overcome with visions of grandeur, and at the very least, instant tenure. Alas, Andrea O'Reilly got there first. An associate professor at York University, and the president of the Association for Research on Mothering, she has written what, to my knowledge, is the first book that focuses exclusively on how Toni Morrison employs the theme of motherhood throughout her fiction. O'Reilly examines all of Morrison's novels, including a brief commentary on her latest publication, Love. Reading Morrison as a maternal theorist (xi), the author persuasively demonstrates that Morrison's beliefs about motherwork and motherlove are fundamental in understanding her perspective about black womanhood.

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