Themes In Toni Morrison's Playing In The Dark

Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, notes in the opening lines of the text that, “as a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer” (3). By claiming this, Morrison indicates that she is approaching literature with a self-awareness that allows her to recognize how the “Africanist presence” in works dominated by white traditions is constructed. She hopes to broaden the “landscape” for studying American literature and by approaching it as a writer, she intends to explain why this is important. Morrison began to read literature as a writer after stating that, “my early assumptions as a reader were that black people signified little or nothing in the imaginations of white American writers” (15). She noticed that white writers seemed to be adding black people in books like “some government quota” because American literature has the tendency to be, “removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States” (5). Morrison recognizes that “black presence” is essential to national literature and that it should not be treated marginally. She also notes how the “Africanist presence” is somewhat fictional in a lot of American literature, if the presence

She is self-aware that freeing the slave girl, is a way for the author to contemplate the similarities of the “free white women and the enslaved black women” (27). The author, Willa Cather’s, was relating this story to her own “problematic” relationship with her real mother during her childhood. It all comes back to the author projecting her own images of what a good society should look like and looking back on her experiences as a child as a sort of “memoir.” Morrison is able to read this book and come away with this conclusion because she went into it as a writer who may have done similar things in her works as