Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison—The Cultural Function of Narrative

As women of different eras, cultural backgrounds, racial identities, and places of origin, Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison would appear to have little in common. But in her study of these two seemingly dissimilar writers Marilyn Sanders Mobley finds elements that unite their fictional concerns.

Mobley argues that a folk aesthetic gives structure and meaning to Jewett’s and Morrison’s work and that a mythic impulse informs their ability to depict people and values that the dominant American culture has traditionally neglected. Through close readings of Jewett’s Deephaven, “A White Heron,” and The Country of Pointed Firs and of Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved, she demonstrates that the fiction of both writers attempts to preserve and affirm cultural difference, cultural knowledge, and cultural memory.

Mobley’s carefully argued study simultaneously offers important new insights into the works of two significant women writers and points out ways in which narrative may be used as a catalyst for cultural and social change.

Marilyn Sanders Mobley is a Toni Morrison scholar, a former president and current board member of the Toni Morrison Society, and Vice President for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equal Opportunity at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.