Featured Reading Guide
Toni Morrison
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida – even L – all are women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet Cosey himself is at the mercy of a troubled past and a spellbinding woman, ‘a sporting woman’, named Celestial. This audacious vision from a master storyteller of the nature of love – its appetite, its sublime possession, and its dread – is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound…
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Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of seven previous novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and most recently Paradise, and has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction. She is Robert F Goheen Professor at Princeton University.
topAbout the Book
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida – even L – all are women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet Cosey himself is at the mercy of a troubled past and a spellbinding woman, ‘a sporting woman’, named Celestial. This audacious vision from a master storyteller of the nature of love – its appetite, its sublime possession, and its dread – is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be. Sensual, elegiac and unforgettable, Love reflects the different facets of love, shifting from desire and lust and ultimately comes full circle to that indelible, overwhelming first love that marks us forever.
topToni Morrison interview/review
Taken from the Guardian profile on Toni Morrison, 15th November 2003
“All my books were questions for me,” says Morrison. “I wanted to know what would happen if…? What do friendship and love mean under those circumstances? How far would you go? I don’t want to write about normality, but when there’s a cataclysm and conflict in belief, a complexity of emotion and behaviour.”
Love, looks back to a segregated yet upwardly mobile Africa-American world upset by integration. Tough, says Morrison, pre-civil rights days were full of legal, social separation, “out of that came fabulous businesses and schools that were top-drawer – instances of pride”. Yet “racial uplift” for a middle class brought fear of being dragged back down. The Hotel Resort on the coast is depicted as both idyllic and exclusive, a haven for some that spurned the “stain” of the black poor. “Every society as it moves forward is fearful of the ones it leaves behind,” says Morrison. “Society is based on who gets in and who doesn’t; who penetrates the class, club, neighbourhood – and who doesn’t. The notion of a social throwback or class interloper intervening in a safe haven of money, manner and acquisition is universal.”
Bill Cosey, the hotel’s owner, is a phantom figure adored by squabbling women even after his death. Women, says Morrison, are “looking to men to be, not just a person, but a certain idea – husband, benefactor, handsome stranger. But competing for male approval, or looking to the male as the sum of your fears, is just focusing on something outside yourself.” A man, like many of her characters, “swamped by his own past history”, Cosey took an 11-year-old girl as his wife. Yet Morrsion, who once scandalised a Time magazine interviewer by appearing to make light of teenage pregnancy, is scathing about social hypocrisy and destructive ideals of beauty. “Children are highly sexualised in this country, and parents are surgically altered to look like them. I’d like everybody to gasp, then think what a good-looking girl’s body is supposed to look like: a 12-year-old boy’s”
topStarting Points for Discussion
- The weight of history is a common theme in Morrison’s work. Consider how the history of each character is revealed and how they attempt to resolve the problems of their troubled pasts. Is it significant that the Cosey hotel is such a successful venue for Black Americans in the late 1950s?
- Consider the feud between Christine and Heed. Who do you sympathise with and who, if either, was guilty of betraying the other? What do you make of their eventual reconciliation?
- Cosey represents several things to each of the women in this book. Even after his death he is still influential to all of their lives – why do you think he holds such power over them? Why does everyone seem so obsessed with him?
- What does this novel say about ‘love’? Consider why Toni Morrison chose Love as her title for this novel. Would you agree that the main theme of this novel is obsessive love?
- Are the women in this book driven by the desire to find, or to keep, their dream of a ‘home’? Consider the juxtaposition of Junior’s home in the Settlement with the luxurious world of Monarch Street. What are the wider issues of home and property explored in this novel?
- This novel has a fractured narrative; why do you think Toni Morrison has structured her novel in this way? Would you agree that the suspense in this novel is created by the gradual revealing of dark secrets at the heart of the story?
Other Books by Toni Morrison
A Mercy
On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, agrees to accept…
Beloved
It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentuckhy, an era is ending as slavery…
Love
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida – even L who cooks for them and sees eve…
Paradise
Four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near an all-black town in…
Song Of Solomon
The story of Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead, heir to the richest black family in a mi…
Suggested Further Reading
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ~ Maya Angelou
- Alias Grace ~ Margaret Atwood
- The Grandmothers ~ Doris Lessing
- Middle Age, A Romance ~ Joyce Carol Oates
- Beloved ~ Toni Morrison