The main social issues in The Bluest Eye, the third book of Toni Morrison’s that I have read, is respect and beauty. This book is very similar to Love in the fact that there were two eleven-year-old black girls who were violated or disrespected by men. In Love, it was the grandfather of her best friend, but in The Bluest Eye, it was her father who raped her and impregnated her. 
In all three of Morrison’s books that I have studied, the main social issues have circled around unhealthy and inappropriate relationships and lack of respect for women. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola is haunted by her parents’ abusive relationship and has always thought that they would love her more if she was pretty and had blue eyes, she believes that whiteness is beautiful and being black makes her ugly. Throughout the book the men have absolutely no respect for the girls or even for adult women, and then the eleven-year-old Pecola is raped and impregnated by her own father. Her mother did not believe her when she told her what happened and the town look down on her in shame. The baby ended up dying in a premature death, and her father then rapes her again before running away and dying in a workhouse. The issue in this books was in no way resolved because then Pecola went crazy because of everything she had experienced.  This issue is critical to the theme because it shows how black women were treated and how even when events like this happened, there were no repercussions and  no way to prevent the men
from doing the same thing to another woman or child. In this novel, the issue of respect and rape is not resolved, and Cholly got away with raping his own
daughter twice.

        The next book that I am studying by Toni Morrison is called Beloved. A ghost from Sethe’s, the main character, past has begun to haunt her, literally, and when a new man walks into her life it just infuriates the ghost even more. In this book, I have
noticed that Morrison’s style is very figurative and unique. She uses a lot of metaphors and analogies, and also likes the comparison of vipers or snakes.  Another pattern that I have noticed is that Morrison always hints at the degradation of women. Love was set in the 1960s and ‘70s and  the demeaning of women was present in that book as it is in Beloved which is set during the time of slavery. Morrison differs from other authors I have read because of her creative use of words. She uses a lot of
retrospective technique that leaves you curious to know the entire story, but her artistic use of metaphors and imagery force you to dig deeper into your own mind to realize what she is really saying. In Beloved, I have noticed that she is attempting to have a functional relationship between a man and a woman compared to Love where most of the men were not satisfied with having just one woman for a long period of time.

The style of Toni Morrison's writing is very obvious just from the first few pages of her second book that I
am reading, Beloved. Morrison is very favorable of the retrospective technique. Both novels now have
been started in present time, but it is at the end of the story. Throughout the novel, she will revert back to the past to describe what is happening in the future.  Morrison also uses the comparison to snakes or “vipers” often. In Love, Heed was always being compared to an “insane viper,” and then in the very first paragraph of Beloved, there is a comparison to “a baby’s venom.” Another similarity of the two books is her artistic use of metaphors and imagery.

    What are some thoughts and suggestions about the website so far???