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Toni Morrison's novels usually represent the influences of the racial oppression by the whites upon black individuals and their communities in America. Moreover Morrison criticizes the black people who follow the destructive ideologies of the whites. She opposes any oppression and alienation of the weak by the strong resulting from racial and patriarchal domination. Ultimately Morrison emphasizes harmonious cooperation through love and responsibility for others in human society.
This essay aims to examine aspects of 'otherness' in Morrison's early three novels. In these novels, black women and children are established as American society's 'other'; epistemologically inferior beings in white-dominated and patriarchal society. In The Bluest Eye Morrison establishes Pecola, the ugly black girl as an 'other' of the segregational and sex discriminative American society. In Sulu, Morrison creates a woman character who resists the black community that follows the values of white society. Sula is treated as an evil, that is, 'other' because of her subversive behavior against traditional society which is founded on the alienation of 'other'. As a result she is excluded from her own community. In the third novel
Song of Solomon, Morrison provides the examplary black woman, Pilate, who loves others and has a spirit of tolerance. Pilate becomes a protective being as a subject not as an 'other' for her black community, although she is in an inferior situation in race, class and sex. She is able to deconstruct the dominant culture that creates the dichotomy of white and black, man and woman, and self and other.