I set out to explore colour symbolism in Toni Morrison’s 1970 novel The bluest eye. In fact, they are interested and entwined. Portraying places with an intimacy that elevates subjectivity over fact, her settings are never indifferent or separate from the lives that they contain. In this essay, I will explore how Morrison represents landscapes as places of intimacy in The Bluest Eye, Jazz, and Paradise, uplifting the interior experiences of black women through narration in order to render place and community as subjective rather than objective. Where other writers use setting as a physical backdrop, a stage, I argue that Morrison builds place with intimacy, paying attention to its corners and folds, giving it not only a name but a persona. In this way, using the ‘magical’ to conjure up something more real and whole than fact, Morrison similarly transforms the settings of her novels into something fuller than an address, writing the emotional truth of a place onto its physical landscape. In Beloved, while we are aware of the facts of Sethe’s escape, we are asked to instead pay attention to Sethe’s subjective memory of it, her private familiarity with pain, her intimacy with Amy’s “breath like burning wood”. Perched on the distinction between fact and truth, her work relies on truth to recover a subjectivity that is often cut away from fact. Toni Morrison’s novels are deeply rooted in and committed to place.
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