SOURCE: Furman, Jan. “Black Girlhood and Black Womanhood: The Bluest Eye and Sula.” In Toni Morrison's Fiction, pp. 12-33. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Furman examines the significance of family and community to developing a personal sense of African-American female identity in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula.

From the beginning of her writing career Morrison has exercised a keen scrutiny of women's lives. The Bluest Eye and Sula, Morrison's first and second novels, are to varying extents about black girlhood and black womanhood, about women's connections to their families, their communities, to the larger social networks outside the community, to men, and to each other. Lending themselves to a reading as companion works, the novels complement one another thematically and may, in several ways, be viewed sequentially.¹ (Morrison calls her first four novels “evolutionary. One comes out of the other...