Tar Baby Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 31 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Tar Baby.

Tar Baby Themes

This Study Guide consists of approximately 31 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Tar Baby.
This section contains 1,843 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Tar Baby Short Guide

Tar Baby Summary & Study Guide Description

Tar Baby Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections:

This detailed literature summary also contains Literary Precedents on Tar Baby by Toni Morrison.

Preview of Tar Baby Summary:

At the core of Tar Baby, like most of Morrison's novels, is the need for African Americans to reconcile their African roots with their historically forced immersion in Euro-American culture. The apparent accommodation between the Streets' economic power and the reduction to an economic function of both island black people and the servant family explode under the force of the mysterious visitor, Son, who challenges everyone's assumptions about the Streets' economic authority and the compromises the two couples, Sydney and Ondine, on the one hand, and Therese and Gideon, on the other, have made to participate in the economic bonanza that flows from the white family's prosperity. As in many of her works, Morrison's chief thematic concerns deal with the characters' acceptance of their AfricanAmerican roots, as well as with the consequences of falling away from those origins.

At the extreme in "assimilation" to white culture is the...

This section contains 1,843 words
(approx. 7 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Tar Baby Short Guide
Copyrights
Gale
Tar Baby from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.