A Comparative Study Of Paradise And Bailey’s Café

Tony Morrison and Gloria Naylor are two important African American female writers who were born in 1930’s and 1950’s respectively.Tony Morrison stands for the precursors of African American writers.As the first black female writer who won Nobel Prize for literature,she enjoys a worldwide reputation for her classic works and offers a strong sense of direction to the writing of the later generations.Gloria Naylor is a typical representative of the latecomers.Since her award-winning debut was published in 1982,Gloria Naylor has been revealing enormous potential by her excellent works one after another.Both Morrison and Naylor belong to prolific writers,and this paper will analyze two of their representative works.Paradise,published in 1998,is the first novel after Tony Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize and it is also the last one of her trilogy.Deserving the expectation of readers,Paradise achieved extraordinary success like her previous works.Bailey’s Café,together with The Women of Brewster Place,Linden Hills and Mama Day,is well known as Gloria Naylor’s quartet.As the last book of her quartet,Bailey’s Café fully embodies the writing spirit and style of Gloria Naylor.Therefore,this paper tends to analyze Tony Morrison’s influence on Gloria Naylor by comparing the similarities between these two novels in terms of theme,character and writing style.This paper consists of three parts: the first part gives a brief introduction to Tony Morrison and Gloria Naylor as well as their literary achievements,then comes to the literature review of Paradise and Bailey’s Café.The second part,as the main body of this paper,is divided into three chapters.The first chapter is the comparison between the two novels in themes.Both of the writers disclose African American women’s living condition under the double oppressions in an indirect way and they both point out that only sisterhood can help African American women find a way out.The second chapter is the comparison in characters.There are many similar female characters in Paradise and Bailey’s Café,and most of the male images are negative and passive in them.The third chapter is the comparison in writing features.Two writers are both adept at using magic realism and blues style in their works.The third part is the conclusion.Through comparison,we do find many similarities between Paradise and Bailey’s Café.It not only reflects the similarities in African American women writers’ writing but also demonstrates that Morrison’s influence on Naylor is profound.