Toni Morrison and Anne Tyler: Cultural perspective of home

Despite the cultural and stylistic distances between the Toni Morrison and Anne Tyler, their novels display a common concern with the lasting effects of early environment on their characters. This study compares and contrasts the concepts of home in the novels of these authors. Chapter I looks at the ways the two writers describe habitations in order to symbolically evoke the nature of the life within their walls. Chapter II investigates domestic life and shows that Anne Tyler emphasizes the family as centrally important to the development of the individual. Chapter III expands the concept of home to the community and demonstrates Toni Morrison's designation of community as the center of security and guidance for her characters. Both Morrison and Tyler acknowledge the needs of their characters to achieve integration through connection with and understanding of their roots. However, they place the location of that rootedness in different spheres of social interaction.