Genre
Speech/fable
Setting and Context
An old woman's home in a rural area outside town
Narrator and Point of View
Morrison speaks from the first person as she narrates this fable, and describes the thoughts and words of her characters in the third person.
Tone and Mood
Morrison's tone is solemn, grave, and authoritative. The mood of the lecture is serious but hopeful.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Old woman and young children/Living language and dead language
Major Conflict
Although there is no major conflict in the lecture, one might read a conflict in the fable between those that advocate for dead language and the writers that produce living, diverse narratives.
Climax
N/A
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
Morrison alludes to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis. In the story, the ancient Babylonians wanted to make a name for themselves by building a tall and grandiose tower. Their plans were foiled by a multitude of languages: none of the workers could understand each other. In Morrison's fable, the old woman wonders what would have happened if the workers had all taken the time to try to understand each other here on Earth.
As an example of the power of living language, the old woman in the fable also alludes to President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19, 1863 on the Civil War battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Imagery
Morrison's style is deeply evocative in its descriptive imagery. She grounds abstract concepts about language and justice through the use of personification, metaphor, and adjective after adjective.
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
N/A
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
Toni Morrison wields personification as a significant tool in her speech. From the start, language is personified, as Morrison describes the discursive and material effects of different forms of narrative. Yet Morrison's point is not exactly aligned with the traditional view of personification, which imagines it as endowing something not alive with life. Instead, Morrison's point is that language is alive; it shapes people and countries and cultures; it acts and impacts the world in real ways. Morrison embraces this tension, using personification to describe language as a force that "drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability . . . " but at the same time writing, "Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence."
