Sweetness by Toni Morrison Analysis Example

Sweetness is an enticing story centered around a mother who recently gives birth to a daughter named Lula Ann. Throughout the short story, she struggles to incorporate her daughter into the family, because her skin color is a darker shade than both her parents. This led to her father Louis claiming she slept with another man to conceive the daughter. Soon after, the father leaves and it’s just the two of them left. They start to rent an apartment. This process took forever as nobody wanted to sell to the black community. Because of her skin, the mother becomes petrified by this and takes drastic measures to ensure that she grows to know the hardships of racial discrimination in society. The mother began to use welfare to support her daughter and her night job. Soon after Lisa Ann leaves and begins to be very successful and able to live a flourishing life soon to have a child, and the mother hopes to become a parent will help her child to understand the brutality of the world. In the later pages of the story, she feels remorse for the unethical way she treated her daughter and hopes her daughter knows how much she cares for her. This story takes you through the mother’s thoughts and portrays the mental struggles of both Sweetness and her daughter. 

This is a thought-provoking story showing you the guild the mother possesses through first-person. The opening of the story starts with “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me” (Morrison). She is telling the reader it’s not her fault. This shows that the mother bathes in her own guilt and tries to convince herself she isn’t the one to blame. She says this 3 times in the story. I believe that deep down she does blame herself and at the end of the story begins to express those feelings. The first sentence in the story keeps itself cryptic to captivate the reader. This is used to keep the reader intrigued, wanting to read more of the story to find out what happens next.

There are a plethora of themes in this story, and some are prominent today. Racial discrimination is a widely controversial subject especially today. This has been an ongoing problem since earlier civilizations. The mother correlates a lighter skin with an easier life and something positive. The mother says, “Her color is a cross she will always carry” (Morrison).  This is her expressing the strain that being a darker-skinned color will have on her. This single quote from the story provides so much information with only one sentence on why her mother treats her like she did. The mother began to internalize racism by using some of the racist terms like “pickaninny”. She becomes racist even to her own daughter and dislikes any of her African American features such as her hair and lips. This is an example of colorism. The mother tries to justify her actions by telling the reader the family’s desire in the past to avoid racism and began to assimilate racism towards people with darker skin than them. This was one of the reasons behind her father abandoning them leaving no father figure to be found. 

The theme of abandonment by the father Louis was one of the most damaging experiences for Lisa Ann. The amount of mental stress she most likely had to go through knowing that her father left because her skin color was too dark to have been his child must have been traumatizing. Additionally, the mother almost thought of abandoning her child and contemplated setting her up for adoption. They are both unable to accept her. No child would be fine with being abandoned by their birth parents. The mother says, “I told her to call me “sweetness” instead of “mother” or “mama”. It was safer. Her being that black and having what I think are too thick lips and calling me “Mama” would have been confusing” (Morrison). This is alienating to Lisa Ann. Becoming distanced from your mother based on skin color and features must have made her lonely. Ironically the story ends with her daughter abandoning the mother by leaving her in a nursing home. 

This story provides many themes such as guilt, racism, abandonment. It’s still being analyzed years later because of ambiguity. This was one of the best stories I have ever read and reviewed. Doubtlessly every character had a challenging period in their life that altering the thinking behind what they did. The mother was hard on her daughter as well as showing how much she truly cared for her, not through her actions but instead her thoughts.