Toni Morrison’s Depiction of Beauty Standards in Relation to Class, Politics of Respectability, and Consumerism in Song of Solomon

iii Acknowledgments I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to my thesis director, Elizabeth Steeby, and the two committee members, Earle Bryant and John Hazlett, for their willingness to share their knowledge and viewpoints; their patience; and their wit. I would also like to thank Peter Schock, who has been invaluable to my education and intellectual development at UNO. Finally, I am ever grateful for the ceaseless and unconditional support of my boyfriend, David Junker. Abstract In Song of Solomon, published during a transitional moment in the history of U.S. feminism, Toni Morrison portrays the destructive forces of hegemonic female beauty standards, materialism, and consumerism in a Midwestern African-American community from the 1930s to the 1960s. She reveals a hierarchy in which men define standards of beauty and respectability that enforce white bourgeois ideals. Focusing on five female characters, this thesis examines this hierarchy; the agents who maintain it; and the ways in which it affects female characters who accept and/or reject it. While one of the characters, Hagar, perishes in her attempt to live up to normative beauty standards, her cousin Corinthians is liberated when she leaves her oppressive father and moves in with a working class male partner. Morrison thus creates a viable alternative to strict adherence to materialist values, while representing the destructive force of oppressive beauty norms and standards of respectability.