Song Of Solomon Rhetorical Analysis

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a novel that includes many issues revolving around race, gender, class, and history. However, an issue that really stands out is women’s expectations. Toni Morrison uses the characters Milkman and Hagar to communicate the message that society's expectations for women cause women to feel internal misogyny.
Hagar was Milkman’s lover but she often felt like she wasn’t good enough for him. She felt that Milkman was into women with nice hair, light skin, colored eyes, and other “appealing” features, but Hagar, being African-American, didn’t have those features. As a result from that, Hagar was left wondering why Milkman never liked her features. Why he never loved her for who she was. Always asking herself why. “Why don’t he like my
In her article, Why don’t he like my hair?, Bertram D. Ashe adds on to the message that Toni Morrison is trying to communicate. She writes, “don’t be a fool with your hair.... no man likes a bald-headed woman”, and the first part of that really stands out to me. The reason for that is how can one be a fool with their hair? Black women are expected to do something with their hair, such as: hair-straightening, perms, weaves, extensions, and things of that sort. My question is, why can’t they rock their natural hair? Women are expected to follow the white cultural ideal of femininity, and just to be good enough for the men they love, they go ahead and follow it. Hagar tried multiple times to be what Milkman wanted. She changed her appearance just to be loved. We know that misogyny is the dislike of women, and because men expect women to look a certain way, women feel hatred within themselves. They’re suffering trying to achieve that penny-colored silky hair. Not because the actual process is hurtful, but because the hate within themselves caused them to change themselves in order to be accepted.