In her novel, Love, Toni Morrison reflects on the strength of love and feelings as these feelings help to determine society’s expectations of a person and the social decisions that person makes.\u00a0 There are different kinds of love in a community.\u00a0 There is a driving need for love in a person.\u00a0 Morrison uses the story of the life of a man, Bill Cosey, and his surrounding family and community to portray these powerful emotions.
\nThe shame Bill Cosey felt for his father and the hurt at never feeling loved by the man is Morrison’s first example of a strong feeling controlling a man’s life.\u00a0\u00a0 Bill Cosey’s father was a colored man who chose to spy on his fellow man in order to profit.
\nWell paid, tipped off, and favored for fifty-five<\/p>\n
years, Daniel Robert Cosey kept his evil gray eye
\non everybody. \u2026. and the money he got for being
\nat the beck and call of white folks in general and
\npolice in particular didn’t bring comfort to him or
\nhis family. \u2026.He worshiped paper money and
\ncoin, withheld decent shoes from his son and passable
\ndresses from his wife and daughters, until he died,
\nleaving 114,000 resentful dollars behind.\u00a0 The son
\ndecided to enjoy his share\u2026use it on things [his father]
\ncursed: good times, good clothes, good food, good
\nmusic, dancing til the sun came up in a hotel made
\nfor it all.” (Morrison 101)
\nBill Cosey was the owner of a resort on a beach in the Southern United States.\u00a0 He was a colored man whom people of his community respected but feared eccentric.\u00a0 His generosity was welcomed, but his social decisions were tolerated, not accepted by the community he helped create.
\nCosey understood the distinction between the social status of the people who patronized his resort and those whom he hired to work there or who lived in the surrounding homes.
\n“Cosey didn\u2019t mix with local people publicly,” Morrison wrote, “which is to say he employed them, joked with them, even rescued them from difficult situations, but other than at church picnics, none was truly welcome at the hotel’s tables or on its dance floor.” (Morrison 61)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cosey seemed to feel a need to overcome the shame of his father’s “blood money” and catered to the people of the community and generously helped them out as he could.
\nHowever, he understood how his patrons would feel about the social lower class and realized that if he allowed them to be on the same level as the upper class which frequented his resort, then Cosey would lose customers and hence, his resort.\u00a0 In conclusion, it was his feelings of shame for what his father did to the people of the community, turning his back on them and selling their secrets for cash, that made Bill Cosey who he was: a man who tried to nurture those less fortunate, provide fun for an elite few, and wanted to be seen in the eyes of society as a good, respected man.
\nThis driving need to feel respected and loved by the community led Cosey to make many decisions.\u00a0 Some decisions actually turned community respect away from him, but because the community could only love a man who had helped so many, his actions that should have been shunned were not.\u00a0 For example, when he married Heed, an eleven-year-old girl, who was the playmate of his granddaughter, people in the community and his family were shocked, but ignored the action because he was Bill Cosey.
\nPeople actually went so far as to put the blame for such an unacceptable act on the poor child herself. As one character remembers they “acted as though Heed had chased and seduced a fifty-two-year-old man, older than her father.\u00a0 That she had chosen to marry him, rather than having been told to.” (Morrison 226)
\nEven this decision to marry an eleven-year-old was based on feeling.\u00a0 Bill Cosey was haunted by a childhood memory where he helped his father capture a thief for police.\u00a0 Yet, when the thief was punished, being dragged through town by horses, Cosey was devastated to see a little girl running behind calling her father. This girl tripped and fell and no one in the community did anything to help her, not even Bill Cosey who felt ashamed for the rest of his life.\u00a0 Nevertheless, his attempts to make himself feel better about this past incident, actually destroyed the love of friendship between his granddaughter and his new, young wife.
\nThe two little girls who shunned the community’s social ideals to build a much yearned for friendship were controlled by their inner need for love and acceptance.\u00a0 The girls, Christine, the granddaughter, and Heed, the playmate, fought to create a friendship in their youth.\u00a0 Heed was from the seedier, poorer end of town and Christine the granddaughter of a wealthy,\u00a0 respected and community-conscious man.\u00a0 According to society’s rules, they should not be friends.
\nChristine’s mother tried to stop the friendship, but Christine recalled how much she had needed a real friend and how hard she would struggle to be allowed to have one.\u00a0 “She would never forget how she had fought for her, defied her mother to protect her, to give her clothes\u2026to picnic alone on the beach.\u00a0 They shared stomachache laughter, a secret language, and knew as they slept together that one’s dreaming was the same as the other one’s.” (Morrison 204)
\nUnfortunately, when Cosey married Heed, Christine felt betrayed because she did not understand.\u00a0 Christine was not told what had happened, and Heed did not understand either.\u00a0 Both were innocent girls who were made to do as they were told in order for the grown-ups in their lives to feel better about what they did or had done even at the expense of an innocent friendship.\u00a0 As Morrison puts it, “After the wedding, they tried to play together occasionally, but with each one lying in wait for the other’s insult, the efforts ended in quarrel.” (Morrison 205)
\nChristine’s mother taught Christine to hate the traitorous playmate because of the feelings she had about a little girl “stealing” her father-in-law from her and her only daughter.\u00a0 All this led to the destruction of the girls’ friendship.\u00a0 Sadly, this friendship and the love and trust it had once held, was the one thing that could have given both girls the pleasant, love-filled life for which they both yearned .\u00a0 If they had sought to be accepted and loved by each other instead of by the adults that essentially ruined their hearts, they would have succeeded in obtaining the love we all need to feel complete inside.
\nUnfortunately, this did not become apparent to the two girls until they were old, bitter women, and one was struggling to hold on to life.\u00a0\u00a0 After hating each other for years and fighting to reap the material possessions of Bill Cosey, Christine and Heed are facing death and finally take the opportunity to reveal their feelings to each other.\u00a0\u00a0 “We could have been living our lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy everywhere.\u00a0 He was everywhere. And nowhere.” (Morrison 291)\u00a0 With these last statements to each other, the girls have suddenly realized that they could have had a more emotionally fulfilled life as friends than they did as daughters, granddaughter, girlfriend, or wife.\u00a0 In essence, their search for the love and acceptance from a father, a mother or mother figure and lover led to the ignorance of the love they shared as friends.
\nThere are many kinds of love in a family and a community.\u00a0 There was the love the community’s people felt for Bill Cosey and the pride he brought to their race with his successes.\u00a0 There is the love of a father and the love of a mother, both sought after and both allowing a child to grow up with self-confidence and a feeling of importance.\u00a0 Then there is the love of a lover: the love between husband and wife.\u00a0 This is the passionate love, but the love that ought to make a person whole as two people who love each other become partners in life and find in each other someone who truly understands.\u00a0 Also, there is the love between siblings.\u00a0 And there is the love between friends.
\nEach love in its own way and for its own reasons is strong.\u00a0 The need for the heart to feel each love and love in return is strong.\u00a0 But the strength of each is only as strong as the lover makes it.\u00a0 The need can only take over as much as a person allows it.\u00a0 This may be what Morrison is trying to focus on in her book.
\nThrough Bill Cosey and his actions, we observe the need to be accepted by society.\u00a0\u00a0 He is ashamed of his father because in a sense his father turned against his own people for money, but then refused to share it with his family.\u00a0 Thus, Bill Cosey feels unloved by his father as well as hated by his community for what his father was.\u00a0 Cosey spent the rest of his life trying to earn that love and respect from both family and community.\u00a0 The reader can deduce this from what Cosey asks a confidant, “What do they say about me?\u2026..You know. Behind my back.” (Morrison 63)\u00a0 When the answer was that he is a respected man, Cosey simply replied,” Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” (Morrison 63)
\nEven as Cosey sought vengeance for an unloving father, May, his daughter-in-law, Christine, and Heed all sought the love of a father from him.\u00a0\u00a0 A love that he intended to give, but never really did give because he was too concerned with his feelings and what the community thought of him.\u00a0 This realization leads to the friendship love that could have been the strongest had Christine and Heed let go of the search for a man’s love and chosen instead to strengthen their friendship.
\nThe love of a husband and wife is ironically not seen between the young playmate and the elder husband, but between an elderly couple, Vida and Sandler, who have learned to live with each other’s idiosyncrasies and accept each other for who they are.\u00a0 Morrison shows this when the couple is together just by what they say and don’t say to each other in order to respect an argument or to stop one from occurring.\u00a0 Also, Morrison shows it in how they honor small requests in order to please each other.\u00a0 Such as, when Vida requests that Sandler speak to their grandson about sex, he does not think he should, but then he does for Vida’s peace of mind. (Morrison 224-225)
\nAll in all, Morrison covers a wide and powerful topic (sample nursing essay examples by the best nursing assignment writing service), the importance of love and feelings.\u00a0 She focuses on how important it is for each of us to feel loved and to feel important to someone else in this world, whether it be a community or an individual.\u00a0 Morrison expands on that need for love to show how a person or even a community can let it control them.\u00a0 But it is controllable and can be realized if one accepts the love they are given instead of searching for the love they will never get.
\nWorks Cited
\nMorrison, Toni. Love. New York, NY, USA: Random House,2003.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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