How Does Toni Morrison Use Bird Motifs In To Kill A Mockingbird

In the novel Jazz, by Toni Morrison, there are several instances of bird motifs. They are an African American couple who moved from the rural South to “the City”. Jazz was written during the harlem renaissance which was the cultural, social, and artistic explosion that occurred in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle of the 1930s. This was the period of time when artist of miscellaneous types were displayed. It was an explosion of creativity that put a magnifying glass on what the North was capable of. It made the North seem like it was everyone's big break. The notion was if you were in the North then you were going to be successful and you were going to thrive. The harlem renaissance was not a direct lead into the Great Migration, yet it was a component in making the North enticing. …show more content…
Between the years 1910 and 1940, two million African Americans left the South, mainly migrating to industrial cities. In the novel, each character is a portrayal of an bird moving to a new place to reap the benefits, and occasionally the benefits they wish to reap are not there. The blatant characters used to represent this is Violet and Joe Trace. They are an African American couple who moved from the rural South to “the City”. Morrison uses the traits of birds to symbolize her main characters exodus paralleling bird migration in order to reveal underlying external conflicts of her African American characters in relevance to the Great