In reading Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison thoughtfully explores the importance of Afro -Americans in the American literary imagination. Morrison shares concerns that the American language and the American literary imagination are both distinctively white, and questions the impact of this whiteness on American writers. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay In chapter 1, titled Black Matters, Morrison focuses on Willa Cather's virtually ignored novel, "Sapphira and the Slave Girl" , arguing that the books' critical point and power comes from the way Cather describes a white mistress who exerts control over her black slave's body and who ultimately defines herself against and within the presence " Africanist” that surrounds him. Saphira convinces herself that her husband is having an affair with Nancy, daughter of one of his slaves, and tried to kill her, however, Saphira failed, then later decided to send her nephew to rape and eradicate Nancy. None of Saphira's plans worked mainly because Rachel, Saphira's daughter, took Nancy under her wing and managed to escape Nancy from her horrible master. In this chapter, Morrison parallels the metaphor of the white slave mistress who uses the black female body with Cather herself as a white author who exploits the vehicle of blackness in her fiction to define her beliefs about whiteness and femininity. Morrison's second section, Romancing the Shadow, deals primarily with Edgar Allen Poe and the logic between American romantic sentiments of egalitarian freedom and black slavery, in which a large number of racial representations were played out. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a custom essay now from our expert writers.Get a Custom EssayMorrison argues here that as 19th-century Americans wrestled with questions about human freedom, social hierarchy, and individual will, the black body was become the center of meditation on these questions of human freedom. , its appeal and its elusiveness. She views romance as a sphere in which there exists a frontal experience with real and pressing historical forces and their inherent logical inconsistencies as they were experienced by writers. Thus, allowing Morrison to investigate a more realistic reading of these writings and their racial perspectives with the specific end goal of examining the non-white, African, "manufactured" presence and its function in American literature..