The novels of Toni Morrison : A study in Race, Gender and Class
Dr. Ram Sharma
Toni Morrison was born on
Morrisonis first novel ‘The Bluest Eye’ is
about a black girl’s desire for the bluest eyes, the symbol for her of what it
means to be beautiful and therefore worthy in our society. At the centre of the
novel is Pecola Breedlove, who comes from a family
that is poor and virtually cut off from the normal life of a community. The
Breed loves despise themselves because they believe in their own unworthiness,
which is translated into ugliness for the women of that family. Associated with
their condition is funk, violence, ugliness and
poverty, symbolized by their storefront house. In contrast, Pecola’s mother. Pauline works as a domestic in a
beautiful house that is a reflection of the ideal women. She is, in effect, a
black mammy to the wealthy blonde girl – doll who lives in the beautiful house.
In a pivotal section of the novel, Pauline expels her ugly, ‘poor’ daughter Pecola from this house because she drops a hot pan of
blueberry pie and dirties the floor. Instead of comforting her daughter, who
has been burnt, Pauline rushes to console the girl – doll who is upset by the
accident. The scene is beautifully constructed to contrast the extremes of
class position in terms of what is desirable. For Pauline hates the ugliness of
her house, her daughter, her family, herself and blames her sense of
unworthiness, on being black and poor. Instead, she aspires to the polished
copper and sheen kitchen she works in where everyone is clean, well-behaved and
pretty. For her, any violation of that paradise by any one, even her daughter,
is paramount to a crime. The mother’s own internalization of
the desirable women as beautiful well-taken-care of cuddled, results in her
rejection of her own daughter, who by virtue of her blackness and her poverty
can not possibly obtain such a standard. Between the bottom, Pecola and her storefront house, and th e top, the little girl doll in her perfect home
Morrison presents us women situated on different points along the scale. Their
positions are generally symbolized by the order of their homes and their shade
of skin colour. Just below the girl-doll is Maureeen Peal, the light skinned dream girl with green eyes
who lives in a fine house, wears immaculate clothes, and is seen by everyone
around her as a princess. Geraldine is slightly darker than Maureen. Because
she is precariously on the edge of bright skin, she hates any element of funk,
which associates with blackness, she rigidly maintains
her prissy home. She expels Pecola from her house,
for this black girl with her happy hair represents to Geraldine both racial and
class detoriation. In the novel Maureen and Geraldine
are also associated with fear of sex. Maureen is clearly interested in learning
about ‘it’. But since that would violate the status of her position, she tries
to learn about ‘it’ from Pecola, who, be cause, she
is black, must know about such nastiness. Geraldine is so afraid of funk
creeping into her pseudo-white middle class life that she is frigid is much the
same way southern ladies were supposed to be. Freida
and Claudia Mc Teer’s mother is just one level above
the Breed loves, at least economically. Somehow she has managed to hold onto
her self respect, despite her love of Shirley Temple-dolls, ‘good hair’ and
bright skin. Her home is not storefront, though stuffed newspapers in the
cracks are necessary to keep out the cold. Instead there is a hard, firm love
that permeates her home. She and her women friends from their own community as
they waver precariously on the edge, between Mrs. Breedloves
total alienation from any community and their desire not to work and to own a
neat home like Geraldine.
Morrison comme nts
on these various positions throughout the novel by using a device that
underlines the pervasiveness of normative class distinctions. The words
form the Dick and Jane primer are juxtaposed to
appropriate sections in the novel. The primer tells us what the society says
the ideal family should be like and is based on middle class ideal where the
father works, the mother stays home, the children are happy, clean and well
behaved even the dog and cat are well-groomed friendly socialized.
The Bluest
Eye is about the contradictions fostered by racism, sexism and class distinctions that assails the black. The contradictions are
too intense for Pecola to sustain her sense of worth.
As a result she descends into madness. The other girls, Claudia and Frieda,
barely manage to survive. Claudia, the narrator of this s tory
summarizes Pecols’s tragedy in this way:
“All of
our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty,
which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us-all we know her-felt
so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we
stood, astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified
us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made
us think we and a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe
we were eloquent. Her poetry kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we
used-to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved or
contempt. We honed our egos on her, paddled our characters with her frailty and
yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
(The
Bluest Eye page 163)
Pecola is raped by her father and the girl’s need to be
loved taken the doomed form of a yearning for blue eyes. Morrison sums up this
personal fate and the novels power ful theme.
“The
damage done was total. She spent her days……. Walking up and
down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear.
Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal
grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded bird,
intent on the blue-void it could not reach. Could not even see but which fill
ed the valleys on the mind.”
Pregnant
by her father, she goes to soap-head church a man who believes himself
possessed of holy powers, what she wants are blue eyes. In this scene, in which
a young black on the verge of madness seeks beauty and happiness in a wish for
a girl’s eyes, the author makes her most telling statement on the tragic effect
of race prejudice on children. Thus the novel shows us the psychic state and
the resultant behaviour of Pecola
under the pressure of white domination Morrison’s interest is in exposing the
vicious genocidal effects of racism on the black girl, Pecola,
Cholly, Pauline, and some other characters can also
be examined in the light of the questions of what it means to be black in a
racist society. As Shelby Steels says “to be black was to be a victim,
therefore, not to be a victim was not t o be black.”
Morrisosn’s second novel Sula
pushes the idea of the black women as pariah further. Although she constructs
the hierarchy of class relation in Sula
quite differently from The Bluest Eye, the concept of class
and its relation to sex and race is still very much a part of the novel. On an
obvious level, Nel’s mother, Helen Wright could be
called the image of the lady in the novel. She is presented in the hypocritical
contours of this image and what is more interesting is the complex way in which
Morrison shows us how woman as helpmate mother and house keeper is connected to
the sense of failure black men often feel in a world that denies them status:
Jude marries Nel because of his sense of this
failure, his need to feel himself a man after being denied a job building the R
iver Road.
“The more
he thought about marriage, the more attractive it became. What ever his
fortune, what ever the cut of his garment, there would always be the hem – the
tuck and fold that his raveling edges, a some one
sweet, industrious and loyal to shore him up. And in return he would shelter
her, love her, grow old with her. Without that someone
he was a waiter hanging around a kitchen like a women.
With her he was a head of a house-hold pinned to an unsatisfactory job out of
the necessity. The two of them together would make one jude.
(Sula page – 82)
The standard of womanhood that Nel represents
in the novel, at least during her marriage to Jude, in not the pure image of
the ideal southern lady. Rather it is the variant that is based on the
status of black men, in fact, of working class men in the society. This role is
seen by Nel’s Community as good, while sula is seen as evil. For Sula
not only refuses that role, she steps ontside the
caste of women, beyond any class definition within that caste, when she does
not work, but neither is she taken care of, she is freely sexual, but is not
really that interested in men as men, she is interested neither in being
beautiful not becoming a mother. She defines herself outside of the sex, class,
race definition of the society. That she becomes a pariah in her community has
much to do with her resistance to any clearly recognizable definition of a women that the Bottom can tolerate.
Morrison,
in Sula captures most profoundly the
way concepts of good and evil are related to social definition of women. For
the bottom the definition has much to do with the status of black people within
the larger society, which ironically in the basis for the adventure and
rebellion that Sula represents. Because
of this black community’s vulnerability, the distinguishing characteristics of
the class of women is that she makes others that she ensures the continuity of
the community by bearing children and by supporting the beleaguered men either
sexually, emotionally or financially. It may be further added that Sula explores equally an extraordinary
consciousness and the gap between generations – Sula
and her grand mother Eva, share a great deal in common. Both left the same home
in Medallion’s ‘Bottom’ only to return and inha bit
it is willful isolation. Both shun tender expressions of love and interestingly
both have authored another’s death. But in her indifference to family bounds, Sula is her grand mother’s opposite.
Indulge
her fancy and where Eva returned for her children (though only content alone on
the second floor), Sula
returned from boredom and put her in her grandmother in a home. Where Eva, with
tragic awareness, ignited her son’s drug – addicted body, Sula
dropped the little boy, ‘Chicken’ to his death with a weird inadvertence. And
where Eva maimed herself trying to save her flaming daughter Hannah, Sula watched her mothers’ immolation with distant
curiosity. Yet this portrait is not simply a paean to the old ways and there is
sympathy for Sula because as a child she had
misconceived Hannah’s remarks, about her, ‘I love her, I jus t don’t like her,’
and because of her vain effort to save ‘Chicken’ of that the narrator remarks
that it has exercised ‘her one major feeling of responsibility’. Moreover, her
temperament blends ‘Eva’s arrogance and Hanah’s self
indulgence’ in an experimental life’ which itself seems a precondition for
seeing and acting upon hard social truths. And finally, she seems like Pecola Breedlove, whose guilt mysteriously sanctified those
around her. Sula performs the original Eve’s purpose
as a community ‘witch’, she provides others with a
scapegoat, a model of such evil conduct that their own is actually elevated
thereby.
Morrison’s
third novel, Song of Solomon is a work of enormous breadth. Macon and
Ruth Dead complete an often devastating characterization of genteel blacks
begun with Geraldine and Helene in the earlier no vels.
Self-serving and cool, their son ‘Milkman’ has given full life to the family
name,. Burdened by his saintly aunt.
Pilate, he sets our for
Song of
Solomon does not primarily focus on the concept of woman, for its protagonists
are men. Yet class in relation to race becomes even more focal
in this novel than in her first two. For though Milkman’s quest for his
identity is the dominant thread of the novel, the major obstacle he must
overcome is the deadening effects of his father’s need to own as much property
a possible in order to protect himself against racism.
And Milkman is accidentally propelled on his search for himself as a result of
his desire for gold. The journey leads him back through his ba
ck through his personal past to a racial history that had been vehemently
opposed to materialism and greed. It is a history that was created from the
suffering imposed upon his people by the greed of others. Although Morrison
does not focus primarily on the relationship of gender to class in Song of
Solomon, she dose integrate that concern into her major theme. There are
two important women I Milkman’s life : his mother,
Ruth and his aunt, Pilate. As the daughter of the only black doctor in town,
Ruth is bred to an upper middle class existence. She is presented in the novel
as the underside of the ideal southern lady image. She is totally cut off from
life – benevolently imprisoned by her father who tries to make her into his
girl doll, spitefully contained by her husband who marries her because of her
class position, then despised by him for her inherent weakness, Ruth’s life is
one of uneventful waste interrupted only by the birth of her son, who she tries
to kee p a baby as long as possible. After he is
grown, the only sign of life in her world is the watermark on her impressive
dining room table, for her sole achievement had been the elaborate centrepieces she arranges for it. Ruth is symbolic of the
terror that awaits those women who be come the emblem of a men’s wealth and
class position. While Ruth is the quintessence of the ideal southern lady image
carried to a grotesque extreme. Pilate is the woman without a navel, the woman
completely outside society as symbolized by her house outside the town, which
is not even wired for electricity. Yet Pilate is also the embodiment of the
tradition of her family and is pilot for Milkman in his necessary journey to
the past. Morrison compares and contrasts these tow women in this marvelous
passage: They were so different, these two women. One black, the other
lemony One corseted the other buck naked under her dress. One well read but ill
traveled. The other had read only geography book, but had been from one end of
the country to another. One wholly dependent on money for
life, the other indifferent to it. But those were the meaningless
things. Their similarities were profound. Both were vitally interested in
They come
together in this novel, the upper, middle – class lady and the conjure woman,
to save Milkman, in a sense the symbol of their continuity. That both these
women are nurturers, especially when one juxtaposes them with Sula. In Song of Solomon and Tar Baby, Morrison
seems to modify the image of Sula as an ideal. Sula was so powerful a character that she ignited the
imagination of many readers, who reversed the Bottom’s judgment, transformin g her from the evil witch into a totally
positive ideal. But though Sula is a product of her
community, she has no concern for it. The distinction that Morrison makes in Song
of Solomon between class and community and between autonomy and self –
absorption is represented. Pilate, however, is rooted in the past and although
she is still effective in the present, she leaves no future. One cannot pretend
that electricity does not exist and that the world is a village. Missing from
Pilate’s character is a sense of contemporary life. Cut off from men, her
daughter Reba becomes obsessed with them and her grand daughter Hagar is
finally killed by her insatiable desire for Milkman. Ironically, her community,
made up solely of women, becomes psychically dependent on men, because it does
not know them. Pilate, then is so a part from the everyday world that her way
cannot be the basis for transforming it. A heroic as she is, Pilate belongs to
another time.
In her
forth novel, Tar Baby, Morrison adds the quality of contermporaneity
to her characterization of an independent black woman. And in the love story of
Jadine and Son, she develops her most compelling
relationship between a man and a woman. But Jadine is
presented in the novel as essentially classbound. Her
desire to ‘make it’ in the world binds her not just to whites, but to upper
class whites, but to upper class whites. Her values are not so much that of the
ideal southern lady as they are of the white male world. She does not wish to
be the lady dependent on the husband’s wealth and status. She wants partly, but
is must be partly in a world of material gain. In no way is she a nurture, not
even to her aunt and uncle, who made her access to wealth possible by becoming
life – long servants to the rich valerian. To Jadine,
independence for a woman means looking out for herself
– she is not concerned with any community or with justice for anyone. In
developing a Jadine, who uses her belief in herself
as a woman as a rational for ‘making it’. Marrison
may be suggesting not only that class concerns are now more critical than
racial bonds, but those women, in their search for autonomy, may be taking on
patriarchal values Jadine is a feminist in appearance
without any of the concern ofr the social justice
that concept should embody. In contact to Jadine,
Son, her love, is a man totally out side of society, a runaway criminal. Like
Pilate, her resists the materialism of the society and
like Pilate, he has no future, for he really lives in Eloe,
a country of the past. More importantly, he refuses to contend with the social
forces that deprive him of fulfillment. His solution is to retreat, run, opt
out Although he feels an intense racial identity, he
does not join with others to change anything. He is not so much beyond class as
much as he is perceived as part of an underclass – totally alienated from the
world he moves in. He finally moves into the realm of myth. Both Jadine and Son are at a dead end. In going to
The design
of Tar Baby, so allegorical and symbolic, probably overextends the
mythic note of Song of Solomon. Folk legend is provided by the title,
but elsewhere. L ittle is quite so down to earth and
supporting realism is undercut by both the fabulous Haitian settings and
Morrison’s anthropomorphizing of them. The key figures are Jadine
and Son. Their union and divorce embody a black man’s search for an authentic,
natural past and a black woman’s estrangement from it. Committed to
materialistic white values, she ends by fondling her sealskin coat. He ends,
more believable than the airborne Milkman, by entering a jungle so humanoid that
it ‘make the way easier for a certain kind of man,’ Marriosn’s
archetype.
Undoubtedly,
Tar Baby is successful as such, but, like most works in that genre, it
remains teasingly deficient as a novel of character. Because the primary function
of Morrison’s characters is to voice representative opinions, they arrive on
stage vocal and highly conscious, their histories symbolically indicated or
merely sketched. Her brief sketches, however, are clearly the work of an artist
who can, when she chooses, model the mind in depth and detail. In acquainting
us with Jadine, for instance, Morrison tunnels the
experience of a 12 – year old observing the patient surrender of a bitch in
heat. Although Marrison uses this incident to explain
Jadine’s initial fear of Son, the rich psychology it
suggests flashes by us too quickly and is subsequently abandoned. Marrison simply, shifts her attention away from the
character’s evolution on to the character’s ideas.
Morrison’s
fifth novel, Beloved brought the Pulitzer prize
to her. The plot entails the struggle of Sethe, from
the summer of 1873 to the spring of 1874, to bear the resurgent impact of her
past, particularly the moment of 18 ye ars earlier when she had drawn a handsaw across the throat
of her baby girl, named Beloved. She had done so rather than hand the child and
her siblings to a vicious plantation manager who had come to
When Sethe arrived
with the new – born daughter tied to her chest, Baby Suggs welcomed her. Sethe was too ugly looking to wake her child in the night,
so Baby Suggs bathed he in sections, cleaned and
oiled, warmed ad consoled Sethe and cleaned the eyes
of the newborn with its mother’s urine. As Sethe
learnt female rites from Baby, it brought close to her ancestors. Baby
initiated Sethe into the wisdom and beliefs and souls
of her people. Symbolically, the performance of these rites is for Sethe the threshold, which represents the liminal phase of her rites of passage, the precursor of a
real and permanent change that will involve a long and exacting pilgrimage. Sethe has a powerful culture mentor like Baby Suggs who
awakens her desire to know her past and to love herself as a person. Thus Baby
enhances Sethe’s sense of womanhood, and their bonds
to one another are made stronger. The first twenty eight days Sethe spent in the company of Baby Suggs were followed by
eight een years of disproval and a solitary life
because the community that loved and respected Baby Suggs stepped back and held
itself at a distance when Sethe killed her own
daughter, Beloved.
One of the
worst effects of historical transition for a used to be slave mother was
alienation and repression. Sethe’s alienation is not
simply the result of a black woman’s separation from her family or her culture
centre but also the result of her murdering her own daughter to protect her
from living an abject life of a slave. Like Sula, Sethe is an outlaw. Just as Sula
is determined to ‘make’ herself even of the risk of distancing herself from
other black women and seeks to assert a sense of self. Sethe
does not care fro the community because she had no choice: That she lived in
124 in helpless, apologetic resignation because she had no choice; that minus
husband, sons mother-in-law, she and her slow – witted
daughter had to live there all alone making do (Beloved page 164).
The thematic potential in Beloved is immense. In this novel one of
Morrison’s most spell – binding womanist remembrances
of things past, Morrison interweaves racial and sexual issues with the theme of
motherhood and treats them at various levels of human experiences – socio –
psychological and legendary and mythic. The novel compels the reader’s
involvement in actively constructing for himself an
imperative framework which runs parallel to Sethe’s
psychological recovery from the trauma of her own past. Morrison, in this nove, achieves a synthetic voice without, however,
subverting the distinct, identity of an Afro-American aesthetic pervasive and
personified in memory as means of rebirth. In her sixth novel Jazz
Morrison uses the mode of Jazz to depict the experience of the black community
in the city of
Morrison’s
approach in interpreting black experiences is quite innovative. In a very
remarkable manner, she has adopted the diverse elements of Jazz to the
requirement of her expression. Morrison’s seventh novel,
REFERENCES
1. &nbs p;
Morrison, Toni. 1970. The Bluest
Eye.
2.
Morrison,
Toni. 1974
3.
Morrison,
Toni. 1977. Song of Solomon.
4.
Morrison,
Toni. 1981 Tar Baby.
5.
Morrison,
Toni. 1987. Beloved.
6.
Morrison,
Toni. 1992. Jazz.
7.
Morrison,
Toni. 1997.
Dr. Ram
Sharma is a Lecturer in English
at