Toni Morrison
As an African-American woman, Toni Morrison’s body of work, particularly her collection of novels, speaks not only to the relationship between God and man but also to thematic threads of gender perception and racial inequality, as well as the resulting social injustice. Unlike Johnson, Toni Morrison ambitiously attempts to subvert the patriarchal nature of print without the help of other media. Morrison’s writing style combines a heady mix of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations with a dreamlike narrative structure, and she describes her process in this way:
All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest. Then comes the image, the picture of the thing that I have to invent the headless bride in her wedding dress; the forest clearing. There is performance, too: “zzz went the saw,” accompanied by gesture. And cadence: “Old man Simon Gillicutty, caaatch me.” I need to use everything—sound, image performance—to get at the full meaning of the story (Morrison, 6)
Reading one of Toni Morrison’s novels feels like being transported into another time and place with such vivid descriptions the reader cannot help but be entranced, and Morrison uses the calm that the performance of her words elicit to more deeply antagonize the reader with her ideas. By choosing to work primarily with texts, Toni Morrison uses her style to destroy the oppressive system from within and gives credence to this deduction by giving voice to her ideas through her character Son, in Tar Baby, who says he had “given up books because the language in them had changed so much—stained with rivulets of disorder and meaninglessness” (20).
Son’s ideas are not the only clues that Morrison wants to defeat the Edenic system in with Tar Baby because this novel in particular sets the racial and gendered themes, so often used by Morrison, against the backdrop of a Caribbean island as a metaphor for Eden before and after the fall as well as the journey of the two main characters to America as a metaphor for the expulsion from the garden.
For Morrison, the end of the world mimics the beginning of the world, or "is it the other way around" as her characters wonder when confronted with situations or people who cannot be explained by society’s norms, and for Morison, both reexamination of human interaction with the earth and the unfounded assumptions commonly made about African-Americans and women are deeply entwined.
Morrison begins, as everything does, with the earth. The Isle de Chevaliers is a place where the footfall of man has created havoc instead of order and the earth has become "exhausted, ill and grieving" (16), a place where the civilization of the earth has backfired. The narrative begins with Son who escaped from a ship and has sought shelter on the island. The ocean gives birth to him, “a bracelet of water circled” his ankles “and yanked him onto a wide, empty tunnel. He struggled to rise out of it and was turned three times…before…he was tossed up into the velvet air” (9). Each time the characters come into contact with the earth, Morrison’s style reflects her desire for the printed word to more closely resemble a performance as each plant, animal, and the earth itself is personified., and in this way the setting also becomes a character. The sky is “pierced to weeping by the blade tip of an early star” (10) over the “poor insulted, brokenhearted river” and “poor demented stream” (16).
Son is discovered several days after the ocean deposits him on the island hiding in the home of Valarien Street, and each of the women in the home individually suspects he has been waiting for a chance to rape them. The fear the women felt at discovering Son stems from both his gender and his skin color. Morrison reveals the thoughts of Margret Street, who is white, and Jadine, her secretary who is black, and interestingly, the way both women think about the dark, black man is characterized by racially derogatory thoughts, assumptions, and names. Morrison points this out to highlight, not only the prejudice of the white community but the similar prejudice that exists within the African-American community as well. In an inversion of the binary system, the patriarch, Mr. Street, has no intention of indulging his wife’s assumptions and invites the young man to spend the night.
Throughout the novel, both of the women are cast as Eve figures, Jadine because she has fiercely guarded her virginity, symbolizing Eve before the Fall. Margaret is similar to Eve both because she is the second wife of Valerian, recalling the midrashic myth, terrorized by the “pearl gray S on the sheet hems and pillow slips” of his first wife that “coiled at her,” (52) and because she commits the unpardonable sin of physically abusing her son. Her confession of this sin leads to the household’s expulsion from the Eden that never was. Even though they are restricted by their societal roles, the women fight against the narrowed interpretation of what it means to be a woman; Margret, who married at seventeen, struggles to keep her failure as a mother a secret but only feels relief when she must confess while Jadine fights her attraction to Son, who is considered low and base by everyone else, but eventually runs away with him.
As Jadine and Son begin a life together in America, their Eden turns out to be a place of anger, abuse, and uncertainty leading them to question their differences, embodied in the knowledge that “one had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands” (218). At times Morison’s expertise makes the reader feel as if their arguments are real and the reader is the one being held out the window by her hands. Their differences center around Son’s simple childhood in Florida and his desire to return to the purely African American town to live how he was raised and Jadine’s interest in the culture, education, and diversity New York provides. Eventually, Jadine feels suffocated and runs away from her role as “a Cadillac he had won, or stolen, or even bought” (206).
Each of the characters succeeds and fails in their role. For the women, this calls into question the root of the rules that require them to march “shamelessly single-minded” with “no time for dreaming…there is so much to do—the work is literally endless. So many to be born and fed, then found and buried. There is no time for dreaming” (234). For Jadine and Son, their different views of their shared race eventually drive them apart, but each is left with the sense that maybe they should have done just a little more to understand the other and learned to adapt. By having each of the characters try so hard to simultaneously live within and struggle against the societal pressures, Morrison defines the struggle of every human who has been pressured to perform a preordained role while struggling to maintain a sense of self, and she does so not only with the thematic exploration of the binary systems but also by defeating the confines of the printed word in this performative text.
All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest. Then comes the image, the picture of the thing that I have to invent the headless bride in her wedding dress; the forest clearing. There is performance, too: “zzz went the saw,” accompanied by gesture. And cadence: “Old man Simon Gillicutty, caaatch me.” I need to use everything—sound, image performance—to get at the full meaning of the story (Morrison, 6)
Reading one of Toni Morrison’s novels feels like being transported into another time and place with such vivid descriptions the reader cannot help but be entranced, and Morrison uses the calm that the performance of her words elicit to more deeply antagonize the reader with her ideas. By choosing to work primarily with texts, Toni Morrison uses her style to destroy the oppressive system from within and gives credence to this deduction by giving voice to her ideas through her character Son, in Tar Baby, who says he had “given up books because the language in them had changed so much—stained with rivulets of disorder and meaninglessness” (20).
Son’s ideas are not the only clues that Morrison wants to defeat the Edenic system in with Tar Baby because this novel in particular sets the racial and gendered themes, so often used by Morrison, against the backdrop of a Caribbean island as a metaphor for Eden before and after the fall as well as the journey of the two main characters to America as a metaphor for the expulsion from the garden.
For Morrison, the end of the world mimics the beginning of the world, or "is it the other way around" as her characters wonder when confronted with situations or people who cannot be explained by society’s norms, and for Morison, both reexamination of human interaction with the earth and the unfounded assumptions commonly made about African-Americans and women are deeply entwined.
Morrison begins, as everything does, with the earth. The Isle de Chevaliers is a place where the footfall of man has created havoc instead of order and the earth has become "exhausted, ill and grieving" (16), a place where the civilization of the earth has backfired. The narrative begins with Son who escaped from a ship and has sought shelter on the island. The ocean gives birth to him, “a bracelet of water circled” his ankles “and yanked him onto a wide, empty tunnel. He struggled to rise out of it and was turned three times…before…he was tossed up into the velvet air” (9). Each time the characters come into contact with the earth, Morrison’s style reflects her desire for the printed word to more closely resemble a performance as each plant, animal, and the earth itself is personified., and in this way the setting also becomes a character. The sky is “pierced to weeping by the blade tip of an early star” (10) over the “poor insulted, brokenhearted river” and “poor demented stream” (16).
Son is discovered several days after the ocean deposits him on the island hiding in the home of Valarien Street, and each of the women in the home individually suspects he has been waiting for a chance to rape them. The fear the women felt at discovering Son stems from both his gender and his skin color. Morrison reveals the thoughts of Margret Street, who is white, and Jadine, her secretary who is black, and interestingly, the way both women think about the dark, black man is characterized by racially derogatory thoughts, assumptions, and names. Morrison points this out to highlight, not only the prejudice of the white community but the similar prejudice that exists within the African-American community as well. In an inversion of the binary system, the patriarch, Mr. Street, has no intention of indulging his wife’s assumptions and invites the young man to spend the night.
Throughout the novel, both of the women are cast as Eve figures, Jadine because she has fiercely guarded her virginity, symbolizing Eve before the Fall. Margaret is similar to Eve both because she is the second wife of Valerian, recalling the midrashic myth, terrorized by the “pearl gray S on the sheet hems and pillow slips” of his first wife that “coiled at her,” (52) and because she commits the unpardonable sin of physically abusing her son. Her confession of this sin leads to the household’s expulsion from the Eden that never was. Even though they are restricted by their societal roles, the women fight against the narrowed interpretation of what it means to be a woman; Margret, who married at seventeen, struggles to keep her failure as a mother a secret but only feels relief when she must confess while Jadine fights her attraction to Son, who is considered low and base by everyone else, but eventually runs away with him.
As Jadine and Son begin a life together in America, their Eden turns out to be a place of anger, abuse, and uncertainty leading them to question their differences, embodied in the knowledge that “one had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture to save the race in his hands” (218). At times Morison’s expertise makes the reader feel as if their arguments are real and the reader is the one being held out the window by her hands. Their differences center around Son’s simple childhood in Florida and his desire to return to the purely African American town to live how he was raised and Jadine’s interest in the culture, education, and diversity New York provides. Eventually, Jadine feels suffocated and runs away from her role as “a Cadillac he had won, or stolen, or even bought” (206).
Each of the characters succeeds and fails in their role. For the women, this calls into question the root of the rules that require them to march “shamelessly single-minded” with “no time for dreaming…there is so much to do—the work is literally endless. So many to be born and fed, then found and buried. There is no time for dreaming” (234). For Jadine and Son, their different views of their shared race eventually drive them apart, but each is left with the sense that maybe they should have done just a little more to understand the other and learned to adapt. By having each of the characters try so hard to simultaneously live within and struggle against the societal pressures, Morrison defines the struggle of every human who has been pressured to perform a preordained role while struggling to maintain a sense of self, and she does so not only with the thematic exploration of the binary systems but also by defeating the confines of the printed word in this performative text.