Toni Morrison Essay, Research Paper
Finding Community and Identity in Works of Toni Morrison
Who re you, outsider? Ask me who am I.
-Langston Hughes, Visitors to the Black Belt
Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Tar Baby explore different types of communities. Such communities differ in race, class and gender respectively. They also include different learned biases and prejudices. In each, one or more of Morrison s characters struggle with the sense of there own identity within the community. Throughout this paper I will explore the different types of communities and take a closer look at the characters in which cannot identify with themselves or others within them.
In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of the most prevalent themes explored was that of one s dependency on society for identification, self value, and feelings of self worth. In an interview, Morrison indicated that her plan was to take love and the effects of its scarcity in the world as her major themes, concentrating on the individual loves of her characters, especially those of an enclosed community. (Kantz, 426) By constructing the chain of events that answered the question of how Pecola Breedlove was cast as the social outcast in her community, Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye attempted to satisfy the more difficult question of why. By using what seemed like tangents in the story, the reader was shown examples of how forces beyond human control such as nature, an omniscient being and primarily a legacy of rejection have come together to establish the heritage of desolation that has been passed on to Pecola Breedlove.
A pattern of precedence was pieced together in the story, showing the seeds of Pecola’s present barrenness to have been planted in the lives of preceding generations. By profiling the lives of Soaphead Church and Pauline Breedlove, Morrison made a case for the validity of generational curses. Their narratives were appropriately placed in the Spring division of the novel as an indication of the characters sowing the seeds that would be reaped by Pecola.
Seemingly, as an example of the ways in which the transgressions of the fathers revisited the sons, the narrator gave an extensive account of Soaphead Church’s family history, constantly citing instances in which traits of the fathers (or effects of their traits) followed the sons for generations. Of his family the author said, “They transferred this Anglophilia to their six children and sixteen grandchildren” and the family was described as one entity. The accomplishments and convictions of the sons were the same as the fathers. Soaphead Church, or more formally, Elihue Micah Whitcomb, inherited a prejudice for ascribing selectively to truth and tendencies to ascribe to lies about their ethnicity and superiority. He inherited his bitterness and pedophilia from his ancestors’ practices and his religious fanaticism from his own father’s secret denomination.
In the same manner Pauline Breedlove’s personal history was shown to have played out in extreme measures in the life of her daughter. From the early part of her life up to the time the reader was introduced to Pauline, she had worn a shroud of shame. The novel said that it was due primarily to her injured foot that she felt a sense of separateness and unworthiness and also why she “never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace” (Morrison, 111). This feeling was intensified by her experiences of exclusion and loneliness after moving up north. She was confronted by prejudice on a daily basis, both classism and racism, and for the first time, the white standard of beauty. These experiences worked to transform Pauline into a product of hatred and ignorance, leading her to hold herself up to standards that she didn’t fully understand or could realistically attain. These standards and feelings of rejection were the qualities that Pecola inherited from Pauline. Her mother, from her birth, placed upon her the same shroud of shame, loneliness, and inadequacy. More significantly, just as in the Whitcomb dynasty, the Breedloves as a whole were at one point described by the narrator as one distressing unit. They were unified in their acceptance of the mantle of unexplained ugliness, shame, and social dysfunctionality. The narrator told the reader that “No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. Dealing with it each according to his own way . (Morrison, 39)
This cycle of rejection was developed further in the metaphors that Morrison used throughout the novel. Nature was a recurring theme in the story and played an important role in answering why Pecola was rejected. Claudia, the novel’s narrator, and her sister Frieda, in their pre-adolescent mindsets could not completely understand why things happened as they did to Pecola. However, what they did know was stated in the beginning of the novel: that “there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941″ (Morrison, 9), the seeds of hope they themselves planted had shriveled and died, just like Pecola and Cholly’s baby. Morrison reiterated this simplistic alignment of Pecola s life with occurrences in nature as a means of understanding throughout the novel. She established nature as an important factor in life’s experiences by incorporating it into the structure of her novel.
Instead of conventional chapters and sections, The Bluest Eye was broken up into seasons-Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer. These are constants in nature that cannot be controlled by any human influence and also suggested that the events had occurred before and will occur again. Such divisions in the novel marked a correlation between the seasons and the chain of events in the story.
For example, the section marked Autumn, which was characteristic of harvesting and reaping the results of spring planting, was the section of the novel where the reader was introduced to the Breedlove family reaping a “harvest” from the “seeds” of racism, poverty, anger, etc. described in Spring.
Additionally, in characters like Maginot Line, who was described in natural terms, a woman comfortable with herself and her surroundings, sought to fulfill the pleasures and standards dictated by her own volition, whether they were pleasant or severe. Pauline Breedlove, whose emotions were affected by the weather (Morrison, 111), was intimately acquainted with the colors, sites, and sounds of nature in the south. In their presence she became tranquil and almost whimsical. The lone description of Claudia’s father was set to the natural image of winter depicting him as steadfast and penetrating. The narrator said of her fathers face, “Winter moves in and presides there” (Morrison, 61). In all of these characters that natural laws not only governed the environment but were also paralleled to the way human nature governs its environment.
Morrison showed a pattern in the man-nature relationship and then applied it to Pecola in Claudia’s initial statement on her failed pregnancy and then also in the metaphors she used to explain Pecola’s dilemma. One such metaphor could be seen in Pecola’s perception of the dandelion and how it mirrored her perception of herself. In one scene Pecola passed a patch of dandelions as she walked into Mr. Yacobowski’s store. “Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty” (Morrison, 47). Yet after suffering the embarrassment of Mr. Yacobowski’s vacant, shame inducing stare the faint glimmer of happiness she experienced in seeing the dandelion was destroyed. When she left and passed the dandelions again she thought, “They are ugly. They are weeds” (Morrison, 50). She had transferred society’s dislike of her to the dandelions and it was not until the end of the novel that Morrison fully explained these metaphors. Through an adult Claudia, Morrison says, “I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruits it will not bear and when the land kills of its own volition, we say that the victim had no right to live” (Morrison, 206). Even nature retained the right to dictate which seeds it would bear to fruition and those that it would reject. Pecola was one of these “certain seeds” that never had a chance to grow and succeed because she lived in an environment that rejected her, one that would not and maybe could not have nurtured her.
Morrison did not stop at the forces of nature, but she also placed a responsibility for this social dilemma on an ambiguous god and/or the church. This omniscient being, the creator of all things, both noble and corrupt, and his messengers had in a sense sanctioned the unfavorable in order to validate the hatred and scorn of the “righteous.” In her introduction to the Breedlove family, Morrison impugned the Breedlove’s acceptance of ugliness to a higher power saying, “It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear” (Morrison, 39). This divine being not only created ugliness for them but it also ambiguously created an environment that rejected and scorned this ugliness. In her youth Pauline struggled with the same type of ambiguity and contradiction in trying to “hold her mind on the wages of sin,” while “her body trembled for redemption, salvation and a mysterious rebirth that would simply happen, with no effort on her part” (Morrison, 113).
Ironically, at the end of the novel it was Soaphead Church, an individual well acquainted with theology, who alone gave an answer to Claudia’s initial question of why. His letter, addressed to “He who greatly ennobled human nature by creating it,” intended to familiarize an omniscient being with the “facts which have either escaped his notice, or which he has chosen to ignore” (Morrison, 176) saying that he had forgotten about the children.
“You said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, and harm them not.’ Did you forget? Did you forget about the children? Yes. You forgot. You let them go wanting, sitting on road shoulders, crying next to their dead mothers. I’ve seen them charred, lame, halt. You forgot, Lord. You forgot how and when to be God That’s why I changed the little black girl’s eyes for her I did what You could not do. I looked at that ugly little black girl and I loved her. I played You” (Morrison, 181-2).
This letter not only incriminated God but it also incriminated the church. In their duty to come to the aid of the despised and dejected they had failed and instead begun to play God themselves, judging society’s mistakes in the name of righteous superiority. This was evident in Soaphead’s gift of the miraculous and Pauline’s successfully achieved martyrdom at the cost of her marriage and the lives of her children.
However, Morrison did not seem to place the blame on Pauline, neither did she blame it on racism, vulgarity nor ignorance. In The Bluest Eye she depicted Pecola as a victim of an evil that had roots deeper than human conviction and could not be understood in such terms. This vicious cycle of rejection, this embodiment of supernatural forces of the creator, creation, and the created combined to produce the evil that left Pecola Breedlove barren and unable to know how or why.
Toni Morrison treated community and identity differently in her second novel, Sula than in The Bluest Eye. Morrison s Sula ruminated on community values, detailing Medallion s residents interactions among themselves, and with the exterior, white community. In the novel, the characters espoused dissimilar notions of individual and communal responsibility because of their personal preferences and the impact of their past experiences. Literary critic Deborah McDowell, maintained that “Sula is rife with liberating possibilities in that it transgresses all deterministic oppositions”. The discontinuity among the characters’ mentalities allowed for numerous literary and sociological interpretations. (McDowell, 79)
To evaluate the controversy between the self and society in Sula, it was necessary to analyze the roots of the Bottom’s mentality, to discuss racism’s impact on the community, and to determine one person’s ability to subvert a community’s value system. Moreover, the novel displayed how authority figures implemented regulations that embraced black people generally and black women specifically. A society’s value system resembles not only the residents’ personal morals, but also the impact of exterior influences. (Stein, 146)
At the beginning of Sula, Morrison focused on the Bottom’s history to present racism’s latent effects. For example, she explained the outcome of a freed slave’s business deal with his master: “The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking … and where the wind lingered all through the winter” (Morrison, 3). Because the master duped his slave, the Bottom becomes “a nigger joke,” leaving the residents with only the satisfaction of knowing that “they could literally look down on the white folks.” (Morrison, 5)
In the first, undated chapter, Morrison also detailed the Bottom’s destruction, noting that “generous funds” contributed to razing the Time and a Half Pool Hall and Irene’s Palace of Cosmetology. Critic, Karen Stein wrote that “This destruction, which sets the tone for the novel’s hovering doom, is both example and symbol of the steady erosion that the black community and its members suffer…the black community is vulnerable to the white society’s exploitative self-aggrandizement” (Stein, 147). By choosing golf, a form of recreation that middle to upper class whites would have participated in at the time Morrison sets the novel, she hinted at the economic forces that subdued Medallion. Additionally, Morrison omitted a time frame for the chapter, suggesting that those actions occurred everywhere. Also, the textual proximity of the community’s birth and death revealed that the Bottom advanced gradually. Although slavery ended in name, the institution persisted in new forms that conquered the black community.
Because white people’s thoughts and actions lingered in the back of the Medallion residents’ minds, they united to form a sense of “cultural identity.” Medallion’s social consciousness derived from their reaction to racism and to the influence of patriarchal control. Therefore, the community developed a series of social norms. Eva and Jude’s attempts to obtain security, for example, mitigated their dolesome notions, exemplifying the types of conformity that occurred in Medallion. Their lives highlighted the perpetual presence of patriarchal authority in Medallion, and as a result, conformity became the means by which they made sense of the world.
To cope with BoyBoy’s desertion, Eva gradually transposed her pain into hate, but she initially placed her anger in cessation to deal with her economic state. The narrator explained, “Eva had $1.65, five eggs, three beets, and no idea of what or how to feel” (Morrison, 32). Because BoyBoy controlled the family’s funds, Eva could not sustain the family alone. Critic, Michele Pessoni wrote, “Eva (like Sula) remained to some extent a victim of the patriarchal culture that reveled in possession and oppression, allowing one person control over another’s life”. With assistance from her neighbors, the Suggs’s, Eva gathered a sufficient amount of food to nourish the family, evincing Medallion’s sense of communal interconnection. (Pessoni, 443) As Pessoni noted, the patriarchal system suppressed Eva because it permitted one person (or group) to wield complete control over an individual. (Pessoni, 446) Morrison showed expressively that Eva stayed behind with the children with no form of sustenance, except her emotions, which permitted the patriarchy to capture physical possessions and demonstrated that she could not survive alone.
As Shadrack, Jude and Eva endured the effects of white racism and economic exploitation, people other than themselves dictated their decisions. In Jude s case, before proposing to Nel, he attempted to establish himself economically. Critics, Barbara Lounsberry and Grace Ann Hovet, held that “Jude had embraced the institution of marriage as a shield to protect him from outside hurts” (Lounsberry, 126). When Shadrack opposed the government, he confronted a patriarchal force, founded on a basis of authority. In Medallion, the patriarchy prevailed, but in the form of gender roles there was a power struggle between the sexes.
Through Jude and Eva, Morrison presented the patriarchal authority’s ability to stifle a person’s innermost desires. In Shadrack’s case, he individuated himself with boisterous behavior, and the community eventually accepted his holiday, National Suicide Day, “In fact they had simply stopped remarking on the holiday because they had absorbed it into their thoughts, into their language, into their lives” (Morrison, 15). Morrison illuminated the various levels on which Shadrack influenced their lives. On January 3, couples do not marry and the sound of a cow bell becomes background music. The narrator continued, “Once the people understood the boundaries and nature of his madness, they could fit him in, so to speak, into the scheme of things” (Morrison, 15). After they pigeonholed Shadrack and identified his limits, they consented to his behavior because the end result remained predictable.