Morrison, Toni 1931–

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Toni Morrison 1931-

(Born Chloe Anthony Wofford) American novelist, editor, playwright, librettist, and children's book writer.

For additional information on Morrison's career, see Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1.

INTRODUCTION

Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American to win this honor. Her novels explore issues of African American female identity in stories that integrate elements of oral tradition, postmodern literary techniques, and magical realism to give voice to the experiences of women living on the margins of white American society. Given her status as a best-selling African American female author, Morrison's work is viewed as having achieved a breakthrough for other black women novelists trying to succeed in the mainstream publishing industry. Her work has won several of modern literature's most prestigious honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Song of Solomon (1977); the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the American Book Award for Beloved (1987); the 1996 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; the National Humanities Medal in 2001; and the Coretta Scott King Book Award for Remember (2004).

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Morrison was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, where her father worked as a ship welder. She is very close in age to her sister, with whom she formed a strong bond that has continued throughout her life. Morrison was encouraged by her family to read and spent much of her childhood at the local library. She graduated with a B.A. from Howard University in 1953 and went on to complete an M.A. in English literature at Cornell University in 1955. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she worked as an instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston and at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She worked as an editor for Random House publishers from 1965 to 1983. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was expanded from a short story she had written while still in college. Although The Bluest Eye received scant critical attention when it was first published, Morrison's career as a nationally recognized author was launched with the success of Sula (1973), her second novel, following which The Bluest Eye was retrospectively given renewed consideration as an important work of fiction. While continuing to write novels and children's books, as well as editing several essay collections on issues of race in America, Morrison has taught as a guest professor in English and humanities at a number of colleges and universities, including the State University of New York at Albany and at Purchase, Yale University, Bard College, Harvard University, and Trinity College at Cambridge University in England. Since 1989, she has held a post as professor of humanities at Princeton University.

MAJOR WORKS

Morrison's overarching thematic concern throughout her oeuvre revolves around issues of African American female identity in the contemporary world. Her novels offer complex examinations of problems within the African American community, power dynamics between men and women, and issues of racism in relations between black and white America. Her fictions are self-consciously concerned with myth, legend, storytelling, and the oral tradition, as well as with memory, history, and historiography, and have thus been recognized as postmodern metanarratives. They are also conscious of the African cultural heritage as well as African American history, thus demonstrating the importance of the past to the struggles of contemporary African Americans. Her novels often employ elements of magic, fantasy, and the supernatural, such as the character in Song of Solomon who can fly, or the ghost of a dead child who appears in Beloved. The Bluest Eye, her first novel, is set in the 1940s and addresses issues of race and beauty standards through the figure of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old African American girl who dreams of having blue eyes and long, blond hair. After Pecola is raped and becomes pregnant, she descends into insanity and insists that she has "the bluest eyes in the whole world."

Morrison's next three novels, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby (1981), are generally regarded as a trilogy. Sula centers on the powerful bonds of friendship between Sula and Nel, who meet as girls and maintain their friendship into adulthood. This bond is ruptured, however, when Nel finds her husband in bed with Sula. Reviewers note that in the novel Morrison explores the importance of female friendship in the formation of individual identity, which in reality is often superseded by women's relationships with men. Song of Solomon turns on the character of Milkman Dead, who is born in the North but journeys to the South, where he discovers that he is a descendant of Solomon, a member of a mythical West African tribe whose members can fly. According to legend, these Africans, captured and enslaved in America, escaped their bondage by flying back to Africa. Tar Baby is set on the Isle de Chevaliers in the Caribbean, in contemporary times. Through the character of Jadine Childs, a successful fashion model and student of art history, Tar Baby examines the dilemmas of assimilation and cultural identity among middle-class African Americans.

Morrison's subsequent three novels, Beloved, Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998), are often loosely grouped as another trilogy, each set in a different period of African American history: Beloved takes place during the post-Civil Rights era, with flashbacks to the years of slavery in the South; Jazz is set during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; and Paradise is set during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s and 1970s. Beloved combines elements of magical realism with the tradition of the African American slave narrative in the story of Sethe, a former slave struggling to raise her children in post-Civil War America. Sethe once killed her own infant in order to save it from a life of slavery, and the ghost of this dead child comes back to haunt her home as an adolescent girl called Baby Suggs. Jazz concerns a romantic triangle between a woman named Violet, her husband Joe, and an eighteen-year-old girl named Dorcas, with whom Joe falls in love. Joe's passion for Dorcas ultimately results in his shooting and killing her. Paradise explores the tensions between the all-black town of Ruby and an all-female convent located on the outskirts of the town. Threatened by the empowerment of women within the convent community, the men of Ruby invade it and massacre the women living there.

In Morrison's 2003 novel, Love, she once again touches on the bonds of female friendship and the damage inflicted by a patriarchal society that exploits young girls. Narrated by L., the former cook at a once-luxurious resort catering to African American visitors, the novel concerns the internecine struggles between two childhood friends, Heed and Christine, over the affections of Bill Cosey, the now-deceased owner of the resort. Heed and Christine's friendship is torn apart when Cosey, Christine's fifty-two-year-old grandfather, purchases the eleven-year-old Heed from her parents in order to take her as his child bride. Heed and Christine, now old women, both live in the mansion of the closed-down resort, fiercely battling one another over the ambiguous will Cosey had scribbled on a restaurant menu. In addition to her novels, Morrison has written several children's books with her son, Slade Morrison, and a libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005), with music composed by Richard Danielpour. The opera is based on the story of escaped African American slave Margaret Garner, which also was the basis for Morrison's novel Beloved.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Morrison holds a unique and central role in the American literary canon, having achieved commercial success along with critical acclaim for her work. Her novels have been almost universally praised by reviewers, and have been the subject of numerous academic books and essays in the fields of gender studies, ethnic studies, postmodern theory, literary theory, and cultural studies. Several scholarly discussions revolve around the lyrical quality of her prose, which has been described as precise, rich, vivid, and powerful. Other analyses focus on her use of Black English as well as her incorporation of multiple narrative voices, which critics identify as key elements of her work. Her style of storytelling has often been described as "gifted," and her writing is admired for embodying many of the rituals and rhythms of the African oral tradition. Morrison is also singled out for her realistic and powerful portrayals of marginalized black women, and is lauded for her ability to depict the entire range of African American experience, from the brutalities and oppression of slavery to the richness and communal spirit of African American culture. Another area of critical study is Morrison's narrative tendency to mix the fantastic with the realistic. Critics have noted the importance of the elder or ancestral figure in her fiction, linking this character to the folklore and beliefs of traditional African culture, in which the supernatural holds power and portent. Still other scholars have commended Morrison's treatment of issues of African American identity, finding that the quest for the self is a motivating and organizing device in her fiction.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

The Bluest Eye (novel) 1970

Sula (novel) 1973

The Black Book [editor] (nonfiction) 1974

Song of Solomon (novel) 1977

Tar Baby (novel) 1981

Dreaming Emmett (play) 1986

Beloved (novel) 1987

Jazz (novel) 1992

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (essays) 1992

Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Construction of Social Reality [editor and author of introduction] (essays) 1992

Paradise (novel) 1998

The Big Box [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Giselle Potter] (juvenilia) 1999

I See You, I See Myself: The Young Life of Jacob Lawrence [with Deba Foxley Leach, Suzanne Wright, and Deborah J. Leach] (juvenilia) 2001

Book of Mean People [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (juvenilia) 2002

Love (novel) 2003

Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (juvenilia) 2003

Who's Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse? [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (juvenilia) 2003

Remember: The Journey to School Integration (juvenilia) 2004

Who's Got Game? The Poppy or the Snake? [with Slade Morrison; illustrations by Pascal Lemaître] (juvenilia) 2004

Margaret Garner: An Opera [music by Richard Danielpour] (libretto) 2005

Toni Morrison: Conversations (nonfiction) 2008

What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (nonfiction) 2008

CRITICISM

Yeonman Kim (essay date spring 2001)

SOURCE: Kim, Yeonman. "Involuntary Vulnerability and the Felix Culpa in Toni Morrison's Jazz." Southern Literary Journal 33, no. 2 (spring 2001): 124-33.

[In the following essay, Kim contends that even though the characters in Jazz are depicted as helpless victims in the face of harsh external forces involving economics, race, gender, and politics, each one undergoes a "restorative transformation" as the novel progresses.]

Given that jazz is "an interplay of voices improvising on the basic themes or motifs" (Jones 200) and Toni Morrison's Jazz is often considered a textualized piece of jazz, the characters' involuntary vulnerability to harsh outside circumstances is fundamentally reiterated and varied throughout the novel. The recurrent tunes of the motif are intricately intertwined with a variety of other thematic elements—such as "the mystery of love" that involves jealousy and forgiveness (Jazz 5), the history of southern blacks' migration to northern cities, and their quest for identity by seeking their parents. The narrative of Jazz thus weaves the motif of the turn-of-the-century African American characters' involuntary vulnerability and its improvised variations, synchronizing distinct levels of structure and textuality with jazz-like flexibility and fluidity. On the superficial level, the narrator interweaves both negative and positive natures of the characters. The reader may easily find the characters' disordered aspects—carnal desire, jealousy, lack of morality, injury, murder, and the like; yet, with a bit more care, their affirmative aspects also become clear.

Instead of giving a moral assessment of their binary behaviors, however, Jazz turns its attention toward a deeper level, starting to seriously examine the question of "who shot whom" (6). The narrator now traces the concealed forces that govern and victimize the characters' psyches stealthily but dominantly. She indicates the existence of manipulating external circumstances, which make them "crack" involuntarily in terms of morality, as Richard Hardack observes:

The implicit connection between transcendental/Modernist fragmentation, violence, and the site of the involuntary has been recently reinforced and rendered explicit in Morrison's Jazz. Morrison asserts that the violent fragmentation of the American character—in Melville's Pierre, who loses control of his body, and in Billy Budd, who kills without intention, in Norris' McTeague or De Lillo's Axton in The Names, or in any of a plethora of American characters who are defined by what is in some context an act of involuntary or unconscious violence—is foremost a projected attribute of American blackness.
(452)

The deviant conduct of the characters in Jazz is involuntary and, perhaps, inevitable. They are inevitably fragmented by outer forces such as the seducing City and its music, the unreliable narrator, as well as social, political, and economic conditions. Morrison, therefore, does not assert that these involuntarily victimized, pathetic characters are to blame for their extraordinary behaviors; rather, she gives them a chance to redeem themselves, exhorting them to forgive and love each other and to be careful in order not to be trapped by the manipulating circumstances. "Sth" (3), the novel's opening word, serves to elicit attention from the listener/reader and may well launch this exploration of the text with an emphasis on the main characters—Joe Trace, Violet, Dorcas Manfred, and Golden Gray.

Throughout the novel, the characters exhibit the duplicity of the human mind: while they display aberrant behaviors such as murder, injury, and misunderstanding, they are also neighborly and kind. The narrative begins with their extraordinary transgressions, which might make the reader consider the characters as morally/mentally corrupt. Above all, Joe is a dreamer desirous to take a bite of the forbidden apple—that is, Dorcas. Although "he knew wrong wasn't right," his vain impulse to taste the apple keeps growing intense (74). And he appears to have fulfilled this desire in the sense that he could date the young Dorcas, but the affair ends up with his shooting Dorcas because of the unsatisfied desire to possess her as his own. Even after her death, Joe's aspiration for Dorcas is still operating: dreaming of Dorcas, he quits his job and pays little attention to his wife. He has lost all sense of reality. His wife Violet is almost a lunatic when she tries to take revenge by attacking Dorcas in the coffin. She is also one who seems to hardly realize what goes on. Rather than blaming Dorcas, she continually looks at her photograph on the fireplace and is jealous of her youth and amiability, wishing to be "white, light, young again" (208).

Dorcas is an indiscreet girl to whom "everything was like a picture show" (202). What does love mean to her? It is simply a secret and thrilling game, or a fight to win someone. In her relationship with Acton, her new lover after leaving Joe, she is very impudent and insincere about love: enjoying other girls' jealousy, she says, "I won him. I won!" (216). In other words, what she might have regarded as love for Acton is far from the notion of love, but is instead vanity for satisfying her own desire to lord a popular man over other girls.

And Golden Gray is described as an egoistic racist when his story is first told. Possibly because of his white color, Wild abruptly turns to run away and knocks herself against the tree. Then, the narrator, in a contemptuous tone, emphasizes the order of Golden Gray's interest: after the collision, the horse, trunk, and other belongings come to his eyes first, and, at last, the wounded woman Wild. To Gray, his horse and trunk are more important than the pregnant woman who is knocked down and bleeding from the head because of him.

Nevertheless, the characters in Jazz are not always negatively depicted as examined above. Morrison's novel would not simply draw on a pack of stereotypical stock characters, but rather depicts a complex working of the characters' psychological and behavioral patterns. In relation to Morrison's characterization, Jan Furman points out:

If they are not psychopaths (and they never are in Morrison's work), then they are merely interesting people and extraordinary specimens of the human condition: they are good people who do bad things. "The combination of virtue and flaw, of good intentions gone awry, of wickedness cleansed and people made whole again," interests Morrison. She does not judge characters by "the worst that they have done" or by the best, but the "combinations … are the best part of writing novels."
(86)¹

As such, instead of condemning the characters' disorderly conducts and transgressions, Morrison sophisticatedly lays out their positive aspects in the text from time to time. As for Joe, for example, the narrator says, "A nice neighborly, everybody-knows-him man. The kind you let in your house because he was not dangerous, because you … never heard a scrap of gossip about him doing wrong" (73). Violet also "had been a snappy, determined girl and a hardworking young woman, with the snatch-gossip tongue of a beautician" (23).

In this discourse of the human mind, the simple dichotomy of good and evil does not concern Morrison. She does not assert that it is natural that human beings have both good and bad aspects, but posits other relevant questions—why and how the characters are "good people who do bad things" (Furman 86). Do the neighborly and hardworking characters deliberately commit transgressions? Or, are there more crucial factors that paralyze their moral consciousness? The narrative makes it evident that the characters are induced to do wrong by seducing, misleading, and oppressive external forces to which they are involuntarily vulnerable.

The City is one of the misleading forces, involving the historical situation surrounding it. The temporal setting of Jazz is the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when southern blacks moved to the North in the hope of greater freedom and wealth. When Violet and Joe came to the City, "they both knew right away that perfect was not the word. It was better than that" (107). And their dreams appeared to come true, since the City might give them better opportunity:

The money to be earned for doing light work—standing in front of a door, carrying food on a tray, even cleaning strangers' shoes—got you in a day more money than any of them had earned in one whole har- vest. White people literally threw money at you—just being neighborly: opening a taxi door, picking up a package…. Steel cars sped down the streets and if you saved up, they said, you could get you one and drive as long as there was road.
(106)

In actuality, however, to make an easy fortune and own a fancy car would turn out to be a hard to achieve dream. The apparently affirmative aspects of the City are not much pertinent to understanding the City life depicted in Jazz. Furman explains, "In Jazz there is the seductive New York" (96). Clearly, the City in the text has a bewitching and controlling power on its inhabitants. Its manipulative dominance over the characters is so strong that the narrator emphatically says in relation to Joe's attitude of being "free to do something wild": "Take my word for it, he is bound to the track. It pulls him like a needle through the groove of a Bluebird record. Round and round about the town. That's the way the City spins you. Makes you do what it wants, go where the laid-out roads say to…. You can't get off the track a City lays for you" (120). Its music operates as a similar seducing mechanism. Dorcas, for example, has lived in "a City seeping music that begged and challenged each and every day. ‘Come,’ it said. ‘Come and do wrong’" (67). The City people are directly exposed to the overwhelming temptation of crime and the carnal "appetite" of its seductive music.

Furthermore, the City forces its people to lose their way of life and receive its own way of living, manipulative and unproductive. It is merely the place that, with "fascination, permanent and out of control" (35), makes Joe forget:

little pebbly creeks and apple trees so old they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down or stoop to pick the fruit. He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a good country egg, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, and he doesn't miss it, doesn't look up to see what happened to it or to stars made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps.
(34)

Life in the City is not only economically consumptive to the inhabitants, but also mentally destructive. It is the process of forgetting from where they come. They are seduced to put their place of origin into cognitive oblivion, away from the generative power of nature and under the sway of the consumptive state of the City.

The characters are also vulnerable to the unreliability of the unnamed narrator in Jazz. The narrator is a first-person voice that is omnipresent, but not omniscient. She can travel from place to place and from time to time, but does not know or anticipate all the relevant information for the narration of her characters. In reference to herself, she says, "I watch everything and everyone and try to figure out their plans, their reasonings, long before they do," but she too is "exposed to all sorts of ignorance and criminality" (8).

By saying this, the narrator is now "taking precaution" (8) for both readers and writers. On the one hand, it is a warning for the reader who might not attend to the fallibility of the narrator and/or writers in general, and who, therefore, tends to believe in the absolute credibility of printed matter such as a history book. However, what if it turns out that the history book is written with a mind biased against a particular group, like black women, as has often happened? So, Morrison, in a recent interview, strongly urges:

You had to stay alert to political changes, because you never knew what people were going to do at any moment. So you had to be always on guard and be able to adjust quickly. That ability was a double entendre: at the same time accommodating the grid we felt and the determination not to let life beat us up completely—you know, that instinct for survival plus "joie de vivre" was very important.
("Toni Morrison" 41)

An individual marginalized under the pressure of politics and power relations ought not to be a negligent onlooker of human history but an active agent ready to pinpoint and fight back socio-political injustice inflicted, much as the reader should be critically alert to the probable unreliability of the narrator/author.

On the other hand, the narrator's indication of her possible "ignorance and criminality" is a mindful warning for herself and, perhaps, writers in general. What if the narrator of Jazz does not realize her faults in describing Golden Gray? What if Morrison has merely overlooked the occasional absurdity of the narrator? She herself "believes in the artist's measure of responsibility for engendering cultural coherence and cohesion by retrieving and interpreting the past—what she calls ‘bear[ing] witness’" (Furman 4).² It implies that writers must be careful in transmitting their views of the world, and feel responsible for them for the sake of society.

The characters under consideration all hunger in common for father/mother figures who are crucial to retrieving their identity.³ Joe has eagerly looked for his mother Wild, who hid herself in the forest. Violet remembers her mother Rose Dear, who jumped to death down a well shaft. Dorcas is missing her Mama, who was killed in a fire. Golden Gray is seeking his father Hunter's Hunter. It is intriguing to ask what has separated and kept the parents and children so far apart. Jazz demonstrates that the separations were made by the unfairness of race, gender, and class, not by their will.

Why did Wild get wild and come to live in the woods with "blue-black birds"? Wild's wildness was "all caused by class exploitation and race and/or gender oppression" (Mbalia 625). Raped, impregnated, and left alone without any caring hand, she could not avoid becoming "wild" and isolating herself in the wilderness only with wild birds. Why did Violet lose Rose Dear in early childhood? She had no choice but to commit suicide, because, despite her struggle for life, the suffering was too overwhelming and severe to endure: her husband left the family, and the unjust sheriff took everything, even the chair she was sitting on. And Dorcas' Mama burned to death while the fire engine was kept "polished and poised in another part of town" (38), just as the ambulance did not come for Dorcas "really because it was colored people calling" (210). As for Golden Gray, he was compelled to live "one-armed" without his father's affectionate love for the reason that his mother, Vera Louise Gray, was a daughter of a rich white landlord, while his father was "a black-skinned nigger" (145). Such a complex working of race, gender, and class, along with brutal economic circumstances, has forcefully pushed the characters toward extreme wretchedness.

As examined so far, the turn-of-the century African American characters in Jazz are inevitably exposed and vulnerable to those harsh conditions of the City and its seductive music, the unreliable narrator, and the oppression of class, race, and gender. They are "brought to the edge of endurance and then asked to endure more; sometimes they crack" (Furman 5). In this sense, Morrison no longer leaves the pathetic characters victimized under the control of such hard to endure circumstances, as Hardack points out that she "has often returned to essentially humanistic verities at the close of the polemical novels" (466). Her characters now need to be healed and restored to a joyous stage.⁴

The process of deliverance from their vulnerable state is diversified and dramatized. In Golden Gray's case, the restoration takes place naturally through the narrator's recognition of her fallibility: "What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? … I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am" (160). Then she starts to reconsider Gray:

Now I have to think this through, carefully, even though I may be doomed to another misunderstanding. I have to do it and not break down. Not hating him is not enough; liking, loving him is not useful. I have to alter things. I have to be a shadow who wishes him well, like the smiles of the dead left over from their lives. I want to dream a nice dream for him, and another of him. Lie down next to him, a wrinkle in the sheet, and contemplate his pain and by doing so ease it, diminish it. I want to be the language that wishes him well, speaks his name, wakes him when his eyes need to be open.
(161)

The person of Gray that the narrator describes highly differs from that of the former egoistic Gray. The narrator at this moment sees him as a humane person who shows warm affection to Wild. So, the modified description of the character of Golden Gray is possibly meant to reshape the reader's conception of him.

As for Violet, her restorative transformation begins earlier than Joe's. She brings Dorcas' picture back to her aunt Alice Manfred and, to keep Dorcas from precipitating her jealousy, affirms that "she was ugly. Outside and in" (205). After that resolution, she is now hesitant about whether to take or leave Joe, saying indecisively, "Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want … well, I didn't always … now I want. I want some fat in this life" (110). This hesitation is soon stopped by Alice Manfred, who, with a keen insight and sense of reality, advises Violet, "Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it" (110). Violet's anxiety about life is gradually relieved through a series of conversations with the motherly woman Alice. Reconciliation and sisterhood thus come to sprout between Violet and Alice, who otherwise might have had a lifelong feud due to Dorcas' death.

In Joe's case, it takes a long time to resume a sense of reality on account of his persistent attachment to Dorcas. Ironically enough, however, Dorcas plays the restorative role through her friend Felice. In other words, not until Felice delivers her friend's last words does Joe show a positive change in his relationship with his wife. Dorcas says right before her death, "There's only one apple…. Just one. Tell Joe" (213), just as her aunt addresses to Violet, "you got just one" (110). He consequently realizes that his only apple should be his wife Violet.

Dorcas' dying words, nevertheless, do not imply that she does not love Joe. The opposite case can be inferred from Felice's comment given to Joe. "See? You were the last thing on her mind…. She let herself die" (213). Despite her usual self-serving egotism, Dorcas, at the last moment of life, realizes the true meaning of love and, thereby, chooses to sacrifice herself for the sake of Joe. Eusebio L. Rodrigues comments on this point: "Her love is so generous and self-sacrificial that she allows herself to bleed to death rather than reveal his name for the police to find him" (747). This sacrificial love is an important clue to understanding "the mystery of love" (5). Happiness and delightful moments have now returned to the house of Joe and Violet, which was gloomy, enough to enjoy music: "Mr. Trace moved his head to the rhythm and his wife snapped her fingers in time. She did a little step in front of him and he smiled. By and by they were dancing" (214).

By presenting the revitalizing moments with Felice, Joe, and Violet together at the dinner table toward the end of the novel, Jazz takes on a mystic and dramatic method by appropriating the Miltonic, Christian concept of the felix culpa (happy fault).⁵ In brief, the term signifies that even though Adam and Eve, by taking of the "apple of good and evil," are cast out of Eden, the fault in turn brings out the great happiness that "a fairer Paradise is found now" (Milton, Paradise Regained 44.613) through the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus. Felice, as her name implies "happiness," assumes a similar, restorative role in Jazz.

Concerning the naming of the characters, Morrison says, "I'm trying to reflect the milieu. At least I use the names that black people are willing to accept for themselves" ("Interview" 460). If the name Felice is used for a certain ramification and Joe's remark—"Felice. They named you right. Remember that" (215)—takes credit, Felice obviously serves as the mediator figure, an agent who restores Joe and Violet's love and merriment that have been broken on account of their past culpability. Also, the narrator of Jazz mysteriously suggests that Felice is "another true-as-life Dorcas" (197), and similarly says, "I saw the three of them, Felice, Joe and Violet, and they looked to me like a mirror image of Dorcas, Joe and Violet" (221). Felice is depicted as an incarnate Dorcas in the narrative of Jazz. ⁶ It might imply that Felice could be regarded as a transformed Dorcas, who, after a redemptive death, helps Joe and Violet to find their lost love and happiness.

Jazz contains Morrison's diagnosis of the extraordinary behaviors of the ordinary people Joe, Violet, Dorcas, and Golden Gray, and, at the same time, avails her restorative treatment of them with an emphasis on sacrificial love. In spite of their intrinsic goodness, they commit bizarre acts such as injury and murder, for they have been involuntarily exposed to the misleading circumstances of the City and its music, the unreliability of the narrator, and the oppressive conditions of class, race, and gender. So, "What turned out different was who shot whom" (6). Nobody shot anybody. Rather, they were shot by harsh circumstances and conditions. The treatment for curing the victimized and wounded characters is prescribed to be forgiveness and love between each other. In addition, Morrison admonishes her people to be wide awake and careful not to be induced or seduced by those harmful circumstances. As the griot cautions—"When Violet isn't paying attention she stumbles onto these cracks" (23)—her people ought to be attentive and, if needed, rebellious to manipulative narrator/authors and seductive cities as well as to the oppressive exploitation and based on class, race, and gender prejudices. "Wake up" (110).

Notes

1. See Nellie Y. McKay, "Interview with Toni Morrison," Contemporary Literature 24 (1983): 413-429. Rpt in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), 405.

2. See Thomas LcClair, " ‘The Language Must Not Sweat’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison," New Republic 184 (21 March 1981): 26.

3. Michelle C. Loris points out, from the perspective of child psychology, that the characters' loss of their mother and/or father in childhood plays a seminal role in Jazz. She indicates that their early loss of parental love, as a result of gender and race-related adversity, is closely related to Joe's search for Dorcas as his oedipal mother figure and Dorcas' positive reaction to Joe as her fantasized father replacement (56).

4. Similarly, Loris sees Jazz as a process in which the characters (Joe, Violet, and Dorcas, in this case) regain their True Selves from the past False Selves (62).

5. On the concept of the felix culpa and its literary application to John Milton's Paradise Lost, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall" in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York: George Braziller, 1995), 277-295.

6. Tabitha, whose Greek name was Dorcas, was a woman who spent her life making robes and other clothing for the poor. Later, she experienced a revival of life. When she became sick and died, her family called for Peter, since he stayed near her town of Joppa. Then a miraculous event happened: "Turning toward the dead woman, he said, ‘Tabitha, get up.’ She opened her eyes, and seeing Peter she sat up" (Acts 9:32).

Works Cited

Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison's Fiction. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1996.

Hardack, Richard. "‘A Music Seeking Its Words’: Double-Timing and Double-Consciousness in Toni Morrison's Jazz." Callaloo 18 (1995): 451-471.

Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Loris, Michelle C. "Self and Mutuality: Romantic Love, Desire, Race, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Jazz." Sacred Heart University Review 14.1-2 (1993-1994): 53-62.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. "Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz." Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): 623-646.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Ed. Christopher Ricks. New York: Signet, 1968.

Morrison, Toni. "Interview with Toni Morrison." The Massachusetts Review 36 (1995): 455-473.

———. Jazz. New York: Plume, 1993.

———. "Toni Morrison." Interview. Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women 10.2 (1995): 40-43.

Rodrigues, Eusebio L. "Experiencing Jazz." Modern Fiction Studies 39 (1993): 733-754.

James Mayo (essay date summer 2002)

SOURCE: Mayo, James. "Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Explicator 60, no. 4 (summer 2002): 231-34.

[In the essay that follows, Mayo suggests that Claudia, the narrator of The Bluest Eye, may have been a victim of sexual assault.]

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye presents readers with a variety of thematic concerns, including dealing with or repressing guilt, shame, and violence; coming to terms with society's image of ideal beauty (both feminine and masculine); racial self-loathing; and, in a narrative sense, dealing with memories of the past that correspond to those themes. Claudia, the novel's narrator, reflects on one summer of her childhood, relating to readers her sense of shame and guilt over the incestuous rape of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Although most criticism of the novel focuses on Pecola's life, as filtered through Claudia's memory-narrative, Morrison gives readers a subtle clue that Claudia herself is a victim of rape and has repressed the memory. Readers should thus consider Claudia's sense of guilt over the death of Pecola's child in a different light.

After her rape, Pecola eventually makes her way to Soaphead Church, a West Indian mystic/prophet. Angry at God for ignoring the wishes of this small, "pitifully unattractive" child (173), anger that he directly expresses in a letter to God. Soaphead Church grants Pecola's wish, giving her the blue eyes she longs for, even though "[n]o one else will see her blue eyes" (182). Soaphead Church is a self-admitted child molester, a man abandoned by his wife years before his arrival in Lorain and his encounter with Pecola. Morrison describes Church as a man who "[a]ll his life had a fondness for things" (165). At some point, perhaps after his wife deserts him, Church's "attentions […] gradually settled on those humans whose bodies were least offensive—children" (166), specifically the bodies of "little girls," whom he finds "usually manageable and frequently seductive" (166).

The hints that Morrison gives readers that Claudia may in fact be one of the "little girls" that Church finds attractive appear in Church's letter to God and in the beginning of the following chapter (the first chapter of the "Summer" section). Church writes in his letter to God. "I couldn't […] keep my hands, my mouth, off them. Salt-sweet. Like not quite ripe strawberries covered with the light salt sweat of running days and hopping, skipping, jumping hours" (179). In the following chapter, as the narrative voice again becomes Claudia's, the sexual symbol of the strawberries is revisited. The chapter begins with Claudia's reminiscing about summer, and she relates that she only has "to break into the tightness of a strawberry" (187) to see summer. Morrison then mixes the symbol to further suggest that Claudia, like many other young girls in Lorain, was a victim of Soaphead Church's pedophilia, as Claudia links strawberries and summer to "dust and lowering skies" (187). Claudia explains that, for her, summer is "a season of storms. The parched days and sticky nights are undistinguished in my mind, but the storms, the violent sudden storms, both frightened and quenched me" (187). The language here is clear: "strawberry," "tightness," and "quenched" offer sexual imagery, whereas "violent," "sudden," "storms," and "frightened" suggest the violence and trauma that a victim of pedophilia would experience.

Morrison also gives readers a subtle clue as to how Claudia may have fallen victim to Soaphead Church. Church, in his confessional, yet blasphemous, letter to God, describes his method of luring the girls into his lair: "I gave them mints, money, and they'd eat ice cream with their legs open while I played with them. It was like a party" (181). Throughout the novel Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola, as would any child growing up poor, long for candy and ice cream. Mr. Henry, who boards with Claudia's family, uses the promise of candy and ice cream as an enticement to keep the girls from telling their parents that he has brought the "whores" into the home while the family is away, thus establishing the relationship between material gifts and sex. Claudia also relates to readers that she and her sister sold seeds throughout the summer of Pecola's pregnancy, ignoring their mother's advice to go only to the homes of people they knew and going, instead, from door to door (188). Again, the sexual reference in the language ("seeds") is clear, and Claudia and Frieda could have, like Pecola, found their way to the door of Soaphead Church.

All of this may lead readers to question why, if she or her sister had indeed been raped by Soaphead Church, Claudia does not reveal that fact in the course of her narration. Two explanations are possible. Claudia, after describing the relationship between strawberries and summer, goes on to say in the same paragraph that her "memory is uncertain" (187). Claudia remembers a story her mother told her of a tornado that struck Lorain in 1929. Over the years. Claudia's and her mother's separate stories have blended, and she states, "I mix up her summer with my own" (187). Naturally, this could be offered as an explanation for Claudia's failure to mention her own rape. Perhaps Claudia has chosen not to remember or accept her ordeal, as Pecola does after she "receives" blue eyes. As Pecola descends into insanity, she has completely repressed the memory of her own rape, and Claudia could have done the same.

Another possibility concerning the omission points to a theme of the novel that many critics have noted, the keeping of secrets. Pecola keeps the secret of her rape: Pecola's mother does not make public the fact that her daughter was raped by her own father; Pecola's mother also chooses not to make public the fact that her husband beats her. J. Brooks Bouson argues that Morrison protects readers from the "traumatic, shame-laden subject matter of her novel" by making them part of the conspiracy, by "invoking the ‘back fence’ world of ‘illicit gossip’" (Bouson 26). "Conspiracy" implies that the characters, indeed the victims, are committed to keeping the traumatic events of their lives secret, only revealing them in an intimate, trusting manner with the reader. The fact that they would want to keep such traumatic events secret only makes sense. The self-loathing they feel could be made worse if their secrets were revealed.

Claudia expresses the feelings of guilt that she and her sister experience over the death of Pecola's child and Pecola's insanity. Claudia feels that the fact that the seeds they planted do not grow somehow implicates her in the death of the child. She and her sister, like the other members of the community, do not do enough to save Pecola, but perhaps Claudia's feelings should be viewed in a different light. It is possible that, as a victim of rape herself, Claudia shares in Pecola's trauma and shame in a more direct manner.

Works Cited

Bouson, J. Brooks, Quiet as It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994.

Monika M. Elbert (essay date 2003)

SOURCE: Elbert, Monika M. "Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987): Maternal Possibilities, Sisterly Bonding." In Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender, edited by Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber, pp. 38-40. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003.

[In the essay below, Elbert underscores the central role of strong women in Beloved.]

Although published in 1987, Toni Morrison's most widely acclaimed and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved may just as well have been written in the nineteenth century. A modern-day rendition of the nineteenth-century genre of the slave narrative, it is a fictional account based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave. Escaped slaves were never safe in the United States, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, a law which permitted slave masters to pursue runaway slaves across state lines. It would be foolhardy to discuss gender roles in this novel without taking into account the "peculiar institution" (as slavery was called in the nineteenth century) of slavery as the framework. It is helpful to juxtapose Morrison's novel with Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) and Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), although Morrison's account shows a more gender-balanced attitude toward the suffering of both male and female slaves. Morrison is concerned with the suffering inflicted upon both sexes; the oppression or suffering under slavery has no gender preference. The injury to slave men and fathers, like Paul D. or Sethe's husband Halle, is just as egregious as the sacrilege to slave mothers and daughters, like Beloved, the one daughter Sethe manages to murder when Schoolteacher comes to retrieve the escaped mother and children.

Morrison's Beloved falls in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852): They both explore maternal possibilities that will effect radical social change. Stowe's readers were the sympathetic Northern mothers, who would react emotionally to the violence done to family life under slavery and then use their influence over their husbands to change the system. Morrison points to the influence of the mothers and grandmothers, the guardians of the community, to exorcise "124" of its ghost. Both authors know that the past needs to be exorcised or healed for there to be a future or for there to be a reconciliation of the sexes (in the case of Beloved through a happy marriage between Sethe and Paul D.). The haunted "124" Bluestone Road needs to be put in order—on both a familial and a national level—for Sethe to be reborn and have another chance at finding peace. Tellingly, Beloved opens with the ghosts of the past still haunting "124" even though it is 1873, well into Reconstruction and 18 years after Sethe's murder of Beloved.

The quintessentially strong Morrison female protagonist, Sethe withstands the atrocities to herself and to her children and still survives. Spurred on by Schoolteacher's Nephews' desecration of her maternal milk, Sethe is resolved to see that her children find safety and freedom. At the end of the narrative, all the injured mothers, alive and dead, exorcise the ghost of Beloved, representative of all lost children, and come to terms with any sense of guilt for their aborted motherhood by uniting in spiritual communion and song, the words of which resist any white patriarchal framework, represented by the "Word." Sethe and the community are cured by the singing women: "the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words…. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash" (261).

Sethe's personal odyssey involves a rediscovery of the community and of her own power. Initially, she can only identify herself in her maternal role; she proclaims that her children are her "own best thing." Paul D. ("a singing male"), the healing male energy, teaches her about her value as an individual and guides her toward autonomy, as he asserts, "You your best thing, Sethe." But Sethe, too, is able to heal Paul D. through her love, "Only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers" (273). Sethe recovers from the victim role of wounded mother and daughter through Paul D.'s love. In fact, Sethe has learned that, as Paul D. claims, her maternal love is "too thick" and that she needs to replace that with self-love and self-respect. The middle of the text, comprising a dialogue between Sethe, Beloved, and Denver, shows the real danger of merging identities, as it ends with a cacophonous and frenzied pitch (so different from the final cleansing tone of the community), "Beloved / You are my sister / You are my daughter / You are my face; you are me" (216). This attitude shows both Sethe's narcissism and her vulnerability; after all, the devouring demon child returned from the dead also tries to possess Sethe.

Morrison's canon favors women who find emotional equilibrium, and even before Sethe reaches this point, there are two positive female role models: Baby Suggs and Sethe's last child, Denver. Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law, as a wise woman preacher, provides the community with food for the soul, until the terrible day upon which Beloved is killed. She understands the value of self-love and communal nurturance, and her legacy is passed down to Denver. The granddaughter Denver knows about the dangerous boundaries formed by overidentification as well as the limitations of sisterhood. When Beloved threatens to destroy both her mother and herself, Denver reaches out to the community and works outside "124" to find self-sustenance and to provide for her family. Fully integrated in the neighborhood, Denver begins to bring the healing process home to her mother. The key to happiness for the Morrison protagonist, regardless of one's gender, is a spiritual celebration of oneself, which then makes possible acts of kindness and love to one's family and one's larger community. The beloved is finally oneself.

Students might want to discuss what makes the quintessential Morrison female protagonist so strong. Self-sustaining women with great fortitude, wisdom, and self-respect are revered in the Morrison canon, and she draws much of her inspiration from strong women she has known in her own life. Celebrating generations of strong, capable women in her family, Morrison proclaims, "they believed in their dignity. They believed they were people of value, and they had to pass that on" (Moyers 59). Even though the novel's ending ironically belies the fact, Beloved, too, is a story to pass on—as a triumph of the human spirit, students should try to answer the riddle of why the story is so important to pass on, what that means in terms of the American awareness of the past, or in terms of a characteristic historical amnesia among Americans.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987.

———. Interview. "Toni Morrison, Novelist." With Bill Moyers. Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas, II, Public Opinions from Private Citizens. Ed. Andie Tucher. New York: Doubleday, 1990, 54-63.