The novels of Toni Morrison : A study of Race, Gender and Class

Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931. She was christened chole Anthony Wofford. She grew up in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children of George Wofford, a ship yard welder, and his wife Ramah Willis Wofford. After attending Lorain High School she went to Howard university, where she majored in English and minored in classics. After earning an M.A. at Cornell in 1955 Morrison taught for two years at Texas Southern University and then in 1957 took a teaching position at Howard. Here she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. In 1964 she divorced Morrison and returned with her two sons to Lorain, a year and a half later she became an editor for a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse. By 1970 she had moved to an editorial position at Random House in New York, where she eventually become a senior editor early. In the 70s she began to write a series of articles, most of which appeared in the New York Times Book Review. She taught Afro – American Literature and creative writing at the state University of New York. Toni Morrison began to write when she returned to Howard in 1957, and since then she has published several novels in which the problems of Black Women in the north are a major theme. Her novels are The Bluest Eye (1975), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997).

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 the 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 deterioration. 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, because, 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 comments 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 story 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 powerful 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 filled 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 to be black.”

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 outside 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 inhabit 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 just 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 novels. 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 Virginia and the skeletons in his ‘parents’ merciless marriage and prompted by his family closet. But lore steadily leads and yields to more interesting truth, in the form of persons, who correct his myopic view. He discovers his dead grandmother, Sing, so called because she was half Indian, Singing Bird, but also the daughter of a white Virginian named Byrd. And he discovers his great grandfather, Soloman, who once proudly flew the coop of slavery and about whom the country black kids still sing: ‘O Solomon don’t leave me’. Song and flight make life endurable and beautiful in Morrison’s world. Having discovered those two ancestors, Milkman forgets the mundane taking his best friend’s advice to heart: “(If you) wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weights you down”. The murderous conflict that had developed between the two (Guitar is a consummate study of an extremist racial approach toward which the novel displays both sympathy and disgust) is ended: ‘For now (Milkman) knew what Shalimar knew: If surrendered to the air, you could ride it’.

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 back 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 keep 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 centerpieces 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 Macon Dead son, and both had close and supportive posthumous communication with their fathers. (Song of Solomon, p-139).

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 contemporary 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 class bound. 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 for 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 Paris, Jadine will possible marry a wealthy Parisian, repeating the pattern of some of her fore-mother, except that they were forced by circumstances to enter the more dominant race and class through their use of sexuality. As independent as she might see, then, her need for material well-being makes her dependent on the class of the wealthy and powerful. Son, on the other hand, simply leaves this world for another, affecting nothing for any one.

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. Little 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,’ Morrison'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.

The detail Morrison provides here about plantation existence for slaves, chain gang existence for black convicts, and the terrors of the runaway’s passage to freedom is authentic. Beloved is based on the true story of Margaret, a fugitive from Kentucky who attempted to kill her children rather than have them enslaved when they were all captured in Ohio in 1850. She, like Beloved’s Shethe succeeded in killing only one. Morrison’s motive in this novel is not only to unveil that ‘peculiar phase of slavery’ which ‘has generally been kept veiled.’ i.e. the tale of sexual abuse, but also to smolder at the inequities’ that black woman face. In order to depict the historical reality of the period Morrison focuses on the 1860s and 1870s and how an Afro – American heritage was maintained during the period of dramatic social changes before and after the civil war. Morrison carefully pinpoints temporal and historical markers. In the beginning of chapter one, the mention of the specific year 1873 and places such as Cincinnati and Ohio ground Beloved within the political and geographical realities of history and the description of a particular slave family, Baby Sugg’s family, take the story back to the pre-Civil War period.

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 luminal 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 eighteen 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 womanish 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 New York during the 1920s, a decade itself known as the Jazz Age. Through a meticulous use of Jazz idiom, Morrison relates the story of Joe Trace and his wife Violet, both of whom had, leaving behind in Virginia all the traumas of their past live, migrated to the city in 1906. The black-drop of the action is New York (the ‘city’) of 1926 “when all the wars are over and there never will be another ……” Amidst this post – war euphoria, the black community receives a jolt when Joe Trace kill his paramour, an eighteen-year old creamy – complexioned girl named Dorcas. While Joe, Violet and Dorcas are the main characters, there are others, equally significant to the story - Mlvonne, Joe’s neighbour; Rose Dear, Violet’s mother; True Belle, her grand-mother and Foster, mother of Golden Gray, Alice Manfred, Dorca’s aunt, Acton, her boyfriend, and Felice, her girl friend. Jazz is an art form in a combination of diverse elements of orchestral and vocal music as well as dance. Fused into its metrix are blues, march rag, spirituals and hymns. The orchestral part mostly comprises saxophone, piano, clarinet, guitar, brass, drums etc. The music is a combination of melody, rhythm and harmony, with a basic theme or composition which provides for a large scope of improvisation. Morrison applies these aspects to the requirements of her novel so that the reader while going through it, may have an experience of watching and listening to a jazz performance. First of all we have the omniscient narrator who introduces the basic theme or composition – the love affair of Joe and Dorcas that comes to a shocking end when Joe shoots Dorcas dead at a dance party because she has left him for Acton. At the time Joe meets Dorcas, he has been living in a bleak household where his wife sleeps with a doll under her pillow and talks only to her parrot that chirps ‘I love you’. Golden Gray was born of an unmarried white mother and a black father and the mother had to go into hiding to give birth to the boy with golden hair and gray eyes. The mother never told the identity of his father and gave a proper bringing up. The eighteen – year boy goes in search of his father and while waiting at a place that turns out to be his father’s house, he looks forward to meeting him. The sudden possibility of meeting his father makes him intensely sad. He imagines himself as having remained a one armed man all these years: Only now……. that I know have a father, do I feel his absence : the place where he should have been and was not. Before I thought every one was one armed like me. Now I feel the surgery. The crunch of bone when is surrendered, the sliced flesh and the tubes of blood out through shocking the blood run and disturbing the nerves. They dangle and writhe. Singing pain. Waking me with the sound of itself thrumming when I sleep so deeply it strangles my dreams away let the dangle and the writhe see what it is missing; let the pain sing to the dirt I am not going to be healed or to find the arm that was removed from me. I am going to freshen the pain, point it, so we both know what it is for (Jazz page 458.)

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, Paradise, is divided in eight chapters and each chapter bears a women’s name. all these experience made Toni Morrison a great novelist and whatever she has written is really her remarkable contribution to both English fiction and human society. She wanted to bring a dynamic change in the lives of black people through her novels. That is why, we are face to face with the pains and sufferings, torture and humiliation of the black people in her novels. The purpose was to make the people aware of the double standard adopted by the society of her age and undoubtedly she succeeded in this regard. The world recognized and appreciated her writings and thus she did not become only one of the greatest novelists in English but also the winner of Nobel Prize for literature in 1993

REFERENCES
1. Morrison, Toni. 1970. The Bluest Eye. New York : Washington Square Press.
2. Morrison, Toni. 1974 Sula, New York. Alfred A Knopf.
3. Morrison, Toni. 1977. Song of Solomon. New York : Alfared A Knopf.
4. Morrison, Toni. 1981 Tar Baby. New York : Alfred A Knopf.
5. Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York : Alfred A. Knopf.
6. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Jazz. New York : Alfred A. Knopf.
7. Morrison, Toni. 1997. Paradise. New York : Alfred A. Knopf.

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Contributed By:  Dr. Ram Sharma, Lecturer in English, Janta Vedic College MEERUT, U.P. dr.ram_sharma@yahoo.co.in

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