Female elements in Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Female Elements in "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison

Focus on Women

Critical Analysis

Reluctance to Support the Black Struggle

In Sula, Ajax would like to fly, and in Morrison highly acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) the metaphor of flight takes center stage. Most critics judged the novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, to be her most ambitious work, longer and more complex than the two earlier novels. One important difference is her switch to a male protagonist. In addition, Song has a number of settings, ranging from Michigan to the South and the roots of the characters. Morrison has said that in books about males, one must have a more expansive setting, since women have lived out their lives in houses, whereas men have had a greater freedom to roam. This expansive setting has given Song a more sprawling character (Watkins, pg. 50).

Focus on Women

As many critics have stated, despite its male protagonist, women are really the focus of Song; and again Morrison says much about their strengths and weaknesses, their sufferings and triumphs, and their relations with black men. As in her earlier novels, in Song Morrison shows the deep conflict between the pain of black men and what that pain causes them to do to their women. She also shows how too much mothering can "emasculate" both men and women, how women are the carriers of the culture in the black community, and how women's insights can lead men to a deeper understanding of themselves, for it is through his Aunt Pilate that Milkman achieves the goals of his quest.

Song is the bildungsroman of Macon (Milkman) Dead, Jr., a young, middle-class black raised in a northern city in a cold and sterile home. Milkman has no consciousness of his roots in black culture, his father, a successful businessman, being ashamed of his own humble past. Macon, Sr., is a bitter man who hates his only sister, despises the poor blacks he exploits, and struggles to accumulate as many bourgeois trappings as he can, one being his light-skinned wife, Ruth, the daughter of the only black doctor in town. Macon represents patriarchal values to an extreme. He treats his wife and daughters with contempt (they are women) and is especially contemptuous of Ruth because he suspects that she had incestuous relations with her father. Raising Milkman to take over the family business one day, Macon has given him very little sense of self; Milkman wants nice things and enjoys being an important man in the black community, but he hates the power his father has over him. Thus the story has strong oedipal resonances.

Literature Review

The plot of Song concerns Milkman's figurative and literal journey to the land of his ancestors in order to discover who he is. The journey involves all the aspects of the typical Western quest: physical danger and pain; rebirth (journeys into and out of caves and forests); encounters with strange, wise people, male and female, who help him on his way; beautiful women who offer love and advice; and fights with men who then become comrades. Milkman's quest ostensibly begins in a desire to locate the family fortune, some bags of gold that his father and aunt had discovered in a cave as children; the "gold" he eventually finds is his real family name (Solomon or Shalimar) and the knowledge that his great-grandfather was an African chief who flew away from slavery, back to Africa. In the process of the search he learns that he, too, can "fly": "If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it" (Song of Solomon, 337). Through knowledge of self and one's roots, through acknowledgment of one's bonds with others, and through pain and self-examination, one can achieve spiritual transcendence and rise to new heights of involvement in the great business of life (Marilyn Atlas). According to Barbara Rigney, one must enter the "wild zone," beyond the constraints of the dominant culture and consciousness, the zone that women find easier to inhabit than do men.

Milkman's (his name derives from his prolonged nursing by Ruth) most important guide and the most important character in Song is his Aunt Pilate. Morrison has said that black novels should have an ancestor, "timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective" (BWW 344). As the ancestor in Song, Pilate shows Milkman how to love and forgive the value of a natural life, the unimportance of material possessions, and the importance of learning one's identity. Even though she has no navel, implying her isolation from others, and thus has been rejected throughout her life, Pilate has a firm sense of self, carrying it symbolically on a piece of paper in a little metal box made into an earring. She has never let her hardships, which include losing several lovers, being ostracized many times by various black communities, and being hated by her own brother, defeat her (RO 136). She dies by a bullet meant for Milkman on the spot where Solomon flew away (ironically, a woman named for the Christ killer gives her life for another), and as she dies, she tells him, "I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all. If I'd a knowed more, I would a loved more" (336).

This lesson of universal love is not lost on Milkman, who realizes that "without leaving the ground" Pilate could always fly. It is through love that we give life meaning, love that comes through self-knowledge and acknowledgment of our duties to others. It could be argued that this is an advance on the moral vision we saw in Sula. Sula's flight destroys, while Pilate's enriches. In Song there is no ambiguity about the value of living in harmony and consideration for others.

Critical Analysis

Song of Solomon is equally Pilate's bildungsroman (RO, 136). Morrison shows us Pilate as a woman in harmony with her natural environment; she scorns material possessions and cares little about her personal appearance, refusing to wear shoes, and makes wine for a living. Though what she does is illegal, she refuses to allow the usual activities of a wine house (prostitution) to take place on her property. As a typical Morrison pariah, Pilate cannot be part of the community, and so she invents a lifestyle for herself, creating a home for her daughter, Reba, and granddaughter, Hagar, that is a refuge, a place of warmth and comfort that contrasts with the sterile environment of Milkman's house. In an early scene of the novel we see Macon Dead standing outside his sister's home, irresistibly drawn to its enveloping warmth:

They were singing some melody that Pilate was leading. A phrase that the other two were taking up and building on. Her powerful contralto, Reba's piercing soprano in counterpoint, and the soft voice of the girl Hagar... pulled him like a carpet tack under the influence of a magnet. Treading as lightly as he could, he crept up to the side window where the candlelight flickered lowest and peeped in. Reba was cutting her toenails with a kitchen knife or a switchblade, her long neck bent almost to her knees. The girl Hagar was braiding her hair, while Pilate, whose face he could not see because her back was to the window, was stirring something in a pot (Marianne, 177).

Ironically, Macon has forbidden Milkman to enter Pilate's house, but he himself cannot keep away. As Rigney says, this is the nurturant, warm "preoedipal maternal space" that all Morrison characters, male and female, would love to enter; it contrasts with the masculine world of Macon's business, in which he easily evicts a poor family.

Song could be seen as incorporating cultural feminist values. Stephanie Demetrakopulos believes that Milkman finds himself through the "feminine principle" and women themselves. Men like Macon lose their souls in their search for wealth and power, and can find them only by surrender to the feminine within (Demetrakopulos NDS 94). Similarly, Guitar Bains, Milkman's best friend, cuts himself off from the world of women and children by joining the radical black organization Seven Days, a group dedicated to returning white violence with black violence. Significantly, it is Guitar's bullet, meant for Milkman, whom he believes has betrayed the black cause, that slays Pilate. However attractive this interpretation is, though, it should not be construed as feminist separatism. Just as men are damaged by cutting themselves off from the softer parts within themselves, so are women damaged when cut off from the world of men.

For example, Pilate's daughter and granddaughter obviously have been hurt by being raised with no significant males in their lives. Reba knows little about men and is weak and floating, still dependent on her mother in her fifties. Though Morrison suggests Reba may be a little slow-witted, she also tells us that having no father was not good for Reba. In the same way, the spoiled Hagar knows nothing about men, cannot take care of herself, and hopes to find a "Prince Charming" (BWW 344). Her society tells her she needs one, and when Milkman enters her life, she invests her entire personality in him. When he leaves her, Hagar lacks the self she needs to survive. Pathetically, she tries to create a self that Milkman will want by buying makeup and clothes, turning her beautiful African hair a horrible orange (Milkman has been dating light-skinned redheads), and generally abasing herself.

Morrison certainly deviates from a sterotypical feminist perspective when she criticizes Hagar's possessiveness as well as Milkman's cruelty. When Hagar and Ruth argue over Milkman, Pilate points out that a man is not a house to be owned. Finally, when Hagar is trying to kill Milkman (not able to possess him, she does not know what else to do), Guitar tells her how wrong she is to base her value on the possession of a man. How can Milkman love her if she is nobody without him? Guitar's speech is ironic, since earlier he has told Milkman that he will defend black women from white men because they are his; nevertheless, Guitar is right in this instance. Morrison acknowledges that although men can be cruel to women, women contribute to the situation by being overly possessive and lacking in self-esteem. A white feminist, however, would probably argue that women are possessive because society has told them they are nothing without men, and it is hard for people with little self-esteem to resist the pressures of their culture.

In her first two novels Morrison was critical of black middle-class women who reject their blackness, seeming to show little sympathy with them. However, Song of Solomon presents quite a change in its treatment of Ruth and her daughters, Magdelene and Corinthians. Ruth has been victimized first by her family and then by her husband. Losing her mother at a young age and having no friends, she fastened all her love on her grasping, haughty father. Starved for love, she developed incestuous feelings for him and, according to Macon, was caught in bed with her just dead father, sucking on his fingers.

In punishment Macon withholds sexual contact from his wife for the rest of their marriage, except for a brief interlude when, with the help of a magic potion of Pilate's, Ruth manages to have intercourse with Macon one more time (Joseph, 195). She had hoped Milkman would restore her to Macon's affections, but since Macon had never really loved her anyway (he married her for the prestige of possessing her), she is unsuccessful. In frustration Ruth nurses Milkman long past the time for weaning, this being the only physical contact she has with anyone. According to Ruth, she never was in bed with her father, and had only kissed his hands on his deathbed. Thus, all these years Macon has been deluding himself about incest that existed in thought only. Terry Otten suggests that the relationship was actually one of "cold indifference" on the part of the father, Ruth developing a sick attachment to him because she led such as empty life (Song of Solomon 337).

This sad woman -- she calls herself "small because she was pressed small" (Song of Solomon 124) -- is not really an attractive character, being weak, overly concerned with propriety, regarding her son as a diversion, and having no interest in her daughters because they are female. Nonetheless, Morrison does engage our sympathy by explaining the forces that created Ruth. Belatedly, near the end of his quest, Milkman develops sympathy for his mother's barren life:

If it were possible for somebody to force him to live that way [celibate], to tell him "You may walk and live among women, you may even lust after them, but you will not make love for the next twenty years," how would he feel?... What might she have been like if her husband had loved her? (Song of Solomon 300)

Morrison creates equally sympathetic characters in Milkman's sisters, showing, as Anne Mickelson asserts, a growth in her feminist consciousness (RO 145-146). Magdalene (Lena) and Corinthians (Cory) are raised in a home where all the parental energy is devoted to the pampered son. As girls, they have no function other than to be paraded every Sunday in their best clothes, to sit at home and make roses out of red velvet, and to wait on their brother. Both college educated to be the wives of professional men, Lena and Cory find themselves middle-aged spinsters, no black men in the community wanting highly educated wives. When Lena finds out that Milkman has told their father about Cory's romance with Henry Porter, she comes into her own with a speech to Milkman that rings out as the impassioned cry of every woman supplanted by a man:

Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; ... You have yet to wash your own underwear, spread a bed, wipe the ring from your tub, or move a fleck of your dirt from one place to another. And to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired, or sad, or wanted a cup of coffee. ... Where do you get the right to decide our lives? I'll tell you where. From that hog's gut that hangs down between your legs. (Song of Solomon 215)

Though we do not find out what happens to Lena, from subsequent events we assume that relations between Milkman and his sisters will change. Stephanie Demetrakopoulos states, and I agree, that there are few women who do not respond with an inner "yes!" To this diatribe (Demetrakopoulos NDS 95).

Reluctance to Support the Black Struggle

I have been arguing here that Morrison expresses ambivalence and conflict in her desire to support the black struggle and in her interest and sympathy for women's experience. This tension is most obviously shown in the central metaphor of Song -- flying. A black man, one of the Seven Days, tries to fly at the beginning of the novel and fails. Milkman discovers that his greatgrandfather flew back to Africa, and the ending of the novel finds him soaring, too, toward the arms of his "brother" Guitar. To realize themselves, to achieve individuation, black men must fly. Morrison has said she admires that aspect of black male culture that refuses to be tied down, to knuckle under to a dull, constrained life. While working on Song she said: "... black men travel, they split, they get on trains, they walk, they move.... it's a part of black life, a positive, majestic thing." Though she acknowledges that when fathers fly, children are hurt -- girls as well as boys -- they also remember their fathers, "half in glory and half in accusation." In Song the men leave home, and the children remember it, sing about it, and mythologize it (Watkins 50).