Toni Morrison: History, Memory, and Meaning in Her Novels

Introduction: Morrison as Redemptive Scribe

What meanings can be attributed to the literary accomplishments of American author Toni Morrison? How does Morrison use history to portray her stories and characters? How did she become known as one of the premier African-American authors in America? This paper delves into those questions and others relevant to the study of Morrison's writing.

Critic Marilyn Sanders Mobley — in her book Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative — writes that Morrison is a "redemptive scribe" (Mobley, 1991, p. 10). One of Morrison's missions is to "correct a cultural misimpression," Mobley explains. She references Morrison's own account of the need for a writer to correct misimpressions about African-Americans: "Critics generally don't associate black people with ideas. They see marginal people…" and assume that when they read about African-Americans it will be "…just another story about black folks" (Mobley, 10).

Morrison admits to resenting this cultural stereotype, saying, "We are people, not aliens. We live, we love and we die" (Mobley, 10). The critic Mobley sees Morrison's work as providing a defense for the "cultural integrity of her people," but notes that it goes deeper than mere "didactic intention." What Morrison really wants to accomplish through her brilliant narratives is "cultural transformation" — in three distinct ways.

The first way is to "fill the cultural void" that exists due to history's transitions away from traditional black cultural activities. For example, the "oral tradition" of storytelling that African-Americans once participated in is now largely lost, even though this tradition helped black communities sustain "…a sense of community" that enriched their lives (Mobley, 11). Morrison sees this gap in the culture of her people and uses her writing to fill it.

Secondly, Mobley explains that Morrison endows "commonplace people, places, and stories" with the "mythic grandeur and significance of archetypal narrative and ritual," which rescues "neglected literary material" as well as the cultural values on which that material is based (Mobley, 11). What Mobley means by "mythic grandeur" is that myth helps orient the audience between the natural world and the "world of possibility" (12).

The third way in which Morrison attempts to fill the cultural void is by celebrating the past — using characters and themes as a "dynamic vehicle for preserving, transmitting, and reshaping the culture" (Mobley, 12). By creating stories that bring the previous values and traditions of black communities to life, she preserves history while simultaneously entertaining and educating readers.

Author Stelamaris Coser extends Mobley's analysis, emphasizing Morrison's ability to transcend so-called "black" or "feminist" literary categories and instead "…recapture and reorganize the fragments of collective history into a new type of narrative" (Coser, 1994, p. 16). The way in which Morrison uses creative "folk rituals" — helping to popularize the roots of contemporary African-American culture — is highly effective and entirely original (Coser, 16). Moreover, Morrison juxtaposes the "starkest representations of racial, sexual, economic, and cultural abuse" alongside her apt use of myth and imagination in order to "counter" the facts left by the "colonizer of yesterday" — namely, slavery (Coser, 16).

Morrison would certainly like to reverse the present order of racism in society, but, Coser continues, her resistance to the bleak past is presented through an "attitude of the present in the professional urban world of advanced capitalism and corporate management" (16). Furthermore, it is not simply that Morrison fills in cultural gaps for black readers; Coser asserts that Morrison's stories "…contain openings for the reader to fill in" (169). Those openings are "invitations" to readers to "re-imagine" and "rewrite" in their own minds the responsibilities and privileges that all humanity shares. In her novel Jazz, Morrison describes the music as having "…a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends" (Coser, 169). The implication is clear: like jazz, a culture has a hunger and should make a cultural disturbance — and never stop making it.

The Black Book: Reclaiming African-American History

Author Nancy Peterson critiques Morrison's The Black Book, suggesting that Morrison did not fully approve of the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Morrison believed that Black Power was more about "exoticism" than "reality" (Peterson, 2001, p. 58). Many militants in the Black Power movement were eager to abandon the past entirely in order to "…cure the cancer of slavery" (Peterson, 58). However, Morrison argues that by discounting the past, "healthy as well as malignant cells were destroyed." In addition to repudiating slavery, modern Black Power advocates also repudiated "…any knowledge of those qualities of resistance, excellence, and integrity" that were important components of African-Americans' past — including their experience as slaves (Peterson, 58).

Morrison's meaning in writing The Black Book was to highlight the "admirable qualities of ordinary black people in America," Peterson continues (58). The book points to worthy black inventors who made contributions to American society, including inventors of "overshoes, an 'air-ship,' a telephone system, an improved fountain pen, a corn harvester, a street sweeper, an egg beater" (Peterson, 58). The Black Book is a thoroughly unconventional publication — with no chronology, no chapters, and no "major theme" (Peterson, 58).

Clearly this unique book was meant to show that African-Americans accomplished a great deal in the modernization of America, while also pointing out that racism played an ugly role in American history. For example, the wife of W. C. Handy — considered the "Father of the Blues" — died on the doorstep of Sydenham Hospital, a private hospital that served only members (Peterson, 59). That event is presented in The Black Book as a simple newspaper clipping, but readers can "…discern that racism, and not private/public distinction [of hospitals] lies behind the failure to take care of this woman" (Peterson, 59).

Beloved: Slavery, Memory, and Cultural Identity

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Language in India, critic Mahboobeh Khaleghi asserts that while Morrison shows "…what slavery did to black people — bodies and minds," she also presents the notion that by confronting, "reclaiming and transforming history" the African-American culture can heal through the "potential of memory" (Khaleghi, 2012, p. 1). Morrison's storytelling takes readers on a historical journey to the life of Margaret Garner — given the name Sethe in the novel — in 1856, who "…killed her child to prevent her recapture into slavery" (Khaleghi, 1). Morrison offers historical accounts of how slavery did not merely keep people in physical bondage. The system of slavery "…called for the crushing of the language, family names, culture, and tribal history of the slaves" (Khaleghi, 1).

Slaves were treated "worse than animals." By using her storytelling skills, Morrison offers the reader the heartbreaking tale of Sethe, whose only gift for her children is her breast milk. "Milk is all I ever had," Sethe explains (Beloved, 195). Even though Sethe is six months pregnant, she runs away from her master, and with the help of a white girl named Amy Denver, the baby is delivered safely. In time Sethe kills the baby — committing infanticide — in order to save her daughter from a life of slavery. One of the most profoundly emotional phases of the book is when the murdered baby returns as a ghost.

Morrison is certainly writing about some of the most bitterly inhumane aspects of American slavery, yet the narrative tells a story within a story — a story of the "journey to self-reliance" and of the way a female slave can achieve a "black identity" in a time when many slaves had been denied their true identity. Claiming ownership of one's self was very difficult for slaves, but Morrison's characters come to life as they go through this experience.

Author Alice Hall writes in her 2012 book Disability and Modern Fiction that in Beloved, Morrison's meaning is captured through the coexistence of "…beauty and horror" on the one hand and "traumatic memory" on the other (74). Morrison uses an unusual approach to beauty, presenting communication not so much through verbalization but through descriptions of the black female body. In Beloved she uses her narrative to denote "sound, smell, movement and touch," fully presenting the bodies of Sethe, Baby Suggs, and Nan as the "scarred," "enslaved," and "displaced" bodies that they are (Hall, 74).

In Beloved, Morrison creates pictures in the minds of readers by showing the character Beloved as a person with "flawless beauty" (Hall, 74). Beloved has "…new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands" (Morrison, 61). By turning the reader's attention to the soft beauty of Beloved's physical appearance, Morrison contrasts that lovely appearance with the reality in her life — the "…monstrous, haunting and all-consuming interior vengeance" of the society outside (Hall, 75).

Hall suggests that the stunning purity of Beloved could be a possible justification or motive for Sethe's terrible decision to kill the child; Sethe wants to preserve in her memory the "unsullied, idealized notion" of Beloved's beauty (75). Hall quotes Sethe from page 296 of Beloved to show how Morrison leads the reader to understand the killing as an act of perverse preservation:

"The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing — the part of her that was clean…" (Morrison, 296) (Hall, 75).

Does Morrison run the risk of presenting unnecessary drama by transitioning from "horror" to "pleasure" in Beloved? Does she transform violence into beauty for literary purposes alone, or does she present such lushness and style to somehow "mediate the horror that she depicts"? (Hall, 75). Reading Morrison, one must recognize that she has become both a symbol and a standard-bearer for African-American female authors because she links fiction to vivid historical context. She has earned the right to boldly present material that clashes with imagery presented in the same paragraph or same sentence. The scars on Sethe's back reflect what slavery did to millions of black people; but those scars are also linked to The Black Book, in which there is a portrait of an escaped slave whose back is "…furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping administered on Christmas-day last" (Morrison, 9) (Hall, 76).

Why did Morrison use the image of a murdered child who returns to live with its mother eighteen years after being killed? Author Therese Higgins argues that Morrison introduced a ghost into this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel because there is an African belief that "ancestral spirits" return to their living relatives' homes (Higgins, 2001, p. 29). Many African societies believe that the dead come back to the family they lived with — "either in body or in spirit" (Higgins, 29). According to Higgins' research, the dead are believed to "…possess the power of affecting the health and general well-being of their living relatives" (29).

Moreover, that ancestral "spirit" is thought to retain the same power and personality it had when alive and, "as such, might be feared or not, but in either case, must be propitiated" (Higgins, 29). The African society known as the Mende believe that if the spirit that returns had been "wronged during its lifetime," it may be "vengeful" upon return (Higgins, 30). The plot of Beloved displays the "glaring similarities" between what the Mende believe about returning spirits and what Morrison has written (Higgins, 31). In Mende belief, a person who dies is "crossing the water" into the world of the dead. In Beloved, the dead baby "…emerges from the water back into the country of the living"; water is among the most powerful and "sustaining" images in the novel (Higgins, 31).

In her book Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion, author Missy Dehn Kubitschek finds numerous examples of symbolism in Beloved. There is an African rite in which a mark is carved into a woman's skin just under the breast — applied when the woman passes from childhood into adulthood, and possibly serving to identify her as a member of a particular tribe or sect (Kubitschek, 1998, p. 126). Sethe remembers that her mother, Ma'am, had such a mark under her breast. When Ma'am is lynched and burned, her body "…is so badly damaged" that the mark no longer shows (Kubitschek, 126). The symbolism, according to Kubitschek, is that slavery totally "obliterated African identity," even though the horror of that erasure lingers on (126).

Author Philip Page asserts that Sethe and Paul D. must tell and retell things about the past in order to attempt to "…free themselves from its paralyzing power," yet by revisiting the past they risk "…losing their precarious sanity as well as hopes for a new life together" (Page, 1995, p. 144). Page calls this situation a "two-edged sword" and a "paradox" — a concept that continues throughout the novel as all four main characters undergo "birth/rebirth journeys across water," symbolizing birth and reincarnation (Page, 144).

Those births and rebirths contrast sharply with the backdrop of Beloved, which is steeped in death and darkness. Morrison has a technical reason for these contrasts; in the case of Beloved's character, her "agonizing journey epitomizes the theme and pain of bringing anything back to life" (Page, 146). Without conflict, contrasts, and the collision of opposites, storytelling falls flat. But for Morrison, even returning to life hurts: "Anything dead coming back to life hurts," she writes (35). Reviving the souls of the dead turns out to be both "painful" and a "magical resurrection" (Page, 146). Part of the pain of returning, at least for Beloved, is that she cannot describe her passage back from the dead. "How can I say things in pictures?" she asks (Morrison, 2010).

There is pain everywhere in this book, and everywhere there is also the search for relief from that pain — which is what slaves sought for so many years. Sethe is desperate to tell her story to someone, especially another woman; but the only female she can relate to, even vaguely, is Nan, who was not very literate. So Sethe relies on speaking to God, using her "talk/think" style of communication — a kind of prayer through conversation in search of a way to "piece it all back together" (Morrison, 22) (Page, 151).

Author Brooks Bouson argues that among the themes of Morrison's most noteworthy book, Beloved, the author wants readers to understand how enslaved women were turned into reproduction machines. Black women were objectified as the "Other" because they could produce children "…as easily as animals" (Bouson, 2000, p. 138). Because slave owners saw the possibility of breeding humans as they bred animals, it justified their "interference in the reproductive rights of enslaved Africans" (Bouson, 138). "…Every slave child born represented a valuable unit of property, another unit of labor, and, if female, the prospects of more slaves" (Morrison, 76) (Bouson, 138).

The black family was not allowed to bond as in normal human relations; mothers were not, in many cases, permitted to nurture their newborns, and hence the love that strengthens family networks was absent (Bouson, 138). Because white owners had the power to define Sethe as "less than human," she is deeply shamed. Morrison's character of Sethe is subjected to the same dehumanizing dynamics that countless black slave women endured. It is deeply disturbing for a reader to grasp the world Morrison depicts, where Paul D. says the "…jump…from a calf to a girl wasn't all that mighty" (Bouson, 140).

Morrison wants readers to imagine just how horrifying this kind of life was for millions of women during the era of legal slavery.

Conclusion

The novels of Toni Morrison provide unlimited and potentially very deep meaning to readers. It seems especially important for young people to become familiar with her writing. By reading, evaluating, and critiquing Morrison's books, students who may not have been aware of the Civil Rights Movement, or of other dynamics within the African-American experience, can learn history while enjoying some of America's most relevant and powerful fiction. Morrison's work stands as both literature and testimony — a legacy that continues to educate, challenge, and transform those who engage with it.

Works Cited

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

Coser, Stelamaris. Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994.

Durrant, Sam. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004.

Hall, Alice. Disability and Modern Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Harding, Wendy, and Martin, Jacky. A World of Difference: An Inter-Cultural Study of Toni Morrison's Novels. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Higgins, Therese E. Religiosity, Cosmology, and Folklore: The African Influence in the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Khaleghi, Mahboobeh. "The Ghost of Slavery: Individual and Communal Identity in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Language in India, 12.2 (2012): 1–7.

Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. Toni Morrison's Developing Class Consciousness. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1991/2004.

Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.

Page, Philip. Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

Peterson, Nancy J. Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crises of Historical Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.

Samuels, Robert. Writing Prejudices: The Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy of Discrimination from Shakespeare to Toni Morrison. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001.

Saunders, James Robert. "Why Losing a Tooth Matters: Shirley Jackson's 'The Tooth' and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." The Midwest Quarterly, 53.2 (2012): 193–204.

Schreiber, Evelyn Jaffe. Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2001.