Female elements in Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Abstract
Wile Sula is the most moving of Morrison's works for me, I have found myself coming back over and over to Song of Solomon: first, for the fierce wisdom of Pilate, which I wrote on in Listening to Our Bodies; then for the wisdom and clarity and originality of Morrison's analysis of masculine archetypes and how they underlie men's individuation; and finally, for lessons about women's life stages, since the novel gives a cross section of women on the boundary line of passages into various new life stages (Smith, 1995).
Like her other novels, Morrison's Song of Solomon crosses several generations; the major action of the novel takes place when all the women have grown middle-aged or old. Although this novel develops in depth Morrison's vision of masculine archetypes, the portraits of the women are as strong and compelling as her more centrally feminine previous novels; as Gloria Snodgrass Malone says, "men [are] more prominent in this novel, but women bear the brunt of suffering." The female figures are for me more memorable than the males. And although the novel's protagonist is male, he is finally redeemed by the strength and spirituality of several women in his family and the witch figure Circe, whom he meets on his journey South. Milkman is thirty-one when this happens (Cowart, 1990). The older women in his family are his mother, Ruth, sixty-two, and his aunt, Pilate, sixty-eight; these women comprise the portraits of women in the last stage of life, well past middle age. His sisters, Corinthians and Lena, are forty-two and forty-three respectively, thus moving into middle-age during the last section of the novel, as does Reba, Pilate's daughter, although her age is never actually given. Hagar, Milkman's cousin and lover, dies at thirty-six, apparently unable and unwilling to move towards middle-age. But before examining the women's life stages in depth, we need to set the stage with Morrison's development of masculine archetypes (Novak).