LOVE IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON

Abstract

This essay focuses on the varieties of love in Toni Morrison’s novels. Love in a Morrison novel is always embedded in history, each character’s way of loving inflected (or warped) by legacies from the ancestral past as well as from his or her personal past. Morrison has said that her novels are didactic. They teach a reader to think anew about love, race and gender. I differentiate in this essay between the early novels, which teach through character and plot and an occasional direct authorial statement, and the later novels, starting with Beloved, which challenge a reader’s preconceptions about love through more subtle structural means. For example, deferred disclosures or gaps in meaning in the later novels draw out a reader’s assumptions about love and then, through a narrative twist, prompt the reader to examine and re-evaluate them. Love comes in a different shape in each later novel, surprising conventional expectations – from love as the deep friendship between young girls in Love to Home’s conception of love as a disruptive force that produces profound change in the lover to the characterization of love in Jazz as something you innovate and recreate each moment. The subtle formal techniques that engage a reader’s own values in an ethical dialogue with the text constitute Morrison’s variation on the tradition of call-and-response central to African American art forms. An overview of love in the first four novels is followed by a close reading of three later novels: Beloved, Home and Jazz.

Keywords:

• love
• possessiveness
• love as innovation
• historical context
• ethical dialogue between text and reader
• narrative structure
• deferred disclosure

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Some of the ideas in this essay are also in my book Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels (2017). I thank the University of Georgia Press and its editor, Walter Biggins, for giving me permission to use materials from the book here.

1 For a full analysis of Love, see chapter 4 of my book Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels (2017), and “Love's Time and the Reader: Ethical Effects of Nachtraglichkeit in Toni Morrison's Love.”

2 Scholars have written from a number of perspectives on Sethe's connection to her children. Among them are Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, Rebecca Ferguson, Jennifer FitzGerald, Pelagia Goulimari, Mae Henderson, La Vinia Delois Jennings, Linda Koolish, Linda Krumholz, Lorraine Liscio, Jill Matus, Naomi Morgenstern, Andrea O’Reilly, Barbara Schapiro, Evelyn Schreiber, Valerie Smith, Molly Abel Travis, Laurie Vickroy, Teresa Washington, Philip Weinstein, and Jean Wyatt (“Giving Body”).

3 Reading Beloved through a Lacanian lens, Sheldon George identifies Beloved as the “object a,” the source-object of Sethe's desire. Once Sethe “embrac[es] Beloved as the objet a that fills her lack […] Sethe becomes a full, desireless subject.” That is, possessing the object a makes her feel whole and thus “eliminates the dimension of desire and all subjective aspirations” (“Approaching” 119). Cynthia Dobbs writes perceptively about Beloved's monologues (570–73).

4 In a series of historical allusions that draw parallels between Dr Beau Scott, whose “scientific experiments” on Cee's uterus destroy her capacity to conceive a child and the nineteenth-century figure of Dr J. Marion Sims, Morrison calls up a repressed US history of eugenics, forced sterilization of women of color, and “scientific” experimentation on unconsenting black bodies. For an account of how elements of Cee's story line up with Dr Sims's experiments on black slave women, see my Love and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's Later Novels.