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Trauma and Home in Three Novels by Toni Morrison

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Trauma and Home in Three Novels by Toni Morrison Universität Trier Fachbereich II Anglistik/Amerikanistik Literaturwissenschaft Houses packed with Grief – Trauma and Home in three Novels by Toni Morrison Schriftliche Prüfungsarbeit zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde Vorgelegt von Dagmar Lonien Seckenheimer Strasse 66 68165 Mannheim Tel.: 0170 1048955 E-Mail: [email protected] Die Arbeit wurde betreut von: Prof. Dr. Gerd Hurm, Erstkorrektor Prof. Dr. Norbert Platz, Zweitkorrektor For my Parents, Hans and Hannelore Lonien 2 Table of Contents I. PREFACE 5 II. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 2.1 Space and Place 10 2.2 Trauma and Memory 17 2.3 Trauma and the Experience of Space and Place 23 III. BELOVED 3.1 Places are always there – History and Place in Beloved 26 3.2 Fire and Brimstone Hidden in Lacy Groves – Sethe’s South 33 3.2.1 Will the Parts Hold – Sethe and Mother Loss 34 3.2.2 It’s Where We Were – Sweet Home 36 3.3 A Rusty Tobacco Tin – Paul D 44 3.3.1 Paul D and the Blues 48 3.3.2 Paul D’s Journey North 49 3.4 The Self that was No Self – Baby Suggs in the South of Slavery 54 3.4.1 Baby Suggs as the Ancestor Figure in the North 56 3.4.2 The Beat and Beating Heart – Baby Suggs and The Clearing 58 3.5 Know it, and go on – Denver as the Link to the Future 62 3.6 Her smiling face is the face for me – The Middle Passage as original Trauma 69 3.7 The World is in this Room – 124 Bluestone 75 IV. JAZZ 4.1 Everything’s ahead – History and Place in Jazz 87 4.2 The World in the Home – Jim Crow South in Jazz 96 4.2.1 The Legacy of the Golden Ideal – Violet 99 4.2.2 Maternal Shame and Abandonment – Joe 111 4.3 Longing for a Right to Be in this Place – Golden Gray 120 4.4 History’s Over – Harlem and the Myth of the New Negro 124 4.4.1 Cracks in the Mask – Violet in Harlem 130 4.4.2 Following the Traces – Joe in Harlem 141 3 4.5 It eases the Pain – Reconciliation 148 4.6 Make me; remake me – Jazz as Jazz 151 V. PARADISE 5.1 Deafened by the Roar of History – History and Place in Paradise 158 5.2 The one all-black Town worth the Pain – Ruby 166 5.2.1 Come Prepared or not at all – The Disallowing 168 5.2.2 Like a Bullet in the Brain – Internalized Trauma as the Foundation of Community 172 5.2.3 Beware the Furrow of His Brow – The Oven as a Symbol of Stasis 181 5.3 Bitches and Witches – The Convent 187 5.3.1 A Communal Healing of Trauma 192 5.4 The Men take Aim – The Massacre at the Convent 196 5.5 What would be on the other Side? – Re-visioning Paradise 202 VI. CONCLUSION 206 VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY 215 VIX. APPENDIX 9.1 Zusammenfassung der Arbeit in deutscher Sprache 224 9.2 Erklärung über die verwendeten Hilfsmittel 232 4 I. PREFACE “The reclamation of the history of black people in this country is paramount in its importance because while you can’t really blame the conqueror for writing history his own way, you can certainly debate it” (Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory). “[Stories] aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. ………………… You don’t have anything If you don’t have stories” (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony). “What has the Beauty to do with the World? What has Beauty to do with Truth and Goodness – with the facts of the world and the right actions of men?” (DuBois 995). Also a student of Political Science and Cultural Anthropology, I have often found myself asking questions similar to W.E.B. DuBois’, questions of the relevance of art, of literature to be specific. Why study literature? Does it make a difference in the world? Is it possible to incorporate both aesthetics and politics in a work of art without compromising the strengths of either? In Toni Morrison’s fiction, I have found a fusion that satisfies the need for beauty and political didactics alike. Rejecting the dichotomy of aesthetics versus politics, Morrison embraces both as a two sides of the same coin: “For me, a novel has to be socially responsible as well as very beautiful” (Jones and Vinson 183). Her work of art delights the reader, while at the same time opening her eyes to the buried truths of subaltern lives. In writing on Toni Morrison, I find myself contributing to the understanding of her work in terms of “the saving power of the narrative, its capacity to open a door, to point out the fire and the fire escape” (Grewal x). Leslie Marmon Silko states: „You don’t have anything if you don’t have stories“(2). For Blacks living in America this entailed for the longest time: “You don’t have a place if you don’t have a history.” Acknowledging the connection between the knowledge of one’s history and the capacity for finding a place to call home, Toni Morrison’s literary oeuvre has been primarily concerned with questions of Black history, memory and trauma. She sees her task as a writer in recovering, or as she puts it, rememoring an African-American history conveniently neglected by the dominant 5 “conqueror” historiography. Her fiction contains powerful, emotionally stirring testimonials of trauma governing the lives of Blacks during slavery, Reconstruction, up to the present day. The trilogy of novels I am analyzing in this dissertation is situated within that tradition of interrogating national identity and reconstructing social memory. Starting with slavery and its aftermath, moving on to the Harlem Renaissance and to the time of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, these three novels constitute a powerful re-imagination of African American place in America’s historical map. These stories of American space as locus of African American trauma go beyond entertainment, being deeply political as well as therapeutic. When it was originally published in 1987, the first novel, Beloved, caused a stir for its unflinching portrayal of one slave woman’s struggle to come to terms with an unspeakably cruel, traumatic past. Morrison took an unusual approach in fictionalizing the true story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who killed one of her children in order to protect her from being captured and delivered back to slavery. Presenting Sethe, the fictionalized Garner, as stuck in a time and place of her deepest, most debilitating traumatic experience, Morrison opens up the discourse of African American history and historiography to fashion a revisionary slave narrative. Exploring the cultural roots of Black Americans in slavery, Morrison extends African American cultural memory in the space of Beloved and situates African American traumatic history squarely in the history of American nation-building. Morrison employs a decidedly spatial concept of history in Beloved, one that her protagonist Sethe aptly describes with her theory of rememory: “Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world” (38). The author’s main achievement with the concept of rememory as spatialized time is a communalization of memory, thus making it publicly accessible for commemoration and interpretation. In Beloved, the reader may roam landscapes of pain and trauma that had heretofore been largely neglected by historiographers and authors alike. Violet and Joe Trace, the protagonists of Jazz, also find themselves caught in a cycle of historic trauma that, since hidden from sight, keeps them bound to the track of repetition of the painful past. Morrison fictionalizes the Reconstruction South as a site of the deconstruction of Black space and identity for the sake of the economic and social advancement of the white oppressor. Growing up in the Jim Crow South of the 6 Reconstruction Era, Joe’s and Violet’s lives are pervaded with a sense of “incredulous terror” (Bhabha, 9) in the face of everyday assaults on their physical and psychological integrity. The horror of their lives is too intense to be remembered, though, and they go through their lives unaware of the damage done to their souls. They become part of the vast Black movement to the metropolitan areas of the North, known as the Great Migration. Following the call of modernity to forget their past and be part of the New Negro movement that promises unlimited freedom for Blacks, they live their lives in Harlem without looking back. They are sure they have overcome their troubled past, until it catches up with them and manifests itself in a violent repetition of childhood trauma that bubbles up against the surface of their New Negro masks. It is then, that Morrison’s witnessing of the subaltern history takes place in the minds of her protagonists. Their memories are polyphonic voices of historical testimony that challenge any one dominant history as being merely discursive constructs containing a particular view of the world. As its name indicates, Jazz is performed in the style of a Jazz piece, thereby challenging narrative conventions as to the authority of the narrative voice. Morrison’s narrator gets reduced to just one voice among many, thereby deconstructing her discursive authority. Joe and Violet are granted the power to create their own histories, which enables them to reclaim their identities that had been defined externally for so long. The last of the three novels I am examining, Paradise, was published in 1997 and concludes the historiographic trilogy started with Beloved’s depiction of slavery and its aftermath, and continued with Jazz’s narrative set in the post Civil War era and during the time of the Great Migration.
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