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Masaryk University Brno MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature Family Matters – Family Patterns and Milkman´s Quest for Identity in T. Morrison´s Song of Solomon Diploma Work Brno 2009 Author: Supervisor: Václava Králová Mgr. Pavla Buchtová 1 I declare that I worked on this diploma work independently, using the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography only. I agree with this diploma work being deposited in the Library of the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University in Brno and thus being made available for study purposes. Brno, 10 November 2009 Václava Králová 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mgr. Pavla Buchtová for her patience, kindness and professional advice and competence. 3 CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………….5 0.1 Toni Morrison´s biography…………………………………………………………………7 0.2 Song of Solomon……………………………………………………………………………..13 1. It is all in the family…………………………………………………………………………..15 2.1 Ruth´s family heritage…………….……………………………………………………....19 2.1.1 Pressed small or abusing?..........………………………………………………………22 2.1.2 Ruth´s possessive maternal love...................................................25 3.1 Macon Dead´s family background………………………………………………..…27 3.1.1 Macon Dead´s greedy paternal love……………………………………………….30 3.1.2 Macon manipulating or manipulated - a villain or a recluse?.............33 4.1 Pilate – prototype of an ancestral woman……………………………………...36 4.1.1 Pilate´s matriarchal family unit……………………………………………………….39 5. Hagar´s suffocating anaconda love………………………………………………….44 6. 1 Milkman´s dull childhood……………………………………………………………….49 6.2 Milkman´s self-indulgent adolescence and manhood……………………..51 6.3 Milkman´s successful quest for identity………………………………………….54 7. Names that bear witness………………………………………………………………..59 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………..62 Résumé……………………………………………………………………………………………………….64 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………..65 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………….68 4 Introduction The goal of this diploma work is to closely analyze the third of Toni Morrison´s novels, Song of Solomon published in 1977. I have read several of Morrison´s novels and she has gradually become my favourite writer, despite (or perhaps exactly for) the fact that her novels are so culturally specific. Song of Solomon illustrates that Afro-American woman´s experience is author´s key but not sole concern, for in it, contrary to her two preceding works, she decided for the first time in her writing career for a male protagonist. It is at once a fascinating family saga, a powerful romance and a fabulous story of self-discovery of the main hero, Macon (Milkman) Dead. Morrison puts Milkman in the world in which he seemingly lives a comfortable life. Around him, though, the author creates a complicated web of family relationships – his parents, Pilate and his lover – the people who all try to seize him in their own way, enmesh in his life with highly or less commendable intentions. The first chapter of this diploma work intends to provide a brief historical context to the story which seemed to be necessary for better understanding of the novel. The following four chapters are dedicated one by one to the above mentioned key people of Milkman´s life. The sixth chapter examines Milkman´s progress to spiritual freedom and maturity. Finally, the last chapter discusses the importance that Afro-Americans put to their names and naming, possible reasons (even historical) for their doing so, as well as the importance of naming in this work of T. Morrison. Within these seven chapters I concentrate on answering the question to what extent and why Morrison lets Milkman´s close relations interfere and determine his life, and identify the psychological drives for their behaviour, simultaneously, it traces Milkman´s ultimate progress to self-identification. It also decodes some of Morrison´s personal beliefs concerning Afro-American family functioning she infiltrated into her fictious story and tried to pass to her readers, as well as brings a picture of common Afro- American family patterns in the frame of historical context. In the analysis I also try to stress some of the features typical for Afro-American literature; including the fascinating part of Afro-American folklore, the ancient Afro-American symbol of flight, the free fall; touch on the concept of double conciousness and explore the harmful existence of the false western female standard of beauty, a favourite literary theme of Toni Morrison, and 5 its devastating impact on Afro-American women. I try to set my analysis in context of Afro-American history and attempt to identify some autobiographic features in this novel. To make the analysis in the main body of the thesis more intelligible, two preliminary subchapters, Toni Morrison´s biography and a concise summary of the plot of Song of Solomon precede it. 6 0.1 Toni Morrison´s biography Toni Morrison is one of the key and most respected representatives of Afro- American women´s literature of the past thirty-five years. Over the decades, as a part of the Black Arts Movement, she has become one of the Afro-American writers and artists who “sought to transform the manner in which black people in the USA were defined and treated“ (McKay, 1796). She is the author of nine novels (translated into 26 languages), numerous short stories, essays, plays, children´s books; the first Afro-American woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Ever since her first novel she has written about “her world“, because she “perceived the gap between the black experience and the representation of that experience“ (Furman 67). In the 1970s of the past century she became the editor who significantly helped to bring Afro-American literature into the mainstream, so that such a thing as popular Afro-American women´s literature could flourish. During her extensive career she has also become the devoted professor who has inspired hundreds of her Afro-American students and artists. In 1993, to support her followers, she founded The Toni Morrison Society. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, an industrial town in Ohio, the second of four children, Toni Morrison was raised in a working-class family. Though of a modest family background she was, unlike many of her peers, blessed with a complete and functioning family - the parents and grandparents who truly cared about their children. Morrison´s mother sang in a church choir, loved jazz, played the piano well. The father frequently told the children African-American ghost stories and myths, “those classical, mythological, archetypal stories“ (Furman 4). Her grandfather often played the violin and her grandmother even wrote her private dream book. Most importantly, however, Morrison´s mother was a keen reader. As Morrison remembers: “My mother belonged to a book club, one of those early ones. And that was hard-earned money, you know“ (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus). Not surprisingly then, when asked what role books played in her childhood Morrison answers: “Major. A driving thing. The security I felt, the pleasure, when new books arrived was immense…“ (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus). Needles to say, when she entered the first grade, Chloe was not only the only Afro-American pupil in the class, but also the only one who knew how to read. 7 During the Depression her father, a shipyard welder, worked three jobs simultaneously to make studies accessible to all his children, and was proud of it. Around 13 Chloe started doing housework in white women´s houses after school, the work that was always available, because the normal teen-age jobs were not. At that time she first experienced discrimination and segregation. Interestingly, I´ve always felt deserving. Growing up in Lorain, my parents made all of us feel as though there were these rather extraordinary people within us. I felt like an aristocrat – or what I think an aristocrat is. I always knew we were very poor. But that was never degrading. I remember a very important lesson that my father gave me when I was 12 or 13. He said, “You know, today I welded a perfect seam and I signed my name to it.“ And I said, “But, Daddy, no one´s going to see it!“ And he said, “Yeah, but I know it´s there.“ So when I was working in the kitchens, I did good work. Years later I used some of what I observed in my fiction (Morrison qtd. in Dreifus ). In 1949 Morrison left Lorain to study English at prestigeous African-American Howard University in Washington, “where she was shocked by segregation and a strict hierarchy concerning the tinge of black complexion practised by a whole range of Afro- Americans then“ (Ullmanová: Afterword: in Morrison: Love). The motif of complexion shade became a frequent image later on in many of her novels (including Song of Solomon). Howard was a disappointment for Morrison. “It was about getting married, buying clothes and going to parties“ (Morrison qtd. in Lewis). In 1955 she earned a master´s degree in English at Cornell University with her thesis on the works of W. Faulkner and V. Woolf. After graduation she became an English instructor at Texas Southern University in Houston, (1955-1957), then returned to Howard to teach English. In 1958 she got married to a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison, whom she had met at Howard, but the marriage was not contented. When it ended in divorce in 1964, Morrison moved to Syracuse with her two baby boys aged mere three years (Harold Ford) and three months (Slade), and started to support the family as a textbook editor. In two years´ time she moved to New York to work as an editor at the New York City 8 headquarters of Random House. At that time “major American publishers such as Random House, Doubleday, McGraw-Hill, and William Morrow, sensing market possibilities in a new Black Art, began to sign African-American writers to lucrative contracts“ (McKay 1804).
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