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The Pennsylvania State University Schreyer Honors College THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE DEPARTMENTS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES, ENGLISH, AND WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES LIVING HISTORY: READING TONI MORRISON’S WORK AS A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF BLACK AMERICA ELIZABETH CATCHMARK SPRING 2017 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for baccalaureate degrees in African American Studies, English, Women’s Studies, and Philosophy with interdisciplinary honors in African American Studies, English, and Women’s Studies. Reviewed and approved* by the following: Kevin Bell Associate Professor of English Thesis Supervisor Marcy North Associate Professor of English Honors Adviser AnneMarie Mingo Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s Studies Honors Adviser Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies Honors Advisor * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. i ABSTRACT Read as four volumes in a narrative retelling of black America, A Mercy, Beloved, Song of Solomon, and Love form a complex mediation on the possibilities for developing mutually liberating relationships across differences of race, class, and gender in different historical moments. The first two texts primarily consider the possibilities for empathy and empowerment across racial differences, inflected through identities like gender and class, while the latter two texts unpack the intraracial barriers to building and uplifting strong black communities. In all texts, Morrison suggests the most empowering identity formations and sociopolitical movements are developed in a coalitional vision of black liberation that rejects capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy as mutually constitutive systems. Central to this theme is Morrison’s sensitivity to the movements of history, how the particular social and political contexts in which her novels take place shape the limitations and possibilities of coalitions. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... iii Chapter 1 Birth of a Race: A Mercy, Beloved, and the Construction of Racial Boundaries 1 A Mercy and Tenuous Intimacies ..................................................................................... 4 Beloved and Un-crossable Boundaries ............................................................................. 13 Chapter 2 Death of a Movement: Love, Song of Solomon, and the Transition from Civil Rights to Black Power .......................................................................................... 22 Love and Power ................................................................................................................ 24 Song of Solomon and Fractures ........................................................................................ 37 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 45 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 48 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To Dr. Courtney Morris, whose encouragement and mentorship brought me to Black Studies, Dr. Shirley Moody-Turner, who showed me that English scholarship can change the world, and Dr. Crystal Sanders, who altered the shape of my career by inspiring my love of history. To my family who has always given me unconditional support. To Dr. Kevin Bell, whose feedback strengthened and deepened my scholarship. And to Toni Morrison whose work reminded me how dearly I love to read. iv Introduction Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison’s work is remarkable in both beauty and scope. The novel set in the earliest period, A Mercy, considers North America in the 1600’s, exploring the relationships built across differences during the racially and politically unstable colonial period. The novel that takes place in the most recent period, God Help the Child, is set in the present day and considers colorism in the contemporary moment. Her other novels are positioned between these two moments, spanning the scope of US history and exploring diverse events including the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, the integration of the US military during the Korean War, the widespread desegregation of public accommodations in the mid-twentieth century, and the emergence of Black Power politics in the mid to late twentieth century. This vast temporal scope results in a body of work that, when read together, forms a complex, nuanced image of black American history that makes vivid and experiential some of its most significant events. In this work, I read four of Morrison’s texts together, A Mercy, Beloved, Love, and Song of Solomon, to uncover how reading Morrison’s work as “volumes” in a narrative history of black America exposes the central themes and political critiques of her corpus in ways reading the novels individually cannot. Divided into two sections, “Birth of a Race” and “Death of a Movement,” this thesis positions two central transitions in American history as the contextual backdrop for understanding the novels, the transition from a racially unstable, colonial America to a cohesive nation-state built on race-based, heritable slavery, and the transition from integrative, liberal visions of black liberation to separatist, Black Power visions of black liberation that occurred in the mid to late twentieth century. Though the four novels each depict a v different component of these key moments, read together they present a powerful case for moving towards a coalition-based politics of black liberation. Grounded in the development of black feminist political movements in response to marginalization by both feminist and black empowerment activists, but with a far longer theoretical trajectory, the concept of coalition is vital in understanding the implications of Morrison’s novels. Coalition building is a social justice practice that acknowledges the interconnectedness and mutual dependency of systems of domination, including capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, the interdependency of all people, the mythological nature of the individual, and the uniqueness and complexity of identity. Coalitions are groups of diverse people that respect the social and political significance of their differences, but work together for mutual empowerment, recognizing the connectivity of their oppressions and their responsibility to acknowledge and root out their own oppressive behavior. In depicting the beauty and intimacy of the interracial relationships possible in the colonial moment in A Mercy, the collapse of those possibilities in Beloved, and the various fissures within the black community in Love and Song of Solomon, Morrison mounts a sensitive, complex argument for the value of coalitions and the ways different historical moments present obstacles to their construction. 1 Chapter 1 Birth of a Race: A Mercy, Beloved, and the Construction of Racial Boundaries Morrison’s elaborately historicized texts offer opportunities for exploring the influence of key events on the development of racial categories, particularly on the solidification of whiteness and blackness as socially and economically significant identity markers. The two texts that occur chronologically first, based on their settings rather than their publication dates, provide a particularly rich depiction of the influence of race-based, heritable slavery on racial identity. Read together, Beloved and A Mercy demonstrate the racial instability of the colonial moment that enabled coalition building across racial and classed lines, which yields to rigidly defined identities following the emergence of chattel slavery. This shift colors even sympathetic interracial interactions with paternalism and prejudice and creates racial identities so strong they meaningfully persist in the present day. A Mercy, which occurs predominantly from 1682-1690 with flashbacks to earlier periods, vividly engages the social and physical landscape of colonial America. It depicts the emergence of whiteness as a cohesive identity that transcends class, gender, culture, and religion to isolate otherwise diverse people with conflicting interests, like wealthy Portuguese landowners and Irish indentured servants. Because whiteness is not yet fully formed in the text, but rather in the process of becoming, the text demonstrates the carefully constructed nature of the category and the complex power relations of the period that challenge easy racial classification. As white farmer Jacob Vaark notes of a conversation between himself and a wealthy landowner that illuminates the insignificance of class boundaries, “Where else but in this disorganized world 2 would such an encounter be possible” (A Mercy 29)? Though explicitly referencing the influence of class and, to a lesser extent, religion on a person’s possibilities, the quote reflects the text’s larger project of depicting a “disorganized world” where interactions that destabilize traditional hierarchies are the norm and each person is actively constructing his or her identity in response. Similarly, Valerie Babb comments in her analysis of A Mercy as a historical commentary on the American origins narrative, “‘Mess’ is an apt characterization of the prenational landscape, reflecting a cultural moment when categories of race, gender and class were in flux, not fully solidified into a social order” (151). I historicize this text with the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion, a multiracial, cross-class uprising
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