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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 READING THE BLOOD : VIOLENCE, SACRIFICE, AND NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN THE NOVELS OF TONI MORRISON DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By D. Scot Hinson, B.A., M.A. ***** THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY 1993 Dissertation Committee Approved by : K. H. Burkman D. A. Moddelmog A d v i s e r V. G. Lee Department of English To the angels, here and above. X X ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest appreciation goes to Dr. Katherine H. Burkman, a mentor "exceeding wise and fair" and a steadfast friend. I also wish to express my most sincere appreciation to the other members of my advisory committe, Drs. Debra A. Moddelmog and Valerie G. Lee, for their guidance, support, and encouragement. Many thanks go to Dr. Martha Kubala and Dr. Molly Travis for graciously allowing me to draw on their work. I would also like to thank the Department of English, the Graduate School, and the College of Arts and Sciences for their support. Thanks also to all of my family and friends for their support and patience, and especially to Amy for her love and friendship. IX X VITA June 18, 1957 .......Born--Charlotte, NC 1981.. .................. BA, Ohio State University C o l u m b u s ,Ohio 1984 .................. MA, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: English Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature IV TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ............................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................ iii VITA .......................................................iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................... v INTRODUCTION .............................................. 6 CHAPTER PAGE I. NARRATIVE VIOLENCE AND THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED IN THE BLUEST E Y E ............... 31 II. THE OPEN WOUND: OPPRESSION AND NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN SULA.. ............................. 6 5 III. CHRONICLES OF DESIRE: MOVEMENT AND FLIGHT IN SONG OF SOLOMON ..........................118 IV. QUICKSAND AND CHOCOLATE : CULTURAL DISPLACEMENT AND NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN TARBA B Y ........170 V. "A NEW KIND OF WHITEFOLKS' JUNGLE: COMMUNITY AND NARRATIVE CRISIS IN BELOVED ............ 209 VI. CONCLUSION ..................................... 247 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 267 INTRODUCTION "A Slaughter Without the Blood": Violence, Community, and Narrative Structure in the Novels of Toni Morrison From The Bluest Eye (1970) to Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison's novels teem with violence— not even mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, or cats and dogs are safe. Morrison, who claims that "aggression is not as new to black women as it is to white women," has written that "there's a special kind of . violence in writings by black women— not bloody violence, but violence nonetheless. Love, in the Western notion, is full of possession, distortion, and corruption. It's a slaughter without the blood" (Black Women Writers At Work 122, 123). In Morrison's fiction, violence assumes many different forms, from ostracism and psychological abuse to rape, from self-mutilation to the most grisly murder. Morrison's earliest novel. The Bluest Eye, describes a father's rape of his daughter, the culmination of his long history of humiliation, psychological abuse, and neglect. Violence has free rein in Morrison's Sula (1973)— from the "stubborn," "headless soldier" running with his brains sliding down his back to the collapse of the New River tunnel, "as ice split and earth shook" (Sula 8, 162). Song of Solomon (1977) is also shot through with violence, beginning with Robert Smith's suicide and ending with the shooting of Pilate. Psychological abuse and racial discrimination are as prevalent in Tar Baby (1981) as is the physical violence in the other novels. And, finally. Beloved 's violence sears the pages and simmers just beneath the surface. The memory of the psychological terrors and physical tortures endured by Sethe as a slave drive her to lovingly pull a jagged, rusty saw blade across her infant daughter Beloved's neck. Beloved's scars are the fruit born of the "tree" whip-carved into Sethe's back by her slavemaster. Toni Morrison acknowledges that the secrets of violence and its sources are safeguarded within the African-American communities she writes about. She claims that she chose the first line of The Bluest Eye— "Quiet as it's kept"--for its conspiratorial quality, for the phrase signified that between "black women conversing with each other" at the back gate, a "secret" was about to be shared, some "secret between us and a secret that is being kept from us," a "conspiracy" both "held and withheld, exposed and sustained" (Tanner Lecture 21). The violent secret in The Bluest Eye, for example, is the secret of "illicit, traumatic, incomprehensible sex coming to its dreadful fruition," and the secret of a "pollution, . a skip, perhaps, in the natural order of things" (Tanner Lecture 21). Morrison's novels attempt a disclosure of the "secrets 'we' shared and those withheld from us by ourselves and by the v/orld outside the community" (Tanner Lecture 21).^ In her works, Morrison attempts both to share and to hide the knowledge that the violence and disruption within the black communities she writes about are originally imposed from outside by white oppressors, but eventually become self- sustaining within those communities. However, when the dominant white society victimizes blacks, they victimize each other in response. Thus, white society's search for scapegoats translates into a similar search within the black community. In The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution that is Changing the Shape of the World, Frantz Fanon describes how oppressed peoples, who have no other recourse, vent their frustration and anger on each other : If this suppressed fury fails to find an outlet, it turns in a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves. In order to free themselves they even massacre each other. The different tribes fight between themselves since they cannot face the real enemy— and you can count on colonial policy to keep up the rivalries; the man who raises his knife against his brother thinks that he has destroyed once and for all the detested image of their common degradation, even though these expiatory victims don't quench their thirst for blood. (Preface 18-19) The communities in Morrison's novels deny their propensity to focus their anger and humiliation on the weaker members of their own communities. And, these communities repress and are unable to identify the violence— v;hite oppression— that is the root cause of the communities' collapse and entrapment in cycles of violence.^ Moreover, in an effort to improve their lot, members of black communities frequently forego traditional African and African-American values and adopt those of the dominant culture. Nonetheless, despite their inability or reluctance to identify the source of violent disruption, Morrison's novels are frequently concerned with the communities' attempts to purge violence and with their struggles to repair the bonds of the community torn apart by it, primarily by recapturing a traditional value system from the past, a value system characterized by tolerance and a lost sense of identity through the community. Morrison's works are devoted to showing how the violence and discord in her communities stem not only from the loss of those beliefs in the community, but also from the abandonment of those beliefs in favor of the beliefs and values of the dominant culture. Deborah Sitter makes a very useful observation when she notes that "frequently in [Morrison's] later works, positive values are associated with specific practices of West African culture: