Toni Morrison and Motherhood by Andrea O'Reilly

Author:Andrea O'Reilly [O'Reilly, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Literary Criticism, Women Authors, African American & Black
ISBN: 9780791485163
Google: KJ0BcQiNstUC
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2012-02-01T05:38:18+00:00

[He] thought hard . . . in order to manipulate her dreams, to insert his own dreams into her so she would not wake or stir . . . and dream steadily the dream he wanted her to have about yellow houses with white doors which women opened and shouted Come on in, you honey you! and the fat black ladies in white dresses minding the pie table in the basement of the church and white wet sheets flapping on a line. . . . (119, emphasis added)

No critic, to my knowledge, has examined Son’s wish “to press his dreams . . . into hers.” Patrick Bjork acknowledges that Son does attempt “to impart to [Jadine] his dream, [his] rural folk consciousness” (121). However, Bjork does not view this desire as at all problematic. Yet Son wants Jadine to forgo her dreams and fulfil his. “Inser[ting] his dreams into hers,” Son redesigns, in Pygmalion fashion, another Jadine, one crafted from his idealized and romanticized view of blackness. His male imposition invokes a very conventional patriarchal assertion of the husband-on-top heterosexuality, theorized by Miriam Johnson and discussed earlier.

The town of Eloe signifies and embodies for Son the funk values of traditional black culture. Craig H. Werner argues in “The Briar Patch as Modernist Myth: Morrison, Barthes, and Tar Baby As-Is” that Son’s ideal of essential blackness as represented by Eloe is a “romantic counter myth” which “evades reality by dehistoricizes experience.” Werner continues, “by embracing [this myth, Son] dehistoricizes Jadine’s complex history as a black woman” (McKay 1988: 164–65). Indeed, by mythologizing Jadine and making her an archetype of black womanhood—fat black lady minding the pies—Son robs Jadine of her own specific and individual identity. Significantly, when Son first meets Jadine he cannot look at her; he chooses instead to look at her pictures because they are “easier . . . they don’t move” (119). This, I argue, indicates Son’s refusal to see Jadine as a real and so a changing person and his wish to fix her in a mythological narrative.8

His statement about Florida women notwithstanding, Son subscribes to sexist categorizations of gender difference. When Son sees Margaret and Jadine leaving the boat, he tells us that: “It amused him that these tiny women had handled that big boat” (133). Later, in New York City, Son reflects upon Jadine “having his baby” and wonders about “What would he name his son? Son of Son?” (219). With these words, Son expresses a patriarchal reproductive consciousness that regards, as Barbara Katz Rothman writes, “children [as] being born to men, out of women” (30). In keeping with patriarchal reproductive consciousness, Son sees the male seed as the defining and original essence of identity, one planted by the father in the mother’s body. Equally problematic is Son’s assumption that the child will be male. With these views, Son expresses the age-old patriarchal preference for sons and maintains the patriarchal practice of patrilineal descent—“he will be the son of son.”

In reading Son as a maternal and feminine figure, critics ignore the phallo-centric discourse by which he is also delineated.

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