Descent in the "House of Chloe": Race, Rape, and Identity in Toni Morrison's "Tar Baby"

Abstract

-T _ oni Morrison's Tar Baby seems for a number of readers an aberration in her development as a writer. Set largely on a kind of rich man's fantasy island in the Caribbean and concerned for the first time with representing rounded white characters, Morrison's fourth novel is somewhat marginal in her canon; it is less frequently taught and receives relatively less critical attention than her other novels. Nevertheless, the way Tar Baby carries forward the thematics of Morrison's earlier work reveals that it centrally participates in her ongoing fictive projects. Notably there is the issue of how the media constructs Western beauty as a universal standard. In this regard, Pecola Breedlove in Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, points the way to Jadine Childs in Tar Baby. Both accept a Western valuation of beauty, although for opposite reasons: Pecola, a dark-skinned black girl, because she cannot approach the cultural imperative, and Jadine, a light-skinned black, because she can embody its image on Parisian fashion runways. But Tar Baby is even more closely related to the project in Song of Solomon. Both novels focus on the struggles of young African Americans-Milkman Dead and Jadine Childswhose subjectivities are split between a desire to assimilate to the values of the white middle class and the voices that urge them to acknowledge a black racial identity. In both novels, Morrison seems engaged in a form of self-fashioning, using these two characters to