‘Differentiation’ from Pecola, Jadine to Bride in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s last novel, God Help the Child uses the technique of narrative repetition. Several different characters and motifs from the previous novels including her first novel, The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby are represented in a similar way in the last novel. I found that God Help the Child and the repeatedly represented works in it are closely related in terms of the novel’s theme. This study aims to analyze the aspects and the meaning of the repetition on the basis of Deleuze’s concepts of ‘difference’ and ‘repetition’. Pecola Breedlove from The Bluest Eye and Jadine from Tar Baby are represented the 21st century’s Bride in God Help the Child. Though their times and spaces are different from each other, their life obsessed with the white-dominated capitalist values without subjectivity makes no difference, ending up with negative repetition. Luckily, after breaking up with her lover, Booker, Bride starts to contemplate all the past experiences of Pecola, Jadine and herself including black people in the U.S., synthesizing the past and the present together. She poses lots of questions to the repetition and tries to get the answer from the ‘contemplation’. The results indicate that Bride could have her own subjectivity, leave her(their) past racial agony behind, move on to the next life, making ‘differentiation’ from her virtuality.