Projecting Early American Literary Studies

Abstract

Many of Toni Morrison’s novels explore the roots of contemporary social conflicts in historical settings that range from the years immediately surrounding the Civil War (Beloved [1987]) through the 1970s and beyond (Paradise [1998]), but her newest work chronicles the disordered world created by European colonization. In A Mercy (2008), Morrison retells the story of the peopling of British North America in a dystopian register. Her portrait of the British colonies in the 1680s seems designed to correct the powerfully idealizing image of colonial encounter of an earlier generation, reflected so famously in Nick Carroway’s colonial fantasy of “aesthetic contemplation” and his sense of the “wonder” arising in the minds of Dutch sailors as they encountered “the fresh, green breast of the new world” in the concluding paragraphs of The Great Gatsby (1925). Carroway goes on to relate this green breast of seemingly untouched nature to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and the greenbacks that seem to promise Jay Gatsby so much more than they can deliver. Early in A Mercy, Morrison similarly identifies the natural world with money when she introduces the Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark making his way from a sloop to the Virginia shore through a dense fog, one distinguished from other fogs by its color: “thick, hot gold,” a “blinding gold” that Jacob experiences as dreamlike, and that he soon misses as he passes through it and regains a measure of control over himself and his surroundings. This blinding, golden Virginia fog will govern Vaark’s actions as the novel progresses, descending upon him in the form of an urge to build a manor house unseemly in its grandiosity, superfluous for a man without heirs, and fatal to its builder, as he dies trying to complete it. Long before Thomas Sutpen arrives in Yoknapatawpha County, a similar compulsion possesses Jacob Vaark to establish a legacy for himself at the house he names Milton in the unspecified northerly region where he dwells. The central trope of the novel involves the