The Roots of the Body in Toni Morrison: A Mater of "Ancient Properties"

Abstract

No matter what you did, muses unhappy Jadine in Tar Baby, the with would impugn your character (288). The diaspora mothers are everywhere. They are night women who visit Jadine in a dream, imaginary women in trees, African woman in Parisian bakery, and Therese on Isle de Chevaliers. They remind Jadine, who is prey to their seduction, of that which she has chosen to forget: her African-American roots. The diaspora mothers are everywhere in Toni Morrison's other novels as well. Like Jadine, Morrison's texts - in particular, Sula, Beloved, and Jazz - are drawn to and repulsed by haunting presence of mother. At center of these works is a literal or figurative maternal presence that dominates each one of characters; she is symbolic hub about which their individual stories revolve. From pumping breasts issues a very curious kind of milk - narrative itself. This incessant literary return to mother, I argue, is both an expression of a psychological desire to recover repressed - object of desire - and an expression of a political desire to recover past. Laura Mulvey has claimed that lost memory of mother's body is similar to other metaphors of a buried past or a history that contribute to rhetoric of oppressed people (167). Morrison's novels demonstrate political potential of mother's body. By charting a discourse of maternal desire, Morrison challenges her readers - in particular, her African-American readers, to whom, in her words, she writes - to reinvestigate their sense of self, and their relation to that which has been (see Rootedness 340). Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field Sula opens with distorted and phantasmagoric body of Shadrack, an unfortunate war veteran. After a horrific battle experience, Shadrack lies in a hospital bed, watching his grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack's beanstalk all over tray and bed (9). His body grows out of bounds, as does his sense of self. He cannot connect his face with an identity: ... he didn't even know who he was or what he was .... he was sure of one thing only: unchecked monstrosity of his hands (12). Morrison introduces bodies that are similarly disoriented - shellshocked, drowned, burned, or mutilated - in almost all of her works. Her novels break down proper body boundaries, thrusting characters into a primordial chaos in which experience of identity founders. Reading one of Morrison's novels is like entering warm, sensuous, and overpowering ambience of a womb. Over and over again, we have characters who regress, in psychoanalytic terms, to undifferentiated sense of self characteristic of an infant. Margaret Mahler's seminal work The Psychological Birth of Human Infant describes process of separation-individuation requisite development and maintenance of 'sense of identity' (11). The infant learns to view mother's face as other, and himself or herself as a distinct self. Critical to this process of separation is experience of body boundaries. Since infant's earliest perceptions are bodily sensations, it follows that ego is and foremost a 'body ego' (220). Therefore, first step toward ego development for infant involves bodily differentiation from mother (65). Morrison's works track a reversal of this process; each orchestrates a return to symbiotic origin of human condition (Mahler 227). Whether we look at Shadrack retreating from society to live in his womb-like hut over river, Son in Tar Baby allowing himself to be swallowed in Caribbean womb-water, Joe crawling back into his mother's cave in Jazz, or Sethe and Paul regressing to a bewildered and helpless infantile state in Beloved, we find that womb exercises an eerie and ineluctable power over Morrison's heroes and heroines. …