Toni Morrison's New Bildungsromane: Paired Characters and Antithetical Form in The Bluest Eye, Sula , and Beloved

Abstract

Toni Morrison's New Bildungsromane: Paired Characters and Antithetical Form in The Bluest Eye, SuIa, and Beloved Anne T. Salvatore The traditional notion of the bildungsroman features a male protagonist who demonstrates "heroic" achievement by overcoming social and moral obstacles, defining a unified, autonomous self, and developing ethical authority through the narrative. In stark opposition to this traditional conception of the genre, several of Toni Morrison's novels present African American female protagonists who inevitably lose the struggle against the double oppression of gender and race, fail to create authentic identity, and thus falter in the pursuit of ethical and narrative authority. Recent critics offer a variety of reasons for the failures of these protagonists, including the "sad infertility of the cultural climate for a thriving African American psyche" (Matus 54); the "damaging impact of inherited and internalized racist stereotypes and discourses" (Bouson 104); the characters' "adoption of a rigid role, [and their] withdrawal from life" (Davis 30). Such explanations clarify the causes and effects of the characters' defeats and establish the protagonists' status as anti-heroines in an ironic form often defined as the female bildungsroman. I propose, however, that Morrison complicates the concept of narrative authority beyond the simple, ironic failure of her protagonists/heroines. In fact, I hope to show that she creates a hybrid form of the bildungsroman that is simultaneously both ironic and nonironic . To accomplish this paradox, she presents a set of paired characters JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.2 (Summer 2002): 154-178. Copyright O 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. Toni Morrison's New Bildungsromane 155 in each novel: the protagonist, who serves as ironic anti-hero, and her nonironic alternate, a secondary character with a seemingly lesser role, who by demonstrating strength and courage, triumphs in some way despite the enormity of cultural and personal obstacles. Thus, Morrison de-centers the focus of the traditional bildungsroman, shifting ethical emphasis and authority away from the assumed central subject. In The Bluest Eye, moral authority rests not on the child Pecóla, whose story as the ultimate nonbeing is presented on the first pages of the novel as the controlling metaphor, but rather on Claudia who, as eyewitness, astutely narrates Pecóla 's rape story. In SuIa, the ostracized title-character dies failing to progress toward genuine identity, while NeI, Sula's conventionally trapped friend, manages a final epiphany. Sethe, the young adult runaway slave in Beloved, while perhaps less clearly doomed than the earlier characters, still seems dependent and perplexed in the end, questioning whether she can move beyond her terrible losses, whereas Denver, Sethe's surviving child, shows clear signs of an ability to forge authentic autonomy in the future. Morrison's strategy of pairing characters changes the nature of the bildungsroman genre, merging the traditional form with the ironic model, and re-introducing a degree of hope to what had become a pessimistically oriented, if not despair-laden, genre. The more traditional definition of the bildungsroman, prominent during the nineteenth century, can be found in circulation as recently as the 1980s. For example, M. H. Abrams describes the genre in his 1981 handbook as a "'novel of formation' or 'novel of education' " (121). He notes that "the subject of these novels is the development of the protagonist's mind and character, as he passes from childhood through varied experiences —and usually through a spiritual crisis—into maturity and the recognition of his identity and role in the world" (121). This definition assumes a positive movement toward maturity, occurring through a linear process that is identifiable and ultimately successful. Philosophically, the definition suggests a Platonic model of an ordered universe where both objective knowledge about the world and a conscious, stable subjectivity are potentially attainable, despite difficulties incurred. In a different handbook published almost twenty years later in 2000, Harmon and Holman offer a basic definition with little apparent conceptual change in the underlying positivist, Cartesian, optimistic assumptions about this genre. These authors imagine the bildungsroman as "a novel that deals with the develop- 156 JNT ment of a young person, usually from adolescence to maturity; it is frequently autobiographical" (59). They do, however, at least hint at transformation...