| Toni Morrison's works are "fantastic earthy realism". She imbues motherhood with the same "fantastic earthy realism". Morrison depicts motherhood as a complex state that is influenced by powerful biological, psychological, and cultural forces. She demonstrates the vulnerability of the Afro-American mother who bears the crushing weight of history and the destructive attitude of the dominant culture on the body and psyche. Morrison expertly shows that maternal experience centered in African American culture is not monolithic, but rather reflective of diverse and complex realities. Her maternal figures are complex, often possessing negative qualities that disturb and confound readers. They have the potential to be loving, nurturing, judgmental, punishing, and even murderous. They are not romanticized or glorified in any traditional sense. They are flesh-and-blood, sexual women who erupt with passion, incite fear and terror, inspire adoration, and provoke sorrow.Chapter one is about the motherhood in Sula. Black women have been depicted as weak and powerless in order to dramatize the manifold ways that white people exploit and mistreat them. Such simplex portraits of black women as utter victims are problematic because they ignore the strength of many black women who have fought the oppressed system as tenaciously as their male counterparts. The "Great mother", Eva, is a puzzling woman. She is the dominant maternal figure in Sula, but she is hardly the stereotyped, all giving perfect mother. Eva, who has endured desperate poverty, is a strong, tough woman. She is also proud. As a young mother, Eva has to maintain constant vigilance over her children's fragile existence after her husband deserts the family. She sees playfulness and affection as absurdly superfluous luxuries she can ill afford to give daughters Hannah and Pearl and son Plum. Another aspect is about the distorted relationship between Eva, Hannah and Plum. Maternal love and body find its worst inversions in their relationships with Hannah and with her son Plum. Plum fights in the First World War. When he returns from the war, he loses his manhood, helpless as a child, and can achieve nothing but drink and sleep. Eva, believing Plum is trying to crawl back into her womb, douses him with kerosene and sets his bed alive so that he can die like a man. Trying to light a fire in the yard, Hannah has her clothes ignited. Eva throws herself from the window of the second floor in the hope of covering her daughter with her body. But she fails to reach Hannah, and the missing leg that had been her children's salvation years before now has prevented her from saving her eldest child. The second section in this chapter one is Eva's distorted motherhood in her naming others. It is universal folklore that to know a person's name is to have power over that person. And the power greater than knowing a name is bestowing it, for the act of naming another reflects a desire to regulate and therefore to control. The namer in Sula is Eva. A primal example is Eva's calling her son "sweet plum". The name is a symbol that Eva has already emasculated and rendered him infantile. Another more evident example is "Deweys". Eva adopts three boys and names them all "Deweys". The undifferentiated name kills their identity, and they grow up as one person. The African Mothers are the primary namers in Morrison's novels, just as they are the transmitters of culture and the inventors of language. In chapter one, I also analyze the distorted maternal body language—Eva's missing leg. The missing leg is full of myths and ambiguities. It is this missing leg that may well be responsible for Eva's attainment of money and therefore of power. Her leg then becomes the primary symbol of maternal love and sacrifice in the novel. Eva's missing leg implicates many things. It is a lack of language and at the same time it speaks for the maternal body, the Mother's ultimate sacrifice for the children. Therefore it is safe to conclude that poverty is the main re... |
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