Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place

Alice Sundman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000543339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How does Toni Morrison create and form her literary places? As one of the first studies exploring Morrison's archived drafts, notes, and manuscripts together with her published novels, this book offers fresh insights into her creative processes. It analyses the author's textual choices, her writerly strategies, and her process of writing, all combining in shaping her literary places.

In a methodology combining close reading and genetic criticism, the book examines Morrison's writing—her drafting and crafting—of her fictional places. Focusing primarily on the novels Beloved (1987), Paradise (1997), and A Mercy (2008), it analyses particular instances of written places, illuminating the manifold ways in which they are formed as text, and showing the centrality of the ideas of joining in Beloved, transformation in Paradise, and articulation in A Mercy.

Toni Morrison is a major literary figure in contemporary literature, and is commonly considered one of the most influential American writers of the post-1960s era. Investigating the conjunction of her texts and manuscripts, this book continues, extends, and supplements the rich body of Morrison scholarship by illuminating how the genesis and formation of her multifaceted literary places constitute vital parts of her fictional writing.

1 Morrison’s Written Places

DOI: 10.4324/9781003196099-2

In Song of Solomon, Pilate always carries with her a geography book and a collection of rocks. The geography book is a gift from her teacher and becomes not only a companion, but also a trigger spurring her “wandering life”: “It was as if her geography book had marked her to roam the country, planting her feet in each pink, yellow, blue or green state” (148). For Pilate, the step from the panoramic “map” perspective to the pedestrian’s experience of place (Certeau 119) is short: through imagination, the maps in her geography book give her a sense of the places they represent. She becomes rooted in all places she visits, and, conversely, the places stay with her: from each place where she lives, she gathers a piece of the ground: “Everyplace I went I got me a rock” (142). Pilate thus collects and carries with her a material fragment of the place. Apart from constituting concrete objects, the rocks also form emblems of lived life: as Pilate’s nephew Milkman thinks to himself, she “had taken a rock from every state she had lived in—because she had lived there” (329; original emphasis).

Morrison’s writing does not aim at covering all states in the way Pilate envisages her wandering life. However, Morrison, too, forms places out of geographical locations. She does this through acts of imagination and textual crafting—thus she foregrounds literary place through textual strategies. Drawing inspiration from Pilate’s relation to geography and place, this chapter explores how some selected moments of Morrison’s written places are formed in her texts, both as charted on a map and as written moments of concrete place and lived life. This overview has the triple aim of giving an overarching picture of Morrison’s geographical settings, presenting a range of moments of writing place in her oeuvre, and, while doing this, demonstrating what this study means by the writing of place.

Writing place, as conceived in this book, involves the process of forming and crafting meaningful place, of transforming some kind of raw material, be it ideas, memories, or research on factual circumstances, into fictional lived place. This could be, for example, turning a remembered store into a dysfunctional home that participates in determining the life of a character, forming a fictional Caribbean island into a place of duality and hesitation wavering between the natural and the supernatural, or transforming research on actual regional vegetation into a placial feature participating in the text’s meaning-making. Writing place gives to particular components of a novel’s setting the privilege of literary attention, thus transforming it from mere backdrop to something else: it takes on meaning and function that, for example, participate in shaping characters or forming themes—or it draws attention to the self-sufficiency of place as such within the fictional world. Such moments of writing place abound in Morrison’s texts. In this chapter, I will give a few examples picked from throughout her work. Obviously, this exploration is not exhaustive; nor does it offer a reading of each novel—that would be too ambitious an undertaking for the limited scope of a chapter. In subsequent chapters, I will go deeper into the writing of place in the three aforementioned novels. Here, however, I wish to demonstrate how Morrison’s oeuvre is remarkable in part because of these significant moments of writing place—of forming textual places.

Before delving into these placial moments, I will give an overarching account of Morrison’s geographical settings. The section “Morrisonian Geographies” takes the geography book’s mapping of places as its point of departure in an attempt to describe how the author’s fictional places relate to actual geography. This is not intended as a summary of each novel; for this, I refer to already existing descriptions of her texts, such as Roynon’s account of her work in Cambridge Introduction (12–98) and the volume The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, edited by Justine Tally. Instead, I will give an overview of Morrison’s most prominent geographical locations and indicate significant movements in the novels. In the section “Placial Moments in Morrison’s Oeuvre,” I will zoom in on some of these locations and reflect on how she forms them into written lived place—for, I propose, by analysing this we can gain a more complete understanding of the qualities of her fictional places and, consequently, a deeper comprehension of her novels.

Both sections will discuss the novels in chronological order based on the year of publication, starting with Morrison’s debut novel from 1970, The Bluest Eye, and ending with her last novel, published 45 years later, God Help the Child (2015). Obviously, this time span of more than four decades is characterised by a number of changing historical and intellectual contexts influencing both Morrison’s writing and the critical reception of her fiction. The present study does not aim at accounting for the intricacy of these multiple time frames—instead, bearing in mind that this complexity exists, I wish to direct the analytical attention to ways in which Morrison’s literary places are foregrounded through writerly strategies.

Morrisonian Geographies

Morrison’s writing, as Cheryl A. Wall has noted, is “not tied to a particular place or region”; rather, her texts to a large extent “map the post-Civil War migrations of blacks throughout the United States” (“Trying” 54). Her novels are set not just in some specific places, but also feature various kinds of movement in the US. In addition to this, places outside of the US frequently appear or are suggested in her work; as Roynon notes, her texts include some kind of relation “to non-U.S. locations … or to events that involve America but do not take place on its soil” (Cambridge 111).

Morrison’s first three novels favour Midwestern locations, primarily Ohio and Michigan, in combination with movements from and/or to the South. In these texts, moreover, trans-Atlantic journeys connected to the slave trade figure as memories, stories, or implicit background for the characters. The first novel The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1940–41. This is where both the narrator Claudia MacTeer and the protagonist Pecola Breedlove live. Pecola’s mother Pauline’s family has moved from Alabama, where they lived “on a ridge of red Alabama clay” (110), to Kentucky and “a real town” (112). As a child, Pecola’s father Cholly had lived “under a soft black Georgia sky” (133). When his aunt, who has taken care of him, dies, he sets off to Macon to find his father. Disappointed with the man he finds, Cholly continues his journey and meets Pauline in Kentucky (114). Together, they decide to “go ’way up north” to Lorain, Ohio (116), which is where Pecola’s tragic life-story takes place. In this novel, we see no explicit transatlantic journeys or relations to non-US locations; these are present implicitly in the form of the background of the characters as African Americans.

Sula (1973), too, is set in the Midwest, in the “neighborhood” (3) Medallion, Ohio, in the years between the end of World War I in 1919 and the time when the US enters World War II in 1941. Both France and the American South figure in the novel as parts of movements to and from Ohio. One of the characters in the novel, the war veteran Shadrack, fought in France in World War I (7). This experience stays with him in the form of post-traumatic mental illness. Helene has moved to Medallion from New Orleans, and when her grandmother is on her deathbed, Helene and her daughter Nel travel to New Orleans and back. Their journey goes by train from Medallion, via Cincinnati, Ohio, through Kentucky and Tennessee to Birmingham, where “they changed trains … for the last leg of the trip” (22–23). From Birmingham, the journey goes via Tuscaloosa, Meridian, Ellisville, Hattiesburg, and “Slidell, not too far from Lake Pontchartrain” to New Orleans (24). Sula, born and raised in Medallion, spends a large part of her adult life away from the town, but returns and finally dies in Medallion.

To a large extent, Song of Solomon (1977), set in the 1930s to the 1960s, centres around a journey starting in Michigan in the Midwest, going via Pennsylvania in the Northeast and to Virginia in the South. Initially we are placed in an unnamed city in Michigan, where Milkman lives. This is probably located in the northern part of the state, since the novel’s Robert Smith, in the opening pages, is attempting to fly to “the other side of Lake Superior” (3); that is, to a location outside of the US, in Canada. Having listened to his aunt Pilate tell of the gold she and Milkman’s father once saw in a cave in Danville, Pennsylvania, Milkman sets out on a quest to find the precious metal. He flies to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From there, he travels by Greyhound bus to Danville. Failing to find the gold, he continues to Virginia, where he thinks Pilate has hidden it. The trip goes from Danville by Greyhound to Roanoke, Virginia, where he rents a car that takes him via Petersburg and Culpeper to the small rural community Shalimar, a place that “was not on the Texaco map he had” (260), but that is located somewhere “in Blue Ridge Country” (275). On his way back to Michigan, Milkman travels via “a little town called Jistann” (326), where his car breaks down, and then via Ohio and Indiana back to Michigan. To some extent explicit, but also implicit in the text is a journey that counters Milkman’s: his ancestors once left Virginia to travel north. Further back in time, his ancestors were brought from Africa to America. Moreover, his ancestor Solomon was said to have flown back to Africa; an act that suggests yet another movement between continents, albeit one that transcends the realistic and, instead, indicates a symbolic or fantastic journey.

With Tar Baby, appearing in 1981 and set in 1979–80, Morrison’s fiction moves outside of the US, to the Caribbean, “the region where Columbus first encountered what he called the ‘West Indies’” (Roynon, Toni Morrison 28). Here, trans-Atlantic movements figure in a modern world of the 20th century. The protagonist Jadine shares her life between the French capital and the American continent and finds herself torn between a cosmopolitan life in Paris and her ancestral roots in African American culture. The setting comprises the fictional island Isle des Chevaliers in the Caribbean, New York City, and the rural community Eloe somewhere in Florida. Eloe has no airport; to get there without a car, Jadine and Son would have to fly to Tallahassee or Pensacola, then go by train or bus to a place called Poncie, from where they would have to “bum a ride” to Eloe (244). Jadine’s relation to Paris, furthermore, brings the French capital into the text as an absent presence.

Beloved (1987) brings us back to Ohio and to movements between the South and the Midwest. The present of Beloved is set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873–74. The South, however, plays an important part in the novel as memories from Sethe’s, Baby Suggs’s, and Paul D’s respective time as slaves frequently appear. The farm Sweet Home, from where Sethe has escaped, is located in Pulaski County in Kentucky (66), and Paul D flees from a prison in Alfred, Georgia, from where he travels through the country to Cincinnati and Sethe’s home. The shifting existence of the character Beloved evokes the Atlantic Ocean in the form of the Middle Passage as well as a vague memory of Africa.

Without ever mentioning the name of the City, Morrison creates a vivid picture of Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s, where the present of the story of Jazz (1992) is set. There is movement to the City primarily from the South: both Violet and Joe grew up in Vesper County, Virginia (30; 90; 105; 123), from where they have moved to the City via Delaware and Maryland, and are, as Duvall notes, “shaped by an agrarian beginning” that is related to “the virulent racism” in the South (“Toni Morrison” 12).

Paradise (1998) is primarily set in the South, portraying a “thoroughly bloodstained” time between World War II and 1976 (Roynon, Cambridge 64). Although the text centres around a small rural town in Oklahoma, a bird’s eye view of the geographical locations and movements in the novel shows movement from other places in the US towards Ruby and the Convent in Oklahoma. Ruby, now an isolated town with few connections to the rest of the country, forms an endpoint for families migrating from Mississippi and Louisiana to Oklahoma, where they first establish the town of Haven and then, disappointed with the town’s development, Ruby (194). The Convent, 17 miles north of Ruby, becomes a meeting point for women travelling aimlessly away from traumatic experiences and destructive relationships. For example, Connie, once abducted or saved by a Catholic nun, is taken from what is presumably Brazil and brought to the Convent on a ship via Puerto Limón (most likely Costa Rica) and New Orleans (223–24). And Mavis leaves her family in Maryland, travels via her mother in Paterson (28), from there to Newark (32) and then west along route 70 via Zanesville (33), Saint Louis (34), and a place somewhere between Lawrence and Topeka in Kansas (35) before she finds herself driving along route 18, from where she ends up in the Convent.

In Love (2003), we remain in the South, this time in a coastal community on the East Coast of the US. This community includes the town of Silk and the less prosperous Up Beach, where the now abandoned hotel and the cannery are located. The present of the text takes place in the 1990s, which is juxtaposed with the flourishing days of the resort from the 1930s to the 1960s. The text does not give an exact geographical location for this community. According to an early reviewer, Cosey’s Hotel and Resort, the “best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast” (Love 6), resembles the Sea Island off Georgia (Showalter), whereas Beavers locates the novel’s Silk in South Carolina (129).

A Mercy (2008) is set in the late 17th century in what is now upstate New York, where Jacob Vaark’s farm is located,¹ and also in what is now Maryland and Virginia, where he travels. The slave girl Florens is acquired from D’Ortega’s plantation in Maryland. This is also the place where Florens’s mother, only referred to as minha mãe, ends up as a slave brought from West Africa. Europe figures in the novel as the place of origin for Jacob, whose ancestors come from England and the Netherlands, his wife Rebekka from England, and D’Ortega, a Portuguese who arrived in the New World after having tried his luck in “Angola, Portugal’s slave pool” (18–19). A ship on the Atlantic Ocean, carrying Rebekka to the New World, forms an intermediate place between Europe and America.

Morrison’s penultimate novel Home (2012) centres around a journey from Seattle in the West to a small town in the South presumably at some point after 1953. It is when travelling that the Korean War veteran Frank Money’s life unfolds and it is on the move that his inner monologue makes him go through a kind of healing process that is completed in his childhood hometown Lotus in Georgia. Frank starts his journey from Seattle,² travelling by train via Portland (22), Chicago, and Chattanooga to Atlanta (100). In a suburb outside of Atlanta, he picks up his sister Cee, who has been the object of dangerous medical experiments. He brings her to Lotus, Georgia, their childhood hometown, and the place where both Cee and Frank can heal. Korea, where Frank fought in the war, plays a crucial part in the story as a place that keeps emerging in Frank’s memory.

Finally, Morrison’s last novel God Help the Child (2015) is set in contemporary California. Here, too, a journey forms a significant part of the novel. In this case, the protagonist is travelling from an unnamed city to the fictional village Whiskey in the rural northern parts of California in search of a boyfriend who has left her.

Among Morrison’s favoured places are thus Midwestern locations, particularly in Ohio and Michigan, often in combination with journeys to and from the South, but also with implicit or explicit relations to locations outside of the US. Her settings also include New York City and Harlem, the Caribbean, and locations in the South, such as the fictional small towns Ruby in Oklahoma and Eloe in Florida. In her last two novels, the West enters her oeuvre as Seattle becomes the starting point for Frank Money’s journey home in Home, and as California forms the place of the protagonist Bride’s journey in God Help the Child. There is, moreover, a prevalence of small-town and rural places, with the exception of Jazz and, to some extent, Tar Baby. Furthermore, as Duvall noted in 1997, place in Morrison’s texts “almost always bears traces of the rural black Southern community” (“Toni Morrison” 12).

Morrison’s textual places, be they fictional or directly corresponding to existing towns or cities, can thus be placed on a geographical map. This combination of actually existing and made-up places resonates with how the author forms her places from an amalgam of maps, photos, historical accounts, and her own memories and imagination. It is this creational blend that makes Morrison’s places come alive. Darlene E. Erickson is indeed right in suggesting that “connections to actual places create an immediacy of location in the novels” (48). Still, it is, in the words of Wall, precisely the interaction between “both the illusion of realism and the artifice of metaphor” (“Trying” 54) that forms Morrison’s places. In the following section, I will show how an exploration of the forming of textual fictional places—the writing of place—may reveal placial features and qualities that, in turn, have the potential to open up for a deeper understanding of the texts. This overview, furthermore, has the additional function of showing what writing place means in this study.

Placial Moments in Morrison’s Oeuvre

While Pilate in Song of Solomon made her experiences of the states of the US remain part of her life through the materiality of minerals, Morrison’s fictional places are brought to life and existence as text; as the au...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Morrison’s Written Places
• 2 Placing the Join of Beloved
• 3 Transforming Places in Paradise
• 4 Articulating Place in A Mercy
• Coda
• Works Cited
• Index