New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's God Help the Child

Race, Culture, and History

Alice Knox Eaton, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Shirley A. Stave

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496828897
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Alice Knox Eaton, Mar Gallego, Maxine Lavon Montgomery, Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Shirley A. Stave, Justine Tally, Susana Vega-González, and Anissa Wardi In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returned to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. God Help the Child, published in 2015, is set in the contemporary period, unlike all of her previous novels. The contemporary setting is ultimately incidental to the project of the novel, however; as with Morrison's other work, the story takes on mythic qualities, and the larger-than-life themes lend themselves to allegorical and symbolic readings that resonate in light of both contemporary and historical issues. New Critical Essays on Toni Morrison's "God Help the Child": Race, Culture, and History, a collection of eight essays by both seasoned Morrison scholars as well as new and rising scholars, takes on the novel in a nuanced and insightful analysis, interpreting it in relation to Morrison's earlier work as well as locating it within ongoing debates in literary and other academic disciplines engaged with African American literature. The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses on trauma—both the pain and suffering caused by neglect and abuse, as well as healing and understanding. The second section considers narrative choices, concentrating on experimentation and reader engagement. The third section turns a comparative eye to Morrison's fictional canon, from her debut work of fiction, The Bluest Eye, until the present. These essays build on previous studies of Morrison's novels and deepen readers' understanding of both her last novel and her larger literary output.

Section 1

Old Scars, New Wounds, and the Search for Wholeness

Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child

Shirley A. Stave

Toni Morrison’s 2015 novel, God Help the Child, raises vexing questions about the construction of identity in the face of childhood trauma inflected through the lens of race. Initially seeming to interrogate the old debate over the social construction of identity vs. essential identity, the novel veers off on a trajectory that plays surface (i.e., skin) off depth (i.e., consciousness). Such an exploration is significant since racism is most obviously predicated upon the color of skin, but permeates the surface to create anxiety about blood, contamination, and impurity. The novel’s two main characters, Bride and Booker, both attempt to evade depth, albeit in radically different ways.

Bride, the novel’s main character, suffers for the first two decades of her life because of her blue-black skin. Born to very light-skinned parents, with a great-grandmother who abandoned her children to pass as white, Bride herself is “[m]idnight black, Sudanese black” (Morrison 3); at her birth, her mother briefly considers smothering her to death, while her father simply abandons his wife and the infant daughter he is convinced has been fathered by someone else. The issue of the internal color line is one Morrison has explored before,¹ as have other African American novelists. Nella Larson’s Passing, as its title suggests, treats two women who are capable of passing for white, one who does so on occasion for convenience, the other who has abandoned her family to marry a racist white man who has no clue as to his wife’s racial heritage. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God features a main character whose light skin and gently waving, silky hair result in another black woman’s attempts to encourage her to marry a light-skinned black man rather than to stay with her darker-skinned lover Tea Cake. Toni Morrison’s Paradise flips the scenario to show the arrogance of a community of blue-black men who reject and demean lighter-skinned black people. However, in many of her other works, Morrison reveals the privilege granted to those capable of passing the paper bag test—Jadine from Tar Baby immediately comes to mind—as well as the scorn heaped upon those who are darker, such as Pecola in The Bluest Eye. The community of Ruby in Paradise notwithstanding, light skin privilege has existed since slavery days, when lighter skin was perceived by slave owners as more European and hence more aesthetically pleasing, the result being that house slaves, whose work load was less onerous and whose lives were less brutal, tended to have lighter skin. Even today, the internal color line vexes many, and the pressure to marry lighter-skinned partners remains a part of racial consciousness.

Ironically, however, Bride’s color is problematic within the context of racism, since her body’s surface can be read as the vestigial trace of untainted African blood. In her family’s dedication to “whitening up,” what must remain unacknowledged is the plight of those ancestors who were seen as subhuman because of their color, even as the project of “whitening up” began with the rape of their female progenitors. As Demetrius L. Eudell argues, citing Sylvia Wynter for support, African Americans must come to terms with “the representation of those of African hereditary descent, as the ontological lack within the terms […] of the secularized autopoetic field of meaning of the Judaeo-Christian West” (23, emphasis in original). Hortense Spillers similarly argues that, through the mechanism of slavery, the black woman became “the principal point of passage between the human and the non-human world. Her issue became the focus of a cunning difference—visually, psychologically, ontologically—as the route by which the dominant male decided the distinction between humanity and ‘other’ [….] In other words, the black person mirrored for the society around her what a human being was not” (155, emphasis in original). The horror Bride’s mother experiences at her child’s color cannot be overstated, since it indicates her confrontation with her repressed knowledge of how her own color marks her as nonhuman in the eyes of some. Sweetness has prided herself on having escaped the onus of virulent racial hatred. Because her grandmother passed for white (abandoning her family in the process), and her own parents gained some privilege through their light color—her mother “wasn’t stopped from trying on hats in the department stores or using their ladies’ rooms,” and her father “could try on shoes in the front part of a shoestore, not in a back room” (4)—Sweetness has claimed a form of “white privilege” not available to darker-skinned African Americans. Bride’s color, then, functions as the return of the repressed, the visible marker that demands the acknowledgment of an enslaved past, even as it underscores what Sweetness also would not choose to concede—that her own light skin bespeaks the rape(s) of her foremothers. Similarly, Sweetness’s husband abandons his family because he believes Bride’s color indicates sexual license on the part of his wife; paradoxically, Bride’s color is the mark of racial purity, and his and his wife’s color indicate the stain of racial tampering.

Sweetness’s revulsion at her daughter’s color leads her to attempt to smother the baby, but she finds herself incapable of completing the act. Rather, she physically and emotionally distances herself from her offspring, going so far as to ask to be called “Sweetness” instead of “Mama.” Sweetness attempts to justify her actions as a protective mechanism, but her disgust with her daughter’s skin is evident: “[N]ursing her was like having a pickaninny sucking my teat. I went to bottle-feeding soon as I got home” (5). Morrison has interrogated the internal color line before, but Sweetness’s claim clarifies that more is at stake than a greater degree of respect from white people and ease in negotiating social situations. “But how else can we hold on to a little dignity?” (4) Sweetness asks. For her, refusing the knowledge of her ancestral connection to slavery, to the “non-Human,” is vital if she is to retain her sense of being. Mae Henderson has spoken of “the wounding at the ‘primal scene’ of slavery [which] becomes imprinted on black bodies, internalized in the black psyche, and passed down to subsequent generations” (224). Sweetness and Bride both suffer from such wounding. To maintain her sense of her own personhood, her interiority, which she predicates upon her light skin, Sweetness deprives Bride of hers, seeing only her child’s surface and refusing to acknowledge the child’s desire for a connection with her mother. Because Sweetness prides herself on her “high yellow” skin, she can scarcely bring herself to touch, much less love, her daughter. Bride recalls, “Distaste was all over her face when I was little and she had to bathe me. […] I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch. I made little mistakes deliberately, but she had ways to punish me without touching the skin she hated” (31). Sweetness’s abhorrence of her child’s surface eradicates any sense that Bride is more than simply skin, leaving the child to “[equate] herself with her appearance” (Wyatt 17). Judith Butler’s argument that sexed identity is formed for some and foreclosed for others might apply here racially as well. She maintains that the creation of a subject “requires the simultaneous production of a domain of abject beings, those who are not yet ‘subjects,’ but who form the constitutive outside to the domain of the subject. The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject.” She goes on to point out that the subject will come to understand itself only through resisting that which it has cast off as abject. Therefore, “the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produced a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation” (3). Lucille Fultz maintains that “Morrison explodes myths about difference by refiguring aesthetics in what has traditionally been deemed ugly, unnatural, freakish—all the negative baggage we bring to physical difference. It must be noted, however, that such notions of difference are generally measured against some standard of normativity—color, phenotypic features, presence or absence and arrangement of certain body parts” (18–19). Little Lula Ann Bridewell must come to a sense of identity in the face of the abjection she has experienced due to the perception of her mother and her community that her skin color is abnormal, even monstrous.

While Butler appears to suggest that the process she describes is inescapable in the developmental process and is that which demands of subjects the rejection of the abjected outside, in Bride’s case, the abjected outside is her actual skin and therefore cannot be repudiated. Bride’s strategy initially suggests a claiming of agency and a refusal of her mother’s renunciation. Abandoning her given name, she distances herself from any familial connectedness, both psychologically and geographically, since she escapes to Los Angeles, where, with the help of a “‘total person’ designer” (33), she recreates herself as the antithesis of what she had earlier been perceived to be. Whereas her mother had regarded her color as “terrible,” and her early jobs were those out of the public eye, after she is remade (her term), her color becomes an asset, not a liability. She dresses only in white and wears no makeup; given her height and her slimness, as well as her haunting blue eyes, she relates, “Everywhere I went I got double takes but not like the faintly disgusted ones I used to get as a kid. These were adoring looks, stunned but hungry” (34). However, Bride carries within herself a racialized sense of abjection that she continually must reject. Hence, she fires her maid because “I could no longer stand the sight of her—fat, with cantaloupe breasts and watermelon behind” (57). Bride recasts the “uninhabitable” not as color, which she cannot escape yet can rescript, but rather as physicality itself, which, because she is young and wealthy enough to have sufficient leisure time to engage a trainer, she can regulate for the time being.

She begins by jettisoning her birth name—Lula Ann Bridewell—choosing to rename herself as simply Bride. Within this fiction, her act erases the Name-of-the-Father, which would seemingly free her from what Butler calls “nominal zones of phallic control” (153). According to Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father, sometimes simply referred to as the Father’s “No,” or even more simply, Law, interjects itself between the mother and the child, disrupting the child’s desire for primal unity. However, in Bride’s case—or rather, in Lula Ann’s case—there is no father to claim the mother for himself; rather, the mother herself is repulsed by the child and refuses any form of intimacy with her. Whereas Lacan would argue that all children come into being as subjects when they recognize the mother’s desire for something other than themselves, Bride has to confront the reality that her mother does not desire her at all. Fultz states, “While the women in Morrison’s fiction endure and sometimes transcend different kinds of pain, the sources of their pain are often similar: pain accumulates to them from their multiple subject positions and often results from poverty and abandonments, or from parental, spousal, communal, and institutional abuse” (50). However, Lacan maintains that children “are concerned to secure (themselves) a place, to try to be the object of their parents’ desire” (Fink 54). Presumably, in a more typical household, the child is sometimes successful in achieving such a place; Bride is not, until, by virtue of a lie that results in another woman’s imprisonment, she briefly enjoys her mother’s attention and affection. However, Sweetness’s acceptance of her child is short-lived; hence, Bride is effectively orphaned,² even though she has living parents.

Furthermore, to become a subject, interpellation must occur, “interpellation” being Althusser’s term for the process by which a person is “hailed” and subsequently responds, taking on the qualities associated with the “name” one is called (for example, “girl,” “white,” “poor”), and thus entering the social order. In Bride’s case, Sweetness refuses to “hail” her child as “daughter,” which leaves the girl ungrounded. One might argue she is first interpellated when, caught observing her landlord raping a little boy, the man refers to her as “nigger cunt,” words she had never heard before and did not comprehend, although “the hate and revulsion in them didn’t need definitions” (56). Her girlhood is marked by recurring racial slurs resulting from her color, “the name-calling […] like poison, like lethal viruses through [her] veins, with no antibiotic available” (57). In choosing to rename herself, Bride is rejecting the earlier interpellation and using her color against those who had formerly antagonized her. She admits, “[F]orcing those tormentors—the real ones and others like them—to drool with envy when they see me is more than payback. It’s glory” (57), an emotional stance that is completely understandable. Essentially, “Bride” is a fiction the young woman creates as an acceptable substitute for Lula Ann, whom she finds too repellant to inhabit. However, in erasing the existence of the girl child, Bride sets into motion a series of erasures that threatens to eradicate her. Furthermore, the name she chooses, “Bride,” places her in a liminal space, neither daughter nor wife, unclaimed for the moment by either father or husband, and, as such, bearing the name of neither.

In refusing the Name-of-the-Father, of Law, and refusing interpellation, Bride is barred from entering what Lacan calls the symbolic order, the social order, predicated upon language, in which we exist as subjects. In the Lacanian scheme, infants at some point (usually between six and eighteen months) enter what he calls the mirror stage (or the imaginary order), in which the child sees its image in a mirror and perceives itself as identical with its image, which it construes as whole, unified, and possessed of agency (Ecrits, 1–4). Once the child acquires language (and is interpellated), it enters the symbolic order, where it both becomes a subject and becomes subjected to society’s mores. Bride remains fixed in the mirror stage, the stage of misrecognition, mistakenly perceiving herself as a unified whole with full agency, requiring no one else, completely depending upon herself.³ Bride misidentifies her entire self with her surface, as what she sees in the mirror; hence, she relates scenes from her own life to films or photographs she has seen, effectively reducing human complexity to generated image, rendering her depth impermeable, available neither to herself nor to anyone else. She comments that of the men she dated, “none [were] interested in what I thought, just what I looked like” (37) but admits that she had created “a shield that protected her from any overly intense feeling, be it rage, embarrassment, or love” (79). However, having given herself over purely to image, to a visual construction of a woman, effectively Bride has substituted representation for that which is represented, relying on media constructions to inform her understanding of lived experience. She compares her relationship with Booker to “double-page spreads in fashion magazines […] with couples standing half naked in surf, […] their sexuality like lightning and the sky going dark to show off the shine of their skin” (9), and decides her own relationship doesn’t measure up. Again, when she sees an older couple holding hands, she envisions their “[s]teps matching, looking straight ahead like people called to a spaceship where a door will slide open and a tongue of red carpet rolls out. They will ascend, hand in hand, into the arms of a benevolent Presence. They will hear music so beautiful it will bring you to tears” (39). Of course, her cinematic vision of the couple’s ascension to heaven reveals much about her own desires, but that she cannot view the two without scripting a scene for them indicates her obsession with image and suggests how her sense of reality is predicated upon the gaze and upon herself as being gazed upon, her surface the only existing certainty. Laura Mulvey, in her iconic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” includes a discussion of the Lacanian Mirror Stage as it relates to film, pointing out that the experience of being so absorbed in a film that the world outside the screen vanishes is “nostalgically reminiscent” of the child’s first perception of itself in a mirror (441). However, for Mulvey (and also for Lacan), recognition differs depending on the gender of the child who is looking into the mirror or watching the film.⁴ Mulvey maintains, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness” (442). Bride predicates her entire existence on her surface, transforming herself into an object to be looked at. Her stunning beauty, once the “whole person designer” is finished with her, enables that transformation.

Bride capitalizes on her looks and launches a cosmetic line for women of all colors; her choice of a career is telling. Bride achieves fame and fortune not only by reconstructing herself as an icon but also by promoting products that enable women to transform and enhance their surface, their faces. However, devoid of a foundational self, she bases her identity purely on surface, incapable of perceiving interiority in herself or in others. She completely misreads the motives of her colleague Brooklyn (herself equally obsessed with image—blond with dreadlocks), whom she trusts as a close friend, even though Brooklyn reveals her disdain for Bride and even attempts to seduce Booker. Additionally, although she enjoys her relationship with Booker, Bride is content to allow that relationship to remain purely superficial, the result being that she knows nothing of Booker’s life, his passions, even what he does while she works. She relishes their sexual relationship but overlooks the absence of any real intimacy between them. She admits that “what was important in our relationship, other than our lovemaking [was] his complete understanding of me” (61), unaware that when she spoke, Booker was not actually listening to her words but was a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1 Old Scars, New Wounds, and the Search for Wholeness
• Section 2 Subverting Whiteness: Writing beyond the Racialized Gaze
• Section 3 Intertextual Interceptions
• Contributors