Exploring the Complexities of Familial Love in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Exams of English

Download Exploring the Complexities of Familial Love in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and more Exams English in PDF only on Docsity! ~ 273 ~ ISSN Print: 2394-7500 ISSN Online: 2394-5869 Impact Factor: 5.2 IJAR 2017; 3(8): 273-276 www.allresearchjournal.com Received: 11-06-2017 Accepted: 12-07-2017 Payal Research Scholar, Department of English, CDLU, Sirsa, Haryana, India Correspondence Payal Research Scholar, Department of English, CDLU, Sirsa, Haryana, India Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: Complexities of familial love Payal Abstract Love and its scarcity is the central issue Morrison deals with over and again in her fictional works. Like her other novels in Song of Solomon too Morrison has introduced the fears of black America – of the disintegration of black identity and the demolition of African values after the love for consumerist/capitalist culture. Morrison has clearly underlined that in the state of isolation or without an individual’s integration into his/her community, wholeness can never be realized. Written around the emergence of Civil Rights Movement, the novel is mainly focused on the subject of a free black man. That the novel emphasizes Morrison’s adoration for the black man can be testified by the fact that she has written this novel in the memory of her no more loving “Daddy”. Sharing the title and theme with an Old Testament book, Song of Songs, Morrison’s Song of Solomon narrates the tale of an emotional alienated black man, Milkman and his quest for family gold which eventually turning his love for money into love for family inheritance and spirituality leads the reader into a debate on internal purification and love as sacrifice and love as possession and accumulation. This paper explores the complications of familial love in both emotionally dead family of the Deads and emotionally enriched family of Pilate. Keywords: Love, family, complexity Introduction Combining the familial structure of Morrison’s first two novels, The Bluest Eye and Sula and thus introducing a patriarchal nuclear set up and a three generational all women family structure, Song of Solomon juxtaposes the collectivism of Afro-American familial pattern with alienation of western nuclear family. The insensitive head of the Dead family, Macon II, does not love its members rather he chooses money and materialism as the substitutions of love object. His insensitive approach warps the capacity to love of his entire family thrusting each Dead in emotionally estranged existence. His house looks “more prison than palace” where “Macon kept each member of his family awkward with fear” (SOS 9, 10). Bjork says “Macon’s manipulation of power and of people as objects not only inhibits him from establishing loving, sensitive relationships, but it also enables him to escape his own identity and heritage” (84). The nuclear family of Macon Dead is comprised of his wife, Ruth, two daughters, Lena and Corinthians and one son, Macon Dead III, eminently known by his nickname, Milkman. He holds his sister, Pilate, whom he once loved deeply, in repulsion for her non-materialism. In contrast to Macon, Pilate’s extended family, encompassing her daughter, Reba and her daughter’s daughter, Hagar, lives on the margins in austerity. Furman suggests “Macon’s greedy obsession with owning things and people is a mutated version of his love, as a child, of the land and his family” (39). Macon inherited from his father the love of land. His early life spent on the farm land under the warmth of his loving father is marked with intensity of emotions. Samuels explains, it was “an Edenic world whose fertile soil enhanced bonding between father and son as well as providing the fulfilling experience” (59). Macon’s father, Macon Sr., was the reflection of a traditional black fatherhood. He was a caring and committed father; he didn’t fly off and leave his children like his father. He nurtured his children without the support of their mother. Under the philosophy of material economy and emotional richness of his father Macon too learned to love integrity and reliability of character. Leading an elementary life in intimacy to nature both father and son cherished to cultivate their land. But the cruel end of International Journal of Applied Research 2017; 3(8): 273-276 ~ 274 ~ International Journal of Applied Research his father by whites and consequent disruption of the familial tenderness murders the son’s scrupled humanity, making him a follower of Mammon. Despite tending his blood relations Macon caresses the symbols of wealth, the keys of his houses: “curled his fingers around them, letting their bunchy solidity calm him . . . and . . . fondled them from time to time as he walked down Not Doctor Street to his office” (SOS 17). His efforts to seek escape from the painful memories of past make him a repressed person. Unfortunately, for his love of money/cupiditas he marries a woman who herself had a distorted psyche. As a result, instead of love it is hatred that rules their married life: “His hatred of his wife glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her” (SOS 10). However the circumstances were ordinary at the outset. Macon later tells his son, it was a time when love was not seen as the origin of relationships as it is seen now since; “Flolks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and – and clear” (70).The thing, which provokes Macon’s abhorrence to his wife, is Ruth’s incestuous attachment to her father. With starvation for love and affection Morrison mingles morbidity. Alienation after her mother’s death propels Ruth to love her father and pine for his love as a child stunting her growth, though she assumed duties as the woman of the house. Morrison further complicates the love between the father and the daughter by highlighting the confusion in Dr. Foster’s psyche about his love for his wife and for his daughter: Fond as he was for his only child, useful as she was in his house since his wife had died, lately he had begun to chafe under her devotion. Her steady beam of love was unsettling . . . At sixteen, she still insisted on having him come to her at night . . . and plant a kiss on her lips. Perhaps it was the loud silence of his dead wife, perhaps it was Ruth’s disturbing resemblance to her mother. More probably it was the ecstasy that . . . he felt inappropriate to the occasion. (23) Though, he loves his daughter, the use of the word “chafe” shows his embarrassment at her constant demands for closeness and love exchanges. Dr. Foster, himself an enigmatic character, cannot remain away from her daughter. Macon’s repugnance at Dr. Foster’s delivering both daughters of Ruth is marked: “I didn’t like the notion of his being his own daughter’s doctor” but “both times he was there. She had her legs wide open and he was there” (71). Marianne Hirsch rightfully comments: “he is unable to find an acceptable delimitation between parental love and transgressive incestuous closeness” (Bloom 149). In addition to this, his being an addict also confirms his abnormality. Another instance strengthens Macon’s allegation. Macon reports: “In the bed. That’s where she was when I opened the door. Laying next to him. Naked as a yard dog, kissing him . . . she had his fingers in her mouth” (SOS 73). Uncertain as Macon too is about their sexual links, it definitely establishes abnormalcy in the father and the daughter. There may be probability of an incestuous relationship between them. But it is difficult to proclaim it since the scene is marked with the death of one character and another character, Ruth, who survives always performs like a complex and mysterious personality. The probably nasty relationship of Ruth with her father freezes Macon’s relationship with his own daughters also. Ruth’s attachment to her father continues after his death. Her visits to his grave indicate her necrophilia, although she rationalizes it as her strong attachment for he was the only person in her life who cared for her or took interest in her. Being pressed small in the big house of the doctor, Ruth never felt the need of companions because she had her father always loving and concerned. So it may be her emphasis on keeping that intimacy alive because she says, “It was very important for me to be in his presence, among his things, the things he used, had touched. Later . . . When he left it, I kept on reigniting the cared-for-feeling that I got from him” (SOS 124). Ruth’s strange obsession for her dead father mirrors Freudian purported parent-child abnormal love fixation. Her growth is stuck in a phase when libido, observing halt, is overwhelmed by fixation. Thus having her anaclitic needs i.e. ego preservative needs attached to the sexual needs fulfilled from her father Ruth makes him her first and long-lasting love object. A victim of irresistible sexual attraction she passes one more equally abnormal fixation to her son, Milkman. Morrison says, “she regarded him as a beautiful toy, a respite, a destraction, a physical pleasure” (SOS 132). Furthermore, by showing the mother, Ruth’s fixation upon her child, Morrison is reworking the above discussed Freudian parent-child libidinal attachment. In Morrison’s works there has been abundance of such maladjusted cases. On the one hand Morrison shows how absence of parental love blocks the possibility of a person’s capacity to love healthily; on the other hand she also shows how the disturbed emotional intimacy and excessive dependence of parent upon child or vice-versa hinders the possibilities of children’s healthy growth to love. When suspecting incest, Macon breaks up his sexual link with her, to compensate for her sexually deprived life, Ruth seeks Milkman as a substitute of Macon by giving him breastfeed past infancy as she says, “something else is needed to get from sunup to sundown” and it was like “a balm, a gentle touch,” “a pleasure she hated to give up” (SOS 13, 14). Susan wills too says “Shunned by her husband, she turns inward to necrophilic fantasies of her father, a mildly obscene relationship with her son, and masturbation” (qtd. in Gates and Appiah 319-320). Ruth is a failed mother, though she says “I would have happily died except for my babies”, she cannot give them a healthy upbringing (SOS 125). She is solely centered on her son, Milkman because she thinks that he will be a supplement of alliance between them “the son she bore was first off a wished-for bond between herself and Macon, something to hold them together and reinstate their sex lives” (131). But contrary to this the child becomes a bone of contention between them “Then the baby became the nausea . . . He became a plain on which . . . she and her husband fought” (131,132). When she fails to win Macon’s love she uses her son as a mean of rebelliousness against Macon. Bjork quotes “Milkman is “her single triumph,” and her personal affrontery to a world that has given her neither love nor purpose” (88). Though, Macon is unknown of the origin of his son’s nickname, Milkman, it greatly inflames him. He feels it quite, “dirty, intimate, and hot” (15) somehow linked to his wife’s impure attachment with her father: “that wherever the name came from, it had something to do with his wife and was, like the emotion he always felt when thinking of her, coated with disgust” (15- 16). And in the condemnation of it he always repels Ruth’s