The South In Toni Morrison
The South in Toni Morrison 's Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing, and home
Lee, Catherine Carr
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison 's third novel in an increasingly varied and rich body of work, is a remarkable narrative. The novel 's power lies not only in its recovery and representation of African American experience in the midtwentieth century but also in Morrison 's insistence on the necessity of healing her broken, alienated protagonist, Milkman Dead. Central to both his maturation and his healing is Milkman 's recognition that the cultural past of the African American South continues to create his twentieth-century present in ways that are not constraining but liberating. Critics have typically understood Milkman 's growth and his healing in the context of the mythic quest or the classic initiation story. ' To be sure, Morrison 's novel reflects archetypal initiation patterns found throughout western literature, as Milkman follows a quest, first for gold, then for knowledge about his ancestors. Like his predecessors in the bildungsroman, Milkman moves from a selfish and juvenile immaturity to a complex knowledge of adulthood.2 Yet, Morrison does not merely reinscribe the initiation motif. Rather, the novel subverts the dominant model of initiation found both in American fiction in general and in African American literature in particular, as Morrison rewrites the classic American initiation story.
In stories as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux" and Ralph Ellison 's Invisible Man, the American protagonist usually moves from a rural to an urban area, from the protection and identity of the nurturing family and friends to the isolation and alienation of western individualism. Such a movement allows the youth to escape the confines of the past in order to create himself as an individual acting outside of time and convention. This freedom comes with a price, however: such an initiation typically brings separation, restriction, and a
Lee, Catherine Carr
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison 's third novel in an increasingly varied and rich body of work, is a remarkable narrative. The novel 's power lies not only in its recovery and representation of African American experience in the midtwentieth century but also in Morrison 's insistence on the necessity of healing her broken, alienated protagonist, Milkman Dead. Central to both his maturation and his healing is Milkman 's recognition that the cultural past of the African American South continues to create his twentieth-century present in ways that are not constraining but liberating. Critics have typically understood Milkman 's growth and his healing in the context of the mythic quest or the classic initiation story. ' To be sure, Morrison 's novel reflects archetypal initiation patterns found throughout western literature, as Milkman follows a quest, first for gold, then for knowledge about his ancestors. Like his predecessors in the bildungsroman, Milkman moves from a selfish and juvenile immaturity to a complex knowledge of adulthood.2 Yet, Morrison does not merely reinscribe the initiation motif. Rather, the novel subverts the dominant model of initiation found both in American fiction in general and in African American literature in particular, as Morrison rewrites the classic American initiation story.
In stories as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's "My Kinsman, Major Molineaux" and Ralph Ellison 's Invisible Man, the American protagonist usually moves from a rural to an urban area, from the protection and identity of the nurturing family and friends to the isolation and alienation of western individualism. Such a movement allows the youth to escape the confines of the past in order to create himself as an individual acting outside of time and convention. This freedom comes with a price, however: such an initiation typically brings separation, restriction, and a
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