ASSIGNMENT
SUBJECT: American Literature
TOPIC: Characters in Jazz
GROUP: Bright Stars
MEMBERS:
Anzah Riaz(42), Razia Zafar(43), Aqsa Nazir(44), Monza Ashiq(45),
Hafsa Rehman(51), Hafsa Munawar(57), Ameez Fatima(81), Mehrwish Tahir(92).
SUBMITTED TO: Prof. Sadia Alam
Characters in Jazz
The characters of Jazz are products of racial and personal trauma resulting from the social and
personal upheavals in their life. And this trauma gives them their depth, complexity, grace, and
violence. Morrison revisits the African-American past and creates the characters who
tell “history as a life lived”.The two principal characters, Joe and Violet, are complex,dynamic
creations. They progress from youthful enthusiasm and hopes through adulthood and
disappointed expectations, but an act of violence prepares each for a process of grieving and
suffering by which both learn to love and care for one another. Yet each takes a different course
towards his or her liberation.
Joe Trace was born in 1873 and was taken in by the William’s family when their son Victory
was just three months old. Victory and Joe grew up as brothers but Joe knew that they did not
share the same parents and so he gave himself the last name “Trace” when he misunderstood
something that Rhoda Williams said. Like his wife , joe also suffers from unstable and painful
childhood. In an effort to sever his memories of an incomplete, “trace” of a mother , when his
adoptive mother tells him;
“O honey (your parents) disappeared without a trace” , he “understood her to mean the
“trace” they disappeared without was(him).”
After hunter’s hunter intimates that his mother is wild ,a “wild-woman” who roams the margins
of society , Joe makes three failings attempts to track her down . A feeling of abandonment and
an uncertainty about his identity plagues Joe from that moment on. Jeop therefore does not
know where he comes from and thinks , mistakenly , that he cannot be complete without this
information , thereby deferring his happiness and looking to others to make him whole.
Joe is a kind- hearted and fundamentally good man who is driven by sadness and fear to shoot
and kill his young lover , Dorcas. “He fell from an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown , spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shoots her just to keep the feeling
going”.
Joe tells Felice that he shoots Dorcas because he was afraid, she would leave him and that he did
not know how to keep her or truly love her. Felice also tells Joe that Dorcas’s last words were
“there ‘s only one apple”. This apple is none other than the apple from the tree of knowledge that
Adam and Eve eat before getting kicked out of the garden of Eden.
Joe marries violet and later moves to New York and makes a decent living as a Salesman of
Cleopatra cosmetics. He is highly regarded in the Harlem community for being a decent man and
something in his face reminds migrants to the city of their rural roots . After living in “the City”
for two decades , his idealism is tempered by the emerging silence that he shares with his wife.
“Violet takes better care of her parrot than she does me.--------May be that’s the way it
goes with people been married long as we have. But the quiet. I can’t take the quiet. She
doesn’t hardly talk anymore.”
He views Dorcas, a teenager , as a final opportunity to regain his youth and excitement. He tries
to secure Dorcas’s affection by adoring her but the relationship ends in rejection and helpless
violence. After Joe Trace shoots and kills Dorcas , “He thinks about her all time. Nothing on
his mind but her . Won’t work can’t sleep. Grieves all day, all night……”
He is not prosecuted because as she was dying ,Dorcas refused to reveal his name. With Felice’s
indirect assistance, Joe is able to come to terms with his past and renew his relationship with his
wife.
Joe Trace is escapist character because he does not care for his wife. Joe admits to having shed
his skin in a snakelike manner a whole bunch of times.
He is born, like actually pushed out of the birth canal.
He gives himself his last name.
He learns to be an independent man with the help of Hunter's Hunter.
He moves to Palestine and meets Violet.
He moves to New York City
He's beaten by a bunch of white men, but survives.
He sees Dorcas for the first time.
This gets to the heart of the trace in Joe Trace being a kind of outline or form—the center, the
real Joe, keeps mutating and being reborn.
Violet Trace is the quasi tragic heroine of the novel. She stumbles through the novel to
reconnect with the part of herself that has been shattered, hidden, or forgotten amidst the
discordance of her times. Violet is the postmodern trauma figure trying to find her mythic
Modern Self. Violet is a fifty-six-year-old woman living in Harlem with her husband Joe.
Hopelessly scrawny with very dark skin, Violet is beautiful if one looks at her long enough.
Violet commits a crime of passion which leads her to trauma. Her husband, Joe Trace kills his
teenage mistress, Dorcas. Violet finds out at the funeral. She becomes sullen with her husband
and explodes into violence at his lover’s funeral, by stabbing the face of the dead girl thus
earning herself the nickname “Violent”.
Violet has a reputation in Harlem for being odd and she does not quite fit with the other ladies.
She exhibits odd behavior such as sitting in the street for hours and trying to steal someone’s
baby. She has a “malleable, permeable and confused Self” and she goes through many moments
of psychological fragmentation, restlessness, doubt, and disorientation throughout the novel. She
tries to understand her fragmented self about her traumatic past and confused present. The
narrator calls Violet’s encounter with her fractured selves her “private cracks”.
The writer has used jazz music as a tool of self-expression for Violet. The story of Violet plays
as a backup to the dazzling rendition and improvisation of the music itself in Jazz. The music
becomes a symbol of Violet’s quest for subjectivity. She, like the music of jazz, desires to be
“someone not molded by the world as she is” but as someone who uses both creative and violent
force to find her solo voice in the noise of the world.
Violet owns a lot of birds. The birds serve as a symbolic connection between her rural past and
the urban present. Violet talks to her birds more than to anyone else. She has even taught her
parrot to say I love you to her. This serves as a symbol of the lack of affection in her life. This
makes the reader sympathize with her desperation for love and her longing for someone “whose
touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance”. Violet lacks in communication with Joe.
Her silence annoys Joe. Violet throws the birds out after her violent action at Dorcas’ funeral.
This action may be symbolic of throwing love out of the window, letting go of and not
appreciating the love she has. By releasing her birds Violet solidifies the emergence of that
Violet, whom the whole City calls Violent.
Violet finds Alice’s company as a way of healing for herself. Both of them are at two opposite
ends of a tragedy and still find solace in each other’s company. Just like her profession of
mending and sewing clothes, Alice mends the shattered soul of Violet. Another conflict in
Violet’s self is her mother-hunger which makes her obsessed with Dorcas. This gap in her
personality is filled by Dorcas’s friend, Felice. Eventually, both Joe and Violet find resolution of
their marital discord through their shared grief and their interactions with Dorcas’s friend Felice.
They begin to listen to music again which brings back spirit into their lives.
Morrison dramatizes Violet’s desire to remove herself from poverty, from loneliness, and her
mother’s death. Violet escapes stagnation to survive. To heal and reform her wounded identity,
Violet needs Alice’s physical presence and emotional support. She thus succeeds in transforming
her identity by adapting to her circumstances and embracing the female community. She expels
her old self to make room for a new one- a self she birthed and healed on her own, not onehanded to her by the ghosts of her past traumas.
Dorcas is a real wild child, a flapper, a jazz lover, a juveline delinquent(negligent), a speakeasy
aficionado. She's a sexually attractive nutshell with bad skin, to be precise. And yet, for all of
this dynamism and strength, and for how important she is for the plot of Jazz, Dorcas isn't
exactly a character whose interiority is explored.
Joe thinks she's the cat's meow; Violet thinks she's the worst thing in the world until she starts
to feel warm maternal feelings toward her; Felice thinks that she's ugly, inside and out; Alice
thinks she's trouble with a capital T; and Malvonne thinks that she's okay because she gets an
extra two bucks a week so Joe can carry on his affair with her. But surprisingly Dorcas thinks a
little, and she thinks about her new boyfriend Acton, who is a super-hot and totally rude. She
also really likes jazz.
"Dorcas lay on a chenille bedspread, tickled and happy knowing that there was no place to be
where somewhere, close by, somebody was not licking his licorice stick, tickling the ivories,
beating his skins, blowing off his horn while a knowing woman sang ain't nobody going to keep
me down you got the right key baby but the wrong keyhole you got to get it bring it and put it
right here, or else".
It's not that surprising that Dorcas doesn't have a lot of interiority, because she basically exists as
an advertisement for being a flapper. She's sensual, and sensuality doesn't have a lot of interior
thought behind it. Or so the thinking of the time seems to go.
Dorcas is also—and this is hugely important—basically related to as a dead girl. The memory of
her is more important than her actions as a flesh-and-blood living woman in this book. As with
Joe and Violet, Morrison recounts the pivotal events in Dorcas's life that shaped her personality,
making her more sympathetic than she would at first appear. As a young girl, Dorcas lost both of
her parents in the same day when her father was killed on a streetcar and her mother died in a
burning building during the East St. Louis riots, which left her orphaned and homeless. Like so
many of the characters in the book, Dorcas migrated to the City where her life was to be rebuilt
by the obsessive care of her aunt, Alice Manfred. However, as a teenager, Dorcas begins to rebel
against her aunt's old-fashioned tastes, and refashions herself as a sexually-desirable woman.
Dorcas wants to be looked at and admired and she successfully captures the older man's gaze.
The morality of sleeping with a married man who is old enough to be her father does not factor
into Dorcas's decision to be with Joe.
Like a little girl, she is eager for the gifts that Joe brings her and she becomes petulant and
moody when she does not get her way. However, Dorcas also wants an authority figure and
when she realizes that Joe is completely malleable she bores with him quickly. Her new
boyfriend, Acton, promises to shape Dorcas and control her, so she allows her identity to be
created for her. When Joe shoots Dorcas, she chooses to die in order to be watched, making
herself a martyr by bleeding to death rather than going to the hospital. However, Morrison's
narrator pieces together the threads of her story to show how Dorcas as one sees her does not
correspond with her inside life.
Throughout the novel, Dorcas' interests in jazz, the "fast life," and "vampy clothing" bring about
her eventual independence from her aunt's puritanical ideas. Dorcas' independence is marked by
her relationship with Joe Trace, whose age and casual demeanor bear a marked contrast to
Dorcas' speed and excitement. Her relationship with Trace, who is married, brings consequences
from his wife, Violet Trace, who slashes Dorcas' face at her funeral. Dorcas' relationship with
Joe Trace is her first, and even as
she represents the "wages of sin," her ruptured innocence and orphaned childhood suggest that
she is more of a victim, than a predator.