ACL 1001: Reading Contemporary Fiction
Lecture 9: Race, Class and Gender in Toni
Morrison’s Tar Baby
THE IMPORTANCE OF BLACK WRITING
WRITING AS A BLACK WOMAN
TAR BABY
CHARACTERS IN TAR BABY
(JADINE, SON AND GENDER)
Structure of the Lecture
Tar Baby
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Organised around the figure of the Tar Baby in the American
Fable
http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/2010/07/brer_rabbit_mee
ts_a_tar_baby.html
Who or what is the tar baby? Who is Brer Fox, Brer Rabbit?
“It was the image of the tar, however artfully shaped, black,
disturbing, threatening yet inviting, that led me to African masks .
. . All of the characters (in Tar Baby ) are masks. And like African
masks, the novel merged the primal and the contemporary, lore
and reality” (Foreword, 1981, pxiii)
W.E.B DuBois, “Double Consciousness”
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The Souls of Black Folks (1903)
W.E.B DuBois (1868-1963): “the problem of the Twentieth
Century is the problem of the color-line”
‘After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the
Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son,
born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this
American world, - a world which yields him no true selfconsciousness, but only lets him see himself through the
revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,
this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at
one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s
soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity’ (p. 2).
Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and
Identity: Migrations of the Subject
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‘But what of Black femaleness or Black womanness?
For it is the additional identity of femaleness which
interferes with seamless Black identity and is
therefore either ignored, erased or “spoken for”. One
still finds some women trying to say that they want to
speak only as an African or as a “Black”, and not as
a woman, as if it were possible to divest oneself of
one’s gender and stand as neutered within the context
of palpable and visible historical, gendered, and
racialized identities’ (p. 8).
‘Otherness’/Alterity
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What these writers are alluding to is an ideology that
determines how people within a culture perceive the
world around them. Recall the black and white binary
we looked at it in the last lecture, and how loaded
those terms were.
What we’re talking about is an ideological structure
which perceives certain people in our culture as ‘the
other’. For example, women, people of colour, our
indigenous population, people of faiths different to
Christianity, homosexuals are all seen as ‘other’ in our
culture, and in many senses this otherness /alterity
permeates these individuals’ sense of self.
Writing as a Black Woman
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"I really think the range of emotions and
perceptions I have had access to as a black person
and a female person are greater than those of
people who are neither ... My world did not shrink
because I was a black female writer. It just got
bigger." Toni Morrison
Writing as a Black Woman
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“I look very hard for black fiction because I want to
participate in developing a canon of black work.
We've had the first rush of black entertainment,
where blacks were writing for whites, and whites
were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now
we can get down to the craft of writing, where
black people are talking to black people.” Toni
Morrison
Writing as a Black Woman
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Lister writes that :
“For Morrison, the function of the novel is not to
instruct the reader through the elaboration of
formulaic, end-determined narratives, but to
illuminate and engage with social and cultural
conflicts and do justice to their complexities” (2009,
p.13).
Morrison not only challenges the content and
perspective of Anglo-centric texts, but she also
challenges their structure and language.
Writing as a Black Woman
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Jago Morrison adds:
“What (Toni Morrison’s) work does represent, though,
is an attempt to go beyond the limits of conventional,
empirical historical scholarship, to a broader
imaginative reclamation of African American-ness”
(2003, p.115).
“One of the most interesting and paradoxical qualities
of Toni Morrison’s writing is the way in which, through
a well-established written medium, it attempts to
illustrate the complexity and extent of African
American oral culture” (2003, p.121)
Writing as a Black Woman
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Jago Morrison also argues:
“Working both within and against established traditions of
scholarship, it is sound, rhythm and above all, language
that, for her, serve as the archive of the African American”
(2003, p.124).
In Morrison’s work we see the a heightened use of
metaphor, repetition, poetic imagery and a lyricism which
challenges the Anglo-centric structure of the novel and of
narration.
She asks us to think about the way we read, and also calls
into question the limitations of the realist novel.
That Interview
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In the 1990s Jana Wendt interviewed her on the ABC.
She asked one of the most stupid questions ever asked
on Australian television.
Interview with Jana Wendt - 1998
Wendt: You have in your writing certainly marginalized
whites. Why are they of no particular interest to you?
Morrison: I was interested in another kind of literature
that was not just confrontational, black versus white. I
was really interested in black readership.
That Interview
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Wendt: You don’t think you will ever change and
write books that incorporate white lives into them
substantially?
Morrison: I have done.
Wendt: Substantially?
Morrison: You can’t understand how powerfully
racist that question is, can you? Because you would
never ask a white author, ‘When are you going to
write about black people?’
Tar Baby
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As we’ve discussed, the novel is based on Brer-Rabbit
and the Tar Baby – trickster folktale.
The term ‘tar-baby’ has two main meanings:
A sticky situation, which is difficult to remove oneself
from; gets worse the more entangled one gets
A racist term used to describe African-American people
(Coates, 2006)
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Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
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First published in 1981
Set on a fictional Caribbean island and in the United
States (New York and Eloe, Florida). L’arbe de la
Croix is written as a paradise, an Eden.
‘In Tar Baby, I wanted to be in a place where the
characters had no access to any of the escape routes
that people have in a large city... I wanted the
characters all in a pressure cooker, and that had to
be outside of the United States’ (Morrison, 1983, p.
417)
Tar Baby: Themes
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Race, class and gender relations between
characters living with and/or working for Valerian
Street, a wealthy white American patriarch
Vision – recurring motif throughout the novel:
blindness, multiple perspectives, art,
representation, photography, facade, masks
Excess, Consumption, Decadence,
Binary Oppositions: black/white; urban/rural;
past/future; rich/poor
Aesthetic Opposition: African vs European
Art
Setting in Tar Baby
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Middle Passage: many Africans jumped ship rather
than face their future as slaves on the US or the
Caribbean plantations
Caribbean: colonised by the French, English, Spanish,
Danish, Dutch, Portuguese
New World economies: built on slave labour which
was used to cultivate crops, such as sugar, cotton,
coffee
Wealthy British and Americans made their fortunes
from the cultivation of commodity crops e.g. Valerian
Street’s candy business
Characters in Tar Baby
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Sydney and Ondine Childs – ‘Kingfish and Beulah’,
‘Machete-hair and Bow-tie’, Uncle Tom and Mammy
Jadine Childs – ‘the copper Venus’; Jade
Valerian and Margaret Street – the Candy King and
the ‘Principal Beauty of Maine’
Michael Street – absent yet present; Socialist
Son – ‘dreadlock haired man’; ‘rapist’
Gideon, Alma Estee and Therese – ‘Yardman and the
Marys’
Gender
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Jadine: light-skinned; Western ideals of beauty; fashion
model; tough; financially independent; antithetical to Son’s
ideas of Black womanhood; ‘the night women’
Son: ‘rapist’; sexual prowess; physically powerful; violent;
remorseful;
Margaret: ‘eye-candy’, challenges notions of good
mothering; ‘trophy’ wife
Valerian: patriarch, benevolent, distant, powerful, “good
father”
Ondine: mother-figure, ‘Mammy’, represents an image of
Black womanhood that Jadine does not wish to emulate.
Sydney, regardless of being friendly with Valerian is still his
employee – while Sydney might not see this, Son does.
Jadine and Son
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Jadine and Son want to rescue each other from the
oppositional worlds they both inhabit, from each other’s
world view
For Son: ‘these include the narrative of the peasant who
rescues the princess from imprisonment; the narrative of the
culturally conscious/literate who rescues the culturally
unconscious/alienated, the narrative of the supposedly
mature elder who rescues the child/Childs, and the narrative
of the formerly enslaved African who returns to rescue
another enslaved relative or friend via the Underground
Railroad’ (Ryan, p. 603)
Jadine and Son
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For Jadine: ‘On Jadine’s part, the narrative patterns
include the sophisticate who rescues/ uplifts the “noble”
savage from his primitivism, the representative of the
“talented tenth” who rescues one of the designated
untalented nine-tenths/folk from educational, cultural and
sociopolitical stagnation, and the supposedly mature
woman who rescues the son/Son’ (Ryan, p. 603)
‘One had a past, the other a future and each one bore
the culture to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled
black man, will you mature with me? Culture-bearing
black woman, whose culture are you bearing?’ (Morrison,
Tar Baby, p. 272)
Jadine and Son
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‘Jadine and Son had no problems as far as men and
women are concerned. They knew exactly what to do.
But they had a problem about what work to do, when
and where to do it, and where to live. Those things
hinged on what they felt about who they were, and
what their responsibilities were in being black. The
question for each was whether he or she was really a
member of the tribe. It was not because he was a man
and she was a woman that conflict arose between them’
(Morrison, 1981, p. 422).
Judylyn Ryan, Modern Fiction Studies, 1993
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‘Toni Morrison’s fiction displays an extensive concern
with the erasure of African cultural consciousness and
cultural history, and the persisting cultural illness which
this erasure precipitates’ (Ryan, 1993, p. 598)
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Toni Morrison, ‘I think that the conflict of gender is a
cultural illness’ (qtd by Ryan, 1993 p. 598)
Judylyn Ryan, Modern Fiction Studies,
1993
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Racial stereotyping is used to ‘revision
stereotypes’ (Moffit 2004, p. 12)
‘Morrison constructs blackness not as a form of
judgment or standards but as a history, a
rhetoric, an ethics, a way of seeing and
knowing the world, and as an aesthetic that
encompasses all of these things’ (Krumholz
2008, p. 265).
John Duvall, Contemporary Literature, 1997
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‘What Son wants to do to the fashion model Jadine is
what Valerian already has done to Margaret, the
former Maine beauty queen--namely, construct a female
subjectivity that effaces itself the better to serve male
identity. If Valerian has made Jadine a tar baby in one
sense (a black woman more cathected to white culture
than black), Son surely wishes to make her a tar baby in
another (a nurturing black mama who will never ask to
share a male authority or autonomy)’ (p. 328)
Letitia L. Moffit, ‘Finding the Door’, Critique, 2004
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‘Morrison has deliberately created Son as an apparent
moral yardstick for all of the other characters, and
although we may initially believe we are supposed to side
with him, in fact, I believe she has crafted her own tarbaby-like “trap”. The trap is in judging the characters in
terms of overly simplistic, quickly formed definitions based
on their apparent roles – a trap into which the characters
themselves initially fall, given their limited visions, but that
readers may avoid, given that from our vantage point we
are able to see multiple visions’ (p. 14).
Conclusion
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‘Tar is the sticky stuff of ideology, the culturally
constructed meanings internalized in language and
our unconscious minds, and it is the potential
transformation through knowledge and selfknowledge that enables and requires us to see (in
and through) blackness. In Tar Baby, Morrison uses
tar to free the language from its signifying chains,
to play in and with the dark’ (Krumholz 2008, p.
272)
Yinka Shonibare, Nigerian Artist, Victoria and Albert
Museum, 2007