57
Ethics of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Novels
A Comparison of Sethe and Eva
Wenqing Cheng
In her description of the relationship between reading and writing, Toni Morrison
writes in Playing in the Dark,
The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which
motions to future readings as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world
and an endlessly flexible language. Readers and writers both struggle to interpret and
perform within a common language shareable imaginative world. And although upon
that struggle the positioning of the reader has justifiable claims, the author’s
presence—her or his intentions, blindness, and sight—is part of the imaginative
activity.1
She recognizes both author’s and reader’s roles in the creation of literary work.
The
interpretation of her fiction becomes the communal work by the reader and the author.
Speaking of the author’s “intentions,” Morrison suggests deep sociopolitical
engagement in the work that manifests human experiences of cultural and political
issues of their time.
She notes that writers not only “transform their social grounding
into aspects of language,” but also are aware of their doing this.
The authors’ special
techniques of narrating events and happenings in novels unavoidably convey certain
opinions about values and moral principles to readers.
The reader’s interpretation
and evaluation of the novel, the characters and other elements that constitute a novel
are to be influenced to a certain degree by the values expressed in the narrative. And
the author’s purposes and intentions inscribed in the storytelling and narrative suggest
ethical situation.
The author’s choices of narrative techniques and forms, and the
integration of folkloric elements are of great ethical significance.
In recent years, many critics have explored the relation between ethics and the
creation and reception of literary works. J. Hillis Miller argues that “ethics and
narration cannot be separate, though their relation is neither symmetrical nor
58 Wenqing Cheng
harmonious” (Miller 2).
In his Narrative Ethics, Adam Newton demonstrates a close
relation of ethics to literary narrative and interpretation.
In Newton’s opinion,
narrative situations frame “relations of provocation, call and response that bind
narrator and listener, author and character, or reader and text” (Newton 13).
His
exploration of ethical structure in narrative explains that the ethics of narrative exists in
the process of narrative transmission from the author to the narrator, to the narrated
and to the reader, and that the ethics of narrative is associated with the storytelling,
reading and interpreting.
Newton’s notion has been widely employed and discussed
in many essays and articles including those on Toni Morrison’s fiction.
James
Phelan, in his 1998 article “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading” in
Style, shares Newton’s approaches to root narrative ethics in narrative itself, but he
chooses to pay more attention to “the reader’s cognitive understanding, emotional
response, and ethical positioning.”
I endorse his analysis of reading Sethe’s choice,
nevertheless I perceive that his emphasis on the author’s ethical guidance in the
narrative to their audience endows the author with too much power.2
The author’s
choices of narrative techniques, which express his or her ethical stands implicitly or
explicitly, are not only the “guidance,” but the author’s suggestion of his or her ethical
judgment to the implied audience also calls for their response.
In Morrison’s fiction,
the author’s employment of narrative strategies not only guides the implied audience
to her own narrative judgment, but through communicating with the audience,
Morrison asks for their judgment.
In addition, the narrative technique in her fiction is
inseparable from the African American oral tradition.
The use of the storytelling
tradition, such as call-and-response, and multiple points of view endows Morrison’s
work with a dialogic relation between the author and the audience.
The aim of this essay is to examine the link between ethical implication and the
narrative forms and strategies in several important passages and scenes in Morrison’s
novels. Gates’s notion of African American writing is illuminating in considering
the oral tradition in Morrison’s work.
He argues that African American writing is
double-voiced and self-consciously intertextual in its relation to both standard English
and vernacular discourse.3 The permeation of the black oral traditions in the narrative
is value-laden and influences the reader’s interpretation.
A well-discussed example
is the author’s revision of the tar baby tale, through which Morrison invites readers’
Ethics of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Novels
imagination in the improvisation of the story.
59
Trudier Harris’s enunciation is very
valuable here, in which she writes, “As is true with all her works, she makes it
impossible to delineate clearly agents of good and evil” (Harris 126).
This essay
focuses on the ethics of narrative with the employment of storytelling tradition. What
does the author convey in using the multiple points of view in recounting a story?
What stand shall a reader take when the author encourages audience participation?
These inquiries entail very significant ethical judgments on the characters, events, and
even the author’s attitudes.
Both Sethe and Eva are confronted with the hardship of life in bringing up their
children, and both choose to kill them for mother love.
I concentrate on the narrative
strategies that depict the complicated ethical situation of a mother taking the life of her
child.
Killing a child is certainly against morals in our society.
Morrison however
creates a mother’s image that cannot be easily condemned as evil.
This essay will
examine comparatively how the author depicts the characters in the process of
storytelling, and how the difficult ethical situation is described in order to convey
complete and objective information to the reader.
To answer these questions, the
actual study of the narrative representation will be required.
And I also briefly
discuss readers’ interpretation of the complicated situation, and their ethical judgment
of the characters, and events in the process of author audience communication.
Bakhtin’s theory of “dialogic relation” between the speaker and the listener proves
that the audience creates the meaning of literary work together with the author.4
Sethe’s Infanticide for Protection
Storytelling tradition plays a very important part in narrating Sethe’s killing of her
daughter.
At the heart of the novel is the story which reveals the truth of Sethe’s
infanticide, a story in which the characters and readers keep asking, “what really
happened.” Created from pieces of memories and in multiple perspectives, the story
is a process of improvisation, which depends on the reciprocal activities between the
speaker and the listener. The bits and pieces of the story are related each time
unfinished, without disclosing the shocking end.
The reader is given enough time to
use his or her imagination to participate into the creation of the story and evaluate the
event and the characters.
60 Wenqing Cheng
To make this point clear, I examine two prime aspects: first the relationship of
Sethe’s infanticide to other parts of the novel, then the multiple points of view in the
telling of Sethe’s story.
The event of Schoolteacher and his students taking Sethe’s
milk is regarded as the cause of her infanticide.
This story, similar to the narrative in
the whole novel, is revealed gradually from the first chapter, in which Sethe makes a
brief mention in her conversation with Paul D.
The narrative defines the crucial
impact of this experience upon Sethe by her repetition of the single sentence, “and they
took my milk,” and by using a long passage to reveal her feelings and consciousness in
interior monologue.
I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the
other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. (70)
The narrative moves from a third-person narrative to the first that provides a reliable
access to the character’s innermost feelings.
The passage reveals the damage that
slavery has done to Sethe’s psyche, the memory of which she refuses to recall, but
which keeps its presence no matter how hard she tries to.
Morrison’s representation
of slavery, the equating of a human being with an animal or with a private possession,
gives hints of ethical choices proceeding the dynamite disclosing of the protagonist’s
resolution.
Sethe’s infanticide is narrated in four perspectives, 5 Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs and
Schoolteacher’s versions preceding Sethe’s telling of her own story.
The narrative
reaches to Sethe’s own version of the story by using African American storytelling
techniques, that is, the story is revealed in unfinished and incomplete memories and
information through different perspectives.
During the process of narrating, the
narrator evades any direct evaluation on each perspective. Compared with other parts
of the novel, the narrative of Schoolteacher’s ethical perspective occupies quite a long
passage. Before their eyes, Schoolteacher and slave catchers see:
Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a
blood soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other.
(149)
So Schoolteacher has “nothing there to claim,” and his perception of Sethe’s killing is
Ethics of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Novels
based on his racist values.
61
He regards Sethe as a creature who has gone wild “due to
the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run” (149).
Both Stamp Paid’s and Baby Suggs’s stories recall the exact scene and the reaction
after the horrible event.
Stamp Paid attempts to disclose the whole story to Paul D,
but the latter refuses to accept the truth by repeating insistently: “But this ain’t her
mouth.”
Thus Stamp Paid’s story is unfinished with the most terrible part left,
“snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked; how her
hands work like claws. . .” (157).
Not only the narrator withdraws from providing
any ethical judgment in this complex situation, but Stamp Paid also becomes
ambivalent about his memory,
wondering “if it had happened at all, eighteen years
ago, that while he and Baby Suggs were looking the wrong way, a pretty little slave
girl has recognized a hat, and split to the woodshed to kill her children” (158). At the
end of the first section, the narrative finally moves from these various versions of
Sethe’s story to her own recollection of the past.
Paul D forces Sethe to tell him the
truth, and to face her unspeakable memories that she can neither escape from nor
forget.
But spinning around the room, Sethe circles around the subject, without
getting to the point.
Her telling of bringing up the children, and of their arrival at
Baby Suggs’s house, continues and finally is interrupted by the narrator’s analysis of
her mind, “Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, the subject
would remain one.”
This direct analysis of the character’s thought, which Axel
Nissen discusses in his essay using the term “psychonarration,”6 shifts back to Sethe’s
memories eighteen years ago.
Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and
recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings. . . And if she thought anything, it
was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she has
made, all parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed,
dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them.
(163)
This representation of Sethe’s mind and thoughts parallels other versions of the story:
those perspectives focalized by other characters in the novel in a progression, from
other person’s viewpoints into her innermost consciousness.
Thus the employment
62 Wenqing Cheng
of improvisation and repetition unsettles the narrative, but at the same time allows each
character to have their own perspectives and reliability.
The readers are confronted
with Sethe’s emotional life after the cognition of Schoolteacher’s racist discourse,
and Stamp Paid’s contradictory story.
the readers.
The complex ethical judgment then, is left to
Schoolteacher’s comparison of Sethe to a creature is certainly
unabashed, but Stamp Paid’s perception of her as a hawk is quite acceptable, for he
witnesses the horror of the murdering and he also shares the same hatred for the
evilness of slavery.
Although Baby Suggs’s perspective of the horrific event is not
clearly expressed in the novel, she manifests her complex feelings in her actions and
brief remarks.
After witnessing Sethe’s killing of her child, she expresses her
understanding of Sethe’s motherhood in saying: “It’s time to nurse your youngest”
(152).
But she shouts at and fights with Sethe when she tries to feed the baby with
her bloody nipple.
Sethe’s repetition of the simple word “no” and her insistence of
the phrase, “Schoolteacher ain’t got them,” suggest different interpretation.
Her
version is not only a justification for herself, but also it conveys some new aspects of
the African American experience that we have never discovered in other literary works.
Sethe’s murdering is evil, but what is our judgment of the slavery from which a
mother tries to protect her children by even killing them?
The author exposes the
evilness of slavery in the process of narrating the complex ethical decision of the
protagonist.
Eva’s Killing for Salvation
In Toni Morrison’s fiction, Eva is another mother’s image who has killed her child.
Eva’s horrible violence is narrated in a comparatively direct way.
In Beloved,
multiple perspectives are employed to disclose the truth in the past and to convey the
complicated ethical situation to the implied reader.
violence is displayed startlingly to the audience.
most Morrison’s novels, the narrator’s.
In Sula, however, the scene of
The narrative voice is, typically in
The frequent change of perspectives assures
an objective narration of the situation and is to acknowledge the validity of the
character’s consciousness.
The actual scene is related with the beginning sentence:
“So late one night in 1921, Eva got up from her bed and put on her clothes” (45).
The
narrative recounts the process after Eva leaves her room and manages herself to
Ethics of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Novels
Plum’s room downstairs.
63
Very similar to the storytelling technique, the narrator
allows the character to provide information, or the description of the situation.
In the
paragraph that follows, the narrative changes to Eva’s perspective:
Back and forth she rocked him, her eyes wandering around his room.
There in the
corner was a half-eaten store-bought cherry pie.
Balled-up candy wrappers and
empty pop bottles peeped from under the dresser.
On the floor by her foot was a
glass of strawberry crush and a Liberty magazine. (46)
No commentary by the author is involved in this description of Plum’s life condition.
Eva’s perspective, however, informs the audience of a war-wasted Plum’s image and
her complex feelings.
The narrative continues without actual conversation between
the mother and the son, except Plum’s occasional “drowsy” mumbling and Eva’s
simple murmuring, “I’m going, Plum.” Eva’s violent actions, the bathing of her son
in kerosene, and the burning are recounted from Plum’s focalization.
And this
change of perspectives produces some folkloristic and ritualistic effects on the event of
the mother murdering her own child:
He felt twilight. Now there seemed to be some kind of wet light traveling over his legs
and stomach with a deeply attractive smell. (47)
Setting her son afire, Eva leaves the room and the narrative voice suggests the
author’s attitude through the description of her actions: “Quickly, as the whoosh of
flames engulfed him, she shut the door and made her slow and painful journey back to
the top of the house” (48).
Those words like “quickly” and “slow and painful” imply
Eva’s contradictory feelings on killing her child.
While in Beloved, Sethe’s story is
unspeakable; Eva is unable to see the horror created by herself.
The words, “slow and
painful” may also suggest that she believes in the moral correctness of her behavior no
matter how painful it is.
Eva’s legendary life is narrated previous to Plum’s death.
The stories told
about the loss of her leg exemplify the employment of oral tradition techniques in
Morrison’s fiction.
“Somebody said Eva stuck it under a train and made them pay
off. Another said she sold it to a hospital for $10,000—at which Mr. Reed opened his
eyes and asked, ‘Nigger Gal legs goin’ for $10,000 a piece?’…” (31).
Trudier
64 Wenqing Cheng
Harris’ analysis is illuminating, for she points out Morrison’s structural incorporation
of folklore elements in saying: “Told for true, these stories take the shape of memories,
a first stage of legend formation in that the details of narrative have not yet been fully
fleshed out (and frequently the teller of the tale can claim to have been an eyewitness
of the occurrence)” (Harris 68).
Paradise.
Similar narrative forms can also be found in
After the raid on the convent, the people in Ruby, especially those
involved in the violence create various stories to cover the truth.
Without unraveling
the facts to the whole community, the narrative emphasizes the changes to the bright
side in Ruby caused by the raid. The narrative continues with no rational explanation
of the disappearance of the leg, but instead convinces the audience that Eva sacrifices
the leg for the money to save her children.
Two other long sections in succession serve to describe Eva’s mind after her
husband left.
Axel Nissen discusses both sections in his essay, “They are both
psychonarration.
Psychonarration—‘the analysis of a character’s thoughts taken on
directly by the author’” (Nissen 268).
I share his notion of psychonarration in
interpreting the narrative that depicts the inside views of the character. But he further
discusses that the approach to the character’s mind “can cause either sympathy or
judgment, depending on the narrator’s tone” (Nissen 263).
much stress on the effect of psychonarration.
His analysis puts too
The interpretation of the author’s
attitudes on Eva involves two important aspects, Morrison’s insistence on the
interaction between the author and the audience, and the process of characterization.
After BoyBoy’s brief visit, the narrative employs the call-and-response to ask the
audience to feel the experience:
Knowing that she would hate him long and well filled her with pleasant anticipation, like
when you know you are going to fall in love with someone and you wait for the happy
signs. (36)
The change of the third-person narrative into the second directly asks the reader to
enter the character’s consciousness.
And the characterization of Eva is a process
from the abandoned wife and mother who survives enormous obstacles to “creator and
sovereign of this enormous house.”
Eva starts as a good mother in saving the
constipated Plum, and this image gradually changes after BoyBoy’s brief visit.
Ethics of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Novels
65
Being the highest power in the house, Eva manipulates the life of the people living
there.
By giving the three orphans the same name Dewey, and offering advice to the
newly-weds, Eva “recognizes no authority, no morality except herself” (Harris 74).7
So the narrative in the two sections does not simply cause sympathy; rather, the
psychonarration there forces the reader’s participation to the complicated ethical
situation. The readers can interpret the text without giving up their own stance.
Eva’s family and the people in Bottom have various judgments on her behavior.
Two years later, in their conversation, Hannah questions Plum’s death in a
presumption of Eva’s lacking in motherly love.
Eva expresses her self-justification
in two aspects: the hardship of life being an abandoned wife and mother, and Plum’s
war-wasted, drug addict condition.
Direct conversation is used here in addition to the
narrative representation of the character’s thoughts by psychonarration.
Eva explains
her reason and motivation sadly:
I done everything I could to make him leave me and go on and live and be a man but
he wouldn’t and I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a
man not all scrunched up inside my womb, but like a man. (72)
Sula’s accusation is the most direct confrontation Eva has ever encountered.
She
refutes Eva’s condemnation of watching her mother’s death by saying: “which God?
The one watched you burn Plum” (93).
Eva in the novel.
And this is the only ethical judgment against
Very few references have been made to the community’s views,
except a brief mention in the conversation between Nel and Sula.
for Plum’s death, but Nel shows neither astonishment nor panic.
Sula blames Eva
Her comment, “Oh,
I heard that years ago. But nobody put no stock in it,” represents most of the people’s
viewpoints.
Several reasons may explain the people’s unconcerned attitude: Eva as
the sovereign in managing her house and other people’s business in Bottom, Plum’s
condition of being a drug abuser, and then fire as an African American traditional
symbol of purification.
On the folkloristic tradition of fire, Trudier Harris gives
instructive analysis in her essay.
According to Harris, fire is “an ancient ceremony
for eliminating evil or the diseased from the midst of society” (Harris 80).
But she
also notes that Eva’s burning of Plum “backfires because Plum’s death only makes
memory vivid” (Harris 80).
The evidence of this can be found in the last part of the
66 Wenqing Cheng
fiction when Nel visits Eva at the old people’s home twenty years later.
Eva tells
Nel: “It’s awful cold in the water. Fire is warm,” and “Plum. Sweet Plum. He tells me
things” (169).
These seemingly insane remarks reveal Eva’s being haunted by
Plum’s death.
Morrison’s incorporation of folkloristic elements into her narrative
challenges the audience’s perception of death.
Morrison’s employment of storytelling tradition entails a dialogic author,
character and audience relation.
The change of different perspectives in recounting a
story represents the evident polyphonic nature of her fiction.
The author admits the
validity of the perception and consciousness of each character, without any authorial
assurance and commentary on their viewpoints.
So in Morrison’s fiction, the
narrator refrains from taking any character’s stance or letting any character’s ethical
judgment control the narrative.
In the narration of a story, each character participates
with different bits of the same story, and thus the cognition of the story, or the
personality of the character is achieved in the process of improvisation in completing
the whole story. In this process, the call-and-response structure of narrative also
invites the audience’s participation in experiencing and creating.
The multiple
versions of Sethe’s infanticide exemplify evidently the polyphonic nature.
Among
them, Schoolteacher’s version is certainly to be rejected because of his shameless
racist view.
Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs, being the fellow African Americans and
having suffered the same evilness of slavery, express their complex perspectives on
Sethe’s violence.
Thus if Sethe’s self justification of killing for protection, suggests
a mother’s instinctive behavior and motherly love, Stamp Paid’s narrative conveys
the violent side of Sethe’s behavior.
And if the narrative of Eva being an abandoned
wife suggests “sympathy” for the character, it is also associated with the process of the
formation of Eva’s personality.
The complex ethical situation should also take
Hannah and Sula’s perspectives into consideration.
Through these structural devices,
Morrison challenges our tendency to appraise events and characters according to
standards of morality in society.
We are unable to fix our stance in her fiction, and
any judgment we have made seems to be too partial.
Morrison’s fiction exemplifies
the dialogic interaction between the reader and the author. And the narrative conveys
the author’s ethical attitudes, which invites the reader to respond and to participate
into the creation of the novel.
The reader’s ethical perception and judgment thus
Ethics of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Novels
create the ethical meaning of the text together with the author.
67
This relation, which
binds the author, character and the reader together, can find its theoretical evidence in
Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel.
His theory of the dialogic relation between the
speaker and listener stresses the reader’s part in the meaning of literary texts.
“The
speaker seeks to orient his discourse with its own determining horizon within the alien
horizon of the understander and enters into dialogic relations with moments of the
horizon.”8
Bakhtin’s enunciation of the speaker’s orientation towards the
listener(understander) sheds light on the employment of oral traditions in Morrison’s
novels.
By incorporating storytelling devices in her work, Morrison invites us into a
communicative relationship between the author and the audience.
Her novels
exemplify the connection between narrative and ethical experience, and the dialogic
author-audience relation.
Moreover the storytelling techniques cannot be separated
from its ideological implications in delivering memories and experiences of the past.
And Morrison challenges our beliefs of morality by introducing the African American
life experiences.
Her ethical treatment of the complex situation in Beloved and Sula,
deepens our understanding of the racism which has not been so vividly described in
any history book.
Avoiding judgment on the character’s difficult resolutions,
Morrison actually condemns slavery and racism, which lead to the mothers’ murdering
of their children.
Her literary treatment of the mother’s difficult decision inspires us
to reconsider the moral issues in our social life.
Notes
1
See page xiv in the preface to Playing in the Dark (London: Picador, 1992). Toni Morrison
discusses racial consciousness in writer’s literary imagination and reader’s interpretation.
2
By saying that James Phelan lays too much stress on writer’s guidance to the implied
reader, I do not mean Phelan has ignored the multileveled communication between the
author and the reader. The incorporation of oral tradition necessitates reader’s
participation, and I consider the dialogic relation between the author and reader in the
creation of the meaning of the text to be more appropriate for Morrison’s text.
3
For the discussion of double-voiced discourse, see Gates 131.
68 Wenqing Cheng
4
For the definition of dialogic relation, see Bakhtin 32-44.
5
Maggie Sale suggests four perspectives in analyzing the narrative of Sethe’s infanticide.
But James Phelan presents three tellings of the story including Schoolteacher’s, Stamp
Paid’s and Sethe’s, see Sale 323.
6
Axel Nissen employs Gerard Genette’s and Dorrit Cohn’s notions of psychonarration in
his essay to discuss the narrative of the character’s mind.
7
In her discussion of Plum’s death, Trudier Harris notes that Eva considers Plum’s misuse
of life to be sufficient for her to take it, see Harris 74-75.
8
David Shepherd compares Bakhtin’s theories to Wolfgang Iser’s ideas, and describes the
notion of “active understanding” as “enabling the dialogic encounter of historically
determined utterances, each of which not only takes what has already been said about its
object, but is also always oriented towards and shaped by an anticipated response,” see
Shepherd 92.
Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M. “Discourse In the Novel.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and
Michael Ryan. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary
Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: Univ. of
Tennessee Press, 1991.
Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading, Kant, de Man, Trollope, Eliot, James, Benjamin. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1974.
___.
Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
___.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1992.
___.
Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998.
Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Nissen, Axel. “Form Matters: Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Ethics of Narrative.”
Contemporary Literature (Summer 1999): 263-285.
Phelan, James. “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading.” Style (1998): 318-333.
Ethics of Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Novels
69
Sale, Maggie. “Call and Response as Critical Method: African American Oral Tradition and
Beloved.” Critical Esssays on Beloved.
Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall,
1998.
Shepherd, David, “Bakhtin and the Reader.”
Hirschkop and David Shepherd.
Bakhtin and Cultural Theory.
Ed. Ken
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993.