Roberta Rubenstein (Auth.) - Home Matters - Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction-Palgrave Macmillan US (2001)
Roberta Rubenstein (Auth.) - Home Matters - Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction-Palgrave Macmillan US (2001)
Roberta Rubenstein (Auth.) - Home Matters - Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and Mourning in Women's Fiction-Palgrave Macmillan US (2001)
Roberta Rubenstein
HOME MATTERS
© Roberta Rubenstein, 2001
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2001 978-0-312-23875-9
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any man-
ner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2001 by
PALGRAVE
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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC
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Macmillan Press Ltd).
ISBN 978-1-349-38663-5 ISBN 978-0-312-29975-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780312299750
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rubenstein, Roberta, 1944-
Home matters : longing and belonging, nostalgia and mourning in
women’s fiction / Roberta Rubenstein.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. American fiction—Women authors—History and criticism.
2. Domestic fiction, American—History and criticism. 3. Women and
literature—United States—History—20th century. 4. Women and
literature—Great Britain—History—20th century. 5. American fiction—
20th century—History and criticism. 6. English fiction—Women authors—
History and criticism. 7. English fiction—20th century—History and
criticism. 8. Domestic fiction, English—History and criticism. 9. Nostalgia
in literature. 10. Desire in literature. 11. Grief in literature. 12. Home
in literature. I. Title.
PS374.D57 H66 2001
813’.509355—dc21 00-051487
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Westchester Book Composition, Danbury, CT USA.
First edition: February 2001
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Chuck, especially,
Acknowledgments ix
Home Matters: Longing and Belonging 1
Notes 167
Works Cited 195
Index 205
Acknowledgments
Home Matters:
Longing and Belonging
ences as well as their ripple effect throughout our lives. More than two mil-
lennia ago, Homer tapped this motif on an epic scale: Odysseus’s encoun-
ters with monsters, temptations, and challenges prepare him for his ultimate
return to the point of his original departure where, to invoke a passage
from Eliot’s Four Quartets, he knows the place for the first time. Twenty
years after his departure from Ithaka, both Odysseus and home have been
transformed.
Countless writers have followed Homer’s lead, with resolutions to the
archetypal theme of homecoming ranging from Thomas Wolfe’s conclu-
sion that “you can’t go home again” to Dorothy’s realization when she
returns from her sojourn in Oz that “there’s no place like home.” However,
in most of the centuries since Homer sang the details of Odysseus’s adven-
tures and his triumphant return to Ithaka, women—even if not, like Pene-
lope, directly affected by her spouse’s extended absence at war and
adventure—have more typically associated home with a different set of
meanings shaped by the reality of domestic obligations and confinement.
Indeed, it is precisely the construction of home as an oppressive rather than
a nostalgic space that underlies the modern feminist movement. Influenced
by Simone de Beauvoir’s exploration of the “second sex” and Betty Friedan’s
articulation of the “feminine mystique” during the 1950s and 1960s,1
many women came to regard home as a restrictive, confining space. Chal-
lenging deeply-imbedded cultural scripts that defined women in terms of
familial and domestic roles, they viewed home not as a sanctuary but as a
prison, a site from which escape was the essential prerequisite for self-
discovery and independence.2 “Homesickness,” stripped of its nostalgic
associations, became synonymous with “sick of home.”
Given the heterogeneous nature of the feminist discourse that has
evolved since the second wave of the women’s movement, scholars and
critics are much more aware of the impossibility—and the fallacy—of pre-
suming to speak for all women or of assuming that any critical or theoret-
ical position is inclusive. In a fragmented postmodern world in which exile
and migration are increasingly common and as entire populations are dis-
placed by ethnic wars, genocide, famine, and other destructive forces both
human and natural, the definition of home—and the meaning of home-
sickness—may depend on where one stands not only psychologically and
ideologically but geopolitically.3 In the new millennium, one may hope for
a cultural pluralism that acknowledges the multiple consequences and
meanings of exile and displacement from home.4
In undertaking the current study, I acknowledge my debt to the influ-
ential paths charted by feminist scholars before me, who inspired my inter-
Home Matters: Longing and Belonging 3
m m m
A few words are in order here regarding the principle of inclusion for
what may seem an eclectic group of writers and texts. All but two of the
writers are American; all but one are contemporary writers, although of
several different generations. Because of the thematic organization of this
study, several authors—Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Barbara Kingsolver,
and Toni Morrison—are represented by more than one text; Morrison
appears in more than one section. The opening chapter on Woolf and
Lessing, the only British writers included in this study, establishes a frame-
work for the discussion that follows. In my view, there are no twentieth-
Home Matters: Longing and Belonging 7
emphasis on the land itself. Working through mourning for her lost mother
and her own lost motherhood, the emotionally displaced Codi Noline ulti-
mately discovers a deeper knowledge of her true place. In linked novels
about Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter, Turtle, Kingsolver
redefines the terrain of home and of the mother-daughter relationship as a
cross-cultural one with political as well as psychological ramifications. Imag-
ining unorthodox constructions of family and belonging, she addresses sev-
eral dimensions of cultural dislocation and exile within a multicultural
America. Taking up another strand of the multicultural construction of
American experience, Julia Alvarez focuses explicitly on geopolitical exile,
including the accommodations and losses that derive from the additional
effects of linguistic dislocation.
As women age, the nature of their emotional and imaginative distance
from home—their longings and losses—evolves as well. Homesickness and
nostalgia function as tropes for a different kind of yearning, embodied in
the recognition of lost youth and of versions/visions of the self that have
been outgrown. Again, both Woolf and Lessing anticipated the preoccupa-
tion with “coming of age,” not in the traditional sense used to describe
novels of initiation into adulthood, but in the sense Simone de Beauvoir
gave the phrase: the coming of age. The narratives I consider here by Anne
Tyler, Paule Marshall, and Toni Morrison focus on characters who negoti-
ate the limits and possibilities of midlife and beyond, accomplishing a pas-
sage through nostalgic mourning for lost dimensions of self as well as (in
the latter two authors) cultural mourning for lost communities and histo-
ries. In Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and Morrison’s Jazz, characters
work through previously unresolved grief as, through them, the authors
themselves mourn the loss of historical homelands, communities, and cul-
tural traditions.
The final section of this study, focusing on Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day
and Toni Morrison’s Paradise, follows the tropes of home and homesick-
ness, and the links between home and mother, into a metaphysical geogra-
phy. Both narratives reflect a division between matriarchal and patriarchal
conceptions of the world that extends to the conception of Paradise itself;
both emphasize maternal figures with special powers who facilitate (or, at
least, attempt to) spiritual homecoming for their symbolic daughters. Both
narratives explore the nostalgia for Paradise, understood as a spiritual home
with strong maternal associations, located in a liminal space where past and
future converge.
I make no claim for the representative nature of the group of writers
considered here. Others, including women of other ethnicities and nation-
Home Matters: Longing and Belonging 9
alities, might well have been included, since the longing for belonging and
notions of home, nostalgia, and mourning are obviously not exclusive to
this small sample of texts. I write about these authors and texts because
they represent so clearly a locus of concern to women in particular, begin-
ning with the resonances of home and relationship but extending to mat-
ters of cultural dislocation, ethnicity, language, moral responsibility, aging,
and spiritual longing. In a number of the narratives, the (usually female)
central character finds herself at a significant crossroad between home and
a problematic “elsewhere,” a place/space that is figuratively located at the
intersection of different geographies, cultures, languages, life stages, or spir-
itual conditions. At the imaginary intersection of time and place, the char-
acters discover—as their authors narratively render—the multiple ways in
which home matters.
Part I
Is Mother Home?
m
m 1m
m m m
m m m
If, as Woolf so memorably declares in A Room of One’s Own, “we think
back through our mothers if we are women,”5 it is also instructive to
approach her writing from the other direction: to think back through one
of her “daughters,” as it were. The presence of nostalgia in Doris Lessing’s
writing—not only as emphatically resisted by (the suggestively surnamed)
Anna Wulf but elsewhere and more ambivalently as both the domain of
unreliable memories and a harmonious unitary world—ultimately casts a
critical light on the ways in which nostalgia functions in Woolf ’s fiction
and autobiography: if not as a “lie,” at least as a scrim that revises and soft-
ens the sharp edges of haunting memories.
Lessing, born of English parents in Persia (now Iran), was reared in South-
ern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and emigrated to England (still England)
when she was thirty. As a result of her leftist political activities, she was listed
as a “Prohibited Immigrant”6 and proscribed from re-entering her African
homeland for more than twenty-five years. Both of her autobiographical nar-
ratives, the significantly titled Going Home (1957) and African Laughter (1992),
record her successive returns “home” to Zimbabwe, providing unique inter-
texts for the expressions of nostalgia that occur throughout her fiction as well.
Lessing’s first experience of literal homesickness, if not the nostalgia
that colors adult recollections, occurred when she was still a child, living
away from home in a convent boarding school in Salisbury; while there, she
was “always ill at school and not only with homesickness.”7 Recapturing
that experience through her fictional persona, Martha Quest, Lessing high-
lights the uneasy quality of nostalgia as sixteen-year-old Martha, isolated in
a darkened room because of infectious pinkeye, awaits her matriculation
exam. The narrator describes an October day, bright with light and pun-
gent with the scent of flowers, as Martha feels “the waves of heat and per-
fume break across her in shock after shock of shuddering nostalgia. But
nostalgia for what?”8 Although offered as Martha’s experience, the passage
transparently expresses Lessing’s own yearning for features associated with
the site of her emotionally complicated childhood; Martha, not yet having
left home (or Africa) as Lessing had done by the time she wrote the first
novel of Children of Violence, could not have known such “shuddering nos-
talgia.” Later, when Martha does leave home to take a secretarial job in Sal-
isbury, Southern Rhodesia, she falls ill with a “dubious” illness and
sardonically resists acknowledging a likely source of her malaise: “One
might imagine I was homesick!” (Martha Quest 209).
16 Home Matters
When Martha drives across the open veld with Douglas Knowell (the
man she soon marries), her voice again disappears into that of the narrator’s
in her celebration of the “naked embrace of earth and sky. . . . [T]his frank
embrace between the lifting breast of the land and the deep blue warmth
of the sky is what exiles from Africa dream of; it is what they sicken for, no matter
how hard they try to shut their minds against the memory of it” (Martha Quest
240, my emphasis). Again, it is not Martha Quest but Lessing, the exile
from Africa, who associates the land with an idealized, embracing mother
and whose voice we hear in that expression of longing.9 Martha’s earlier
query, “nostalgia for what?”, is ostensibly answered in A Proper Marriage
(1952) when, newly pregnant, she fatalistically attributes her odd confusion
of anxiety and excitement to “nostalgia for something doomed.”10
The paradoxical expression of retrospective foreknowledge is, once again,
more revealing of the exiled Lessing’s knowledge of loss than of the still-
adolescent Martha’s.
The yearning for a place—and for a past—that is simultaneously real,
ideal, and true is rendered in considerably more complex terms in Lessing’s
subsequent fiction, particularly for Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook, for
whom such nostalgic proclivities are especially problematic. As Anna con-
siders the experiences of her formative years in Southern Rhodesia—from
a greater distance in both time and space than does the young Martha
Quest—she struggles to find a “true” perspective within her romanticized
memories; she determines that nostalgia must be resisted, for it distorts and
falsifies memory. Early in the Black Notebook, Anna confesses her feeling
that her first and only novel, Frontiers of War, utterly falsified rather than
rendering honestly her deepest emotional experiences. She virtually repu-
diates it as an “immoral novel” because “that terrible lying nostalgia lights
every sentence” (Notebook 63), capturing not the authentic version of
events at Mashopi but “something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit
excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for license, for freedom,
for the jungle, for formlessness” (Notebook 63).11 At her most cynical, she
even characterizes this complex of self-deceiving feelings as a “nostalgia for
death” (Notebook 287).
One challenge a reader faces in attempting to understand the meaning
of what Anna Wulf terms “lying nostalgia” is the impossibility of compre-
hending such observations independently of the Anna who records them.
In the multiple notebooks and time frames of Lessing’s narrative—encom-
passing Anna’s memories from the 1940s, when she lived in Zambesia
(Southern Rhodesia), to her experiences in London during the 1950s,
when she tries to record more recent and current events in her life—she
Yearning and Nostalgia 17
attempts to capture both the “raw” experiences and their myriad transmu-
tations, only some of which she acknowledges as fictions. All of her mem-
ories are observed through a fractured lens whose distortions are produced
not only by the passage of time but by the difficulty of finding the “cor-
rect” emotional distance from them.“Lying nostalgia” becomes a judgment
about the difficulty—in fact, the impossibility—of recovering, through
either memory or fiction, the “authentic” version of past experiences.
Among the many strands that draw the multilayered narrative of The
Golden Notebook into a kind of coherence, the unstable relations between
past and present, between experience and language, between fact and fic-
tion, and between subjectivity and authenticity pervade Anna’s struggle
with her various “selves” and thus occupy a significant place in the novel’s
multiple meanings.12
It is revealing to juxtapose Anna Wulf ’s struggle with “lying nostalgia”
in her accounts of her experiences at Mashopi with Lessing’s later actual
visits to the land of her formative years. In 1982, her first visit “home” since
1956, she returned to several emotionally significant places of her young
adulthood, hoping to “sort out memory from what [she] had made of it”
(Laughter 66). When she actually encountered specific places, she found that
she could not disentangle her memories from her fictionalizations of them.
Visiting the Macheke Hotel, fictionalized in The Golden Notebook as the
Mashopi Hotel, Lessing discovered that her fictitious version of it was so
deeply installed in her memory that she could not even recall the propri-
etor’s true name (Laughter 76).
Interestingly, the “I” who thus complained was Anna Wulf. Here, Lessing
acknowledges the objection to “lying nostalgia” as her own, further
demonstrating the effect of time’s passage on the already-blurred bound-
aries between fictionalized and autobiographical versions of her experi-
ence.13
In each of her autobiographical accounts of her visits to her original
18 Home Matters
For a long time I used to dream of the collapse and decay of that house,
and of the fire sweeping over it; and then I set myself to dream the other
way. It was urgently necessary to recover every detail of that house. . . . I had
to remember everything, every strand of thatch and curve of wall or heave
in the floor, and every tree and bush and patch of grass around it, and how
the fields and slopes of the country looked at different times of the day, in
different strengths and tones of light . . . . Over months, I recovered the
memory of it all. And so what was lost and buried in my mind, I recovered
from my mind; so I suppose there is no need to go back and see what exists
clearly, in every detail, for so long as I live. (Going Home 55–6)
In 1956, I could have gone to see the farm, the place where our house had
been on the hill, but I was driving the car and could not force myself to turn
the wheel off the main road north, on to the track that leads to the farm.
Every writer has a myth-country. This does not have to be childhood. I
attributed the ukase, the silent No, to a fear of tampering with my myth, the
bush I was brought up in, the old house built of earth and grass, the lands
around the hill, the animals, the birds. Myth does not mean something
untrue, but a concentration of truth. (Laughter 35)
During her six weeks in Zimbabwe in 1982, Lessing once again avoided
visiting the site of her childhood home. Finally, on her return in 1988, she
resolved to override her longstanding resistance and her brother’s caution
that going there would “break [her] heart” (Laughter 314). Unaware of her
enduring struggle with her feelings about their family home in the bush,
his remark refers more literally to the disappearance from the bush of
entire groups of wild animals, casualties of the transition to more commer-
cially viable farmland.16 Nonetheless, Lessing finally determined that she
“had to go back to the old farm” (Laughter 301), in order to confront her
own “myth-country”:
able to keep in one’s mind those childhood miseries, the homesickness like
a bruise on one’s heart, the betrayals—if they were allowed [to] lie in the
mind always exposed, a cursed country one has climbed out of and left
behind for ever, but visible, not hidden . . . would then that landscape of
pain have less power than I am sure it has?” (Laughter 305, Lessing’s ellipsis).
However, finally encountering with relief the actual place,“one not imag-
ined or invented” (313), Lessing confronted her deepest nostalgia for the
physical landscape of her childhood. “I stood there, needless to say limp
with threatening tears, unable to believe in all that magnificence, the space,
the marvel of it. . . . I lived here from the age of five until I left it forever
thirteen years later. I lived here. No wonder this myth country tugged and
pulled . . . what a privilege, what a blessing” (314–15, Lessing’s final ellipsis
and emphasis).
What distinguishes this more recent autobiographical statement of Less-
ing’s return to the landscape of her youth from the tormented struggles of
her fictionalized persona, Anna Wulf, is the softening of the idea of nostal-
gia as a “lie.” There is less a sense of loss than of recovery, even of wonder-
ment, and acceptance of both what has been forgotten and what has been
remembered, albeit inevitably colored by complex emotional shadings.
Although Lessing sensed the strong presence of her parents’ “ghosts”
(Laughter 317) at the site of the family farm, she recognized that her sense
of loss was not only personal but general;“every day there are more people
everywhere in the world in mourning for trees, forest, bush, rivers, animals,
lost landscapes . . . you could say this is an established part of the human
mind, a layer of grief always deepening and darkening” (Laughter 318, Less-
ing’s ellipsis).
The impulse to return to, reconstruct, or recover such lost landscapes of
the past in some sort of “pure” form uncontaminated by the alterations of
time or later experience and understanding is a central preoccupation
expressed elsewhere in Lessing’s oeuvre. In Briefing for a Descent into Hell
(1971), the locations that Charles Watkins, a professor of classics, visits dur-
ing several hallucinatory journeys also suggest the ambivalent grip of nos-
talgia. His inner journeys are juxtaposed with the medical establishment’s
efforts to penetrate his amnesiac condition. In fact, amnesia functions in the
novel as the antithesis of nostalgia. If nostalgia is the yearning to recover
the self one knew in earlier, happier circumstances, amnesia is its involun-
tary erasure; the complementary conditions might be described as memory
of loss and loss of memory. Thus, at various moments, Watkins struggles to
remember something vitally important—who he “is” and what his “mission”
is—but the details continually elude him.
Yearning and Nostalgia 21
m m m
A “myth country” located in the past—and in the imagination—also fig-
ures centrally in both Virginia Woolf ’s autobiographical writings and her
fiction. The epiphanic “moments of being” that invigorate her fictional
characters often originate in a yearning to return to or recover an idyllic
scene or site. For the fictional Clarissa Dalloway, one such defining place is
Bourton, where she spent the summer when she was eighteen. Recalling
her passionate attachment to Sally Seton during that summer, she can still
invoke the precise qualities of her feelings, preserved as if without alter-
ation or distortion.“The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the
Yearning and Nostalgia 23
integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It
was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only
exist between women, between women just grown up.”21
The central encounter in the narrative between Clarissa and Peter
Walsh, with the ensuing ripples of recollection that it releases for both of
them, pivots on nostalgia: their overlapping but differently tinted memories
and yearnings for the emotional intimacy and intoxication of their youth-
ful romance at Bourton. “Do you remember the lake? [Clarissa] said, in an
abrupt voice, under the pressure of an emotion which caught her heart,
made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as
she said ‘lake’” (Mrs. Dalloway 43). For Peter the image brings an inner
wince of pain as well, as he is forced not only to confront his loss of
Clarissa to Richard Dalloway all those years ago but to acknowledge that
he still loves her. In late middle age, both Clarissa and Peter look nostalgi-
cally to the past, regretting the erosion of the freshness, the intensity, of
their youthful passions. Still, Woolf, who believed that certain vivid memo-
ries retained their exact impressions intact in the mind, unmodified by the
passage of time—“these scenes—for why do they survive undamaged year
after year unless they are made of something comparatively permanent?”
(“Sketch,” Moments 122)—permits Clarissa to preserve some of that vital
fire of emotional truth into her adult life. The exhilaration she had experi-
enced with Sally at Bourton survives in memory as the “radiance . . . the
revelation, the religious feeling” (35–6) of their youthful encounter, a
“moment of being” that she savors several times during the single day that
forms the novel’s present time.22
The most emotionally saturated “myth country” in Woolf ’s writing is
not Clarissa Dalloway’s Bourton, however, but the environs of St. Ives,
Cornwall, where Virginia herself vacationed with her family during sum-
mers of her early childhood. Not only her first but, in her own estimation,
her most central memory is associated with that landscape:
If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and
fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying
half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the
waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the
beach . . . of lying and hearing this splash and . . . feeling . . . the purest
ecstasy I can conceive. (“Sketch,” Moments 64–5)
Later she emphasizes her feeling that nothing else in her early childhood
was as valuable as the gift her parents gave her of those summer holidays in
24 Home Matters
m m m
To the extent that nostalgia may signify not only homesickness or the
yearning for an emotionally significant place but also the longing for an
absent, emotionally important figure who is strongly associated with it,
memory traces of home are inevitably linked with those of mother.25 Both
Virginia Woolf ’s and Doris Lessing’s fiction and autobiographical writings
demonstrate this central emotional connection. Undoubtedly the fullest
expression of nostalgia in Woolf ’s writing occurs in passages, both autobi-
ographical and fictional, in which she attempts to recover memories of her
Yearning and Nostalgia 25
mother, Julia Stephen, who died when Virginia was thirteen. In “A Sketch
of the Past,” written when she was in her late fifties, Woolf admits that she
remained haunted by the image of her mother until she was in her for-
ties—until, in fact, she wrote To the Lighthouse. Before that time,“the pres-
ence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine
what she would do or say as I went about my day’s doings. She was one of
the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life”
(“Sketch” 80). Later she adds,“of course she was central. I suspect the word
‘central’ gets closest to the general feeling I had of living so completely in
her atmosphere that one never got far enough away from her to see her as
a person” (“Sketch” 83).
Moreover, Woolf associated the death of her mother with the loss of
the idyllic St. Ives. One summer, the Stephen family returned to Talland
House to discover that the incomparable view of the lighthouse and bay
had been spoiled by the construction of a hotel; soon, a realtor’s sign
appeared on their own lawn. “And then mother died. . . . Our lease was
sold . . . and St Ives vanished forever” (“Sketch” 117). In To the Lighthouse,
Woolf imaginatively transforms homesickness by rendering into a consum-
mate work of fiction her experience of the loss of the idyllic setting of
childhood as well as the (idealized) mother with whom it was inextricably
associated. Like her mother, Julia Stephen, Mrs. Ramsay is an emotionally
commanding presence whose image remains equally indelible in her
absence, years after her death is matter-of-factly announced in the novel’s
middle section. Moreover, through a fictionalized persona, the artist Lily
Briscoe, Woolf explores the pain still associated with the loss of that ideal-
ized mother. In her autobiographical commentary, Woolf observes,“if one
could give sense of my mother’s personality one would have to be an
artist” (“Sketch” 85). However, the motherless Lily of the first part of the
novel worships Mrs. Ramsay in a manner that would characterize few
actual mother-daughter relationships; idealizing the older woman, she liter-
ally desires to merge with her.26 “What device [was there] for becoming,
like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object
one adored? . . . Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ram-
say one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired . . . intimacy
itself, which is knowledge. . . .”27
In the novel’s middle section, the bracketed, understated announcement
of Mrs. Ramsay’s sudden death clearly mirrors Julia Stephen’s unexpected
death in 1895 at the age of forty-nine. Other bracketed statements of the
deaths of Prue and Andrew Ramsay echo the loss of Virginia Woolf ’s half-
26 Home Matters
sister Stella and her brother Thoby to arbitrary, premature deaths. While
“Time Passes,” the Ramsay house in the Hebrides—modeled after Woolf ’s
mythologized St. Ives—remains empty and dark. The sense of literal and
emotional absence represented through descriptions of the deteriorating,
unoccupied house lyrically revises Woolf ’s less poeticized view of the years
immediately following Julia Stephen’s death: “With mother’s death the
merry, various family life which she had held in being shut for ever. In its
place a dark cloud settled over us; we seemed to sit all together cooped up,
sad, solemn, unreal, under a haze of heavy emotion” (“Sketch” 93).28
In the novel’s final section, Lily returns ten years later with the remain-
ing Ramsays to the house in the Hebrides and confronts the presence of
absence: the undiminished power of Mrs. Ramsay’s personality remains
despite her death. Lily’s yearning is embedded in the effort of completing a
(new) painting that, rather than capturing a realistic representation of Mrs.
Ramsay, abstractly crystallizes her own feelings of attachment, longing, and
loss. If nostalgia may be distinguished from simple memory by the presence
of painful longing that betrays uncompleted mourning and by a desire for
the (impossible) restoration or recovery of that which has been lost, Lily
experiences those feelings as she grieves for Mrs. Ramsay and longs to
recover her presence. Ultimately, in the novel’s concluding passage, Lily
experiences a cathartic, healing moment as she moves from expressions of
anger and longing to the transmutation of loss through creative expression.
Adding the final line that resolves the emotional dilemma pursued
through her grieving, and its aesthetic equivalent pursued through her
painting, she achieves the moment of release: “I have had my vision”
(Lighthouse 209).
Thus, in the first part of To the Lighthouse Woolf creates a multifaceted
but nonetheless idealized vision of her mother fabricated out of her own
unrequited longing and loss, placing Lily to worship, childlike, at the mater-
nal woman’s knee—the way Woolf did (or imagined she did) as a child. In
her autobiographical account, however, Woolf acknowledges more criti-
cally,“Can I remember ever being alone with her for more than a few min-
utes? Someone was always interrupting. When I think of her
spontaneously she is always in a room full of people . . .” (“Sketch” 83).
The novel’s middle section,“Time Passes,” lyrically equates mother and home
as the death of Mrs. Ramsay reverberates through the destruction and col-
lapse of the magical intimate space with which she is associated; in the
novel’s final section, the house (if not Mrs. Ramsay) is brought back to life
again. In the last section, nostalgic yearnings are balanced with a critical
perspective and a degree of anger toward her vanished mother that Woolf
Yearning and Nostalgia 27
was incapable of acknowledging for nearly thirty years and that Lily Briscoe
was incapable of acknowledging ten years earlier in the first section of the
narrative. Lily, recalling what she regards as Mrs. Ramsay’s excessive willing-
ness to subordinate herself to the needs of her emotionally demanding hus-
band, reflects, “Giving, giving, giving, she had died—and had left all this.
Really, she was angry with Mrs. Ramsay” (Lighthouse 149).
The true source of Lily’s anger is not Mrs. Ramsay’s emotional “giving”
to Mr. Ramsay but what any mourner feels toward the lost object of her or
his attachment: anger toward the departed for the absolute and irrevocable
fact of her death, which has severed the bereaved survivor from that vital
object of affection. “Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time, unable
to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing
one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay’s fault. She was dead. The step
where she used to sit was empty. She was dead” (Lighthouse 149–50, my
emphasis). The emphasized phrase and the repetition of the statement,“she
was dead,” bring to mind a child’s diction, also captured in the indiscrimi-
nate angry complaint,“it’s all your fault.”
Phrased another way, the Mrs. Ramsay of the first part of the novel is an
idealized figure rendered from Virginia Woolf ’s nostalgic memories and
fantasies, preserved from childhood, of her mother’s presence. For the Mrs.
Ramsay of the final part of the novel, Lily is the vehicle for Woolf ’s more
critical exploration of the reverberations of her mother’s absence: the emo-
tional traces of nostalgic mourning along with the belated expression of
anger triggered by irrevocable loss.29 Registering the cathartic effect of the
process that she ultimately filtered through Lily Briscoe, Woolf analyzed
the significance that writing about her mother (and father) in this novel
had on her decades-long obsession:
I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their patients.
I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it
I explained it and then laid it to rest. But what is the meaning of “explained”
it? Why, because I described her and my feeling for her in that book, should
my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and
weaker? (“Sketch” 81)
Although Woolf does not explicitly answer the questions she raises in
this passage, it is obvious that To the Lighthouse is the answer. Her narrative
achieves a double memorialization, through art, of the lost mother: the
masterpiece of language rendered by Woolf that contains the more modest
visual equivalent created by her fictional stand-in, Lily Briscoe.30
28 Home Matters
m m m
At the age of sixty-four, Doris Lessing—only a few years older than Woolf
when she wrote the first of her autobiographical memoirs—also attempted
a “sketch of the past,” no doubt prompted by her return to southern Africa
after an involuntary decades-long absence. In it, she acknowledges the dif-
ficulty of articulating her earliest, painful memories as she attempts to
achieve a balanced recollection of her parents, particularly her mother.
Interestingly, one striking image of her parents reads as if it could have
come from Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay confront
their mutually exclusive perceptions of the journey to the lighthouse and
of the world itself. As Lessing phrases it,
the “longing for the mother as the ‘containing world’,” 35 “the world fold[s]
itself up” (Memoirs 216) around the nameless female figure who leads the
narrator and the others into the blissful state that is the imagination’s anti-
dote to homesickness. Thus do the nostalgic memories of home and mother
become imaginatively figured as Paradise.
Nostalgic longing and mourning remain central matters two decades
later in Lessing’s most recent and less admittedly-autobiographical fiction,
Love,Again (1995). Through the prism of aging, Lessing maps the territory
of the affections from the vantage point (or disadvantage point, as it were)
of post-middle-age. Matters of the heart—and a deeper scaffolding of
unacknowledged longing—continue to challenge even an emotionally
self-sufficient older woman as she finds herself struggling to reconcile
claims of autonomy with the overpowering pull of emotional intimacy
and sexual desire that unexpectedly enmesh her. While the reawakening of
eros catalyzes the central character’s reflection on her past and obliges her
to consider the interconnections among aging, gender, desire, and loss,
Lessing’s narrative also reprises the complex nostalgia that marks her previ-
ous fiction.
Sarah Durham, an attractive widow in her mid-sixties, is a scriptwriter
for a theatrical agency who, in the process of working on a romantic opera,
finds herself infatuated with several men in the production, all young
enough to be her sons. Eventually, as she struggles with her irrational feel-
ings, she finds herself recalling events from much earlier in her life, even
dating back to infancy. Grieving in response not only to the suicide of a
friend with whom she has collaborated on the opera but to the painful
reawakening of the whole gamut of primitive sensual and erotic feelings,
she relives the experience of “Absolute loss. As if she had been dependent
on some emotional food, like impalpable milk, and it had been with-
drawn.”36
Among other emotionally saturated moments in the history of Sarah’s
affections are several experiences that concern her younger brother, whom
she recognizes was the true object of her mother’s affections during their
childhood. Late in the novel, Sarah observes a scene in a park that mirrors
her own (and, presumably, Lessing’s) experience of being catapulted out of
her mother’s emotional orbit by the birth of a much-wanted son. In the
scene, a young child is cruelly excluded from her mother’s totally-absorbed
infatuation with her infant brother. In the vain hope of claiming her
mother’s attention, the child lavishes affection on the adored baby. Sarah,
privately empathizing, even identifying, with the excluded child’s desola-
tion, acknowledges their mutual habitation of an “eternity of loneliness
32 Home Matters
and grief ” (346). Through her fictional protagonist’s attempt to trace the
vagaries of desire back to their source in the primary mother-child rela-
tionship, Lessing demonstrates the power of negative nostalgia as the unap-
peased phantoms of earliest experience converge with the not-entirely
appeasable demons of advancing age.
m m m
Following her return to Macheke/Mashopi to determine whether she
could know the place apart from her imaginative transformations of it in
The Golden Notebook, Lessing wrote,“Memory in any case is a lying record:
we choose to remember this and not that. . . . When we see remembered
scenes from the outside, as an observer, a golden haze seduces us into senti-
mentality” (Laughter 72). As a description of the nostalgia-producing aspect
of imagination, the language here is especially pertinent: the “lying record”
of memory results from the inescapable filters of time and experience that
separate the current self who recalls—“from the outside, as an observer”—
from the younger self whose experiences are recalled. Lessing’s conviction
that memory inevitably “lies” sharply contrasts with that of Woolf, who
validates the undistorted accuracy of certain scenes from her childhood.
While Woolf considers but ultimately resists the likelihood that, over time,
even indelible memories are transformed by the evolving perspective of
the observer self, Lessing discounts the possibility of recovering a “pure”
version of any scene or experience in one’s past. Indeed, it is this difference
in orientation, partly shaped by their different historical moments, that
most distinguishes between the operations of nostalgia in Woolf ’s and Less-
ing’s oeuvres. The modernist Woolf wrote during a time period in which
collective loss—the devastations of one world war and a second one
impending, the erosion of cultural stability, and the loss of the certitudes of
traditional narrative form itself—corroborated the experiences of pro-
found loss within her own personal history. In both her fiction and her
autobiographical writing, she attempts to “fix” the past in both senses—to
repair and to secure—at least in part by excavating and resolving nostalgic
memories. By contrast, Lessing is an exile who, reflecting (and reflecting
on) her own life, chronicles the dislocations of female experience as they
overlap with contemporary experience—geographical as well as psycho-
logical and temporal. Thus, while the past may be unequivocal for Woolf, it
is entirely equivocal for Lessing, who questions the very fixity of the past
that Woolf attempts to fix. Yet despite the challenge to “lying nostalgia”
that Lessing articulates so persuasively through Anna Wulf in The Golden
Yearning and Nostalgia 33
m m m
In Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver develops the theme of longing—for
the absent mother and for home—with reference to other stories of quest
and return, most prominently The Odyssey. The idea of home/land is com-
plicated by allusive references to a more recent classical Western text, The
Waste Land, as well as to Native American conceptions of home and cos-
mos. The figure of the father also functions importantly in the equation of
loss. One of the suggestive resonances with home and homeland that
structure Animal Dreams is the allusive presence of the father of narratives
of homecoming, Homer. (For English speakers, the notion of home is
embedded in the poet’s very name). Indeed, the first point of view intro-
duced in the novel is that of Doc Homer, father of the protagonist, Codi
Noline. Through misguided pride rather than malice, Doc Homer has dis-
guised and misrepresented the identity of home for his daughter since her
earliest childhood. The voices of father and daughter alternate throughout
the narrative, providing a double perspective for the several intertwined
narrative motifs. Although the Spanish version of Homer’s name, Homero,
heads each of the narrative sections told from his perspective, the full
meaning of that fact only becomes clear late in the narrative. Codi and her
younger sister Hallie represent not only complementary embodiments of
the quest but complementary dimensions of the Odyssean universe: readers
learn that Cosima (Codi’s full Spanish name) signifies “order in the cosmos”
while Halimeda (Hallie’s full name) translates as “thinking of the sea.”1
Animal Dreams is structured through three overlapping narrative dimen-
Home is (Mother) Earth 39
sions, each of which depends on the pattern of the quest and/or the return
home. The most fundamental is the emotional and psychological cluster
that concerns the attachments and losses in Codi’s own family history and
represents her belated but ultimate recovery of her own lost self in the
aptly named town of Grace, Arizona. Codi’s mother died when she was
three years old and her sister Hallie was only an infant. Although Codi has
vague memories of her mother as a “strong and ferociously loving” figure
(Animal Dreams 49), she remains “an outsider to . . . nurturing” (46), not
even certain whether she witnessed or only imagined the helicopter that
conveyed her departing mother, who died even before the vehicle could
“lift itself up out of the alfalfa” (49).
Since childhood, Codi’s widowed father has been nearly as absent to
her. The community’s respected doctor, Homer Noline is, ironically, unable
to heal his own family. Numbed by grief over the loss of his wife, he has
remained in a state of perpetual mourning, raising his two daughters in a
clinical, detached manner based more on the correct orthopedic shoes than
on the expression of affection. His perception of his daughters as young
children, expressed in the first section of the novel, underscores the way his
own emotional losses have continued to delimit the world for Codi
(though not for Hallie). Recalling the two girls sleeping like small animals
huddling together for warmth, Homero conflates their past and future lives,
reflecting “how close together these two are, and how much they have to
lose. How much they’ve already lost in their lives to come” (4).
Thus emotionally unparented from an early age, as children Codi and
her sister had played a game they called “orphans,” in which they fantasized
about who among an anonymous crowd of people might be “our true
father or mother[.] Which is the one grownup here that loves us?” (72).
Codi’s sense of isolation continued into adolescence, when she grew to be
nearly six feet tall; her acute self-consciousness about her height still makes
her feel “out of place” (228). When she was fifteen, she became pregnant
by her boyfriend—a Native American youth who never knew of her preg-
nancy—only to lose the child during the sixth month. Her father, aware of
both her pregnancy and the stillbirth, had even witnessed Codi’s burial of
the fetus in a dry riverbed without ever revealing that fact or attempting to
comfort her in her loss. Although at one point he recalls an imagined con-
versation with her—“Do you know what you have inside you?” (98)—he
had voiced neither those words nor any other acknowledgement of her
condition or its termination.
Shaped by these fundamental losses of mother and of child, Codi
regards herself as “bracketed by death” (50). In fact, her surname,“no-line,”
40 Home Matters
Codi only slowly acquires through his nurturing affection for her. Loyd’s
role in the narrative as Codi’s spiritual guide is signaled by his names. His
surname, peregrina, is the Spanish word for “pilgrim”; his given name, Loyd,
suggests his “alloyed” state. Like his endearing coyote-dog Jack, he is of
mixed blood: Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache. The different tribal legacies
embody complementary orientations in the world, roughly—as Loyd char-
acterizes them—“homebodies” and “wanderers” (213). Despite his hybrid-
ity, Loyd identifies himself not as an Apache, or wanderer (as Codi had
assumed during their brief adolescent relationship) but as a Pueblo, or
homebody.
Codi, at this point still believing that her family originated far from Ari-
zona, concludes that she is a member of the “Nothing Tribe” (213).7 Else-
where she is humorously characterized by her friend Emelina as the
opposite of a homemaker, a “home ignorer” (77). Becoming more fully
acquainted with Loyd only after she meets his extended family of nurtur-
ing female relatives in the Santa Rosalia Pueblo, Codi discovers that “You
can’t know somebody . . . till you’ve followed him home” (231)—indeed,
until you know his community. According to Paula Gunn Allen (herself of
mixed—Laguna Pueblo and white—blood), among the Keres (Laguna
Pueblo) people in particular, the association between home and tribe con-
stitutes a vital dimension of identity. The individual knows who he/she is
within a communal context of connectedness to others and to tradition.
Moreover, as Allen interprets the Pueblo belief system, the figure who
embodies that connection is Mother:“Failure to know your mother, that is,
your position and its attendant traditions, history, and place in the scheme
of things, is failure to remember your significance, your reality, your right
relationship to earth and society. It is the same as being lost—isolated,
abandoned, self-estranged, and alienated from your own life.”8 Juxtaposing
Loyd’s spiritual “groundedness” with Codi’s lack of “ground orientation,”
Kingsolver assimilates the Pueblo conception of home not as a regressive
place but as a spiritual space within which one is vitally linked to a larger
community. Against Codi’s defensive ethic of personal loss shaped by a his-
tory of unresolved mourning—“Nothing you love will stay” (233)—Loyd
Peregrina’s healing teaching and profound concern for her enable Codi to
discover her capacity for intimacy and a more encompassing meaning of
home as a state of mind, where nothing is ever lost.
William Bevis observes that in a number of novels by Native American
authors,“coming home, staying put, contracting, even what we call ‘regress-
ing’ to a place, a past where one has been before, is not only the primary
44 Home Matters
“The greatest honor you can give a house is to let it fall back down into
the ground. . . . That’s where everything comes from in the first place.”
I looked at him, surprised. “But then you’ve lost your house.”
“Not if you know how to build another one. . . . The important thing
isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in
your hands, wherever you go.” (235)
Loyd stresses that, in contrast with white people, who regard home as a
material concept (and some of whom insist on hauling their mobile homes
around with them), Native Americans travel light, like coyotes: “Get to a
good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you’re home. Once
you know how, you can always do that, no matter what” (235). He adds,
“It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always
go looking for it somewhere else” (236). His observations emphasize the
Pueblo Indians’ sense of home less as a literal place than as a spiritual space,
an inner center of being. Codi, initially resisting Loyd’s wisdom along with
the vulnerability his affection for her exposes, admits to herself, “I wasn’t
keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always
looking ahead for the perfect home . . . where no one you loved ever died”
(236). In Codi’s view, home is the place associated with mother and safety,
where no one—least of all the mother herself—ever dies. But because
Codi has never fully mourned either the loss of her mother during her
childhood or her stillborn child during adolescence, she carries within her
the presence of absence: the condition of emotional emptiness and unsat-
isfied longing.
m m m
46 Home Matters
honour of the Departed, the ‘Feast of Souls,’ which characterized the com-
mencement of the winter season, and is retained in the Catholic concep-
tion of November as the month of the Dead” (Weston 85).
In Animal Dreams, specific references to or celebrations of the beginning
of the “month of the Dead”—the Day of All Souls—occur at the begin-
ning, middle, and end of the narrative, marking successive stages in Codi
Noline’s spiritual renewal and her journey home. The first appears as the
novel’s opening sequence, “The Night of All Souls” (3–4), in which Doc
Homer’s recollections of his young daughters are interwoven with multiple
images of graves, skeletons, corpses, and death. During the second Day of
All Souls, Codi accompanies several women of the community and their
families to the town cemetery. There, she remembers that, years before, her
father had prohibited her and her sister from participating in the annual
celebration, remarking, “Those great-grandmothers aren’t any of your
business” (160). Of course, the exact opposite is true, as the identity of
Codi’s relatives becomes her urgent business. When she stumbles on the
neglected gravestone of one Homero Nolina, Codi begins to suspect her
father’s true connection to Grace. Her puzzlement about the “no-line” of
her family history—her sense of exclusion from the hereditary line con-
necting generations both before and after her—accentuates her acute long-
ing for belonging. “More than anything else I wished I belonged to one of
these living, celebrated families, lush as plants, with bones in the ground for
roots. I wanted pollen on my cheeks and one of the calcium ancestors to
decorate as my own” (165). Through her discovery of her ancestors’ Span-
ish surname, Codi ultimately recovers her connection to her legitimate
“family tree,” as Kingsolver further conflates the narrative’s imagery of fer-
tility and vegetation. The nolina plant is a desert species related to the yucca
plant; producing a flower spike as large as a Christmas tree, it is capable—if
moisture is insufficient—of surviving for years between flowerings.16 As
Codi slowly evolves from “noline” to “nolina,” Kingsolver fittingly signifies
her potentiality for blossoming after an extended period of dormancy.
One further important representation of the associations between bur-
ial, fertility, and renewal concerns the death and interment of Hallie. Ear-
lier, Codi has characterized her sister as “the blossom of our family, like one
of those miraculous fruit trees that taps into an invisible vein of nurture
and bears radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on
living . . . the semilla besada—the seed that got kissed” (49). Inevitably, the
idealized Hallie dies during the narrative, a victim of kidnapping and ter-
rorism in Nicaragua. Profoundly grieved by Hallie’s death, Codi regards
herself not only as “a skeleton with flesh and clothes and thoughts” (302)
Home is (Mother) Earth 49
but also as “a hard seed beyond germination” (307). Yet, symbolically, her
sister’s death allows Codi to assimilate the lost/denied dimensions of her
better self—caring, passion, and vulnerability—that Hallie embodied. As
she articulates that psychological truth at the ceremonial funeral for Hallie,
“Everything we’d been I was now” (328).
However, between the news of her sister’s death and her burial, Codi
experiences a temporary failure of nerve stemming from fear of her grow-
ing attachment to Loyd. While airborne on her way to Denver in ambiva-
lent escape, she discovers a decisive sign in the airplane’s unscheduled
landing for mechanical reasons. Her new perspective vividly corroborates
the “sea change” as well as the evolution toward a Native American aware-
ness that has occurred in her. From the air, Codi initially observes the
“bone-dry” (320) paths that mark the empty creeks. Then, in an image that
suggests a baptism in vitality, she observes the
watercolor wash of summer light [that] lay on the Catalina Mountains. The
end of a depression is that clear: it’s as if you have been living underwater,
but never realized it until you came up for air. I hadn’t seen color since I lost
Hallie.
....
Just past the railyard was a school where a double row of corn-colored
school buses were parked in a ring, exactly like one of those cheap Indian
necklaces made for tourists. Bright backyard swimming pools gleamed like
turquoise nuggets. The land stretched out under me the way a lover would,
hiding nothing, offering up every endearing southwestern cliché, and I
wanted to get down there and kiss the dirt.
I made a bargain with my mother. If I got to the ground in one piece, I
wasn’t leaving it again. (320–21)
At last recognizing her true home in her deeper connection to the land
and/as her mother, Codi returns to Loyd by train, a more “grounded”
mode of travel. Suggestively, she feels as if she had “been on that train for
the whole of [her] life” (322). Just before she reveals her presence to Loyd,
she acknowledges her altered understanding of the relation between inside
and outside and the implicit sense of arrival home:“I was on the outside, in
a different dimension. I’d lived there always” (323). It is not Codi’s destina-
tion but her vision of it that has changed. Having begun to accept that she
cannot participate fully in life without accepting the reality of loss and
death, she makes Hallie’s memorial service in Grace an occasion for cele-
bration of her life rather than a somber rite emphasizing its cessation. By
Hallie’s own prior request, the body remains behind in Nicaragua, under-
50 Home Matters
scoring the fertility motif that unifies the narrative: “She said Nicaragua
could use the fertilizer” (303). The ceremony takes place in early summer,
in an orchard where peacocks curiously eye the events and where “every
tree in every orchard looked blessed” (324), signifying the restoration of
fruitfulness as well as Codi’s recovery of a legitimate location on her own
Nolina family tree. Through her awakened capacity for love and her reunion
with her community and its land, Codi herself becomes a semilla besada.
Her sister’s philosophy—“It’s what you do that makes your soul, not the
other way around” (334)—ultimately describes the moral understanding
and spiritual growth that occur in Kingsolver’s protagonist.
Prompted by the memorial ceremony for her sister, Codi endeavors to
lay to rest—and to reconnect with—the spirits of others she has lost. The
ritual reburial of her lost child is described both through Codi’s intense
emotion and Doc Homer’s confused overlapping memories of past and
present events. Moreover, the equation between buried corpses, fertility,
and renewal suggests not only the wasteland motif but Eliot’s poem in par-
ticular. The lines fromThe Waste Land, “That corpse you planted last year in
your garden,/Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”17 reverber-
ate in Codi’s unknowing participation in precisely this cycle of death and
renewal when, at fifteen, she had buried the corpse of her stillborn child in
a dry riverbed. Retracing those steps nearly twenty years later, she achieves
reunion with the land and with her own inner being—that prematurely
buried part of herself that might be characterized psychologically as her
lost inner child—and ultimately begins to blossom and mature.
A common motif in myths of quest and return (although one not
explicitly present in the wasteland legend) is the quester’s reconciliation
with his or her parents, signifying the acceptance and assimilation of adult
roles; Animal Dreams concludes with these culminating reconciliations. The
final celebration of the Day of All Souls that concludes the novel extends
these central correspondences between death and renewed life, quest and
arrival home. Near the end of Eliot’s The Waste Land, the Fisher King, with
“the arid plain behind” him, wonders, “Shall I at least set my lands in
order?”18 Homer Noline, now deceased, has joined his Nolina ancestors in
the cemetery where “the spirits of all those old bones [are] being tended by
their children” (339). His daughter Codi rejoices that, on behalf of Homer
Noline/Homero Nolina and in fulfillment of the auspicious name he gave
her at birth, she’d “brought some order to his cosmos finally” (340).
More profoundly, affirming the meaning of her name, Cosima, she has
brought order to her own cosmos. The sense of motherlessness, the pres-
ence of absence that has fueled Codi’s protracted mourning and longing to
Home is (Mother) Earth 51
Bug stops running;“wherever it ran out, I’d look for a sign” (11). She nar-
rowly avoids being named after Homer, Illinois (a name and a place that
Kingsolver reserves for significant roles in the novel that she published
three years later, Animal Dreams), making it as far as a place called Taylorville
before she runs out of gas. Her next stop is considerably more fateful. On a
Cherokee Indian reservation in Oklahoma—a place with significance for
her since her great-grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee—Taylor finds
herself the custodian of a Native American child who is deposited in her
car during the night. The woman who delivers the child in this unprece-
dented manner implores Taylor to “take this baby” (17), indicating that she
is the child’s aunt and that its mother is dead. As a result of this unorthodox
“delivery,”Taylor finds herself responsible for the welfare and well-being of
a child somewhere in age between “a baby and a person” (17), much the
way any new mother does, although in this instance without the customary
contributions of either parturition or a father.
Through these events early in the narrative, Kingsolver establishes the
tone and direction of her story. Initially,Taylor follows her arbitrary destiny,
signified by the child’s unorthodox arrival in her life, and only later recog-
nizes the challenge to shape or “tailor” the child into a person. Her first sig-
nificant choice is to accept the Indian child rather than to return her
promptly to the reservation. As Taylor remarks of her initial encounter
with the child left for her,“From the first moment I picked it up out of its
nest of wet blanket, it attached itself to me by its little hands like roots
sucking on dry dirt” (22). In fact, the child clings so tenaciously to Taylor
that she names her Turtle, “on account of her grip” (36). From that literal
attachment, the novel traces the growth of a true emotional bond as the
relationship develops from Taylor’s view of the child as “not really
mine . . . just somebody I got stuck with” (52) to her affirmative decision
to become the child’s legal mother.
When Taylor arrives in Arizona, her unconventional family expands
further to include the owner of the incongruously named business, Jesus is
Lord Used Tires. Competently assisting Taylor in the repair of the two flat
tires her car has developed during the long journey from Kentucky to Ari-
zona, Mattie also serves (as her name hints) as a kind of surrogate mater,
beginning with her first offer, “Just make yourself at home” (43). In sharp
contrast to the austere Southwestern landscape Taylor first encounters in
Arizona, Mattie’s tire enterprise beckons as a startlingly flourishing envi-
ronment, an incongruous but almost Edenic garden with global geograph-
ical references—“a bright, wild wonderland of flowers and vegetables and
auto parts. Heads of cabbage and lettuce sprouted out of old tires” (45).
Home/lands and Contested Motherhood 55
The purple bean vines in this garden-run-amok grew from seeds brought
from China decades earlier by one of Mattie’s neighbors.
Seeking a place to live through the Want Ads, Taylor meets Lou Ann
Ruiz, a young woman also transplanted from home; their “hometowns in
Kentucky were separated by only two counties . . .” (72). Lou Ann affirms
her instant kinship with Taylor, remarking, “You talk just like me” (76). In
her struggles with the demands of new motherhood and single parenting
following her husband’s defection, Lou Ann functions as a kind of sister
and double to Taylor; her exaggerated anxieties, guilt, and fear of life form
a comic counterpart to Taylor’s earnestness and plucky independence. Tay-
lor, affectionately observing her new friend and companion attempting to
shield her baby, Dwayne Ray, from all of life’s hazards, concludes that,“For
Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was
truly harmless” (84). Taylor recognizes that Lou Ann is actually less a pho-
bic personality than the possessor of an overly vivid imagination. Her true
fear is the “fear that the things you imagine will turn real” (102).
Taylor’s new life expands to include a job at Mattie’s, where she encoun-
ters two Guatemalan refugees who have fled their country because of
political persecution and torture. Only later does she discover Estevan and
Esperanza’s connection to Mattie: Jesus is Lord Used Tires is also a safe
house in an underground system of sanctuaries for Central American
political refugees. Taylor, a foreigner in the Southwest—though not nearly
as isolated by differences of language and culture as are the Guatemalan
couple—strongly empathizes with their feelings of dislocation and “home-
sick[ness]” (103); ultimately, she learns the deeper sources of their misery.
When they travel together from Arizona to Oklahoma to reach another
safe house, Taylor asks Estevan, who was once an English teacher in
Guatemala City, “Do you miss your home a lot?” Elaborating on his dis-
placement from his geographical, ethnic, and linguistic origins, Estevan
articulates the complex and overlapping meanings of home for the exile.
He replies,“I don’t even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of
home” (193). Later he defines his sense of longing from the exile’s posi-
tion: “What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted
everywhere” (195).
The homeless exile Estevan is the moral center of The Bean Trees, intro-
ducing Taylor to both the reality of geopolitical displacement and the spir-
itual maturity of one who has been punished by an arbitrary destiny. At an
early gathering of the friends who evolve into Taylor’s extended family,
Estevan offers a parable of nurturance, mutuality, and community. First, he
describes a place called hell, where the occupants are starving. Although a
56 Home Matters
pot of delicious stew is available, no one is able to eat. “They only have
spoons with very long handles. . . . [T]he people can reach into the pot but
they cannot put the food in their mouths” (108). In the other place, called
heaven, although the circumstances are identical—a pot of stew and long-
handled cutlery—the occupants are well-fed. Estevan dramatically demon-
strates how that result is accomplished by “reach[ing] all the way across the
table to offer [a chunk of pineapple] to Turtle” (108). Significantly, for this
exile, heaven is associated with both nurturance and communal sharing.
The possibilities and limitations of nurturance—and their inevitable
associations with both mother and home—constitute a central issue in The
Bean Trees. When the child, Turtle, begins to speak in English, her first word
is “bean,” later expanded to “humbean” (human being)—uniquely suggest-
ing the organic continuum of all living things. As Turtle’s vocabulary
expands, she names and focuses insistently on vegetables and vegetation; her
favorite activity is to plant and “bury” seeds. Bean trees and their look-
alikes appear several times in her experience, including once when Turtle
identifies a seed-bearing wisteria vine as a bean tree. Taylor, marveling at
the resemblance Turtle has perceived, regards it as a “miracle”: “the flower
trees were turning into bean trees” (144).
Although on the surface Turtle seems as “healthy as corn” (120), she is
herself a kind of miracle. During a pediatric exam, Taylor learns that the
child has been seriously abused, so damaged by fractured bones and prior
injuries recorded in “secret scars” (127) that her physical growth has been
seriously stunted. As the pediatrician explains, “sometimes in an environ-
ment of physical or emotional deprivation a child will simply stop grow-
ing, although certain internal maturation does continue. It’s a condition we
call failure to thrive” (123). Taylor, stunned by this revelation of an inno-
cent child’s suffering, directly glimpses a world in which evil and injustice
exist. Yet, in the harsh desert environment of southern Arizona, a counter-
vailing image offers itself. Taylor, averting her focus from the X-ray images
of Turtle’s damaged body that the doctor places against a window for illu-
mination, “looked through the bones to the garden on the other side.
There was a cactus with bushy arms and a coat of yellow spines as thick as
fur. A bird had built her nest in it. In and out she flew among the horrible
spiny branches, never once hesitating. You just couldn’t imagine how she’d
made a home in there” (124). Taylor later discovers other examples of
tenacity, survival, and the maintenance of home even in the face of depri-
vation, learning from others and from her own observations that many
species of desert plants and animals that appear to be in the condition of
“failure to thrive” in fact have developed the capacity to remain dormant
Home/lands and Contested Motherhood 57
until the conditions for growth are more propitious. (The idea recurs in the
image of the tenacious, drought-resistant nolina plant—and, by association,
Codi Noline—of Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams.)
Turtle’s innocent suffering is linked to another strand of the narrative. In
explanation of a suicide attempt by Esperanza (whose name ironically
means both “to wait” and “to hope”), Estevan reveals to Taylor that the
source of his wife’s pain is the loss of their young daughter, who was
forcibly taken from them in Guatemala. When Taylor realizes her own
good fortune by comparison with Esperanza’s, she feels guilty, as if her
“whole life had been running along on dumb luck and [she] hadn’t even
noticed” (137). When Taylor touches Esperanza, the woman’s skin feels
“cold and emptied-out, like there was nobody home” (149). That experi-
ence parallels Taylor’s own feeling of emptiness when she imagines the
abuses in Turtle’s early life.
The final third of The Bean Trees focuses on a cluster of ideas associated
with attachment and loss as well as with home/land and mother. When a
social worker advises Taylor that she has no legal claim to the child to
whom she has become so attached, the threatening alternative to the
unorthodox but “perfectly good home” (174) that Taylor and Lou Ann
have created is an institutional “state home” (175) where Turtle would be
sent as an orphan. Taylor finds herself in a position that resembles both her
friend Lou Ann’s chronic fear of danger and loss and Esperanza’s actual loss
of her child to forces beyond her control. Mattie advises her,“Nobody can
protect a child from the world” (178). Taylor, believing that she may lose
Turtle if she does not at least attempt to locate the child’s relatives and gain
their legal consent for her de facto motherhood, determines to return to
the place where the child was left to her, at the same time conveying Este-
van and Esperanza to a more secure safe house.
As the two pairs—Taylor and Turtle, Estevan and Esperanza—travel to
Oklahoma as a “family” in Mattie’s borrowed car, the lines of relationship
are not always clear. In fact, Taylor agonizes about the growing affection
between Turtle, who refers to Esperanza as “Ma,” and Esperanza, who sees
in the child her own lost daughter. The Guatemalan couple chooses to
accompany the child further than is necessary because, as Taylor observes
with mixed feelings, they are “getting attached” (203). En route, Taylor also
discovers another crucial detail of Turtle’s history. The Cherokee child’s
association of “Mama” with cemeteries explains the meaning of her pecu-
liar habit of “planting”—now understood as burying—dolls and other
objects as well as seeds: she had obviously witnessed the burial of her
mother. The organic link between life and death, between human and veg-
58 Home Matters
m m m
Although The Bean Trees concludes with Taylor en route home to Tucson
with Turtle, all of the certainty established by Taylor’s contrived adoption
of Turtle unravels in the sequel, set three years later. In Pigs in Heaven
(1993), Kingsolver further explores the intersecting meanings of
home/land, family, and community as these categories bridge two distinct
cultures, Caucasian and Native American. Like The Bean Trees, this narrative
focuses on the moral implications of attachment, both the one between
mother and daughter—in this case, Taylor and not only her daughter but
her mother—and across cultures. Both Taylor and Alice Greer (a minor
character in the first novel who figures more prominently in the sequel) are
single mothers who are deeply attached to their daughters. Both mothers
participate in the narrative’s central moral conflict: how does one act in a
child’s best interest when different cultures disagree fundamentally on
where she belongs, on what is her true home?
Kingsolver has acknowledged that her decision to write a sequel to The
Bean Trees was based on her realization that she needed to correct the moral
myopia of the first novel. “I realized with embarrassment that I had com-
pletely neglected a whole moral area when I wrote about this Native
American kid being swept off the reservation and raised by a very loving
white mother. It was something I hadn’t thought about, and I felt I needed
to make that right in another book.”2 The sequel, Pigs in Heaven, expresses
more explicitly Kingsolver’s cultural mourning on behalf of displaced
Native Americans. When a young Cherokee lawyer enters the lives of Tay-
60 Home Matters
lor and Turtle to reclaim the child for the tribe, the adoption itself is
declared invalid as matters of identity and ethnicity are raised anew.
Annawake Fourkiller, who was “schooled in injustices”3 from an early age,
also regards herself as a rescuer of those who have been separated from
their tribal home/land for one reason or another. When her impoverished
family, including four brothers and Annawake, was broken up during her
childhood, she and her twin, Gabriel, were separated. Gabe was adopted by
a white family in Texas; eventually he determined that he belonged in nei-
ther white nor Native American cultures. His acute sense of displacement
led to a life of desperation and crime; Annawake knows where her twin is
only when he is in prison. As she phrases it with bitterness, Gabe was
“stolen from the family and can’t find his way home” (60).
As a result of the traumatic breakup of her family, Annawake has
become committed to reclaiming Cherokee children whose displacement
from their culture of origin through adoption by white families represents
the continuation of a destructive process in Native American historical
experience. As she later explains to Alice Greer the sad history of the
Cherokee removal known as the Trail of Tears, which occurred in 1838,
of her cultural homeland, Great-Mam refuses even to leave the car, pro-
claiming,“I’ve never been here before.”5
In Pigs in Heaven, Annawake Fourkiller’s effort to reclaim Turtle for her
tribe is based on her view that the threatened Cherokee culture must be
defended from such exploitation by the surrounding white culture. Thus,
in her view, tribal identity must take precedence over attachments across
cultures. No matter how good and loving a mother Taylor is, no white
mother can give the Cherokee child the intangible sense of “where she
comes from, who she is” (77) within her cultural heritage, a concern that,
Annawake argues, becomes increasingly important as a child matures. Tay-
lor, resisting the implications of Annawake’s beliefs concerning cultural
identity and historical loss, defensively responds, “My home doesn’t have
anything to do with your tragedy” (75). However, as Taylor ultimately dis-
covers, it does.
Along with details of Taylor’s crisis of motherhood, Kingsolver inter-
weaves the stories of Alice, Taylor’s own mother, who has Cherokee blood
on her mother’s side, and the full-blooded Cash Stillwater, who (Taylor
finally learns) is the widowed father of Turtle’s mother, who died in an
auto accident. Alice Greer returns to another site of the Cherokee home-
land, traveling to (the perhaps-too-obviously named) Heaven, Oklahoma,
to help her daughter Taylor defend her emotional claim to Turtle against
Annawake Fourkiller’s legal challenge. The emphasis on community that
underscores The Bean Trees is extended in Pigs in Heaven as Kingsolver
explores the implications of conflicting cultural attitudes toward family
structure and communal responsibility. For Annawake, the most problem-
atic dimension of Taylor’s relationship with Turtle is the communal Chero-
kee family organization. As Annawake explains, because several related
families share the responsibility for children and people sometimes “share
the kids around” (223),“it’s not a big deal who’s the exact mother” (227).
A Cherokee cultural legend illustrates the matter of communal respon-
sibility. The story of the “pigs in heaven”—the star constellation known in
Western European cultures as the Seven Sisters or Pleiades—concerns six
brothers who, according to Cherokee legend, neglect their tasks because
they would rather play than work. As punishment, they are turned into pigs
as they ascend into the heavens.6 After hearing the story, Taylor’s lover, Jax,
concludes that the “moral” encoded in the legend is a guiding myth of
communal responsibility for the Cherokee people:“Do right by your peo-
ple or you’ll be a pig in heaven” (88). In contrast, the message underlying
the mainstream American myth of success is closer to “do right by your-
self ” (88).
62 Home Matters
Later in the narrative, the story of the pigs in heaven acquires still
another interpretation. Annawake, speaking this time with Taylor’s mother,
Alice, suggests that the story’s moral is “to remind parents always to love
their kids no matter what . . . and cut them a little slack” (314). When
Alice insists that she sees seven rather than six stars in the constellation,
Annawake modifies her interpretation still further to include not only
“The Six Pigs in Heaven” but “the one mother who wouldn’t let go” (314).
In fact, Annawake’s evolving interpretation suggests her own changing atti-
tude toward the legal proceedings she has initiated. Implicitly, she under-
stands that Taylor is “the one mother who wouldn’t let go”—a “turtle” (like
her daughter), who clings so tenaciously to the child to whom she has
become attached that she cannot willingly yield to the Cherokee tribal
position.
Annawake, caught between the legal argument and her growing moral
awareness of the damage that might accrue to the child if the legal pro-
ceeding is successful, secretly launches an alternative strategy: a “match”
between the child’s Cherokee grandfather, Cash Stillwater, and Taylor’s
mother, Alice. The tactic is ultimately (and comically) successful, as the
legal issue is resolved through a decision to assign Turtle’s custody jointly to
people representing complementary aspects of her “best interests”—Taylor
by history of their relationship and Cash Stillwater, Turtle’s Cherokee
grandfather by blood. As Annawake phrases the argument in court, the
“outside press” will only be interested in one issue: “what is in the best
interest of the child? But we’re Cherokee and we look at things differently.
We consider that the child is part of something larger, a tribe. Like a hand
that belongs to the body. Before we cut it off, we have to ask how the body
will take care of itself without that hand” (338).
Through this solution, all three generations of the Greer females come
to accommodate themselves to a larger conception of home/land: a place
defined not only by the nuclear family—even one as unorthodox as Taylor
and Turtle’s—but by a larger cultural community. In the narrative’s resolu-
tion of these competing versions of family and home, Alice recovers her
Native American roots along with an accommodating Cherokee husband.
Through him, his granddaughter, Turtle, gains access to her tribal heritage
and her Native community. However, Alice and Turtle have more to gain
from this arrangement than Taylor. Inevitably, Taylor regrets the loss of her
exclusive bond with the child she has loved and raised for three years.
Nonetheless, in keeping with sharing as a moral principle as well as the
principle that shapes the equilibrium of the natural world—sooner or later,
life’s gains are paid for by losses—she accepts the collective tribal wisdom
Home/lands and Contested Motherhood 63
m m m
Both The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, like Animal Dreams, explore the
larger cultural forces and ethical beliefs that influence the meanings of
mother and home/land, attachment and loss, longing and belonging. For
Taylor Greer, motherhood, rather than occurring as an unproblematic bio-
logical event, must be fought for in moral as well as emotional terms,
defended against competing claims of cultural identity and communal as
well as personal responsibility. In both narratives, children are displaced
from their home cultures and/or their biological parents, “given” to other
couples through illegitimate adoptions. The symmetry between the cir-
cumstances of Esperanza’s daughter, lost to probable adoption by “military
or government couples who cannot have children” (Bean Trees 137), and
Turtle, originally thrust into Taylor’s care and ultimately adopted by her
against Cherokee claims of compromised cultural identity, enables King-
solver to express a complex dilemma in which children figure as innocent
pawns in a larger struggle for ethnic survival and identity.
Additionally, both narratives explore the reverberations of homelessness
and political displacement and exile for Native peoples. Estevan and Esper-
anza in The Bean Trees and Annawake Fourkiller in Pigs in Heaven, foils to
Taylor’s contested motherhood, are voices of cultural mourning, grieving
for their personal losses within the context of their respective people’s his-
torical loss of homeland, family, and identity. Homeless people, Estevan and
Esperanza are classified as illegal aliens in the United States where they have
sought sanctuary from political persecution in Guatemala. Mayan Indians
and Cherokee Native Americans are represented in Kingsolver’s narratives as
subject peoples who have suffered political oppression and social exploita-
tion sanctioned by the power elites in their respective countries. The loss of
home/land persists in the challenges to cultural continuity and community
posed by exile, geographical displacement, and cross-cultural adoption.
The resolution of Pigs in Heaven, despite its somewhat contrived plot-
ting, is Kingsolver’s way of acknowledging the implications of such ques-
64 Home Matters
between her roles as observing narrator and acting subject of the story—
between the present and the past. Her homecoming after a five-year
absence is weighted by the feeling that, despite her powerful yearnings to
return to her country of origin, she does not feel “at home” in the
Dominican Republic. Not only has she has literally lost her Spanish accent
but, as she stumbles in her native language, she fears that she is losing her
mother tongue altogether. The opening episode,“Antojos,” turns on a Span-
ish word that Yo does not recognize. Various García relatives who still reside
on the Island explain that antojo means craving, “like a craving for something
you have to eat.”4 Additionally, craving connotes longing or yearning for
something absent, an orientation that underscores Yolanda’s nostalgic rela-
tion to a place and a relinquished past that she can never entirely either re-
enter or recover.
One stimulus for Yolanda’s visit is her secret longing to return perma-
nently to her homeland. “Let this turn out to be my home” (11), she
wishes. However, the rest of the narrative contests that possibility. In this
first vignette, Alvarez juxtaposes details drawn from Yo’s two domiciles,
emphasizing the self-division that complicates the life of exiles. Yo’s nostal-
gia for the home/land of childhood is repeatedly undercut by reminders of
crucial differences between her past and present domiciles, including char-
acteristics that she observes from the altered perspective of her years of liv-
ing in America and becoming culturally assimilated. “This is not the
States. . . . A woman just doesn’t travel alone in this country” (90), others
caution her. When she disregards that prohibition by traveling by herself
into the foothills in search of her antojo, guava fruit, the bucolic scene ini-
tially prompts her nostalgic response:“This is what she has been missing all
these years without really knowing that she has been missing it. Standing
here in the quiet, she believes she has never felt at home in the States,
never” (12). However, darker emotions surface when she fears that she is
lost in the rural countryside. “The rustling leaves of the guava trees echo
the warnings of her old aunts regarding the real dangers that await women
foolish enough to travel alone: you will get lost, you will get kidnapped,
you will get raped, you will get killed” (17).
When her car develops a flat tire out in the country, Yolanda feels fur-
ther endangered, her anxiety heightened by the approach of two men car-
rying machetes. “She considers explaining that she is just out for a drive
before dinner at the big house, so that these men will think someone
knows where she is, someone will come looking for her if they try to carry
her off. But her tongue feels as if it has been stuffed in her mouth like a rag
to keep her quiet” (19–20). The image vividly signals the sense of peril,
68 Home Matters
hints that Yo is going crazy and Yo compliantly accepts his view that their
estrangement is a result of her mental instability. Her breakdown is repre-
sented as inseparable from the breakdown of language itself. First, “she
could not make out [John’s] words. . . . He spoke kindly, but in a language
she had never heard before” (77). As she separates from John, her own self-
estrangement intensifies. When she determines to leave the marriage, she
signs her parting message to John with “his name for her, Joe,” since “her
real name no longer sounded like her own” (79). Her breakdown leads to
an interlude in a psychiatric facility where she attempts to mend her
painful inner division—exacerbated by her husband’s tendency to separate
and categorize his own ambivalent feelings toward her—and recover “one
whole Yolanda” (80). When her parents query her about what happened to
a marriage they had assumed was a happy one, Yo responds with a state-
ment that, while a colloquial oversimplification, is nonetheless accurate:
“We just didn’t speak the same language” (81). But even after the marriage
ends, the problem of language persists, with Yolanda developing a “random
allergy to certain words. She does not know which ones, until they are on
the tip of her tongue . . .” (82). The word “love” triggers an acute allergic
reaction; emotional pain is expressed not only in the words themselves—in
both English and Spanish—but in the body’s own language.
Alvarez’s reverse chronology inverts (and subverts) the idea of “develop-
ment” in either the narrative sense—the traditional bildungsroman form—
or the psychological sense—the development of identity. Effects precede
causes. Indeed, because the narrative moves backward in time as the reader
moves forward through it, the effect is an excavation of the layered strata of
memory that exposes and retraces experiences and language to their earli-
est sources. The reversal of chronology makes each vignette a recuperative
story of something originally lost. Thus, the failed relationship between
Yolanda and John recounted in the vignette titled “Joe” is described from
the perspective of its dissolution, but also from Yo’s later insight into the
sources of its failure. The chronological inversion also produces narrative
irony, as in the episode in which Yo reveals that she has lost her identity as
a writer. In the vignette that follows, she describes her appearance at a
poetry reading as a practicing writer, reading bold love poems before an
audience that includes both her lover and her bemused mother.
In the same vignette (“The Four Girls”), Yo recounts knitting a blanket
for her sister Fifi’s new baby as she articulates the metaphorical relationship
between knitting and living. She admits that she is “addicted to love stories
with happy endings, as if there were a stitch she missed, a mistake she made
way back when she fell in love with her first man, and if only she could
70 Home Matters
find it, maybe she could undo it, unravel John, Brad, Steven, Rudy, and start
over” (63). Her observation serves as a vivid metaphor for the narrative as a
whole as Alvarez, through Yolanda, moves backward to unravel—and to
“fix” or reknit in a more deliberate and coherent design—the interrelated
meanings of language, identity, and loss.
Accordingly, in “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story,” Yolanda retraces her first
love relationship, her involvement with a shallow and crude young man.
Drawn to him in a college creative writing class in which they are assigned
to write love poems, Yo is introduced to an entirely different vocabulary for
love—or rather, for sex. Once again (from the reader’s perspective, though
for Yo it is the first time), she discovers that she and the young man to
whom she is attracted don’t speak the same language. While Yolanda,
regretting the “immigrant origins” (94) that still color her behavior and
speech despite her efforts to suppress her Latina identity, relishes the first
blossoming of romance and sexual desire, Rudy Elmenhurst’s far more
prosaic goal is simply to get Yolanda into bed. The central differences
between them are symbolized by their entirely different languages for
“love”:“His vocabulary turned me off even as I was beginning to acknowl-
edge my body’s pleasure. If Rudy had said, Sweet lady, lay across my big, soft
bed and let me touch your dear, exquisite body, I might have felt up to being felt
up. But I didn’t want to just be in the sack, screwed, balled, laid, and fucked
my first time around with a man” (96–7, Alvarez’s emphasis).
The problem of terminology is compounded by Rudy’s parents. Even
before Yolanda meets them, she learns, through Rudy, that they patroniz-
ingly regard her as “a geography lesson for their son. But I didn’t have the
vocabulary back then to explain even to myself what annoyed me about
their remark” (98). When she does meet them, they call attention to her
foreignness by complimenting her on her “accentless” English (100). Soon
afterwards, Rudy drops Yolanda, having realized the inaccuracy of his
stereotypical view of hot-blooded Latina women whom he had assumed
would be easy “lays.” The reader, having already encountered Yo’s “allergic
reaction” to the vocabulary of love in her (earlier-described but later-
occurring) relationship with John, now understands its deeper sources.
A central theme of the first section of García Girls is loss expressed in
terms of the complex intersections of language(s) and eros; a central issue
of the middle section is the interrelated meanings of home and homesick-
ness, longing and displacement. Encompassing the García family’s first ten
years after their exile from the Dominican Republic, the vignettes focus on
the shift between “waiting to go home” (107) and the realization that, for
Inverted Narrative as the Path/Past Home 71
political reasons, they will never do so: “we were here to stay” (107). Ini-
tially, the four siblings “[whine] to go home” (107). Their standard of living
as recent immigrants to the United States is markedly lower than the man-
ner to which they were accustomed as the family of a prosperous doctor of
the elite class in the Dominican Republic. In their life on the Island (as
Mami reflects in a later episode),“there had always been a chauffeur open-
ing a car door or a gardener tipping his hat and half dozen maids and
nursemaids acting as if the health and well-being of the de la Torre-García
children were of wide public concern” (174). New York, once regarded as
the magical place from which the girls’ father and grandfather had returned
with magical toys and gifts, becomes a far less romantic location where they
are able to afford “only second-hand stuff, rental houses in one redneck
Catholic neighborhood after another, clothes at Round Robin, a black and
white TV afflicted with wavy lines” (107). More disturbing, at school in
Brooklyn, the girls are continually reminded of their otherness by racist
epithets delivered by their white American peers.
However, when the García girls begin to attend boarding schools, they
discover freedoms they had never imagined—“dance weekends and foot-
ball weekends and snow sculpture weekends. . . . We began to develop a
taste for the American teenage good life, and soon, Island was old hat,
man. . . . By the end of a couple of years away from home, we had more
than adjusted” (108–9, Alvarez’s emphasis). Concurrently, the García par-
ents fret that the girls are becoming too assimilated. To counter the omi-
nous possibility that their daughters will eventually fall in love with and
even marry American men, they advance their own “hidden agenda”—
“marriage to homeland boys” (109)—by sending the girls back to the
Island each summer to reimmerse them in the traditional culture and lan-
guage.
The plan backfires when the youngest of the four sisters, the teenaged
Fifi, indeed falls in love with an Island man, an illegitimate cousin who
embodies all of the Island culture’s deeply entrenched patriarchal and
macho attitudes toward women. Carla, the oldest sister and a budding psy-
chologist, labels Fifi’s uncharacteristically submissive relationship with her
boyfriend as “a borderline schizoid response to traumatic cultural displace-
ment” (117). Although Alvarez uses the abstract clinical phrasing partly to
satirize Carla’s inflated academic pretensions, the underlying reality of the
trauma of “cultural displacement” is entirely accurate. The three older Gar-
cía sisters, conspiring to spring their youngest sibling loose from her infat-
uation and the very real threat of her entrapment in an oppressive
72 Home Matters
will discover her husband’s hiding place and that he will be hauled off to
jail—or worse. Alvarez reminds us of “the national language of a police
state: every word, every gesture, a possible mine field, watch what you say,
look where you go” (211).
When Mami learns that the family’s exit papers have been secured and
that they will leave the island within forty-eight hours,“everything she sees
sharpens as if through the lens of loss . . .” (212). The second daughter,
Sandi, voices that sense of personal and cultural mourning on behalf of all
of the sisters—indeed, on behalf of all exiles. When each girl is told that
she may select only one special toy to accompany her on the one-way jour-
ney to the United States, Sandi feels that
nothing quite filled the hole that was opening wide inside [her]. . . . Noth-
ing would quite fill that need, even years after, not the pretty woman she
would surprise herself by becoming, not the prizes for her school work and
scholarships to study now this and now that . . . not the men that held her
close and almost convinced her when their mouths came down hard on her
lips that this, this was what Sandi had been missing. (215)
All of the Garcías except the youngest, Fifi, have disturbing memories of
their “last day” (217) on the island; Fifi only remembers Chucha, the fam-
ily’s ancient Haitian servant. Chucha’s odd practice of sleeping in a cof-
fin—in rehearsal for her final slumber—represents the approaching death
of the Garcías’ old life. Significantly, Chucha is the one non-García charac-
ter in the narrative whom Alvarez grants a first-person voice. In her mono-
logue, she foresees the decay and destruction of the family home:
Now I hear the voices telling me how the grass will grow tall on the
unkempt lawns. . . . Chino and I will be left behind in these decaying houses
until that day I can see now . . . that day the place will be overrun by
guardias, smashing windows and carting off the silver and plates . . . . They
will strip the girls’ shelves of the toys their grandmother brought them back
from that place they were always telling me about . . . a bewitched and
unsafe place where they must now make their lives.
. . . They will be haunted by what they do and don’t remember. . . .
They will invent what they need to survive. (222–3)
a curious woman, a woman of story ghosts and story devils, a woman prone
to bad dreams and bad insomnia. There are still times I wake up at three
o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that
loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life,
her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the
center of my art. (290)
not just a term. I’m mapping a country that’s not on the map, and that’s why
I’m trying to put it down on paper. It’s a world formed of contradictions,
clashes, comminglings—the gringa and the Dominican[—]and it is precisely
that tension and richness that interests me. Being in and out of both worlds,
looking at one side from the other side . . . a duality that I hope in the writ-
ing transcends itself and becomes a new consciousness, a new place on the
map, a synthesizing way of looking at the world. (Declare 173)
m m m
The four texts considered in this section represent different expressions of
displacement from home/land and of cultural mourning. Both Barbara
Kingsolver and Julia Alvarez, focusing on female protagonists in young
adulthood, render the connections between home and loss, longing and
belonging. For Kingsolver’s Codi Noline, displacement from home is both
geographical and emotional. Her journey home requires a revision of the
false history of her origins given to her by her father and the acknowledg-
ment of—and mourning for—of multiple emotional losses: the mother she
lost during childhood, the unborn child she lost during adolescence, and
the sister she loses during the narrative. Kingsolver’s two narratives that
focus on a cross-cultural mother-daughter relationship project the resolu-
tion of mourning into a larger cultural framework where “history” is not
simply the story, whether true or false, of one family’s history. As Taylor
Greer discovers the high personal cost of displacement for both her Chero-
kee daughter and her Guatemalan friends, Kingsolver juxtaposes conflict-
ing value systems across cultural and political differences and highlights the
intersection of past histories and current practices. The paired novels artic-
ulate losses that both encompass and transcend the personal domain,
expressing cultural mourning not only for family members but for lost
home/lands and cultural autonomy. Julia Alvarez, writing in her second
language, amplifies the notion of cultural mourning as she traces the forms
of loss for the political and geographical exile who chooses assimilation
into a new language and culture. Each of these narratives represents the
author’s attempt to repair or revise the past. Positioning her character in the
liminal space between longing and belonging, each author employs nostal-
gia to achieve a new comprehension of the relationship between private
history and cultural displacement.
Part III
m m m
Initially, Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years may seem out of place in the context of
other narratives considered in this study, not only because of its comic tone
but because, while the others focus on female protagonists who long to
return home and/or who suffer from homesickness, nostalgia, or cultural
dislocation, Tyler’s novel decisively inverts the pattern. Rather than nostal-
gically seeking to return, either literally or imaginatively, to a place associ-
ated with succor and wholeness, the forty-year-old protagonist of Ladder of
Years suffers (initially) from never having left home. If Delia Grinstead can
be said to be homesick, it is in the ironic sense of being sick of home.1 She
has “never lived anywhere else”2 besides her house in a comfortable resi-
dential area of Baltimore. The youngest of three daughters of a successful
family doctor who was widowed when she was four years old, Delia later
became the wife of another doctor, who inherited her father’s practice, and
the mother of three children of her own, currently in various stages of
adolescence. Remaining a homemaker and homebody, Delia has, uniquely,
inhabited the same house/home for her entire life.
The event that propels her away from her stagnant life is her chance
encounter in a grocery store with a young man whose wife has recently left
him. The stranger, having spotted his former wife in a nearby aisle with her
current partner, impulsively asks Delia to pretend she’s with him to mislead
his errant spouse. Indeed, the novel (like most of Tyler’s novels) is full of
such accidental moments, of women who have left their marriages and
homes either literally or emotionally, of people pretending to be someone
else. The young man in the grocery store makes Delia aware of herself for
the first time “from outside, from a distance” (27).
Soon afterward, she finds herself wondering whether her husband Sam,
whom she married when she was seventeen and he was thirty-two, married
her primarily because it gave him an entrée into her father’s established
Home/sickness and the Five Stages of Grief 83
medical practice. Having worked for years as unpaid receptionist and secre-
tary for her father and husband, Delia has come to feel invisible and unap-
preciated. Those feelings are exacerbated not only by the recent death of
her father but by the drift of her three children from dependence on her
into lives of their own. Their indifference makes her feel inconsequential,
“like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges . . .” (23). Later in the
narrative, Delia ponders the accident of timing that dictates that “aged par-
ents die exactly at the moment when other people (your husband, your
adolescent children) have stopped being thrilled to see you coming” (129).
Although Ladder of Years is in many ways a comic novel with a somewhat
improbable plot that concludes with reunion and even an impending mar-
riage, its undertone is considerably more somber. As the narrative pro-
gresses, the reader comes to understand that Delia is in a state of denied
bereavement, not only for her recently deceased father but for her self.
Only when she actually leaves home and establishes herself in a new envi-
ronment—ironically, one that comes to duplicate a number of features of
the roles she initially sheds—does she properly acknowledge those losses,
begin to recover a deeper knowledge of who she is, and become aware of
the nature of the home/sickness that has forced her to revise her life.
Although her chance encounter with the young man in the grocery
store offers the opportunity for a romantic liaison, Delia quickly pulls back
from the possibility. Rather, Adrian, who edits a newsletter about time
travel, becomes the catalyst for Delia’s rather different mode of travel in
both time and space. Some weeks after an innocent but potentially com-
promising encounter with Adrian, Delia finds herself, during a family vaca-
tion at the Delaware shore, reminiscing about the early years of her
marriage and motherhood. She recalls the intensity of honeymoon passion
(now lost) and the years when her children still believed that she was “so
important in their lives” (72). In contrast to her nostalgic musings, a belit-
tling comment from her husband compels Delia to see Sam’s detachment
and to regard their “entire marriage unroll[ing] itself before her: ancient
hurts and humiliations and resentments, theoretically forgotten but just
waiting to revive . . .” (74).
Impulsively, wearing only her swimsuit and her husband’s robe, Delia
walks away from her family on the beach and—becoming another of Tyler’s
“accidental tourists”—keeps traveling until she finds herself miles away, in
a small town in Maryland. Actualizing the escapism offered by the formu-
laic romance fiction that she reads compulsively as a way to flee the “grind-
ing gears of daily life” (29), Delia literally “runs away from home” (210) the
way children occasionally—but mothers virtually never—do. What is most
84 Home Matters
noteworthy about her “escape” is its capriciousness, its utter lack of premed-
itation. Although something within her clearly prompts her to keep going
without turning back, she never fully examines her impulse for deserting
her family with scarcely a backward glance or a pang of guilt. Once the
new trajectory is set into motion, Delia, although driven more by chance
than design, finds herself for the first time in her life making intentional
choices about who she will be in her new circumstances as an independent
woman. Much of the narrative traces her efforts to shed her former life and
start over again at a new location not only on the map but within herself.
One aspect of Delia’s travel away from her husband and family at the
beach is a hitchhiked ride in a handyman’s van that doubles as his home.
Delia envies the “beautiful, completely stocked, entirely self-sufficient van
that you could travel in forever, unentangled with anyone else. Oh, couldn’t
she offer to buy it?” (80) The van, besides offering an entirely different vision
of home/self than the one in which Delia has become trapped, also sug-
gests the underlying incentive for her journey: the necessity to achieve self-
sufficiency and to disentangle herself from the stultifying embrace of home.
Taking a boarding house room in the small town of Bay Borough and
securing a position as secretary to a local attorney, Delia soon establishes
new routines and savors the very spartan qualities of her new life as “Miss
Grinstead”: only two changes of clothes; a room so bare and bereft of per-
sonal possessions that she can look around with satisfaction and “detect not
the slightest hint that anybody lived here” (97). Affirming her choices as
part of the “impersonal new life she seemed to be manufacturing for her-
self ” (96), Delia exults in her isolation, reflected back to her in the room’s
“starkness” (93). Her spare surroundings actualize the fantasy of a character
in an earlier novel by Tyler, who ventures the opinion that “our whole soci-
ety would be better off living in boarding houses. . . . Everyone should
have his single room with a door that locks, and then a larger room down-
stairs where people can mingle or not as they please.”3
Delia Grinstead’s retreat to a bare room that signifies psychological as
well as physical escape from the comforts of home allusively suggests Doris
Lessing’s story, “To Room Nineteen.”4 In that story, a dissatisfied woman
also walks out on her husband and (younger) children, intermittently with-
drawing to a stark, anonymous hotel room in order to disengage from her
enmeshed life as wife and mother. However, tracing a much darker trajec-
tory than does Tyler’s narrative, Lessing’s story leads not to the woman’s
psychological liberation and reunion with her family but to irreversible
withdrawal and absolute spiritual despair that culminates in suicide. By
contrast, Tyler’s Delia climbs the stairs to her bare room in the boarding
Home/sickness and the Five Stages of Grief 85
house, thinking,“Here comes the executive secretary, returning from her lone meal
to the solitude of her room. It wasn’t a complaint, though. It was a boast. An
exultation” (96, Tyler’s emphasis).
The professional persona that Delia projects in the first salaried position
of her life is cool and efficient rather than friendly. Even her reading tastes
change; instead of romantic escape fiction, she selects literary classics from
the local library.5 During solitary meals at the local diner, she withholds any
distinguishing information about the life she has vacated as a wife and
mother, instead posing as “a person without a past” (108). Before long,
everyone in the small town of Bay Borough, from the cook and waitress at
the local diner to young mothers with their toddlers at the park, welcome
her into their associations. Delia is so committed to starting again “from
scratch” that when her older sister, having traced her to her new location,
visits her and tries to discover the reason for her abrupt disappearance,
Delia provides no explanation, asserting simply that she does not intend to
return home. Further, she admits that the only aspect of her defection
about which she feels any remorse is having taken the family vacation
money. She regrets that she “didn’t start out with nothing. Start out . . .
even with the homeless . . .” (118). Her wish to approximate the condition
of “homelessness” discloses her need to wrench herself away from the
inner stagnation and entrapment represented by home.
Delia’s assertions to her sister signal a new stage in her inner journey, in
which she begins to confront more honestly the forces that prompted her
abrupt departure. Initially, each night before she falls asleep in her spartan
room, she weeps “without a thought in her head” (109). The phrase sug-
gests the degree to which she is grieving without acknowledging either the
nature of her emotional state or its sources. As Tyler’s language hints, Delia
enters a state analogous to the inner stripping that precedes spiritual
renewal. “She had always known that her body was just a shell she lived in,
but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell—in which
case, who was ‘she’? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left.
Maybe there would be nothing” (126–7).6 For the first time in her life,
Delia begins to examine assumptions that have shaped her identity and to
mourn losses that she has not previously acknowledged. Recalling inci-
dents from childhood, she recognizes that “she had always been such a false
child, so eager to conform to the grownups’ view of her” (123, Tyler’s
emphasis). She had maintained that compliant orientation into adulthood,
spending most of her married life to the much-older Sam Grinstead “try-
ing to win [his] approval” (137) as if he were her father rather than her hus-
band. Because Sam is indeed a surrogate for her father, Delia has continued
86 Home Matters
to act like a daughter, a role that her husband has unintentionally reinforced
through his often-patronizing comments and behavior.
Twenty-five years after the social transformations catalyzed by the femi-
nist revolution of the 1970s, Delia Grinstead seems altogether untouched
by them. Yet, despite Tyler’s own expressed distance from feminism,7 Ladder
of Years follows a pattern established in earlier feminist fiction: the psycho-
logical “awakening” of a woman who has unthinkingly defined herself
through conventional female roles. However, in contrast to the “mad
housewife” narratives, published during the peak years of women’s libera-
tion movement, that focus on women fleeing unhappy marriages and rela-
tionships,8 Delia Grinstead (whose surname suggests “grin instead”) has
by-passed an even earlier stage of leaving home: separation from one’s par-
ents. It becomes imperative for her to leave the place where her role as
youngest daughter has merged into those of wife and mother in order to
discover her self as a person apart from those roles.
In this sense, Delia may be understood as a late twentieth-century,
middle-aged version not of her namesake, Shakespeare’s Cordelia, but of
Ibsen’s Nora Helmer. Nora, a woman similarly enmeshed in the roles of
daughter, wife, and mother (though of younger children), is patronized by
her husband, who calls her as his “little scatterbrain,”9 much as Delia’s fam-
ily regards her as “sweet and cute” or “silly and inefficient” (23). Ladder of
Years may be read as a narrative extension to Ibsen’s play that imagines what
might happen to a woman like Nora—a decade older and a century later
but still virtually untouched by ideas of female independence—after she
has emphatically closed the door to her doll’s house. However, while Nora
Helmer’s dramatic exit in A Doll’s House is represented as a deliberate moral
choice, Delia Grinstead’s departure is catalyzed by unconscious issues,
including aspects of loss and denied mourning. When she reflects on her
feelings about her father, Delia concludes that the medication her doctor-
husband Sam had given her to enable her to sleep on the night of her
father’s death had in fact blunted her need to mourn his passing. The
morning after he died, she felt that “she had missed something. Now she
thought what she had missed was her own grief. . . . Why the hurry to
leap past grief to the next stage?” (129). Reflecting on that experience
from the perspective of her solitude in Bay Borough, she permits herself to
weep and to grieve, this time aware of its sources as well as its necessity.
“She felt that something was loosening inside her, and she hoped she
would go on crying all night” (129).
Delia’s anaesthetized state on the night after her father’s death was not
only medicinal but emotional. Her husband’s complicity in numbing her
Home/sickness and the Five Stages of Grief 87
beginning again from scratch” (139). With a hint of sarcasm, her mother-
in-law responds,“When you’ve finished starting over, do you picture work-
ing up to the present again and coming home?” (143) Ironically, as Delia
delves more deeply into herself, her new life threatens to resemble the one
she thought she’d shed. She even acquires a stray cat whose ingratiating
habits recall those of the cat she left behind. Noticing some of these repet-
itive patterns, she decides to leave her secretarial position because her
employer’s expectations that she will make coffee and feed parking meters
resemble too closely the thankless tasks she performed as her father’s and
husband’s secretary/servant/flunky at home.
Her acceptance of a new position as a “live-in woman” for a man whose
wife has left him and their preadolescent son may seem almost too con-
trived a plot twist, an inverted image of Delia’s defection from her own
marriage and children. But the explicit mirroring enables Tyler to explore
Delia’s further self-discovery in a situation once-removed from her habitual
roles that fittingly reframes the psychological issues with which she strug-
gles. As if operating in a kind of parallel universe, Delia unconsciously
chooses positions in her new life that enable her to replay and examine the
roles she has played in her former life and home. Thus, having felt that her
own husband and children have become strangers to her, Delia turns the
circumstances from passive to active: she chooses to be a substitute mother
(though not substitute wife) to total strangers.
Before she takes the live-in position, Delia mulls over its appeal, reveal-
ing her anxieties about her own maternal role and, perhaps behind it, about
her own mother who died during Delia’s childhood: “a hireling would in
some ways be better than a mother—less emotionally ensnarled, less likely to
cause damage. Certainly less likely to suffer damage herself ” (160, emphasis
in original). Unlike Delia’s own family, her surrogate son and his father—a
finicky high school principal whose pet peeve is creeping slang and the
resulting deterioration of the English language—cherish her rather than
taking her for granted. As Delia manages twelve-year-old Noah’s schedule,
cooks meals, and attends to miscellaneous household tasks, she discovers to
her pleasant surprise that she is a far more capable and indispensable person
than she had been for her own family. “She seemed to have changed into
someone else—a woman people looked to automatically for sustenance”
(183). Yet, as she struggles to find the proper distance she should maintain
from Noah, Delia realizes how easy it is to “fall back into being someone’s
mother” (172).
Just as Noah begins to metamorphose from an engaging child into a
more complicated adolescent like her own sons, Delia’s actual sons arrive in
Home/sickness and the Five Stages of Grief 89
Bay Borough. The older one disappoints her by not even attempting to see
her; the younger one bluntly confronts her with the effects of her deser-
tion, including his fear that Delia’s older sister is making a play for their
father. Delia, sidestepping the latter detail but acknowledging how much
she has missed her children, also admits to herself a less socially acceptable
feeling: that they were “partly what she was running from” (210). While her
children had “turned into semistrangers” as she became less important in
their lives, it is also true, as she understands from her current vantage point,
that “they, in fact, had become just a bit less overwhelmingly all-important
to her” (211). She even rationalizes that her younger son “had not appeared
ruined by her leaving. He had survived just fine, and so had his brother and
sister” (210). In the interest of retaining Delia’s perspective narratively,Tyler
implicitly asks her readers to discount (as Delia herself does) the effect on
her children of her “parental truancy.”10
While her substitute son, Noah, is away at camp for two weeks, Delia
vacations in Ocean City by herself, as if to replay—but this time, on her
own terms—the previous summer’s family outing to the shore. She even
finds herself reading the same paperback romance she had taken with her
to the beach the year before. The key word in its title, captive, reminds
her—and signals the reader—how far Delia has traveled from home since
then. Her serenity as a solitary traveler emphasizes the degree to which she
has escaped the captivity of her traditional roles and discovered, for the first
time in her life, how to be alone with herself. However, the emotional and
spiritual stripping process is still not complete, as is suggested by the
imagery of layers and self-exposure. When Delia enters the ocean for a
swim, she “spen[ds] forever submerging, like someone removing a strip of
adhesive tape by painful degrees”; later, when she peels off her swimsuit in
her motel room,“a second suit of fish-white skin lay beneath it” (250). The
latter image echoes that of Delia’s first shower in her boarding house in
Bay Borough a year earlier, when she rinsed off the “grime and sweat and
sunblock” from her day at the beach, exposing “a whole new layer of skin”
(97).
The woman in the narrative whose situation most closely resembles
Delia’s, Noah’s mother Ellie, becomes an unexpected ally in Delia’s process
of emotional and spiritual reorientation. Considering Ellie’s question
whether this is her first vacation alone, Delia wonders to herself “whether
traveling alone to Bay Borough qualified as a vacation or not. (And if it
did, when had her vacation ended and her real life begun?)” (252). As the
two women compare marriage with single life, Ellie describes her experi-
ence in words that also characterize Delia’s position as an estranged wife:
90 Home Matters
“In a way, the whole marriage was kind of like the stages of mourning. . . .
Denial, anger . . .” (254, Tyler’s final ellipsis). Significantly, she only identi-
fies the first two stages of grief, yet the others—bargaining, depression, and
acceptance—are also pertinent to Delia’s circumstances.11 If bargaining
may be understood as Delia’s rationalizations about leaving her husband
and children, she ultimately moves from denial/isolation and anger through
bargaining, depression and, ultimately, acceptance: of her father’s death, her
children’s increasing independence, and her husband’s (and her own) aging.
What emerges in the final stage of Delia’s inner journey is her realiza-
tion that, in running away from home, she has been trying to escape not
simply from her traditional roles as wife and mother but also from time and
mortality. Early in the narrative, in response to the young man Adrian’s
admiration of her face, Delia had examined her image in a mirror and had
regarded as “unfair” the fact that “she should be wrinkling around the eyes
without ever losing the prim-featured, artless, triangular face of her child-
hood” (26).12 Although she is only forty, her father’s death and the onset of
angina in her considerably older husband soon afterward serve as reminders
of time’s lengthening shadow.
Tyler further develops the theme of aging through the figure of Nat
Moffatt, Noah’s grandfather. Sixty-seven years old and living in a nursing
care facility because of his physical frailties, Nat possesses the heart and
spirit of a much younger man and makes no apologies for his challenge to
conventional views of aging. As he phrases it in the passage that provides
the novel’s title metaphor,“I’ve always pictured life as one of those ladders
you find on playground sliding boards—a sort of ladder of years where
you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and
others move up behind you” (193–4). The topography of Senior City
duplicates this one-way ladder, with the most infirm residents occupying
the building’s top floor. During Delia’s year in Bay Borough, Nat thoroughly
upsets the “ladder of years”13 that structures the living arrangements as well
as the underlying age-based assumptions of Senior City’s residents, marry-
ing a divorcée half his age—several months earlier than planned because
she is pregnant—and fathering their child. Yet, despite Nat’s irreverent and
unconventional attitudes toward age, even he later concedes the difficulty
of “starting over.” Regarding his infant son, he laments, “I must have
thought I could do the whole thing over again, properly this time. But I’m
just as short-tempered with James as I ever was with my daughters” (321).
In some ways, Tyler’s narrative is structured like a fairy tale in modern
dress: who wouldn’t like to return to certain decisive moments in the past
Home/sickness and the Five Stages of Grief 91
with the opportunity to play out different choices? As in a fairy tale, the
proverbial kiss from a handsome young man precipitates a woman’s awak-
ening, followed by her departure from home and inner transformation.
Adrian’s kiss offers Delia a tempting invitation to renewed passion and
romantic escape. A year later, another spontaneous kiss, this one from
Noah’s father, reminds her again of that potentiality and indirectly propels
her back into her husband’s waiting arms. However, the aspect of Delia’s
transformation that is least affected by her year in Bay Borough is her sex-
uality. Eschewing the second opportunity for a sexual liaison as she had
refused the first, Delia ultimately returns to her husband as faithful wife,
albeit one who has finally outgrown the role of daughter/child.14
What immediately triggers Delia’s return home is a call from her former
life not as a wife but as a mother: the wedding of her daughter Susie.
Somewhat improbably, Delia feels so distant from her old life after more
than a year’s absence from it that she momentarily wonders whether her
status will be that of guest or mother of the bride. The visit home obliges
her to repeat her earlier defection, this time leaving her surrogate family—
much as she had done the year before—without their “live-in woman.”
When Delia arrives at her former home in Baltimore for the wedding,
neither her actual family nor the house seem particularly “welcoming”
(276). She later learns that the configuration of the place has radically
changed during her absence; only her husband actually lives in it at this
point, the others having left for diverse reasons. Sam, her children, and the
extended family and friends who have arrived for the wedding are surpris-
ingly nonchalant about Delia’s presence. In a sense, they still take her for
granted, unthinkingly expecting that she will simply resume her customary
functions, ranging from doing laundry to preparing meals, right where she
left off more than a year before. “She glanced toward Sam for some cue
(the kitchen wasn’t hers anymore; the household wasn’t hers to feed), but
he didn’t help her” (291). Far from understanding the transformation that
has occurred within Delia during her extended absence, members of her
family and others who knew her before simply place her in “a convenient
niche” in their minds, one of those “eccentric wives” who live in one place
while their husbands live somewhere else. “Nobody gave it a thought”
(285). Only her daughter, who postpones the wedding for reasons of her
own, manages to articulate her anger about her mother’s defection: “your
children . . . orphaned, and me setting up a whole wedding on my own
without my mother! . . . Was it him? Was it us? What was so terrible? What
made you run out on us?” (293).15
92 Home Matters
Nat’s idea of his journey as a “time trip” (322) also describes Delia’s.
Tyler’s story of necessary separations concentrates not only on the reorien-
tation of intimate relationships but on their intersections with time. At one
point, Delia wonders “how humans could bear to live in a world where the
passage of time held so much power” (213). Not long after she kisses Nat
goodnight, she joins Sam in bed, waiting for (and receiving) words that sig-
nal his wish to have her back home with him. However, their reunion begs
some of the questions raised earlier in the narrative. Delia returns, seem-
ingly without reference to her grievances, to the husband from whom she
has been not only geographically but emotionally estranged for a year and
a half. The novel ends with her privately concluding that she has returned
a different person to a different home than the one she had vacated so
impulsively, without addressing whether or not her husband has changed
accordingly.
It had all been a time trip—all this past year and half. Unlike Nat’s, though,
hers had been a time trip that worked. What else would you call it when she’d
ended up back where she’d started, home with Sam for good? When the peo-
ple she had left behind had actually traveled further, in some ways?
Now she saw that June beach scene differently. Her three children, she
saw, had been staring at the horizon with the alert, tensed stillness of explor-
ers at the ocean’s edge, poised to begin their journeys. And Delia, shading her
eyes in the distance, had been trying to understand why they were leaving.
Where they were going without her.
How to say goodbye. (326, Tyler’s emphasis)
grow up. Passing through and resolving the stages of grief and mourning,
Delia Grinstead is enlightened in both the emotional and spiritual senses of
the word. Home/sickness, first propelling her away from home, finally leads
her to an emotionally transformed landscape. She returns as an adult who
has revised her relation to home by learning how to leave it.
m 6 m
The note was a lamentation that could hardly have come from
the rum keg of a drum. Its source had to be the . . . bruised
still-bleeding innermost chamber of the collective heart.
—Praisesong for the Widow
L ike Julia Alvarez, Paule Marshall was born on an island in the West
Indies (Barbados) and grew up in the United States (Brooklyn).
Like Alvarez’s Yolanda García, Marshall’s Avey Johnson is in transit
between her current residence in the United States and the West Indian
islands and other homes that come to represent her individual and cultural
histories. For both authors, islands signify the geographical equivalent of
memory-places where the past is housed (and contained) and from which
it continues to exert its complex influence. However, more like Anne
Tyler’s Delia Grinstead than Alvarez’s Yolanda García, the widowed Avey
Johnson is also middle-aged; considerably more of her life is already behind
her when Marshall’s narrative begins. Given the protagonist’s age and cir-
cumstances, Praisesong for the Widow (1983) might be regarded as the repre-
sentation of a midlife crisis somewhat like that experienced by Tyler’s Delia
Grinstead, who also discovers herself by precipitously leaving home.
Though superficially it is this, it is also considerably more. The narrative
encompasses not only personal but cultural dimensions of mourning for a
lost self, a lost past, and a lost culture, tracing what Marshall overtly names
“the theme of separation and loss”1 for Avey in both her individual and
collective history.
96 Home Matters
past experiences with the present moment, the dreams and visions oblige
her to review earlier times in her life when she had felt less self-estranged
and more connected to others. Early in that process, before she begins to
grasp the significance of these intrusive visions, Avey feels “like someone in
a bad dream who discovers that the street along which they are fleeing is
not straight as they had believed, but circular, and that it has been leading
them all the while back to the place they were seeking to escape” (82–3).
Recurrent figures and images mark the several stages of Avey’s literal
and spiritual journeys. First is the frequent appearance in her dreams of her
great-great-aunt Cuney, a phantom who beckons, summons, and even
wrestles with Avey to draw her into the domain that she resists visiting: the
past. Other figures beckon or touch her to draw her further along her
journey or to aid her during times of helplessness or resistance. The dis-
ruptive dreams and visions also bring together in the same narrative plane
different realms in time and place. Events in the narrative present are inter-
cut nonchronologically with incidents from Avey’s childhood and young
adulthood. Blurring the line between past and present, Marshall narratively
expresses the fact that all individuals are the sum of their experiences, even
those they have forgotten or repressed, and that recollections of experi-
ences that may prompt reawakening occur in a deliberately disruptive,
asynchronic sequence.
Aunt Cuney’s appearance provokes Avey to recall and imaginatively
revisit Tatem Island, a place strongly associated not only with her own
childhood but with a legendary piece of cultural history to which she has
given little notice. She recalls accompanying Aunt Cuney each summer on
a long walk, their destination a narrow spit of land where “the waters in
and around Tatem met up with the open sea. On the maps of the county it
was known as Ibo Landing” (37). Aunt Cuney had brought the young Avey
to the place, known by the people of Tatem simply as the Landing, to relate
the story of a miraculous event that was witnessed by Cuney’s own grand-
mother, Avatara, as a child. According to the story handed down to Cuney,
soon after slave ships docked at the landing, a cargo of Ibo slaves was
brought to shore. Although the Africans were chained at the ankles, wrists,
and necks with iron fastenings—“’Nuff iron to sink an army. And chains
hooking up the iron” (39)—they instantly sized up the situation. Seeing
into the future—their destiny as chattel and, beyond that, the Civil War and
“everything after that right on up to the hard times today” (38)—the Ibos
refused it outright. Instead, they walked back to the water, past the slave
ships, and across the Atlantic to Africa and home. Having witnessed this
miraculous event, the first Avatara insisted that “Her body . . . might be in
98 Home Matters
Tatem but her mind . . . was long gone with the Ibos . . .” (39). Many years
after Avatara’s death, Aunt Cuney was visited by her grandmother’s spirit,
who instructed her to pass her name on to Avey at her birth.
When the puzzled Avey had asked her great-aunt why the Ibos “didn’t
drown” (39), Aunt Cuney had reminded her of the story of Jesus walking
on water, suggesting that the account of the Ibos’ return home is a sacred
story, chronicling a miracle that resists ordinary explanations.2 Avey had
later realized that Aunt Cuney, in telling her the legend of Ibo Landing,
had “entrusted her with a mission she couldn’t even name yet had felt duty
bound to fulfill. It had taken her years to rid herself of the notion” (42).
Only belatedly does Avey reverse that process, re-engaging with the mis-
sion to keep alive and pass on her African heritage.
However, before Avey achieves that life-affirming reorientation, the
visions that confront her both before and immediately after she leaves the
cruise ship—pointedly named Bianca Pride—are associated with death,
decay, and destruction. Sounds produced during a shipboard game of shuf-
fleboard suggest to her “some blunt instrument repeatedly striking human
flesh and bone” (56) and bring to mind a disturbing sight she had witnessed
years before from her apartment window, the brutal beating of a black man
by a policeman with a billy stick. Not long after this recollection disturbs
Avey’s serenity, a “shriveled old man” (58) on the ship startles her by grab-
bing her skirt and beckoning her to sit near him. “In a swift, subliminal
flash, all the man’s wrinkled sunbaked skin fell away, his thinned-out flesh
disappeared, and the only thing to be seen on the deck chair was a skeleton
in a pair of skimpy red-and-white striped trunks and a blue visored cap”
(59). The images of death approach much closer to Avey herself when she
arrives on the nearby island of Grenada, intending to fly home the follow-
ing day, and finds herself recalling the Eskimo practice in which elders are
left alone to die on the ice.
The images of death, isolation, and destruction—tropes for the condi-
tion of Avey’s spirit—ultimately coalesce in her recollections of the home
she has previously regarded as her sanctuary. Questioning her hasty decision
to abandon the cruise, she tries to comfort herself by summoning the
shapes of familiar material possessions in her suburban domicile. However,
instead of their “reassuring forms,”
she kept seeing with mystifying clarity the objects on display in the museum
in the town of St. Pierre at the foot of Mt. Pelée . . . the twisted, scarcely
recognizable remains of the gold and silver candlesticks and snuff boxes,
jewelry, crucifixes and the like that had been the prized possessions of the
Hom(e)age to the Ancestors 99
well-to-do of St. Pierre before the volcano had erupted at the turn of the
century, burying the town in a sea of molten lava and ash.
She might enter the dining room tomorrow night to find everything
there reduced to so many grotesque lumps of metal and glass. . . . (83)
The image of the skeletal man who confronted Avey on the cruise ship
reappears more positively in the form of the proprietor of the rum shop,
an ancient, lame man named Lebert Joseph. To his insistent questions,
“[W]hat you is?” and “What’s your nation?” (166–67), Avey has no answers.
Ignorant of both “who she is” and her own “nation” or cultural origin—
her personal and collective identities—she describes herself merely (and
accurately) as an outsider, “a visitor, a tourist, just someone here for the
day . . .” (167). However, despite her irritation at the ancient man’s blunt
questions, she finds herself confiding to him the peculiar sequence of
events that prompted her impulsive decision to leave the cruise ship and
return home. As the old man reads her thoughts even without her speaking
words, Avey realizes that he is no ordinary rum shack proprietor. Rather,
Lebert is a wise man who “possessed ways of seeing that went beyond mere
sight and ways of knowing that outstripped ordinary intelligence . . .”
(172).
Their conversation turns to a discussion of the imminent Carriacou
Island Excursion, explained by Lebert in his island patois as an annual cele-
bration by out-islanders in tribute to the “Old Parents” who came from
Africa. During the festivities, islanders venerate and ask forgiveness of their
ancestors and renew family connections through ritual dancing and
singing. Avey declines Lebert’s invitation to join the Excursion and festivi-
ties, protesting that she wants to leave the island immediately and “plan[s]
on being home tonight, in [her] own house” (181). However, her plans are
challenged not only by Lebert but by her own disruptive inner visions.
Once again, an invisible hand pulls her in another direction besides the one
she consciously chooses, reconfiguring her idea of home before her very
eyes. When she tries to summon in her imagination the sanctuary of her
suburban home, what comes to mind instead is a site of desolation and
devastation. “Home again, she entered the dining room only to find that it
had turned into the museum at the foot of Mount Pelée in the wake of the
eruption that had taken place during her absence, and which had reduced
everything there to so many grotesque lumps of molten silver and glass”
(181).
As Lebert, whose name alludes to the Afro-Caribbean trickster god,
Legba,3 cajoles Avey to join the Excursion, Marshall represents as a literal
battle her protagonist’s resistance to opening herself to her cultural past as
well as to deeper dimensions of her own experience. In her struggle to
resist Lebert’s entreaties, Avey feels “as exhausted as if she and the old man
had been fighting—actually, physically fighting, knocking over the tables
and chairs . . .—and that for all his appearance of frailty he had proven the
102 Home Matters
stronger of the two” (184). Earlier in the narrative, Avey struggles similarly
with the phantom of her great-aunt Cuney, who, appearing in the dream
vision, summons her to return to Tatem and the Landing. Avey’s resistance
to that “call” leads to a “tug-of-war” that becomes a “bruising fist fight”
(45). During the struggle, her pricey fur stole is virtually stripped from her
body, prefiguring the stripping that accompanies her spiritual conversion.4
However, ultimately capitulating to Lebert’s power, Avey becomes “as
obedient as a child” (186) and prepares to embark on the Carriacou Excur-
sion. Waiting on the wharf triggers her memory of another key moment
in childhood, when she and her family joined a number of black families
for another annual celebratory occasion, an excursion up the Hudson
River. The communal boat trip had elicited in the child Avey an image
identical to one she had experienced in Tatem when she had watched the
church elders perform a collective dance, the Ring Shout. The parallels are
Marshall’s way of expressing the fundamental overlapping elements of
Avey’s repressed personal and collective histories:
As more people arrived to throng the area beside the river and the cool
morning air warmed to the greetings and talk, she would feel what seemed
to be hundreds of slender threads streaming out from her navel and from the
place where her heart was to enter those around her. And the threads went
out not only to people she recognized from the neighborhood but to those
she didn’t know as well. . . .
....
Then it would seem to her that . . . the threads didn’t come from her, but
from them, from everyone on the pier. . . . She visualized the threads as
being silken, like those used in the embroidery on a summer dress, and of a
hundred different colors. And although they were thin to the point of invis-
ibility, they felt as strong entering her as the lifelines of woven hemp that
trailed out into the water at Coney Island. . . .
While the impression lasted she would cease being herself, a mere girl in
a playsuit . . . ; instead, for those moments, she became part of, indeed the
center of, a huge wide confraternity. (190–91)
[A]s [Avey’s] mind came unburdened she began to float down through the
gaping hole, floating, looking, searching for whatever memories were to be
found there. . . . And the deeper [she] went, the smaller everything became.
The large, somewhat matronly handbag on her lap shrank to a little girl’s
pocketbook of white patent leather containing a penny for the collection
plate. . . . (197)
“with a look almost of humility” (215). Afterwards, she learns that her
mentor and guide, Lebert Joseph, had sat awake in the house the whole
night while she was incapacitated, functioning as a kind of guardian or
spiritual father working in tandem with her spiritual mother, Aunt Cuney,
to assist in the (re)birth of Avey’s soul.
Not only humbled but reduced to a child by this point in her journey,
Avey is further reduced to the helplessness of infancy—virtually like “a
baby that had soiled itself ” (217) and who is entirely dependent upon
maternal hands for bathing and cleansing. Another of the several maternal
figures who assist Avey during her journey, Rosalie (whose surname, Par-
vay, connotes her function as a purveyor of both physical and spiritual sus-
tenance), performs a ritual bathing and oiling of her body while Avey
simultaneously experiences herself as the “child in the washtub” (221)
being bathed by her great-aunt Cuney in Tatem. Rosalie’s gentle and dis-
crete ministrations, accompanied in island patois by a “praisesong” or chant
whose origins are African,6 effect a spiritually restorative “laying on of
hands” (217). Marshall thus situates Avey’s rite of passage within a larger
African cultural context of social transition and spiritual transformation.
Rosalie’s gentle massage culminates for Avey in an orgasmic moment
analogous to the one she associates with both passionate lovemaking and the
sensation of visceral joy—the “embodiment of pleasure” (128) that she had
experienced as a child riding the Coney Island breakers with her father.
[T]his warmth and the faint stinging reached up the entire length of her
thighs. . . . Then, slowly, they radiated out into her loins: When, when was
the last time she had felt even the slightest stirring there? . . . The warmth,
the stinging sensation that was both pleasure and pain passed up through the
emptiness at her center. Until finally they reached her heart. All the tendons,
nerves and muscles which strung her together had been struck in a powerful
chord, and the reverberation could be heard in the remotest corners of her
body. (223–4)
would accompany her great-aunt along the moonless roads to visit a sick
friend or to stand with her across from the church when the Ring Shouts
were being held” (231). Again, Avey realizes that Lebert Joseph is more
than he appears to be—or, rather, that it is his appearance that keeps chang-
ing. One moment he seems a decrepit gnome “of an age beyond reckon-
ing, his body more misshapen and infirm than ever before” (233). The next
moment, “the crippled figure up ahead shifted to his good leg, pulled his
body as far upright as it would go (throwing off at least a thousand years as
he did), and was hurrying forward with his brisk limp to take her arm”
(233). As a shape-shifter, the trickster Lebert Joseph “tricks” Avey into
recovering her true identity.
Initially, Avey takes a sideline seat for the ritual events of the evening
fête of drumming, singing, shouting, and dancing that draws from both
Afro-Caribbean and African sources. Each ritual is part of a ceremony of
remembrance: of origins, of kin, of culture, of the home/lands in Africa
from which all of the participants, through their ancestors, feel exiled. The
celebration begins with the “Beg Pardon” led by Lebert Joseph, in which
those present petition their ancestors for forgiveness, not only on their own
behalf but on behalf of absent relatives and friends scattered throughout
the diaspora. Next, the elder members of the group dance the “nation
dances” to the gentle beat of the keg drums. As Temne, Banda, Arada,
Moko, and other nations are called out by name, Avey experiences the
direct presence of the Old People as “kin, visible, metamorphosed and
invisible, repeatedly circled the cleared space together . . .” (239). Under the
influence of the chanting and the drum rhythms, Avey feels for a moment
her own kin—her great-aunt Cuney—standing next to her.
Although the Carriacou fête is somewhat less grand than Avey had
anticipated, she finds herself not disappointed but drawn even further into
its imaginative dimension. Like Avey herself in the process of regeneration,
the ceremonies reflect a process of stripping down to the elemental core.
“It was the essence of something rather than the thing itself she was wit-
nessing. . . . All that was left were a few names of what they called nations
which they could no longer even pronounce properly, the fragments of a
dozen or so songs, the shadowy forms of long-ago dances and rum kegs for
drums. The bare bones. The burnt-out ends” (240). Through the image of
skeletons that recurs in different forms throughout the narrative and in the
statement as a whole, Marshall pointedly laments the lost traditions and
wisdom that have almost perished, having been reduced to their “bare
bones” as African cultural identities have been dispersed and attenuated
over time.
106 Home Matters
The final movement of the Carriacou fête, the Creole dances, signify the
mingling of the cultures in an island “creole” of singing and dancing, both of
which modulate into a more rapid rhythm. Lebert Joseph,“his head perform-
ing its trickster’s dance” (243), is the “hub, the polestar” (243), the master of
ceremonies who personally guides Avey and prompts her to participate in the
dance. As drums plumb the depths of Avey’s awakened spirit, she surrenders to
the suggestive power of the reverberations. A particularly resonant note struck
on a goatskin drum captures for her “the theme of separation and loss” and
the “unacknowledged longing” she has finally recognized within herself as a
part of a larger cultural entity.“The note was a lamentation that could hardly
have come from the rum keg of a drum. Its source had to be the heart, the
bruised still-bleeding innermost chamber of the collective heart” (245).
As the mood of the ceremony shifts from the creole Juba to a carnival-
like Trinidadian jump, Avey moves from observer to participant, joining the
elderly dancers on the periphery of the circle. Doing so, she acknowledges
how far she has retreated from the joyous dancing of her early years of mar-
riage and, before that, from the spiritual “confraternity” that she had known
as a child. The dances and other elements of the ceremonial fête on Carria-
cou enable their participants to mourn, neutralize, and imaginatively heal
cultural loss, to override the condition of literal and spiritual exile from their
ancestral people and cultures of origin, and to celebrate their deeper cultural
connections.7 Avey Johnson, entering into the “counterclockwise” dance
(247), the “flatfooted glide and stamp” (248) of the Carriacou Tramp, is also
re-enacting the steps of the Ring Shout that she had observed during her
childhood in Tatem. In fact, they are the same dance. One scholar of the rela-
tionship between African and African American cultural rituals documents
the unequivocal centrality of the Ring Shout in the maintenance of cultural
identity for people who were wrenched from their African homelands:
Shouters in the person of the out-islanders had reached out their arms like
one great arm and drawn her into their midst” (248–9). The passage repeats
the image of the supportive arms and hands that assist Avey at crucial
points in her spiritual journey. Additionally, the phrase, “making it across,”
alludes to the legendary Ibos who made it across the water in their defiant
refusal of slavery and return to Africa. Avey finally “makes it across”—
enters into active commemoration of her African, Caribbean, and African
American ancestors—as she understands the deeper meaning of the dances.
Through her protagonist’s transformation, Marshall reweaves the threads
of Avey’s experience, and of the novel’s key movements, by recapitulating
the image from Avey’s childhood that signifies her spiritual connection to
others:“for the first time since she was a girl, she felt the threads, that myr-
iad of shiny, silken, brightly colored threads. . . . [S]he used to feel them
streaming out of everyone there to enter her, making her part of what
seemed a far-reaching, wide-ranging confraternity” (249). In the midst of
her engaged participation in “the Carriacou Tramp, the shuffle designed to
stay the course of history” (250), Avey is astonished when first Lebert, then
his daughter Rosalie and others, stop and bow reverentially before her. Their
gestures implicitly acknowledge that she has earned her ancestral name,
becoming “Avey, short for Avatara” (251), an avatar of their shared ancestry.9
As Avey departs from Carriacou, she suspects that the island is in fact a
kind of magical space, “more a mirage rather than an actual place. Some-
thing conjured up perhaps to satisfy a longing and need” (254)—in other
words, something generated by Avey’s own deepest longings. With the aid
of several “conjurers” in the outside world and within herself, Avey John-
son finally finds her way home. Moreover, if in response to that longing
finally satisfied, she returns home a different person, so also is home a trans-
formed place. By the time she arrives back in the United States, she has
determined to sell her suburban house outside of New York City and fix
up the house in Tatem left to her by Aunt Cuney. Most importantly, she
plans to have her grandsons visit her there each summer as she had visited
her Aunt Cuney as a child. “And at least twice a week in the late after-
noon . . . she would lead them, grandchildren and visitors alike, in a troop
over to the Landing” (256), where she intends to share with them the leg-
end of the Ibos who miraculously returned home to Africa.
m m m
Although Avey’s journey commences with a reluctant nostalgia—unin-
vited, unwelcome, and unproductive—it comes to serve a reparative rather
108 Home Matters
the recurring image of the volcano that springs from dormancy into active
eruption, powerfully disrupts and exposes Avey’s comfortable but sterile
life. Revitalized by her discoveries, Avey is inspired to revive the “threads”
that link her, from the navel and the heart, to others across time and space.
As the reborn Avatara, she becomes a go-between in the tradition of her
own avatars—the first Avatara, Aunt Cuney, Lebert Joseph, Legba. Accept-
ing her liminal role, she re-enters and reclaims history, finding her true
home at the spiritual crossroads of geography and genealogy.
m 7 m
Haunted Longing
and the Presence of Absence:
Jazz, Toni Morrison
and it’s almost as though the singer says,‘I am so miserable because you don’t
love me,’ but it’s not unthinkable.”3
Such blues complaints might be understood as the musical rendering of
nostalgia, of longing mingled with the emotional pain of lost love. Like the
penetrating expression of a blues lament and its recapitulation in the
instrumental variations of a jazz improvisation,4 Morrison’s lament on
“love or its absence” has both developed and deepened in expression dur-
ing the course of her fiction, coming to represent the experience of loss
felt by individuals who have been separated from lovers, spouses, parents, or
children. In some instances that lament springs from the emotional history
of an entire group whose members have been scarred, directly or indi-
rectly, by a legacy of cultural dislocation, personal dispossession, and emo-
tional (if not actual) dismemberment.5
What Morrison calls the “absence of love” I term the presence of absence
because most individuals experience it not merely as something missing
but as a lack that continues to occupy a palpable emotional space; the pres-
ence of absence is the presence of unresolved mourning. As I have previ-
ously proposed, mourning may be understood not only in individual but
cultural contexts, a response not only to personal losses but to collective
traumas and their ramifications over time. For African Americans, that
collective trauma occurred generations earlier when their ancestors,
forcibly transported to the United States as slaves, were subjected to invol-
untary separations, physical abuses, and emotional trauma. Ineradicably
woven into the fabric of African American experience is the cultural
memory of lost cultures, lost lives, lost possibilities, lost parents and chil-
dren, lost parts of the body, lost selves. As the character Baby Suggs
expresses it in Beloved, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its
rafters with some dead Negro’s grief.”6 Naming and embodying that
grief, Toni Morrison expresses the responsibility that she feels for “all of
these people; these unburied, or at least unceremoniously buried, people
made literate in art.”7
Jazz, set during the 1920s, an era of emerging cultural optimism for
African Americans, initially seems to establish a mood much lighter than
those associated, as in Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, with the “absence
of love,” grief, and loss. A series of linked episodes reflects a cultural
moment of vibrant social and aesthetic transformations in the years follow-
ing the Great Migration and World War I, when, as Morrison has noted
elsewhere, “black culture, rather than American culture, began to alter the
whole country and eventually the western world. It was an overwhelming
development in terms of excitement and glamour, and the sense of indi-
Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence 113
ments of urban life at the dawn of a new age:“Round and round about the
town. That’s the way the City spins you. Makes you do what it wants, go
where the laid-out roads say to. All the while letting you think you’re
free. . . . You can’t get off the track a City lays for you” (120).
m m m
From the perspective of the characters’ inner lives, the phantoms of the
“absence of love” that appear in this novel, as in Morrison’s previous nov-
els, call attention to the haunted longings that disrupt the narrative’s jazzy
surface. Such longings often have sources in a child’s experience of invol-
untary separation from or actual psychological abandonment by one or
both parents. Implicitly, such abandonments in Morrison’s fiction recapitu-
late the actual and emotional displacements of African American historical
experience, beginning with the genocide of African people who were
ripped from their families and communities and placed on slave ships
bound for the West. Untold numbers of them did not survive the Middle
Passage; those who did survive were destined to live out the losses upon
which slavery was predicated—the horrifying deprivations, degradations,
and abuses of body, mind, and being that are so graphically rendered by
Morrison in Beloved. Like a jazz variation prompted by a blues lament, Jazz
takes up in a minor key the lingering emotional effects of those traumatic
displacements. The relocations of the Great Migration—“the wave of
black people running from want and violence” (33)—were similarly
infused with cultural loss and mourning for disrupted lives as well as for
people and places left behind.
Representing the traces of this experience of loss at both individual and
communal levels, orphans figure prominently in Jazz, beginning with the
major figures in the love triangle/tragedy introduced on the first page.16
Joe and Violet Trace and Dorcas Manfred are each the offspring of dead,
missing, or emotionally unavailable parents. Joe, abandoned at birth and
raised by another family, gave himself a surname that marked the presence
of absence: the parents who “disappeared without a trace” (124). Dorcas,
Joe’s eighteen-year-old lover, was orphaned in childhood when her parents
became innocent victims of the violent race riots that consumed East St.
Louis in 1917, leaving more than two hundred African Americans dead.
Dorcas’s friend Felice is, if not an actual orphan, arguably an emotional
one. Raised by her grandmother while her parents worked on the railroad
line in other cities, Felice knew her father and mother primarily through
116 Home Matters
the brief visits that punctuated their much longer absences. As she phrases
it, “I would see them once every three weeks for two and a half days, and
all day Christmas and all day Easter. . . . Thirty-four days a year” (198).
More literally than Felice and like her younger rival, Dorcas, Violet
Trace was orphaned during adolescence. Her “phantom father” (100)
deserted his family to seek his fortune, leaving his wife, Rose Dear, to raise
their five young daughters. When Rose Dear was brutally dispossessed
from her sharecropper’s hut, she moved her family to an abandoned shack.
Before long, however, she found her hardscrabble life unendurable and,
broken in spirit, drowned herself in the well when Violet was twelve, leav-
ing her daughters in the care of their grandmother, True Belle.17
Violet was convinced by her mother’s suffering and despair that she
never wanted children of her own. Many years and several miscarriages
later, the inner emptiness produced by that decision haunts her in the form
of a “mother-hunger” (108) so intense that she sleeps with dolls and even
snatches a baby from a carriage momentarily left unguarded. Violet imag-
ines her husband’s lover Dorcas as “a girl young enough to be that [lost]
daughter” of her failed pregnancies and, torn between regarding her as “the
woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb” (109), she
finally acts out her anguish by mutilating the dead girl’s face during her
funeral. Later, the narrator speculates that Violet’s violent action may be
understood as “a crooked kind of mourning for a rival young enough to be
a daughter” (111).
The term “mother-hunger” may be understood another way: not only
Violet’s hunger to be a mother to appease her belated longing for children
but also her hunger for her lost mother. Of the lingering effect of her
mother’s self-annihilation, the narrator observes, “the children of suicides
are hard to please and quick to believe no one loves them because they are
not really here” (4). Morrison commented in a 1977 interview that “What
[black] women say to each other and what they say to their daughters is
vital information.”18 Further (in Nancy J. Peterson’s paraphrase), “Without
this passing down of wisdom, the daughters cannot have ‘livable’ lives and
an entire generation of African Americans will be affected adversely
because of the wounds these motherless or sisterless black women carry
with them.”19
Both Violet and Joe Trace are Morrison’s representations of another
kind of haunted longing: the loss of youth, or what the narrator describes
as a hunger for “the one thing everybody loses—young loving” (120). In a
historical moment and place where being young and “hep” (114) seem to
be everything,“there is no such thing as midlife. Sixty years, forty even, is as
Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence 117
much as anybody feels like being bothered with” (11). Although the narra-
tor imagines Joe Trace as in some sense still a boy—“one of those men
who stop somewhere around sixteen” (120)—from the perspective of
Dorcas’s friend, Felice, Joe is “really old. Fifty” (201). As if to counter the
fact of their middle age, both Joe and Violet associate themselves with the
upbeat jazz culture that emphasizes youth and appearance: he sells Cleopa-
tra beauty products for women and she is a hairdresser who does “fancy
women’s hair” (84). For both Traces, Dorcas catalyzes their longing for lost
youth and passion. When Joe grieves for his dead lover, Violet wonders if
“she isn’t falling in love with [Dorcas] too” (15).
Before Joe fell in love with the girl who made him feel “fresh, new again”
(123), he had recognized the loss of intense feeling that he associates with his
youth and had “resigned himself to . . . the fact that old age would be not
remembering what things felt like” (29). He defends himself to the woman
whose room he rents to pursue his tryst with Dorcas by explaining that his
wife has behaved oddly since she underwent “her Change” (46).“Violet takes
better care of her parrot than she does me. Rest of the time, she’s cooking
pork I can’t eat, or pressing hair I can’t stand the smell of. Maybe that’s the
way it goes with people been married long as we have” (49).
Violet, lamenting the loss of Joe’s affection, speaks with Dorcas’s aunt,
Alice Manfred, who becomes her confidant. The women share a sorrowful
realization that their age (and gender) blocks them from access to the
intensities of love and passion that they observe all around them and hear
amplified in the sensual music of blues and jazz.“Songs that used to start in
the head and fill the heart had dropped on down, down to places below the
sash and the buckled belts. Lower and lower, until the music was so low-
down you had to shut your windows . . .” (56). Violet laments the absence
of love and passion, wondering, “Is this where you got to and couldn’t do
it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not
and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where
everything is over but the talking?” (110) From the perspective of her own
years of loneliness, Alice fervently advises her, “You got anything left to
you to love, anything at all, do it” (112). Later, Violet admits to Dorcas’s
friend Felice that she has messed up her life by wishing she could be some-
one else—someone “White. Light. Young again” (208).
Similarly, Joe Trace reaches midlife still attempting to fill the “inside
nothing” (37) where the minimal trace of his lost parentage has expanded
to form a space of enormous longing. Although he never finds the woman
who abandoned him, in the Virginia woods where he grew up he discov-
ers the denlike home of the woman referred to only as “Wild.” The
118 Home Matters
shoots her emotional surrogate. In doing so, he acts out what may be
understood as an ambivalent wish both to reunite with and to punish the
woman who, like his mother many years before, has deserted him: “I had
the gun but it was not the gun—it was my hand I wanted to touch you
with” (130–1). From that aggressive “touch,” Dorcas bleeds to death. Later,
when Dorcas’s friend Felice asks Joe,“‘ Why’d you shoot at her if you loved
her?’” Joe replies, with a candor that makes explicit the deficiency that has
stunted his emotional life, “‘ Scared. Didn’t know how to love anybody’”
(213).
Like a blues lament that repeats the same primary musical themes in dif-
ferent keys, another orphan’s story in Jazz recapitulates and amplifies the
emotional issues at the heart of Joe and Violet Trace’s stories. The most
enigmatic character of the narrative, Golden Gray is a young man of an
earlier era and place—antebellum South—who also seeks an unknown and
radically absent parent. The son of a “phantom father” who never knew of
his paternity and a white woman who never acknowledged her mother-
hood, he is also, figuratively, the child of a black slave woman—Violet’s
grandmother, True Belle—who was obliged to leave her own children in
order to become a surrogate mother for the child with beautiful golden
skin and hair. Because he is suggestively both mulatto and androgynous—
both black and white, both male and female—he is the boundary-strad-
dling, liminal figure upon whom others, including the narrating voice
itself, project and construct multiple, and contradictory, meanings.
When Golden Gray reaches the age of eighteen, he learns the identity
of his father from the woman who “lied to him about practically every-
thing including the question of whether she was his owner, his mother or
a kindly neighbor” (143). Tracking his father in same Virginia woods in
which, many years later, Joe Trace attempts to track his mother, Golden
Gray finds the cabin of the woodsman called “Henry Lestory or LesTroy”
(148). The uncertain surname signals the narrative’s self-conscious fiction-
ality. Morrison, blending modernist narrative cues with postmodernist
strategies that employ displaced or unreliable narrative voices, thus empha-
sizes the irreducible provisionality—the fictionality—of narrative knowl-
edge. Implicitly, she invokes a particular vision of le story—the problematic
history of a racially-mixed South—through a character whose story con-
tains decidedly Faulknerian echoes.27
Golden Gray, awaiting the arrival of the man reputed to be his father,
describes his feelings regarding his missing parent as an amputee might
describe his experience of a phantom limb, in language that most explicitly
Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence 121
Only now . . . that I know I have a father, do I feel his absence: the place
where he should have been and was not. Before, I thought everybody was
one-armed, like me. Now I feel the surgery. . . .
. . . . I don’t need the arm. But I do need to know what it could have been
like to have had it. It’s a phantom I have to behold and be held by. . . . I will
locate it so the severed part can remember the snatch, the slice of its disfig-
urement. (158–9)
You see a pregnant black woman naked at the end of Beloved. It’s at the same
time. . . . [I]n the Golden Gray section of Jazz, there is a crazy woman out
in the woods. The woman they call Wild (because she’s sort of out of it from
the hit on the head) could be Sethe’s daughter, Beloved. When you see
Beloved towards the end [of Beloved], you don’t know; she’s either a ghost
who has been exorcised or she’s a real person who is pregnant by Paul D,
who runs away, ending up in Virginia, which is right next to Ohio.29
I call her Beloved so that I can filter all these confrontations and questions that
she has in that situation [the circumstances of her death and reappearance in
Beloved] . . . and then . . . extend her life . . . her search, her quest, all the
way through as long as I care to go, into the twenties where it switches to this
other girl [Dorcas, in Jazz]. Therefore, I have a New York uptown-Harlem
milieu in which to put this love story, but Beloved will be there also.30
Morrison only later realized the full implications of the recurring image of
the “dead girl” in her fiction, noticing that “bit by bit I had been rescuing
her from the grave of time and inattention. Her fingernails maybe in the
first book; face and legs, perhaps, the second time. Little by little bringing
her back into living life. . . . She is here now, alive. I have seen, named and
claimed her—and oh what company she keeps.”31
The phantom “dead girl” represents the psychic core of collective loss
and mourning that Morrison, over the course of her fiction, has been fig-
uratively working through and resolving. Whether intentionally or not,
Morrison’s language recalls Freud’s own considerably more clinical descrip-
tion of the “work” of mourning. As he phrases it in his classic essay on
mourning and melancholia,
Normally [following the loss of the loved object], respect for reality gains the
day. Nevertheless, its orders cannot be obeyed at once. They are carried out
bit by bit, at great expense of time and cathectic energy, and in the meantime
the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of
the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is
brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accom-
plished in respect of it. Why this compromise by which the command of
reality is carried out piecemeal should be so extraordinarily painful is not at
all easy to explain in terms of economics. . . . The fact is, however, that
when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and unin-
hibited again.32
Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence 123
m m m
Any discussion of Naylor’s Mama Day must acknowledge early on the
effect of the novel’s unique narrative design on its meanings. Commencing
in the narrative future, 1999, (the novel was published in 1988) when
Cocoa Day’s husband, George Andrews, has been dead for fourteen years,
the story moves backward in time, intermittently revisiting events that
occurred not only during the five years of the relationship between Cocoa
and George but during the extended history of the Day family during the
five generations before Cocoa’s time. The prologue to the narrative is artic-
ulated by what might be called the collective voice of Willow Springs,
despite the speaker’s paradoxical claim that there “ain’t nobody really talk-
ing to you . . . the only voice is your own.”1 Of the narrative’s two major
sections, the first, detailing the courtship and marriage of Cocoa and
George, is set in New York; the second, the unraveling of those events cul-
minating in the near-death of Cocoa and the actual death of George, is set
in Willow Springs. Over the course of the narrative, Cocoa and George
reconstruct for each other—and for the reader—the details of their
courtship and marriage, along with their struggle to locate the bridge that
might connect the incompatible worlds they represent. The narrative thus
unfolds in what I term the holographic present tense, to amplify Mama Day’s
conviction that there are four sides to everything:“his side, her side, an out-
side, and an inside. All of it is the truth” (230). Moreover, although this
conclusion is not available to the first-time reader until late in the narrative,
Mama Day pivots on the nostalgic perspective of Cocoa Day who, fourteen
years after her husband George’s death, still mourns her loss. One strand of
the narrative is thus a memorialization of romantic love interrupted—but
not terminated—by death.
Another central relationship in Mama Day offers a competing narrative of
love and fierce attachment. Although Cocoa’s biological mother is dead by
the time she begins to tell her story, her powerful surrogate mother still lives
in the person of Mama Day, who is actually Cocoa’s great-aunt. (The story
of a powerful great-aunt who resides on an island and who influences the
central character’s destiny may remind a reader of Avey Johnson and her
great-aunt Cuney in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, discussed in an
earlier chapter.) Though the conjure woman Miranda Day is literally child-
less, people on the island of Willow Springs regard her as “everybody’s mama”
(89). During the narrative, Mama Day recovers the meaning of her own lost
history—not as a mama but as a daughter. Not long afterward, she secures
the life of her surrogate daughter, Cocoa, at the cost of Cocoa’s husband.
Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations 129
opers from the mainland are keen to develop the island as yet another
“vacation paradise” (4). Visitors crossing the bridge from the mainland pro-
ject their own fantasies of Eden onto Willow Springs. Visiting for the first
time, George Andrews exclaims that Cocoa “had not prepared [him] for
Paradise” (175) and even proposes to her,“Let’s play Adam and Eve” (222).
However, he fails to understand that Willow Springs is truly an enchanted
domain where mediations and transformations—some initiated by magic
and conjure, others by more mundane events—occur.3
Equally important for what happens during the course of the narrative,
the island is a maternal space, dominated by empowered mother/matri-
archs, particularly Mama Day and her sister, Abigail, Cocoa Day’s grand-
mother. Indeed, the image that links the several stories and counterstories
of Mama Day is the matriarch—the lost mother whose absence is central to
the personal histories of Miranda and Cocoa Day and also of George
Andrews. Cocoa is parentless: her father disappeared long before she was
born and her mother, Grace, died during Cocoa’s childhood. However, she
has a history of family attachments that the orphaned George envies: “To
be born in a grandmother’s house, to be able to walk and see where a great-
grandfather and even great-great-grandfather was born. You had more than
a family, you had a history. And I didn’t even have a real last name” (129).
George is alone in the world; like Toni Morrison’s Joe Trace of Jazz, he is
both parentless and childless. The son of a young prostitute who aban-
doned him soon after birth, he was raised in another kind of home, a shel-
ter for homeless boys that operated with few if any maternal features. By
contrast, Cocoa has been lavishly nurtured, even spoiled, by both her
grandmother and her great-aunt, whose complementary strengths have
shaped her. As she explains to George,“if Grandma had raised me alone, I
would have been ruined for any fit company. It seemed I could do no
wrong with her, while with Mama Day I could do no right. . . . [I]n a
funny kind of a way, together they were the perfect mother” (58). That
composite perfect mother partially compensates Cocoa for the loss of her
actual, imperfect mother, Grace, who abandoned her by dying during her
childhood.
The principal daughter-figure of Mama Day has three names, each of
which aligns her with a different value system and degree of intimacy and
attachment: Ophelia, Cocoa, and Baby Girl. George calls her Ophelia, a
name rarely used in Willow Springs, where, despite (or, more likely, because
of) the fact that she shares the name of Mama Day’s mother who died by
suicide, she is addressed as either Cocoa or Baby Girl. While Cocoa is a pet
Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations 131
name that refers to her light skin color, the third and most intimate name
signals her identity as “Baby Girl,” the object of maternal affection. Over
the course of her life, Cocoa has found it difficult to grow up and beyond
that affectionate but limiting epithet. In Willow Springs, Cocoa is continu-
ously reminded of her childhood self by “living mirrors with the power to
show a woman that she’s still carrying scarred knees, a runny nose, and
socks that get walked down into the heels of her shoes”(48), as the com-
munal narrator phrases it. When, later in the narrative, Cocoa suffers
acutely from the effects of poison placed in her scalp by a jealous rival, she
is further infantilized, literally reduced to a baby girl who requires continu-
ous nurturing care.
Although consciously Mama Day wants Cocoa to find happiness in her
married life, unconsciously she also resists surrendering to George her pos-
sessive power over her “Baby Girl” at precisely the time in her life when
Cocoa hopes to become a mother herself. Though the poisoning that
Cocoa suffers is administered by a woman who mistakenly considers her a
sexual rival, in another sense the poison-induced illness is the physical man-
ifestation of Cocoa’s emotional predicament: she is the object of a struggle
to the death between competing claims for affection and intimacy from
mother (surrogate) and lover. From “outside,” the deeper struggle for Baby
Girl’s soul is between two competing dimensions of love: the maternal and
the erotic, signified by the matriarchal and maternal bonds of Willow
Springs on the one hand and heterosexual passion on the other. From
“inside,” Cocoa struggles against divided loyalties: to whom is she most
deeply attached and whose “baby girl” will she continue to be when a
choice is demanded?
When she first returns to Willow Springs with George, such a choice
seems unnecessary. She believes that she is “a very fortunate woman” (177),
loved by and belonging to both George and her matriarchal relatives.
Nonetheless, she finds it awkward to make love with her husband in the
bedroom that is so strongly associated with her filial identity.“I felt as if we
were going to have an illicit affair. I had never slept with a man in my
grandmother’s house. . . . [T]ry as I might, I became a child again in this
house” (177). As she voices to George her wish to balance different roles,
“Ophelia and Cocoa could both live in that house with you. And we’d
leave Willow Springs none the worse for the wear” (177). However, subse-
quent events prove otherwise.
Significantly, the fever and other symptoms induced by the deadly
nightshade embedded in Cocoa’s scalp soon after she returns to Willow
132 Home Matters
a little girl again and it was so nice. My head cradled in Grandma’s soft
bosom, her hands stroking my forehead as she coaxed me to take small sips of
that awfully bitter tea. I liked it when she was there to promise me a new
dress or a set of real silk ribbons if I’d take just one more swallow, while
Mama Day would have promised me a spanking if I didn’t open my locked
mouth. Are you feeling better, baby? Yes, call me baby again. You’ll be the
one to make the gray light disappear. (261)
ming across the Sound, trying desperately to reach Cocoa, who is calling
out to him. In George’s version of the dream,“A wave of despair went over
me as I began sinking, knowing I’d never reach you” (184). His sense of
desperation may be compounded by the fact (revealed much later in the
narrative) that George cannot “swim a stroke” (263). In Cocoa’s dream,
George is swimming in the wrong direction, away from rather than toward
her cries. The dream of watery engulfment recurs when Cocoa almost suc-
cumbs to poison-induced fever; she is convinced that it is not she but
George who has “gone under” (253). When she awakens from the night-
mare, she thinks at first that she is in the embrace of her grandmother, not
George. This and later images of watery engulfment suggest Cocoa’s drift
toward death and, symbolically, the regressive thrall of the maternal
embrace: the (impossible) return to the womb.
For Mama Day the imagery of watery engulfment is more ambiguous.
Just after the hurricane that slams the island of Willow Springs and makes
the waters around the island rise to engulf the single bridge to the main-
land, Mama Day goes to visit the “other place” (254), the ancestral, original
home. The Day homestead functions in the narrative as the symbolic cen-
ter where time and space converge. Even from the perspective of an out-
sider like George, the ancestral place “resonate[s] loss. A lack of peace”
(225, Naylor’s emphasis). At that location, Mama Day retraces the emo-
tional trajectory from rupture to back to rapture, thinking back through
her foremothers—“past the mother who ended her life in The Sound, on
to the Mother who began the Days” (262).6 There, she discovers that a true
understanding of the past is necessary to make possible the future she
hopes for.
In the attic of the other place, Mama Day stumbles on several artifacts of
her family’s history, most importantly a ledger containing the bill of sale of
her great-grandmother. Only the first two letters of the First Mother’s
name, “Sa,” appear in the document, and Miranda grieves that she doesn’t
even know the full name of the founding mother of her family.“A loss that
she can’t describe sweeps over her—a missing key to an unknown door
somewhere in that house. The door to help Baby Girl” (280). But imagina-
tion supplies what time has effaced, so that “in her dreams she finally meets
Sapphira” (280). Her journey through a series of figurative doors that open
into and reveal the lost past ultimately leads her to “a vast space of glowing
light” in which she experiences herself in a way that she has not permitted
herself to feel for most of her life: as a daughter. In that moment of
enlightenment, she brings to full awareness her knowledge of lost maternal
plenitude.
Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations 135
There’s only the sense of being. Daughter. Flooding through like fine
streams of hot, liquid sugar to fill the spaces where there was never no arms
to hold her up, no shoulders for her to lay her head down and cry on, no
body to ever turn to for answers. Miranda. Sister. Little Mama. Mama Day.
Melting, melting away under the sweet flood waters pouring down to lay
bare a place she ain’t know existed: Daughter. And she opens the mouth that
ain’t there to suckle at the full breasts, deep greedy swallows of a thickness
like cream, seeping from the corners of her lips, spilling onto her chin. Full.
Full and warm to rest between the mounds of softness, to feel the beating of
a calm and steady heart. (283)
her body, but not her mind” (225). Her abandonment “broke his heart
’cause he couldn’t let her go” (308). Later, Mama Day amplifies her specu-
lation, concluding that Wade had “freed ’em all but [Sapphira], ’cause . . .
she’d never been a slave. And what she gave of her own will, she took
away” (308). Mama Day’s version makes more sense than do the other
explanations for Wade’s deed of land on the island to Sapphira and the con-
jure woman’s influential legacy of power that has passed down on the
female side of the Day family for five generations.
From her newly illuminated perspective as daughter of both “Sapphira
[who] left by wind” and “Ophelia [who] left by water” (152) and also of
Bascombe Wade, Mama Day determines that maternal power, while vital, is
not always sufficient. Indeed, “looking past the losing was to feel for the
man who built this house. . .” (285). She believes that she needs George,
whose confident belief in his own rational powers mirrors that of the
paternal side of Mama Day’s own family and would complement her own
intuitive gifts. “[T]ogether they could be the bridge for Baby Girl to walk
over. Yes, in his very hands he already held the missing piece she’d come
looking for” (285). However, Mama Day also knows that “George [does]
not need her” (285); he is capable of saving Cocoa on his own. George is
thus the object of Mama Day’s ambivalence, since she perceives him as
both necessary to her aspirations for the Day “line”—Cocoa’s eventual off-
spring—and a rival to her unacknowledged possessive maternal love. Moti-
vated by conflicting purposes, she chooses to regard George not as a man
but as a child—“‘ it’s gonna take a man to bring her peace’—and all they
had was that boy” (263)—thereby reducing his male power to something
within her maternal control.
Thus propelled by conflicting goals, Mama Day sets George a challenge
that, impeded by his stereotypical Western male rationality, he almost surely
cannot meet. Giving him two tokens from her own family that she has
found in the process of searching her ancestral home, she asks him to go to
the henhouse and seek “the old red hen that’s setting her last batch of
eggs. . . . [S]earch good in the back of her nest, and come straight back
here with whatever you find” (295). What she hopes he will find is not a
material object but a new kind of understanding. George, failing either to
grasp the nature of the test or to master the symbolic task demanded by
Mama Day, succeeds only in destroying both hen and eggs and himself.
Throughout Mama Day, hens and eggs function as symbols for Mama
Day’s life-generating powers. George’s aggressive encounter with “the old
red hen that’s setting her last batch of eggs” signifies his combative struggle
with the elderly Miranda over Cocoa’s future as well as his inability to
Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations 137
m m m
Naylor’s narrative interweaves complementary nostalgic stories, each with
its own counterstory of “fixing”—recovering, repairing—the lost past that
encompasses both succor and grief. In the narrative of heterosexual
romantic love, Cocoa and George are the central figures. Cocoa nearly loses
her life as the victim of misdirected sexual jealousy but, aided by her
maternal heritage, instead loses her husband. In the nostalgic counternarra-
tive—the story retold by Cocoa and the spirit of George years after his
actual death—loss is offset in the very fact of George’s spiritual survival
beyond the grave. The enduring nature of the love between Cocoa and
George is narratively represented by the alternating monologues that form
the holographic present tense of the novel: the complex and evolving his-
tory of their relationship. George’s status as a phantom presence from the
“other side” with whom Cocoa intimately communicates suggests the
unresolved mourning that underlies her narrative. As she phrases it,“You’re
never free from such a loss. It sits permanently in your middle, but it gets
138 Home Matters
less weighty as time goes on and becomes endurable” (308). Her narrative
memorializes her relationship with George, ostensibly still unfolding retro-
spectively fourteen years after his death: “each time I go back over what
happened, there’s some new development, some forgotten corner that puts
you in a slightly different light. . . . When I see you again, our versions will
be different still” (310–11). The romantic narrative of love and loss, of suf-
fering and sacrifice, exists in a state of continuous revision.
The underlying and competing love story, the maternal one, also traces a
nostalgic narrative of loss and mourning and a counternarrative in which
both death and erotic desire are neutralized. In that story, the central figure
is Miranda Day. Virtually all commentators on the novel admire Mama Day
as an unambiguously positive character,“that true and perfect maternal fig-
ure we all yearn to have known.”8 I regard her as a more ambiguous medi-
ator in the narrative’s triangulations of attachment, separation, and loss. As
the daughter of Ophelia, the erased maternal figure whom she lost during
childhood, and the great-aunt of another Ophelia (Cocoa) who also lost
her mother during childhood, Mama Day struggles to save her spiritual
daughter at all costs. Her possessive attachment to Baby Girl—in her
words, “the closest thing I have to calling a child my own” (294)—is her
defense against loss. Cocoa compensates her for maternal abandonment
and for the absence of a daughter of her own.
Yet that possessive attachment is ultimately incompatible with Cocoa’s
relationship with her husband. In the maternal counternarrative, Mama
Day, rather than allowing George to save his wife Ophelia on his own
terms, sets a symbolic task that frustrates his rationalism and dooms him to
failure and, ultimately, death. Though Mama Day had reasoned that
together she and George “could be the bridge for Baby Girl to walk over”
(285), as events unfold, one part of the “bridge” is destroyed: George is sac-
rificed to achieve Cocoa’s survival. Further, his death releases Mama Day
from the competition for possession of “Baby Girl,” securing Cocoa for her
own reconciliation with the past and vision of the future.
It would appear that the Great Mother Sapphira, whose contemporary
avatar is Mama Day, triumphs and matriarchy prevails through the sacrifice
of the (not-quite-perfect) romantic male lover on the altar of maternal
love. But not entirely. While Mama Day mends the pain of the loss of her
own mother and mediates the survival of her surrogate daughter, Cocoa
survives to assume the legacy of longing and unresolved mourning—the
“vacant center” (309) that marks the Day family history. As readers learn
near the end of the narrative, some years after George’s death
Ophelia/Cocoa marries a “good second-best man” (309) of whom even
Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations 139
Mama Day approves. With him, she lives neither in a metropolis (“I
couldn’t stay up in New York” [305]) nor on an island (“I couldn’t hide in
Willow Springs forever” [308]) but on the mainland (“it was easier in
Charleston; we’d never been there together” [308]). Yet, while married to a
“decent guy” (309) whose significance to her story is so slight that he
remains nameless, Cocoa remains spiritually married to George Andrews.
From Cocoa’s perspective, his essential presence in her life, and in her nar-
rative, is testimony to the enduring power—even beyond death—of
romantic love and erotic union. From Mama Day’s perspective, George has
become part of the history of the failure of such possessive attachments—
another man who “broke his heart ’cause he couldn’t let [his woman] go”
(308). Indeed, Cocoa’s story virtually mirrors George’s: she cannot “let him
go,” even in death.
Although Cocoa eventually succeeds in her desire to become a mother
herself, she gives birth to sons rather than daughters. Thus, the legacy of
the Great Mother is not absolute. In fact, the matriarchal line that Miranda
Day hoped would extend through Cocoa in fact ends with her. By the
novel’s conclusion, the multiple “sides” to the story suggested by Mama
Day—the overlapping narratives and counternarratives of Mama Day—
remain incompletely resolved.9 In Naylor’s complex triangulations, Cocoa
Day remains divided as daughter, lover/wife, and mother, figuratively strad-
dling the emotional spaces of mother and home, mourning and loss. There
can be no complete resolution of longing because the intersecting narra-
tives of love and possession are incompatible. The narrative ends inconclu-
sively, not only because Cocoa’s own story is still in progress but because
“there are just too many sides to the whole story” (311).
Willow Springs may be Paradise, but that is not where Cocoa Day lives.
m 9 m
like the community Oven, from “utility” to “shrine.” In an earlier era, the
mansion erected by a rich landowner of dubious reputation was dubbed an
“embezzler’s folly” (3); to judge from fixtures that hint at its use as a place of
sexual exploitation of women, it presumably operated as a brothel. The sus-
pected house of ill repute later evolved into a more benign kind of retreat:
a school for Native Girls, administered by a small coterie of Catholic Sisters.
Years later, its decorations and symbols conflate those antithetical functions
through the iconographies of sacred and profane traditions. Nude Venuses,
carved nymphs, and faucets that mimic the shapes of male and female geni-
talia share space with images of martyrdom, including a “space where there
used to be a Jesus” (12) and a woman with an “I-give-up face”—identified
as Saint Catherine of Siena—“serving up her breasts like two baked Alaskas
on a platter” (74, 73).6 Further, “nursing cherubim” and “nipple-tipped
doorknobs” (72) suggest an ambiguous erotic/maternal iconography of
breasts. The maternal ambience of the Convent is suggested not only
through the images of food and nurturance but through associations with
birth and the presence of infants. At least two babies are born in the Con-
vent; the sounds of children’s laughter and singing are frequently heard by
the women who live there. The narrative itself is divided into nine chapters,
concluding with both death and deliverance. (However, antithetically, the
men who storm the Convent and deliver death are also nine in number.)
Although the religious Sisters are long gone from the Convent by the
1970s—the narrative’s current time frame—a spiritual sisterhood nonethe-
less unites the women who find shelter within its walls. In its contemporary
incarnation, the Convent functions as an empowering place, a home away
from home, a kind of safe house for spiritually—and often also literally—
starving (female) souls. Within the Convent’s sphere, women who have
been betrayed, abandoned, abused, or otherwise delegitimized in the world
discover a place where they may mend their injuries and vanquish the mon-
sters that haunt them. The only behavior not permitted within the Convent
is lying. The liberating and authenticating potentiality of the place is so
powerful that the women who accidentally stumble into its welcoming
embrace ultimately discover that they have no desire to leave “the one place
they [are] free to leave” (262).
Unlike the Oven, whose functions change over time but whose mean-
ings the community of Ruby struggles to preserve unaltered, the meanings
of the Convent are fluid and unstable. Not only do they shift during the
course of the narrative but they also differ depending on the perspective,
values, and gender of the observer. For Mavis, Grace, Seneca, and Pallas,
along with Soane and Dovey Morgan and Lone DuPres—three women of
Amazing Grace and the Paradox of Paradise 145
Convent might be said to operate on the values of “the mothers’ law”: affil-
iation, nurturance, and disregard for such social distinctions as age, class,
race, and skin color. Accordingly, the opening line of the narrative—“They
shoot the white girl first” (3)—announces that one of the women who
lives at the Convent is white, but Morrison deliberately develops the narra-
tive in such a way that the reader can never know with certainty which one
it is.9 As she has indicated elsewhere, she wanted to create in imaginative
terms a space where “race both matters and is rendered impotent”
(“Home” 9).
As different as are the communities of Ruby and the Convent, they
have something essential in common: the residents of both have been “dis-
allowed”—that is, spiritually stunted by shame, rejection, and exclusion.
Moreover, the history of the one is as inextricably related to the history of
the other as the Oven is to the Convent (the first word is literally contained
in the second). Though the diverse women who arrive at the Convent do
not intentionally seek it out, they are united in that space as they flee from
traumatic circumstances in their lives. Each woman has been “disallowed”
by someone in her own family, shamed or damaged in her sense of her self
through a betrayal or desecration of her deepest attachments. Either she has
been an abused wife who turned her destructive actions toward her own
children (Mavis) or a daughter betrayed or implicitly or explicitly aban-
doned by her mother (Consolata, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas).
Mavis, the first wanderer to seek solace at the Convent, leaves her Mary-
land home following the deaths of her newborn twins, who suffocated in
the heat of a closed car as a result of her own negligence. Subsequently, she
uses that car (her husband’s cherished Cadillac) as her escape vehicle, leav-
ing behind her abusive husband and three other children. Following a brief
stay with her own mother, she drives across the country and ultimately
finds herself—having run out of gas in more than the literal sense—in the
Convent’s nonjudgmental embrace. Grace, nicknamed Gigi, is a runaway
from San Francisco, the daughter of an “unlocatable” (257) mother and a
father doing time on death row. For Gigi, the journey that ends at the Con-
vent begins with a riot in Oakland during which a black child bleeds from
a mortal gunshot wound. Though the circumstances of her early history
are vague, Gigi’s central preoccupation is eros. Her travels are prompted by
a futile search for the location of a mythical couple locked in erotic
union—a “man and woman fucking forever” (63) in a desert location sug-
gestively called Wish, Arizona. Even those who disdain the mythical cou-
ple’s unrestrained sexuality secretly need them,“needed to know they were
out there” (63). The image captures an entirely different sense of “out
148 Home Matters
there” from the one that preoccupies the repressed town fathers of Ruby.
Though Gigi never locates the legendary couple, once she reaches the
safety of the Convent she legitimizes her own wish for erotic freedom,
shedding her clothes, sunbathing naked, and engaging in a sexual liaison
with the nephew of one of Ruby’s most powerful patriarchs.
Seneca is another of the narrative’s actual and emotional orphans.
Abandoned in a public housing project in Indiana at the age of five by an
adolescent mother whom Seneca believed was her sister, she was eventually
found and placed in foster care, only to suffer sexual abuse from her foster
brother. Before Seneca finds succor in Consolata’s home for lost souls, she
is exploited in a manner only hinted at by a woman she meets on the road
who pays her a large sum of money to keep her as a sexual “pet” for several
weeks. The last of the four women to arrive at the Convent, Pallas, is also
an emotional orphan and runaway. A “sad little rich girl” (259), she runs
from the Los Angeles home of her affluent father, traveling to San Fran-
cisco with her boyfriend (a Latino maintenance man at her high school) to
find the mother whom she has not seen for thirteen years. When they find
her, the boyfriend decides he prefers the mother—named Divine Truelove—
to the daughter. (Despite the obvious irony, the mother’s name underscores
several of the narrative’s central preoccupations.) Betrayed by both lover
and mother, Pallas runs again and is forced into a lake in the dark by cruel
boys. She arrives at the Convent traumatized into speechlessness.
The antidote to each of the runaway women’s experiences of “disal-
lowance” is what might be termed “allowance”: the unconditional forgive-
ness and tolerance that permeates the Convent, signified by the sustenance
dispensed by Consolata that feeds both body and soul. Though Pallas’s
appetite had been “killed” (178) by her lover’s and her mother’s mutual
betrayal, soon after her arrival at the Convent she, like the other women,
recovers her appetite. Under the influence of Consolata’s nurturing accep-
tance—signaled by a table overflowing with delectable food—the women
slowly evolve from soul-ravaged to ravenous.
m m m
If one of Morrison’s ongoing concerns in Paradise, as in the two novels that
precede it, is the meaning of the beloved imago—the idealized, lost love
object who is imaginatively constructed through nostalgic longing—in this
narrative the notion is developed within the contexts of maternal nurtu-
rance and unconditional love, both human and divine. In the chapter enti-
tled “Divine,” significantly positioned at the midpoint of Paradise, a wedding
Amazing Grace and the Paradox of Paradise 149
drowns her self-pity and shame by liberally imbibing the wine that stocks
the cellar of the former mansion. There, “craving only oblivion” (221),
Consolata retreats from the society of the other women living in the Con-
vent and wishes for her (and their) death.
What decisively alters Consolata’s drift toward self-annihilation is a visi-
tation by a phantom presence. Like the phantom “Friend” whom Dovey
Morgan sees several times in her garden, a benign male figure approaches
the Convent and speaks with Consolata. The figure wears a cowboy hat
like that of Steward Morgan, Deacon’s identical twin whom, years earlier,
Consolata had once mistaken for her lover. Beneath the hat, the presence
reveals long “tea-colored hair” (252) and green eyes—physical characteris-
tics of Consolata herself. The phantom presence is thus suggestive of her
own hidden androgyny. The singular visitation of a figure who is both
Other and self awakens Consolata from her spiritual malaise. Wresting her-
self away from inebriation and despair, she turns her attention to the “dis-
order, deception . . . and drift” (221–2) that have eroded the serenity of the
Convent as the runaway women have brought their own quarrels and ten-
sions into it. Drawing on her spiritual legacy from the Reverend Mother,
Consolata begins to guide her figurative daughters away from their infan-
tile behavior and “babygirl wishes” (222) along a path of emotional recu-
peration and spiritual discipline. In the characteristic nurturing setting of a
table spread with food, she advises them, “I will teach you what you are
hungry for” (262) and feeds them an alternative eucharist of “bloodless
food and water alone to quench their thirst . . .” (265).
Under Consolata’s guidance, the women enact a healing ritual. Making
outlines of their naked bodies on the Convent’s cellar floor, they use paints
and chalk to express within these “templates” or “moulds” their deepest
feelings about what has happened to/in their bodies. In effect, they re-mould
themselves, beginning to purge their self-hatred, self-destructive compul-
sions, and emotional histories of victimization. For example, Seneca has for
years lacerated herself, carving in her own flesh a pattern of abuse initiated
by others during her childhood. During the moulding ritual, when she felt
“the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open
body [template] lying on the cellar floor” (265).
While the exclusive and static paradise of Ruby slowly unravels in
response to its own very worldly internal divisions, abetted by its history of
insularity and rigidity, the inclusive maternal space of the Convent nudges
its occupants in the opposite direction. To the damaged women—one who
has been a “bad mother” herself and the others who have been damaged by
abusive or neglectful “bad mothers”—Consolata functions as the idealized
Amazing Grace and the Paradox of Paradise 153
My child body, hurt and soil, leaps into the arms of a woman who teach
me my body is nothing my spirit everything. I agreed her until I met
another. My flesh is so hungry for itself it ate him. When he fell away the
woman rescue me from my body again. Twice she saves it. When her body
sickens I care for it in every way flesh works. I hold it in my arms and
154 Home Matters
between my legs. . . . After she is dead I can not get past that. My bones on
hers the only good thing. Not spirit. Bones. No different from the man. My
bones on his the only true thing. . . . Never break them in two. Never put
one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve. (263)
“But can’t you even imagine what it must feel like to have a true home? I
don’t mean heaven. I mean a real earthly home. Not some fortress you
bought and built up and have to keep everybody locked in or out . . . but
your own home, where if you go back past your great-great-grandparents,
past theirs, and theirs, past the whole of Western history, past the beginning
of organized knowledge, past pyramids and poison bows, on back to when
rain was new, before plants forgot they could sing and birds thought they
were fish, back when God said Good! Good!—there, right there where you
know your own people were born and lived and died. . . . That place. Who
was God talking to if not to my people living in my home?” (213)
as she phrases it, “bathed me in emerald water. Her voice made proud
women weep in the streets. . . . Piedade had songs that could still a wave,
make it pause in its curl listening to language it had not heard since the sea
opened. . . . Travelers refused to board homebound ships while she sang.
At night she took the stars out of her hair and wrapped me in its wool”
(284–5). The celebration of that idealized succoring figure and the place of
ultimate embrace and union with her—home as mother/Paradise—is
strategically, and ironically, positioned in the narrative just before the nine
men of Ruby stage a demonic massacre that expresses and enacts the
antithesis of Paradise: an unleashing of sanctioned violence typically asso-
ciated with aggression and war.
When Soane and Lone DuPres—spiritually awake women of Ruby
who have secretly communicated and sympathized with Consolata over
the years—hasten to the Convent after the massacre, they find Consolata
bleeding from an apparently mortal bullet wound to the head. They “close
the two pale eyes but can do nothing about the third one, wet and lidless,
in between” (291). The image of the “third eye”—literally, the site of the
bullet wound in Consolata’s forehead—also suggests the third eye of eso-
teric spiritual traditions15 and Consolata’s own gift of “in sight.” Signifi-
cantly, Consolata’s final word is “Divine” (291).
Virtually the only thing that people can agree on concerning the ram-
page at the Convent and the mysterious disappearance of its apparently
slaughtered female occupants is that there is no single version of events
about which everyone concurs. Apart from Deacon Morgan, who remains
silent, “every one of the assaulting men had a different tale” (297). Lone
DuPres, the Cassandra figure whose warnings are never heeded by the men
of Ruby, is convinced that God performed a miracle comparable to
Christ’s ascension—that He “swept up and received His servants in broad
daylight . . . for Christ’s sake!” (298) The Reverends Pulliam and Misner,
who try to account for the version of events that has begun to take on the
status of “gospel” (297)—the presumably murdered women “took other
shapes and disappeared into thin air” (296)—inevitably disagree on “the
meaning of the ending” (297). One meaning is the (re)introduction of
mortality into Paradise. The brutal assault on the Convent women by the
nine men of Ruby who represent and enact the community’s deepest fears
of lawlessness and threat of Otherness is closely followed by the death of
the (symbolically named) defective child, Save-Marie, the first person to die
in that “town full of immortals” (296) for an entire generation.
Only three people of Ruby are permitted to glimpse another “meaning
of the ending.” The first is Deacon Morgan who, having failed to prevent
156 Home Matters
his twin from firing the shot that fatally wounds Consolata, repudiates the
men’s rationalization that they acted against the Convent women in “self-
defense” (290). Uncharacteristically, he advises the other agents of the ram-
page,“This is our doing. Ours alone. And we bear the responsibility” (291).
Later, the repentant Deacon begins a “long remorse at having become what
the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout
and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different” (302). The others
who are granted insight into the “meaning of the ending” are Reverend
Misner and Anna Flood, who later return to the Convent to try to make
sense of what happened there. Drawn to its garden, filled with evidence of
the perennial cycle of “blossom and death” (304), each senses the beckon-
ing of an entrance into another realm, a door or window to “the other
side” (305).
Through that opening in the Garden, the patient reader is granted a
glimpse of the state of grace that each of the novel’s lost women achieves:
consolation and reconciliation. The final segment of Paradise provides a
series of what (to invoke the Homeric epic tradition) might be termed
“recognition scenes.” Each of the four wayfarers who discovered her self in
the Convent appears once more as if herself a phantom presence from Out
There—this time, understood as the “other side” of the beckoning
door/window. In each instance, the woman appears either to affirm a rela-
tionship with a beloved person from her past or to claim a kind of repara-
tion from one who absolutely betrayed or “disallowed” her. Appropriately,
given the narrative’s emphasis on the wished-for gratification of appetites
both worldly and otherworldly and on parent-child relationships, all of the
meetings involve an encounter between a daughter and her mother (or, in
one instance, her father); further, the two positive recognitions occur
within the context of sharing bread. Gigi, appearing to her startled father
during his lunch break at a prison farm, gently assures him that he will
indeed “hear from [her]” again (310). Also over lunch, Mavis meets her sur-
prised daughter Sal in what leads to a vivid and emotionally moving recon-
ciliation. In response to the daughter’s question, “You okay?” Mavis
responds, “I’m perfect.” Sal adds, “I always loved, always, even when,” to
which Mavis responds, “I know that, Sal. Know it now anyway” (315), as
she kisses her daughter’s cheek and disappears into a crowd.
By contrast, Pallas and Seneca appear to the mothers who betrayed or
abandoned them and withhold forgiveness or reconciliation. By disdaining
connection in any form, each in effect mirrors the original rejection by the
“bad mother” who “disallowed” her. Though “the smile on Pallas’ face” is
“beatific” (311), it is not intended for the astonished mother to whom she
Amazing Grace and the Paradox of Paradise 157
appears. Rather, just as the daughter lost the power of speech in response
to her mother’s betrayal and her later traumatizing experience in a lake,
Divine Truelove is struck voiceless, unable to call out to capture her daugh-
ter’s attention. Similarly, when Seneca’s mother sights her in a crowd,
Seneca—“blood running from her hands” like stigmata (316)—denies the
identification. In a comment that, like each of the other Convent women’s
statements, is open to double meaning, she adds, “That’s okay. Everybody
makes mistakes” (317). In Morrison’s parable of spiritual growth, it is not
the proud, self-declared “immortal” inhabitants of Ruby but the wayward,
flawed women of the Convent who are given the opportunity to “fix”
their damaged pasts and who are granted (narratively, at least) transcen-
dence over death.
Paradise concludes with an image that recapitulates one final time the
nostalgic “wish for permanent happiness” (306) associated with the title
word. Pertinently, the image is framed in a setting that embodies the earli-
est experience of mother/home/Paradise. The sea gently lapping the beach
suggests the paradigmatic site of home as womb: prenatal, amniotic bliss.
Piedade sings a lullaby of solace as two unidentified women—one older
and “black as firewood” (318), the other younger, with skin “all the colors
of seashells,” “tea brown hair,” and “emerald eyes” (318) like Consolata—
ponder memories “neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the com-
pany of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the
fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back
to love begun” (318, my emphasis). When, reminiscent of the motions asso-
ciated with giving birth, “the ocean heaves[,] sending rhythms of water
ashore,” Piedade looks “to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but
different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for
they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shoul-
dering the endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise”
(318, my emphasis).
The inverted echo of Consolata’s name and her visionary fantasy of
Piedade’s realm thus anticipate the novel’s concluding word: “Paradise.”
Although Morrison does not invoke the Portuguese word that is closely
related to piedade—saudade—its signification of nostalgic longing saturates
the closing images of the novel: consolation (Consolata), pity (Piedade),
and solace. Yet the novel’s idyllic coda is a decidedly qualified and even
ironic one since, as the story of Ruby demonstrates, perfection is a static
(and humanly unattainable) condition. The dynamics of internal division
and change—processes occurring not only within communities but within
individuals—make the tranquil changelessness of Paradise impossible. In
158 Home Matters
the novel, Reverend Misner observes, “How exquisitely human was the
wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became
trying to achieve it” (306). As Morrison has mused elsewhere on the
destructive potentiality that exists within even the most virtuous causes,
“The overwhelming question for me . . . was how does it happen that peo-
ple who have a very rich, survivalist, flourishing revolutionary impetus, end
up either like their oppressor, or self-destructive in a way that represents the
very thing they were running from.”16 Speaking at a symposium entitled
“Imagining Paradise,” Morrison reiterated her conviction that an “exclu-
sionary paradise” is an inevitable “part of the history of western thought:
‘Be good so you go to heaven and won’t be with bad people.’” 17 Inherent
in a vision of perfection based on a principle of exclusion and “disal-
lowance”—the suppression (and repression) of the Other—is the destruc-
tive potentiality that intrudes from both inside and outside the community
and the self.
Despite Morrison’s expressed intention to imagine a paradise that is nei-
ther exclusive nor static,18 the paradoxical image with which the novel
closes belies these intentions. The final sentence suggests an Edenic space
where the women (no men are mentioned) pause before resuming their
tasks in the ordinary world—“the endless work they were created to do
down here in Paradise” (318). In the imaginary space where maternal nur-
turance and filial affection are celebrated/elevated, where racial differences
cease to matter, and where earthly and spiritual desires converge, even the
most injured and wayward daughters may achieve a state of grace. In that
paradoxical Paradise, they find themselves both safe and saved: at home at
last in the idyllic but—in more than one sense—exclusive embrace of the
Go(o)d Mother.
Fixing the Past,
Re-Placing Nostalgia
A lthough it may be true that one “can’t go home again,” the eight
writers considered in this study express a variety of ways to return
imaginatively, through memory and art, to the original home—
the place that represents emotional succor, intimacy, and plenitude. If the
past may be understood as the home/homeland from which we are all
160 Home Matters
died during her childhood and for whom she has deferred mourning, at a
high emotional cost. Additionally, Codi Noline struggles to find the truth
of a family history from which she has been disconnected as a result of her
father’s falsifications. Ultimately, she reaches the healing knowledge that “all
griefs are bearable” (Animal Dreams, 327). Reconnecting with her own
maternal sources in both directions, as it were, she resolves mourning, fix-
ing (securing) the memory of her lost mother and fixing (repairing) the
lost pregnancy of her youth by choosing motherhood with the same man as
the child’s father a second time. Kingsolver also complicates the notions of
home and loss represented in the work of Woolf and Lessing. Codi’s
Native American lover functions as her spiritual guide to a deeper “ground
orientation”—the Native American spiritual vision of home/mother as
the land itself. The outcome of Codi’s multilayered personal salvaging
operation is a reparative vision of herself within a larger web of belonging:
a community, a reclaimed family history, and spiritual grace.
The narratives discussed with reference to cultural dislocation engage
with larger contexts for nostalgia and mourning that extend some of the
issues raised in the work of Woolf and Lessing. The matter of home
becomes inseparable from issues of homeland, exile, and loss that bear on
an entire cultural group or community. Thus, Kingsolver’s Taylor Greer,
arbitrarily thrust into motherhood across cultures, discovers the profound
cultural disruptions and dislocations upon which her attachment to a
Cherokee child is predicated. Julia Alvarez’s Yolanda García of How the
García Girls Lost Their Accents engages nostalgia as a way to fix/repair the
path home across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Her narrative both
defines and embodies a reparative vision that neutralizes and transmutes
loss. By figuratively unraveling and reknitting into a different and more sat-
isfying design the strands of her family’s history and her own experience of
exile, Yolanda fixes the past: geopolitical dislocation is repatterned to artic-
ulate a restorative hybrid vision of cultural and linguistic identity. Unlike
Kingsolver’s Codi Noline and Taylor Greer—both, like Yolanda García,
young women on the verge of adult life and generativity—Alvarez’s Yo
affirms herself in a manner more like Woolf ’s Lily Briscoe: as an indepen-
dent artist rather than as either daughter or mother.
The narratives considered in “Midlife Nostalgia and Cultural Mourn-
ing,” written by authors a generation older than Kingsolver and Alvarez,
focus on characters approaching the coming of age. Tyler’s Delia Grinstead,
Marshall’s Avey Johnson, and Morrison’s Violet and Joe Trace trace differ-
ent trajectories of the journey home and produce different resolutions
of nostalgia as a psychic defense against loss. Of the female characters
162 Home Matters
considered here, the one who most explicitly fixes her past by literally
revising her life is Anne Tyler’s Delia Grinstead. As Delia impulsively runs
away from home and installs herself in a parallel life, Tyler traces an
improbable comic trajectory that discloses a darker subtext. Although
Delia’s mother died during her childhood, Tyler makes little of that fact,
though it may account for some of Delia’s anxieties about her own mater-
nal role. It is her father who shapes Delia’s orientation toward attachment
and loss. Ultimately, through belatedly mourning his death, Delia (also
belatedly) acknowledges and resolves mourning for earlier phases of her-
self. Fathoming the underlying meaning of her home/sickness, she surren-
ders the outdated versions of herself as daughter, mother, and
child-wife—roles that have persisted, ironically, as a result of her never hav-
ing left the original safe house of her filial home and domestic space.
Paule Marshall’s widowed Avey Johnson, compelled to confront not
only her personal history but the cultural history from which she is equally
disaffected, ultimately returns home transformed by her island sojourn.
Gaining, like Kingsolver’s Codi Noline, a new “ground orientation,” signi-
fied by her participation in ceremonial African dances of reparation and
renewal, she confronts her spiritual disaffection and discovers her home
within a larger cultural history and geography. Avey, like Codi, is aided in
her homeward journey by a male spiritual guide who steers her past obsta-
cles in her progress toward a more authentic vision of herself and her his-
tory. Finally, like Codi, Avey moves from “no-line” to recover her “line”
within a vital communal web of spiritual kinship.
In Toni Morrison’s Jazz, what I have termed the beloved imago functions
as the embodiment of individual longing/mourning for the absent/lost
love object who stands for an entire collective history of loss. Both Joe and
Violet Trace are haunted by “mother-hunger.” Dorcas functions imagina-
tively as both lost mother (for Joe) and lost daughter (for Violet). Addition-
ally, she is the sacrificial figure through whom both Joe and Violet
accommodate themselves to the loss of youth and passion during a period
when—as Morrison imaginatively renders what was happening to African
Americans living on the edges of the Jazz Age—America itself seemed
obsessed with both. Combining stories and figures from different emo-
tional and cultural histories and times, Morrison melds several facets of
cultural dislocation and longing for belonging in African American expe-
rience during Reconstruction and the Great Migration, rendering the cul-
tural mourning that signifies a collective loss with sources in an even earlier
era of involuntary exile and dislocation.
The self-reflexive narrating voice of Jazz fixes the past in still another
Fixing the Past, Re-Placing Nostalgia 163
sense. Revising several stories in the very process of telling them, the voice
exemplifies the postmodern understanding that the past is not a set of fixed
facts but a fluid matrix out of which stories assume diverse forms. History
becomes fiction or—to invoke Morrison’s postmodern word play—it
becomes “le story.” In this sense, the past, because it remains open to multi-
ple interpretations, is neither irreparable nor fixed but indeterminate. Thus,
fiction can imaginatively fix (secure, reset) events that happened in the past.
The reconciliation of Joe and Violet Trace, ironically made possible by
Dorcas’s death, revises longings and acknowledges losses that might have
resulted—as the “unreliable” narrator had anticipated—in a destructive
outcome.
Cocoa Day of Naylor’s Mama Day, motherless and childless like King-
solver’s Codi Noline, struggles within a more polarized legacy, in this
instance mediated by the maternal great-aunt who stands in for her lost
mother. Whereas in Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, Loyd Peregrina functions
as both nurturing lover and spiritual guide, Naylor’s George Andrews is an
earnest but more ambiguous lover/spouse who lacks the spiritual knowl-
edge sustained by Mama Day and the Great Mother of Willow Springs. In
her multivoiced narrative, Naylor interweaves the romantic love story of
Cocoa and George with the counter love story: Mama Day’s need to pro-
tect—and to possess—her surrogate daughter as a defense against abandon-
ments and losses in her own emotional history. However, the “four-sided
story” of Mama Day resists “fixing” despite Mama Day’s ambivalent collab-
oration/contest with George Andrews over Cocoa’s deliverance and despite
Cocoa’s own efforts to mediate between competing desires and loyalties.
Morrison’s Paradise fittingly concludes this study, defining the outer lim-
its of the meanings of longing and belonging, mother and home, emo-
tional loss and spiritual reparation. Through Consolata, the soul-damaged
women who reside at the pointedly named Convent find a safe house and
a nurturing spiritual mother and guide. But ironies abound in Paradise (if
not in Paradise): competing visions of perfection are placed in direct con-
frontation with each other. Like Naylor’s Mama Day, Paradise traces a strug-
gle between matriarchal and patriarchal power and complementary visions
of home and Paradise. Further, Morrison narratively articulates a reparative
fantasy, a defense against the soul-destroying experiences of social and psy-
chological “disallowance” in African American historical experience. Yet
that healing vision ironically betrays the limits of a nostalgic vision of Par-
adise. As rendered by Consolata, the fairy tale realm presided over by
Piedade—characterized by “the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at
home” (Paradise 318)—is a timeless, static place of female exclusivity.
164 Home Matters
actually may have been experienced in the vanished past and that which
never could have been. Even as the remembered/imagined vision of home
is a construction, it also constructs—and stokes, and sometimes even
heals—the longing for belonging. Home functions in the (literary) imagi-
nation not as a tangible place but as a liminal site, what cultural anthropol-
ogist Victor Turner defines as “a place that is not a place, and a time that is
not a time.”1 In that domain, in that transitional space or time where mean-
ings remain temporarily open or suspended, the characters considered
here—and their authors and readers—may discover that home is ultimately
a state of mind. It may even be, for a few, a state of grace.
Notes
create literature, recite poetry, remember the past and experience the pre-
sent. Basically, we writers are telling the story of that return—either in the
form of a New Testament or an Old Testament variation on the creation
myth. It’s a return to innocence, to childhood, to our sources.” Qtd. in William
Gass, “The Philosophical Significance of Exile” (interview with Nuruddin
Farah, Han Vladislav, and Jorge Edwards) in Literature in Exile, ed. John Glad
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 4. Like many comments by male
writers regarding the effects of exile on their writing, Farah’s observation
omits mention of the female dimension: Eve’s expulsion, with Adam, from
Paradise. For feminist postcolonial approaches to the notion of home, see
Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relations and
Twentieth-Century Fiction (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996); and Caren Kaplan, “Territorializations: The Rewriting of
Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987):
187–98.
5. Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) was the foundational text for
bookshelves of studies elaborating on and qualifying this conjunction of
ideas. Among the most influential studies in feminist critical scholarship is
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s elucidation of the figurative meanings of
domestic spaces, The Madwoman in the Attic. Focusing on nineteenth-century
British women writers, Gilbert and Gubar’s groundbreaking study inaugu-
rated a central premise in feminist literary criticism: that literary narratives
might be more fully understood through the intersecting contexts not only
of culture and history but of gender and patriarchal ideology. Figurations—
and configurations—of space derive their power as metaphors from social
arrangements and imbedded ideological assumptions about differences in
gender. See The Madwoman in the Attic:The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-
Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
Annette Kolodny’s work also pivots on spatial conceptualizations of women’s
writing. See The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in Amer-
ican Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
6. Roberta Rubenstein, Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1987).
7. See Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Motherhood: Psychoanalysis and the
Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Develop-
ment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
8. In Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities, Brenda O. Daly and
Maureen T. Reddy coin the term “daughter-centricity” to highlight the
one-sided emphasis in second wave feminist theory and criticism on the
daughter’s subjectivity at the expense of the mother’s (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1991), 2. Marianne Hirsch provides a needed balance by
analyzing the mother as subject rather than object in fiction by women. See
Notes 169
Chapter 1
Yearning and Nostalgia: Fiction and Autobiographical Writings
of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing
1. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (1962; rpt., New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1989), 137. Future references in the text are to this edition,
abbreviated as Notebook.
2. Doris Lessing, Under My Skin (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 12, Less-
ing’s emphasis.
3. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being: Unpublished
Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976), 75. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition,
abbreviated as Moments and (for the essay) as “Sketch.”
4. Such vivid, almost photographically exact images are termed eidetic images.
Barbara G. Myerhoff offers an especially rich description of such memo-
ries: “Memory is a continuum ranging from vague, dim shadows to the
brightest, most vivid totality. It may offer opportunity not merely to recall
the past but to relive it, in all its original freshness, unaltered by intervening
changes and reflections. Such magical Proustian moments are pinpoints of
the greatest intensity, when a sense of the past never being truly lost is expe-
rienced. The diffuseness of life is then transcended, the sense of duration
overcome, and all of one’s self and one’s memories are felt to be universally
valid. Simultaneity replaces sequence and a sense of oneness with one’s past
is achieved. Often such moments involve childhood memories, and then
one experiences the self as it was originally, and knows beyond doubt that
one is the same person as that child who still dwells within a time-altered
body.”“Re-membered Lives,” Parabola V, no. 1 (February 1980): 76.
5. A Room of One’s Own (1929; rpt., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1989), 76.
172 Notes
6. Doris Lessing, African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (New York: Harper-
Collins 1992), 11. Subsequent references in the text are abbreviated as
Laughter.
7. Doris Lessing,“My Mother’s Life,” Granta 17 (Fall 1985): 236.
8. Doris Lessing, Martha Quest, vol. 1 of Children of Violence (1952, rpt., New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 32. Subsequent references in the text are
to this edition.
9. Judith Kegan Gardiner, focusing on the effect of exile on Lessing’s writing,
draws different conclusions from mine, observing that “Lessing expresses a
nostalgia for the space of the colony as opposed to the civilization of the
center, nostalgia not for home but for homelessness, for boundlessness.”
“The Exhilaration of Exile: Rhys, Stead, and Lessing,” in Women’s Writing in
Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1989), 145.
10. Doris Lessing, A Proper Marriage, in vol. 1 of Children of Violence (1954; rpt.,
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 341. In her analysis of the uses of
memory in women’s fiction, Gayle Greene discusses nostalgia in Lessing’s
Children of Violence and The Golden Notebook (see especially 302–3 and
308–10). She argues that, although nostalgia is not gender specific, it has “dif-
ferent meanings for men and women. Though from one perspective, women
might seem to have more incentives than men to be nostalgic—deprived of
outlets in the present, they live more in the past . . .—from another perspec-
tive, women have little to be nostalgic about, for the good old days when
the grass was greener and young people knew their places was also the time
when women knew their place, and it is not place to which most women
want to return.” “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory,” Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society 16, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 296.
11. Betsy Draine, focusing on the relation between formal elements and mean-
ing within Lessing’s fiction, argues that Anna’s nostalgia conveys a longing
less for place than for a more abstract sense of order through achieved
form—“a yearning for the recovery of the sense of form, the stage illusion
of moral certainty, innocence, unity, and peace. In effect, this yearning is a
desire for unreality and nonexistence. Since the yearning can never be ful-
filled, it always leads to painful frustration and often to nihilism and despair”
(71). Moreover, the notebooks each express a “pattern of opposition
between nostalgia and awareness . . .” (72), including Anna-Ella’s “long bat-
tle with nostalgia for the lost condition of naive commitment to an order of
meaning . . .” (81). Substance Under Pressure:Artistic Coherence and Evolving Form
in the Novels of Doris Lessing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
12. Elsewhere, I have explored these issues in greater detail, concluding that
“there is no single authoritative view of events” in The Golden Notebook and
that “all versions of Anna’s experiences are fictions, though each is true in
its own way. . . . The ‘truth’ is not in any one version of Anna’s experiences
Notes 173
19. The image of an Edenic city occurs throughout Lessing’s work. It is a leit-
motif of Children of Violence, from the adolescent Martha Quest’s visionary
fantasy of an ideal city in Martha Quest to the concluding volume of the
Children of Violence series, pointedly titled The Four-Gated City. As I have
noted elsewhere, “The image of the city also reproduces the configuration
of the sacred city, laid out with four cardinal orientations whose center
symbolizes the sacred center of the universe.” Novelistic Vision, 127; see also
37–8, 56, and 164. Ellen Cronan Rose traces the sources of the image of
the città felice in Lessing’s work to its sources in medieval texts. See “Doris
Lessing’s Città Felice,” in Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, ed. Claire Sprague
and Virginia Tiger (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 141–53. Claire Sprague, in a
chapter pertinently titled “From Mud Houses to Sacred Cities,” also consid-
ers the persistence of the image and its conflation of past and future fan-
tasies; she cites Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel’s observation, in their
study of utopian thought, that “‘ the nostalgic mode has been an auxiliary of
utopia’” (155). Sprague traces the image of the “archetypally lost city” from
Children of Violence through Lessing’s series of intergalactic novels, Canopus
at Argos. See Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repeti-
tion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 168–80.
20. Doris Lessing, Canopus in Argos: Archives. Re: Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta
(New York: Knopf, 1979), 6–7. Subsequent references in the text are to this
edition, abbreviated as Shikasta.
21. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; rpt., New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1990), 34. Subsequent references in this text are to this edition.
22. Elizabeth Abel also observes a kind of nostalgia in the narrative, though one
quite different in emphasis than the one I explore here. As she phrases it,
“Critics frequently note the elegiac tone which allies Mrs. Dalloway with the
modernist lament for a lost plenitude, but nostalgia in this text is for a
specifically female presence absent from contemporary life” (42). She reads
the recollected scene between Clarissa and Sally Seton, interrupted by Peter
Walsh’s appearance, as a “psychological allegory”:“the moment of exclusive
female connection is shattered by masculine intervention . . . [suggesting] a
revised Oedipal configuration: the jealous male attempting to rupture the
exclusive female bond, insisting on the transference of attachment to the
man, demanding heterosexuality” (32–33). Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of
Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
23. Woolf describes the “seductions by half-brothers” in two different autobio-
graphical accounts: “A Sketch of the Past” and “22 Hyde Park Gate,” in
Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 69, 155, 182. Louise
DeSalvo, exploring the implications of Virginia Woolf ’s sexual abuse during
childhood, concludes that “the pattern of abuse lasted for many, many years,
from roughly 1888, when [Woolf] was six or seven, through 1904; that she
Notes 175
was abused by more than one family member; that it was a central formative
experience for her; and that a pattern of abuse existed within the Stephen
family.” Virginia Woolf:The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and
Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 101. Some Woolf scholars have disputed
several of DeSalvo’s assertions.
24. “Old Bloomsbury,” in Moments of Being, 161.
25. Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco argues that, “Although different objects from
various periods of one’s life can evoke nostalgic yearnings, ultimately they
are derivative substitutes for the pre-oedipal mother.” “Reminiscence and
Nostalgia: The Pleasure and Pain of Remembering,” in The Course of Life:
Psychoanalytic Contributions Toward Understanding Personality Development, vol.
III: Adulthood and the Aging Process, ed. Stanley I. Greenspan and George H.
Pollock (Washington, DC: DHHS Pub. No. (ADM) 81–1000), 121.
26. In an early autobiographical commentary written during her twenties,Woolf
describes the relationship between her mother and her older half-sister,
Stella, in terms that both idealize the bond and suggest her own unfulfilled
desires for merger with the mother they shared: “It was beautiful, it was
almost excessive; for it had something of the morbid nature of an affection
between two people too closely allied for the proper amount of reflection
to take place between them; what her mother felt passed almost instantly
through Stella’s mind; there was no need for the brain to ponder and criti-
cize what the soul knew.”“Reminiscences,” in Moments of Being, 43.
27. To the Lighthouse (1927; rpt., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989),
51. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition, abbreviated as Light-
house.
28. Thomas C. Caramagno, tracing the ramifications of Woolf ’s mood disorder
through her fiction and autobiographical writings, proposes that such
intense nostalgia might have been generated by her bipolar emotional ill-
ness. While “normal” individuals react to the death of a parent or loved one
with “sadness, mourning, and loneliness,” the “biochemically depressed”
respond to such events to an emotionally intensified degree that typically
includes “an intense sense of abandonment and certain doom.” Further,
“convinced that they alone are inadequate and impotent, and feeling as
helpless and as vulnerable as infants, these patients often look back nostalgi-
cally to what now seems to them an idyllic childhood union with an ideal-
ized parent, as they bemoan their loss or blame themselves for this fateful
turn of events.” The Flight of the Mind:Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depres-
sive Illness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 115.
29. A number of Woolf scholars have focused on the problematic relationship
between Lily and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, including the possible
parallels that may be drawn between the fictional characters and Virginia
Woolf ’s relationship with her own mother, Julia Stephen. Using psychoana-
lytic approaches, Ellen Bayuk Rosenman and Elizabeth Abel both identify
176 Notes
“the body of the mother has been demystified; it is no longer seen as the
only source of nurture and stability. . . . Woolf no longer desired to sacri-
fice her autonomy for the sake of becoming a child again” (269).
30. In describing the “mourning-liberation process,” psychoanalyst George H.
Pollock argues that “the successful completion of the mourning process
results in creative outcome. This end result can be a great work of art, music,
sculpture, literature, poetry, philosophy, or science, where the creator has the
spark of genius or talent that is not related to mourning per se. Indeed the
creative product may reflect the mourning process in theme, style, form, and
content, and it may itself stand as a memorial.” The Mourning-Liberation Process,
2 vols. (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1989), vol. 1, 114.
31. Virginia Tiger notes the correspondences between the autobiographical
Maude Tayler and the figures of May Quest of Lessing’s Children of Violence
and Maudie of The Diaries of Jane Somers. “Doris Lessing, ‘Impertinent
Daughters’ and ‘Autobiography (Part Two): My Mother’s Life’ ” (review),
Doris Lessing Newsletter 10, no .2 (Fall 1986): 14. Claire Sprague elaborates
on Lessing’s multiple fictional representations and revisions of her knotted
relationship with her mother. Sprague 108–28.
32. Memoirs of a Survivor (1975; rpt., New York: Bantam, 1979), front dust jacket.
Subsequent references in the text are to this edition, abbreviated as Memoirs.
33. Lessing’s mother later chose to go by her middle name, Maude. “Imperti-
nent Daughters,” 53.
34. Lessing remarked, in response to an interviewer’s question about her mother’s
self-proclaimed unsatisfying life in Southern Rhodesia, “Well, of course she
wanted to go Home. . . .” Eve Bertelsen, “Interview with Doris Lessing,” in
Doris Lessing, ed. Eve Bertelsen (Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 104.
35. Jacoby, 7.
36. Doris Lessing, Love, Again (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 216. Subse-
quent references in the text are to this edition.
37. Greene, 298.
Chapter 2
Home is (Mother) Earth: Animal Dreams, Barbara Kingsolver
1. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 13.
Subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
2. Interview with Donna Perry, Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out (New
Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 147.
3. Eliot acknowledged his significant indebtedness to Jessie Weston’s now-clas-
sic study of the Grail Legend, From Ritual to Romance, and to James Frazer’s
The Golden Bough. Weston posited the central elements of the Waste Land
story: “a close connection between the vitality of a certain King, and the
prosperity of his kingdom; the forces of the ruler being weakened or
178 Notes
destroyed, by wound, sickness, old age, or death, the land becomes Waste,
and the task of the hero is that of restoration” (23). Later she clarifies the
sources of these legends in ancient rituals of fertility: “in the earliest, and
least contaminated, version of the Grail story the central figure would be
dead, and the task of the Quester that of restoring him to life . . .” (120).
Weston, From Ritual to Romance (1920; rpt., Garden City, New York: Dou-
bleday, 1957). My reading of Animal Dreams with reference to the wasteland
theme is not based on any statements by Kingsolver concerning Eliot’s
poem or its antecedents. Rather, given the wealth of allusions to the motif
that appear in the narrative, I assume the author’s familiarity with the arche-
typal story.
4. In Ceremony, a young man of mixed Laguna (Pueblo) and white blood
returns to his New Mexican pueblo after the Second World War and strug-
gles with his profound feelings of loss and alienation, believing that he is
somehow personally responsible for the multiyear drought in his area.
Through various healing ceremonies of fertility and renewal, he is ulti-
mately reconnected to the land and to himself. See Roberta Rubenstein,
“Boundaries of the Cosmos,” in Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 190–202. In an interview, King-
solver affirmed her “kinship” (159) with Leslie Silko, whom she regards as
one of her favorite writers, and acknowledged that her own worldview is
closer to the Native American than to the Judeo-Christian position. See
Donna Perry, Backtalk, 148. At least one other Native American author, Jim
Welch, incorporates the wasteland motif in his novel, Winter in the Blood
(1974). See Kenneth Lincoln’s analysis of the wasteland parallels in Welch’s
narrative in Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983): 153, 155, 162. Several other narratives by Native American
authors represent an ailing protagonist whose cure comes as he recovers his
tribal identity. See William Bevis,“Native American Novels: Homing In,” in
Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature, ed. Brian Swann and
Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987): 580–620.
5. Carlo’s vocation may be an ironic allusion to ancient fertility myths: the dis-
memberment and recovery of the “severed parts” of Adonis/Osiris were
associated with rituals of renewal and fertility. See Sir James George Frazer,
The Golden Bough, abridged ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1940): 365–6,
378–9.
6. “. . . the Doctor, or Medicine Man, did, from the very earliest ages, play an
important part in Dramatic Fertility Ritual . . . that of restoring to life and
health the dead, or wounded, representative of the Spirit of Vegetation.”
Weston, 109. In Silko’s Ceremony there are several healers, including the
Medicine Man Betonie and the spirit woman, Ts’eh, through whose inter-
vention Tayo reconnects with his Laguna tradition, participates in cere-
monies of purification and renewal, and recovers from his inner deadness.
Notes 179
Chapter 3
Home/lands and Contested Motherhood:
The Bean Trees and Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver
1. Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees (1988; rpt., New York: HarperCollins,
1992), 10. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
2. Interview with Donna Perry, in Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out (New
Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 165.
3. Barbara Kingsolver, Pigs in Heaven (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 61.
Subsequent references in the text are to this edition.
4. Kingsolver did not learn of her Cherokee blood until she was “much
older.” “My Cherokee great-grandmother was quite deliberately left out of
the family history for reasons of racism and embarrassment about mixed
blood. But her photograph captured my imagination when I was a little girl,
180 Notes
and I always felt a longing to have known her. I felt that there was some sort
of wisdom there that I needed.” Backtalk, 148.
5. Barbara Kingsolver, Homeland and Other Stories (New York: Harper and
Row, 1989), 18.
6. According to Thomas E. Mails, a scholar of Cherokee culture,“The celestial
cluster that the Cherokees called the Seven Stars was regarded with particu-
lar reverence.” The Cherokee People: The Story of the Cherokees from Earliest
Origins to Contemporary Times (Tulsa, OK: Council Oak Books, 1992), 160.
Mails cites the principal nineteenth-century ethnographer of Cherokee
culture, John Howard Payne, who recorded a different version from the one
Kingsolver uses. According to Payne’s informants, the legend was based on
“a family of eight brothers who once sneaked into the town council house
and beat the sacred drum kept there for ceremonial purposes. Some of the
elders of the town caught and reproved the brothers, who became angry,
seized the drum, and flew upwards into the sky with it, defiantly beating
upon it as they went. Finally, seven of the brothers became seven stars. The
other brother, however, fell back to the ground so hard that his head stuck
deep into it, and he became a cedar tree. This tree would stand forever, and
it had the peculiar ability to bleed like a human being whenever it was
bruised or cut.” The Cherokee People, 160.
Chapter 4
Inverted Narrative as the Path/Past Home:
How the García Girls Lost their Accents, Julia Alvarez
1. Amy Kaminsky, Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American
Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993), 30;
emphasis in original. Kaminsky’s study focuses on Latina writers in exile
who write in their native language.
2. Ibid., 33.
3. Julia Alvarez, Something to Declare (Chapel Hill, N C: Algonquin Books,
1998), 139. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition, abbreviated
as Declare.
4. Julia Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991; rpt., New York:
Penguin Plume, 1992), 8. Subsequent references in the text are to this edi-
tion, abbreviated as García Girls.
5. Jonathan Mandell, “Uprooted but Still Blooming,” New York Newsday, 17
November 1994, sec. B, p. 4.
6. Alvarez credits her reading of Kingston’sThe Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girl-
hood among Ghosts (1976) as a turning point in her conception of writing
because it showed her the possibility of articulating her own bicultural
experience. Kingston “used Chinese words and had Chinese characters, and
she talked about being in the middle of two worlds, those mixed loyalties,
Notes 181
those pulls in different directions, and I read that and I said ‘Oh my God,
you can write about this.’” Mandell, sec. B, p. 12, emphasis in original.
Acknowledging her major literary influences, Alvarez notes,“When I read a
page of my own writing, it’s as if it were a palimpsest, and behind the more
prominent, literary faces whose influence shows through the print
(Scheherazade, George Eliot, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Maxine
Hong Kingston), I see other faces: real-life ladies who traipsed into my
imagination with broom and dusting rag. . . .” Declare 149.
7. Jean Starobinski,“The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes 54 (1966): 130.
Chapter 5
Home/sickness and the Five Stages of Grief:
Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler
1. Several commentators on Tyler’s fiction have noted the centrality of the
theme of homesickness in her novels. Commenting on Tyler’s Dinner at the
Homesick Restaurant, Joseph Voelker observes that “homesickness” comes to
encompass several different meanings, including “not only sickness for home
(longing, nostalgia), but also sickness of it (the need to escape from the inva-
siveness of family) and sickness from it (the psychic wounds that human
beings inevitably carry as a result of having had to grow up as children in
families). ” Art and the Accidental in Anne Tyler (Columbia: University of Mis-
souri Press, 1989), 76. John Updike proposes that Tyler’s fiction pivots on the
tensions between “stasis and movement, between home and escape. Home is
what we’re mired in; Miss Tyler in her darker mode celebrates domestic
claustrophobia and private stagnation.” “Loosened Roots,” in Critical Essays
on Anne Tyler, ed. Alice Hall Petry (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 89.
2. Anne Tyler, Ladder of Years (New York: Knopf, 1995), 15. Subsequent refer-
ences in the text are to this edition, abbreviated as Ladder.
3. Anne Tyler, Celestial Navigations (New York: Knopf, 1974), 125–6.
4. Doris Lessing,“To Room Nineteen,” in A Man and Two Women (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1963), 278–316.
5. Virginia Schaefer Carroll proposes that the changes in Delia’s reading habits
track the stages of her inner transformation, evolving from “virtuous repres-
sion of preference in the name of self-improvement” (102) to critical reading
for the purpose of “construct[ing] meaning and synthesis” (103). “Wrestling
with Change: Discourse Strategies in Anne Tyler,” Frontiers 19, no.1 (1998).
6. The word “nothing” links Delia’s inner stripping with that of King Lear,
who initially is angered by what he regards as betrayal by his youngest and
favorite daughter, Cordelia. Only belatedly does he come to understand
another meaning in the phrase,“nothing will come of nothing.”
7. Correcting an earlier comment in which she expressed her distaste for
“novels by liberated women,” Tyler noted, “Certainly I don’t hate liberated
182 Notes
women as such. . . . I assume I’m one myself, if you can call someone liber-
ated who was never imprisoned.” Qtd. in Alice Hall Petry,“Tyler and Fem-
inism,” in Anne Tyler as Novelist, ed. Dale Salwak (Iowa City: University of
Iowa Press, 1994), 33.
8. For the titles of several “mad housewife” narratives of the late 1960s and the
1970’s, see n. 2 in notes for Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, above.
9. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, trans. Peter Watts (1879; rpt., Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 148.
10. Benjamin DeMott, “Funny, Wise, and True,” in Critical Essays on Anne Tyler,
ed. Petry, 112 .
11. There are several different descriptive models for stages of grief and
mourning. Tyler apparently draws on Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five-stage
model, developed through her observations of and discussion with patients
dying of terminal diseases: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depres-
sion, and acceptance. On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
12. Issues concerning bodily changes and other manifestations of aging are
developed in a number of midlife (and post midlife) narratives, including
Doris Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark (1973) and Tyler’s own Breathing
Lessons (1988). For a discussion of the latter novel along with Ladder of Years
as narratives about the transitions of menopause, see Virginia Schaefer Car-
roll,“Wrestling with Change”; for a broader discussion of representations of
midlife transformations in women’s fiction, see Margaret Morganroth Gul-
lette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
13. Pertinently, Virginia Schaefer Carroll notes that “ladder of years” is a “direct
reference to the climacteric, a word derived from the Greek klimakter, which
literally means ‘rung of a ladder’” (“Wrestling with Change,” 88). Carroll
analyzes Tyler’s novel as an exploration of a woman’s life-reorientation pre-
cipitated by (peri)menopause.
14. Several commentators have noted Tyler’s avoidance, throughout her fiction,
of the subject of sexual passion. Writing about Earthly Possessions, Nicholas
Delbanco observes that “violence and lust are rare, or offstage; the charac-
teristic emotions are abstracted ones—anger comes to us as vexation, bliss as
a kind of contented release.” Critical Essays on Anne Tyler, ed. Petry, 87. Even
more emphatically, Edward Hoagland contends that throughout her fiction
Tyler “touches upon sex so lightly, compared with her graphic realism on
other matters, that her total portrait of motivation is tilted out of balance.”
Critical Essays on Anne Tyler, 144.
15. Susie’s words echo the grievance—and guilt—experienced by several of Tyler’s
characters who are victims of parental abandonment. Cody Tull of Dinner
at the Homesick Restaurant dreams that he asks his father, who vanished years
before,“Was it something I said? Was it something I did? Was it something I
didn’t do, that made you go away?” (New York: Knopf, 1982), 47.
Notes 183
Chapter 6
Hom(e)age to the Ancestors: Praisesong for the Widow,
Paule Marshall
1. Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1983),
44. Subsequent references in the text are to this edition, abbreviated as
Praisesong.
2. Barbara Christian observes that the legend of “Africans who were forced to
come across the sea—but through their own power, a power that seems irra-
tional, were able to return to Africa—is a touchstone of New World black
folklore. Through this story, peoples of African descent emphasized their own
power to determine their freedom, though their bodies might be enslaved.
They recalled Africa as the source of their being.” Black Feminist Criticism: Per-
spectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon, 1985), 151–2.
3. According to several scholars, Lebert Joseph represents the Yoruba trickster
god Esu-Elegbara, one of whose avatars is Legba, the Haitian and Afro-
Caribbean god of households and thresholds. As Eugenia Collier notes,
“Like Lebert Joseph, Legba is a lame old man in ragged clothes. Intensely
personal and beloved, Legba is the liaison between man and the gods. . . .
An African Hermes, psychopomp, guide of souls, god of the crossroads,
Lebert Joseph leads Avey along the path to self-discovery. . . .”“The Closing
of the Circle: Movement from Division to Wholeness in Paule Marshall’s
Fiction,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980):A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari
Evans (Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 312. Karla F. C.
Holloway regards Lebert Joseph as “the incarnation of [Avey’s] Ibo ances-
tors.” Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Women’s
Literature (New Brunswick, N J: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 118. See
also Abena P. A. Busia, “What is your Nation? Reconnecting Africa and
Her Diaspora through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,” in Changing
Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism,Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed.
Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press,
1989), 204.
4. Kimberly Rae Connor regards Avey Johnson as an “involuntary convert”—
one who undergoes a spiritual conversion despite her strong resistance to
the process. Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994).
5. According to Barbara Christian, the title of this section of the narrative,
“Lavé Tête,” refers to a Haitian voodoo ceremony in which the initiate is
“washed clean.” Black Feminist Criticism, 154.
6. Abena P. A. Busia describes praisesongs as traditional African “ceremonial
social poems” that are “recited or sung in public at anniversaries and other
celebrations, including funerals of the great. Praisesongs may embrace the
history, myths, and legends of a whole people or their representative and
184 Notes
Chapter 7
Haunted Longing and the Presence of Absence: Jazz,
Toni Morrison
1. Marsha Darling, “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with
Toni Morrison” (1988), in Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille
Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 254 (Morri-
son’s emphasis).
2. Jane Bakerman,“‘ The Seams Can’t Show’: An Interview with Toni Morri-
son,” in Conversations, ed. Taylor-Guthrie, 40.
3. Anne Koenen,“The One Out of Sequence: An Interview with Toni Mor-
rison,” in Conversations, ed. Taylor-Guthrie, 71.
4. Virtually all music scholars concur that jazz developed from and elaborates
on the characteristic elements of the blues, including the basic twelve-bar
structure with flatted third, fifth, and seventh notes, and the call-and-
response pattern. As Mary Ellison describes the essential relationship
between the two forms,“Jazz and blues have always been different genres of
the same music[,] with jazz emphasizing the instrumental and blues the
vocal content. Jazz has consistently been dependent on the blues, from its
186 Notes
9. Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992; rpt., New York: Plume/Penguin, 1993), 3. Sub-
sequent references in the text are to this edition.
10. Considering the correspondences between musical and narrative techniques
in Jazz, Eusebio L. Rodrigues contends that Morrison employs punctua-
tion, repetition, rhythm, and other linguistic elements in distinctive ways to
mimic jazz and to transform the text into “a musical score” (246), whereby
“the reader has to actively participate in the process of musicalizing the text
before it will yield up all its meanings.” “Experiencing Jazz,” in Peterson,
ed., 249. Paula Gallant Eckard further proposes that in effect, jazz is “the
mysterious narrator of the novel” (11) and that “jazz as narrator constructs
the text” (18). “The Interplay of Music, Language, and Narrative in Toni
Morrison’s Jazz,” CLA Journal 38, no.1 (1994). The analogies between the
improvisatory nature of jazz and the fluid structure of literary narrative
operate in the other direction as well, according to ethnomusicologist Paul
Berliner, who proposes that jazz improvisations might be likened to story-
telling:
In part, the metaphor of storytelling suggests the dramatic molding
of creations to include movement through successive events “tran-
scending” particular repetitive, formal aspects of the composition
and featuring distinct types of musical material. . . . Paul Wertico
advises his students that in initiating a solo they should think in
terms of developing specific “characters and a plot. . . . You intro-
duce these little different [musical] things that can be brought back
out later on; and the way you put them together makes a little story.
That can be [on the scale of] a sentence or a paragraph. . . . The real
great cats can write novels.” Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of
Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 202
(ellipses and brackets in original).
11. Nellie McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Toni Morrison: Criti-
cal Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Gates Louis, Jr. and K. A. Appiah
(New York: Amistad, 1993), 411.
12. Carabi, 41–42.
13. Morrison wrote her M.A. thesis at Cornell on the theme of alienation and
suicide in the novels of Woolf and Faulkner. Virginia Woolf ’s important
manifesto of modernism, “Modern Fiction,” provides an interesting inter-
textual echo of the passage from Jazz quoted above: “Life is not a series of
gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent
envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is
it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and
uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display,
with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?” “Modern Fic-
188 Notes
tion,” The Common Reader, First Series, ed. Andrew McNeillie (1925; rpt.,
New York: Harcourt, 1984), 150. In a meditation on the similarities and dif-
ferences between Woolf and Morrison (addressed as if to Morrison), Bar-
bara T. Christian notes, “although your and Virginia’s views of the novel
might seem to be worlds apart, both of your writings are riveted on the
relationship between the inner life of your characters and the world within
which they find themselves, the object in fact of their consciousness.”“Lay-
ered Rhythms: Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison,” in Peterson, ed., 28.
14. Carabi, 42.
15. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., tracing the history of the “voice in the text” in
African American literature, proposes that the “trope of the Talking Book”
embodies the “paradox of representing, of containing somehow, the oral
within the written. . . .” The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American
Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 131–2.
16. Morrison’s novels before Jazz also feature a number of orphaned chil-
dren—whether understood literally, like Cholly Breedlove (The Bluest Eye),
who was abandoned at birth by his mother in a dump heap and whose
father never knew of his existence; and Sethe (Beloved), who was separated
by slavery from her mother and never knew her father; or emotional
orphans, like Pecola Breedlove (The Bluest Eye) and Sula Peace (Sula), who
experience themselves as radically estranged from their parents; or cultural
orphans, like Jadine Childs (Tar Baby), who, besides being literally parentless,
wobbles ambivalently between black and white worlds. Using a telling
metaphor, Ann Douglas has observed that African Americans, “whose
ancestors were kidnapped from their native land and sold into slavery in an
alien country, were, in fact, America’s only truly orphan group.” Terrible
Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1995), 83.
17. Gurleen Grewal argues that the “theme of dispossession” is a central theme
of the novel. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 129.
18. Morrison interview with Ntozake Shange, quoted by Nancy J. Peterson in
“‘ Say make me, remake me’: Toni Morrison and the Reconstruction of
African-American History,” in Peterson, ed., 209.
19. Ibid.
20. Marianne DeKoven, using the term utopia rather than paradise, stresses the
“intensity of Morrison’s . . . utopian desire” in the “push of [her] literary
writing toward transcendence” in Beloved. However, during the historical
moment in which Beloved is set, “both the New World Eden and white
Abolitionism are vitiated by slavery and racism.” “Postmodernism and Post-
Utopian Desire in Toni Morrison and E. L. Doctorow,” in Peterson, ed., 116.
21. Understood psychoanalytically, the figure of the mother “remembered”
from infancy is a not a true memory but a fantasy of her, a phantom or
Notes 189
Chapter 8
Memory, Mourning, and Maternal Triangulations:
Mama Day, Gloria Naylor
1. Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988), 10. Subse-
quent references in the text are to this edition.
2. In Susan Meisenhelder’s view, George has been so co-opted by white patri-
archal values that he is a black cultural orphan, trained to be a parody of the
stereotypical white male. “‘ The Whole Picture’ in Gloria Naylor’s Mama
Day,” African American Review 27, no. 3 (1993): 407. A number of commen-
tators on the novel, including—besides Meisenhelder—Lindsey Tucker,
Helen Fiddyment Levy, and Bonnie Winsbro, discuss its polarized perspec-
tives. See Tucker, “Recovering the Conjure Woman: Texts and Contexts in
Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day,” African American Review 28, no. 2 (1994):
173–88; Levy, Fiction of the Home Place: Jewett, Cather, Glasgow, Porter, Welty,
and Naylor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992); and Winsbro,
Supernatural Forces: Belief, Difference, and Power in Contemporary Works by Eth-
nic Women (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
3. Lindsey Tucker observes that Willow Springs alludes to the island of Shake-
speare’s The Tempest. “Miranda’s name (which means ‘worker of wonders’)
suggests Shakespeare’s Tempest with a radical rewriting of the father-daugh-
ter relationship. Ophelia’s name also has Shakespearean associations, espe-
cially in view of the fact that the grandmother, also named Ophelia, has
gone mad and committed suicide by drowning.” Tucker, 184. Peter Erick-
son, exploring Shakespearean allusions in Naylor’s work, argues that in
Mama Day, Naylor “create[s] a black female equivalent to Prospero” while
“largely ignoring Caliban” and subversively reconfiguring elements of race,
class, and gender in The Tempest. “‘ Shakespeare’s Black?’: The Role of
Shakespeare in Naylor’s Novels,” in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and
Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad
Press, 1993), 243.
Notes 191
Chapter 9
Amazing Grace: The Paradox of Paradise: Paradise,
Toni Morrison
1. Toni Morrison, “Home,” in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema
Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 4. Subsequent references in the text
to this essay are abbreviated as “Home.”
2. It is tempting to consider parallels between Morrison’s trilogy and Dante’s
Divine Comedy. Beloved recounts the Hell of slavery and its immediate after-
math, while Paradise not only shares the title of the final book of Dante’s
trilogy but traces a journey towards divine grace. However, the middle novel
of Morrison’s trilogy, Jazz, does not readily correspond to Purgatory. Anna
Mulrine characterizes the trilogy as an “arc of inquiry into the dangers of
excessive love—for children, mates, or God.”“This Side of ‘Paradise,’” U. S.
News and World Report, 19 January 1998: 71.
3. Ibid.
4. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998), 96. Subsequent refer-
ences in the text are to this edition.
5. As Nancy J. Peterson phrases it,“we read the entire novel waiting for a sec-
ond shooting that never happens.” “‘ Say make me, remake me’: Toni Mor-
rison and the Reconstruction of African-American History,” in Toni
Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches, ed. Peterson (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997), 213.
6. Either intentionally or inadvertently, Morrison has conflated details from
the lives of more than one martyred saint. Agatha of Sicily and several other
female martyrs were tortured by having their breasts cut off and at least one
offered the severed breasts to her persecutors. However, this was not true for
Catherine of Siena, who martyred herself through continuous fasting and
“holy anorexia.” See Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast:The
Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1987), 83, 86–88.
7. See n. 16 in chapter 7 of this study.
8. In his typology of such myths, Mircea Eliade notes that “the supreme para-
disiac element” is “immortality.” Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, trans. Philip
Mairet (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 59, emphasis in original.
9. As Morrison has explained her reason for withholding this information,
“The tradition in writing is that if you don’t mention a character’s race, he’s
white. Any deviation from that, you have to say. What I wanted to do was
Notes 193
not erase race, but force readers either to care about it or see if it disturbs
them that they don’t know. Does it interfere with the story? Does it make
you uncomfortable? Or do I succeed in making the characters so clear, their
interior lives so distinctive, that you realize (a) it doesn’t matter, and (b)
more important, that when you know their race, it’s the least amount of
information to know about a person.” Qtd. in David Streitfeld,“The Nov-
elist’s Prism,” The Washington Post, 6 January 1998, sec. B, p. 2.
10. According to the scholar of religion, Anders Nygren,“agape is spontaneous and
‘unmotivated.’. . . When it is said that God loves man, this is not a judgment on
what man is like, but on what God is like” (85). Furthermore, “there is from
man’s side no way at all that leads to God. . . . God must Himself come to
meet man and offer him His fellowship. There is thus no way for man to come
to God, but only a way for God to come to man: the way of Divine forgive-
ness, Divine love” (89).“Agape and Eros,” in Eros,Agape, and Philia: Readings in
the Philosophy of Love, ed. Alan Soble (New York: Paragon, 1989).
11. The episode recalls a central episode in Faulkner’s Light in August: Joanna
Burden also experiences erotic desire late in life and nearly consumes her
lover, Joe Christmas, before he murders her; she is instead consumed by the
fire that destroys her house. See William Faulkner, Light in August (1932;
rpt., New York: Vintage Random, 1990).
12. Caroline Walker Bynum notes that, for twelfth-century Cistercian monks,
for example, “the most frequent meaning of mother-Jesus . . . [was] com-
passion, nurturing, and union” (151). In the fourteenth century, the
anchoress Julian of Norwich,“whose vision of God as mother is one of the
greatest reformulations in the history of theology” (136), delineated in her
book of Showings the maternal qualities of Jesus. See Jesus as Mother: Studies
in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982). In representative passages, Julian of Norwich writes,
And thus Jesus is our true Mother in kind, by our first making; and
he is our true Mother in grace by his taking our kind that is made.
All the fair working and all the sweet kindly office of dearworthy
motherhood are appropriated to the Second Person. . . .
But now it is necessary to say a little more about this “forth-
spreading”: as I understand it in our Lord, it means how we are
brought again by the motherhood of mercy and grace into our nat-
ural home where first we were made by the motherhood of kind
love, and this kind love, it will never leave us.
Our kind Mother, our gracious Mother, for he would be wholly
our mother in every way. . . .” Revelations of Love, trans. and ed. John
Skinner (New York: Doubleday, 1997), from sections 59 and 60,
132–3.
13. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 129 (my emphasis).
194 Notes
14. Mircea Eliade notes that the universal “nostalgia for Paradise” has as its
source “those profound emotions that arise in man [sic] when, longing to
participate in the sacred with the whole of his being, he discovers that this
wholeness is only apparent, and that in reality the very constitution of his
being is a consequence of its dividedness.” Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries, 98.
15. The third eye is located “between and slightly above the eyebrows, at the
center of the forehead. It is . . . regarded by occultists as the seat of psychic
and paranormal powers.” Neville Drury, Dictionary of Mysticism and the Occult
(San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 255.
16. Diane McKinney-Whetstone, “Interview with Toni Morrison,” BET
Weekly,The Washington Post, February 1998, 15.
17. “Toni Morrison Honored at Princeton Conference,” Toni Morrison Society
Newsletter 6, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 4.
18. Ibid.
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Index
30, 33; in Mama Day, 129, 130, jazz (music), 185–6n.4; in Morrison’s
136, 139, 141; in Paradise, 142, 145, fiction, 113, 117, 123,
153, 154, 157, 158, 163, 164–5; in 187n.10
Pigs in Heaven, 59–61, 62, 63; in Juhasz, Suzanne, 191n.5, 191n.9
Praisesong for the Widow, 95, 96, Julian of Norwich, 193n.12
98–9, 100, 101, 107, 108; in
Virginia Woolf, 23, 24; running Kaminsky, Amy, 64, 180n.1
away from, 83–4, 87, 89 Kaplan, Caren, 168n.4
homeland, home/land, 37, 38, 57, 159, Kappel-Smith, Diana, 179n.16
164; “Homeland” (story), Barbara Kingsolver, Barbara, 7, 66, 77,
Kingsolver, 60; in Animal Dreams, 161; Animal Dreams, 7–8, 37–51,
7–8, 37, 38, 63, 77; in The Bean 53, 54, 77, 160, 161, 163; The
Trees, 57, 63, 77; in How the García Bean Trees, 37, 53–9, 61, 64, 66,
Girls Lost Their Accents, 66, 67, 68, 77, 161; “Homeland” (story), 60;
71, 74, 75; in Pigs in Heaven, 60, Pigs in Heaven, 37, 59–64, 77,
62, 63, 64; in Praisesong for the 161
Widow, 105, 106, 108 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 75, 181n.6
homelessness, in Animal Dreams, 44; in Kolodny, Annette, 168n.5
The Bean Trees, 55,63; in Ladder of Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 182n.11
Years, 85; in Paradise, 146; in Pigs
in Heaven, 63 Lessing, Doris, 6–7, 8, 12–22, 24,
Homer (The Odyssey), 2, 4, 38, 93, 156, 28–33, 37, 51, 160, 161, 164;
179n.7 African Laughter, 2, 13, 15, 17,
homesickness, 2, 4, 5, 38, 81, 181n.1; in 18–20, 32, 164; Briefing for a
The Bean Trees, 55; in How the Descent into Hell, 20–22; Going
García Girls Lost Their Accents, 70, Home, 15, 18; The Golden
72, 73, 75; in Jazz, 81; in Doris Notebook, 14, 16, 17, 20, 24, 32–3,
Lessing, The Golden Notebook, 160; “Impertinent Daughters,” 8,
16–17; in “Impertinent 30, 173n.16, 177n.33; Love, Again,
Daughters,” 30; in Martha Quest, 31–2, 160; Martha Quest, 15–16;
15–16; in The Memoirs of a The Memoirs of a Survivor, 29–31;
Survivor, 30–31; in Praisesong for “My Mother’s Life,” 15; A Proper
the Widow, 81; in Anne Tyler, Marriage, 16; Shikasta, 22; The
181n.1; home/sickness, in Ladder Summer Before the Dark, 182n.12;
of Years, 81, 82, 87, 94, 162 “To Room Nineteen,” 84; Under
My Skin, 29
Ibsen, Henrik (A Doll’s House), 86, 87 Levy, Helen Fiddyment, 191n.7
imago, 189n.21 Levy-Warren, Marsha, 169n.13
See also: beloved imago liminal, 8, 165; in Praisesong for the
Widow, 109; in Jazz, 120
Jacobus, Mary, 170n.14 Lincoln, Kenneth, 178n.4
Jacoby, Mario, 21, 118, 169n.10, Lock, Helen, 184n.9
177n.35 Lowenthal, David, 169n.10
208 Index