In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison deals with children and that element of belief by many black people, as she sees it, that an ultimate glory is possible. Pecola Breedlove yearns for blue eyes as the next best thing to being white. Blue eyes become for her a symbol of pride and dignity. She seeks the glory of blue eyes through prayer … and eventually through madness when, believing that blue eyes have finally been granted her, she walks about flapping her arms like wings, convinced that she can fly. Secure in her madness, she has no knowledge that she has become the town pariah.

The author's second novel, Sula (1974), expands the theme of pariah by charting her heroine's odyssey from childhood to adulthood…. Toni Morrison develops the theme by focusing on two women and their friendship: an extraordinary friendship in which one is a rebel who becomes the town's scandal, and the other a conformist who does all the proper things expected of her. Analyzing their different households at the age of twelve, Morrison brings together the components of their lives with a fine sympathy for a friendship which, though broken, ultimately assumes a dramatic meaning for the story and the women. Though it is Nel, the conformist woman, who voices the idea that Sula had been her glory, the book ends with each woman's thoughts centered on the other, despite the fact that no reconciliation has taken place. (pp. 124-25)

Toni Morrison combines the psychological, the symbolic, and the philosophical in her portraits of Nel and Sula in order to demonstrate that each complements the other. There is a hint of Dostoevsky's The Double and the Dostoevskyan idea that in every person there lurks a double. Morrison's fictional method is character counterpoint, rather than the Dostoevskyan technique of encompassing the timid and the masterful in one figure. (pp. 125-26)

A radically fresh approach to the theme of rebellion is that the author works with symbols and the psychological to establish Nel and Sula as projections of different aspects of the same character. In appeareance one is light, the other dark. Nel's skin is described as the color of wet sand, while Sula's is a heavy brown color and she has a birthmark over one eye….

The symbolic use of names is important. Nel (knell) connotes the pealing note of doom on which Nel's life ends not once but three times, with each separation from Sula. The first time is when Nel marries and Sula goes away for ten years. The second time is the break with Sula over Jude, Nel's husband, with whom Sula sleeps briefly. The third and most poignant is Nel's realization that in Sula's grave is buried the passion, the life, the fun, and the healthy womanhood which Sula represented. On the other hand, Sula's name suggests an abbreviation of Suleiman, The Magnificent….

In terms of psychological analysis, the actions of Sula and Nel are "figure splitting"—the separation and projection of character into component parts. Nel is calm, passive, or frightened in a crisis. Sula's emotions erupt in some action that is strong or even violent. (p. 128)

Each significant part of the two women's characterizations, both as children and as women, then, comes from the author's repeated insistence that they are one person split into two; as Sula's grandmother says, "never was no difference."…

In the author's structuring of Sula and Nel, then, they are less persons in their own right than representations of rebel and conformist, which the author views as the black woman's intrinsic conflict. Particularly with Sula, the writer seems to be going beyond such representation, addressing herself to the idea of the great rebel—the one who exceeds boundaries, creates excitement, tries to break free of encroachments of external cultural forces and challenges destiny. What, for example, does she have Sula do? Believing that an unpatterned, unconditioned life is possible, Sula tries to avoid uniformity by creating her own kind of life. (p. 129)

The author, however, is not just working with the idea of the importance of experience. There are times in the book when one gets the impression that in dealing with the theme of a woman's right to an experimental life, the writer is pushing the reader to consider something much more unconventional. This is that the impulse to murder and violence in the human psyche is endemic not only to men; women, too, are capable of violence, Morrison seems to be saying. (p. 130)

In [Sula] the moral initiative which underlies Sula's experimental life is rooted in her capacity to initiate violence, as is illustrated in two childhood scenes. The author hits us with the idea that Nel and Sula as women recall the different scenes of violence with the same emotion—pleasure, or more accurately "satisfaction." Whether or not the author is exploring repressed drives or even pathological complexes, the following two scenes are presented boldly. As a twelve-year-old, Sula drowns Chicken Little when she swings the child around so vigorously that he slips from her hands and lands in the nearby river….

The author follows this immediately with another scene which underscores D. H. Lawrence's idea that no act of murder is "accidental." Sula's mother catches on fire while tending a fire in the yard, and Sula watches her mother's burning not with horror, as would be expected, but with an "interested" expression…. (p. 131)

Without question, the description of the two scenes and the emotions of Sula/Nel has sexual overtones. As Mailer dramatizes with Rojack in An American Dream, the act of murder can be as orgasmic as the act of sexual love. There is more than an implication of this idea in Morrison's novel; disguised as a psychological novel, it is really a novel of ideas prodding us to think on the experimental life for woman…. (p. 132)

Yet the author does not seem at ease with her characterization of Sula, violence, and the experimental life. She steps in with an armload of explanations distributed over several pages. Sula had inherited her grandmother's arrogance and her mother's self-indulgence; she had never felt any obligation to please someone unless their pleasure pleased her; she was as willing to receive pain as to give it; she had never been the same since she overheard her mother Hannah explain that she loved Sula but did not likd her; the boy's drowning had closed something off in her; and so forth.

The author soon drops this line of reasoning and turns with relief to a defense of Sula summed up as: Sula was not afraid of "the free fall."… (It's a phrase which has a possible echo of Milton's Lucifer.) The conventional women of the Bottom were. These women had allowed their husbands to dry up their dreams, and those without men looked like "sour-tipped needles featuring one constant empty eye."… Sooner or later, all died with their aprons on. The writer makes it clear that Sula's one lapse into conventionality, when she falls in love with Ajax and begins to dream of a commitment from him, results in sorrow and the common fate reserved for the black woman—desertion.

Unfortunately, the literary destiny of most rebel women—death—does not spare Sula…. She dies at thirty, but not without stating that her rebellion has been the natural outcome of her dialectic. On her death bed, she sustains her position philosophically by weighing the pros and cons of what is good and bad, renounces the accepted definition of goodness, and reiterates her belief that it is only life that matters. Life is important, life must be lived and duty and suffering on this earth are too high a price to pay for heavenly immortality. (pp. 132-33)

The novel bears the same incompleteness as Sula's search for freedom…. Sula makes of life a defiant gesture which liberates her to an extent, and keeps her from self-pity. She is sustained by her pride in the fact that she walks through life with no blinders on. Yet, there is no happy ending. Sula collapses in the loneliness of the search for freedom, and proves what? That love is necessary? That the human heart cannot entertain equal proportions of good and evil? That everything is not relative? These and other unanswered questions are given more scope in [Morrison's next novel], Song of Solomon. (p. 134)

In this novel, she deals not only with the woman who breaks away from the established society to create an individualistic life for herself, but with the black man who yearns to fly—to break out of the confining life into the realm of possibility—and who embarks on a series of dramatic adventures…. But whether or not the hero, Milkman, as he is nicknamed, will continue to ride the air or die at the hands of his former black friend is unresolved. However, this question, posed at the end for the reader, throws in sharper focus the themes which the writer carries over from her previous books: flight, the journey, family, friendship, violence, the paradox of good and evil, the world of black society: its code, superstitions, plus fable, song, and myth.

The achievement of this novel is its willingness and ability not only to explore these areas in further detail, but to use black folklore, the ready acceptance of the supernatural, and magic as part of black culture. (p. 135)

Many of Morrison's characters in [Song of Solomon] believe in the capacity of the mind to see through the chinks of the cavern—even the money-hungry and materialistic Macon Dead. But it is Macon's sister Pilate who emerges as the most powerful figure in the book with her calm acceptance of this world, as well as of another reality other than the fixed one of the world. She is thoroughly at home with herself, and has the kind of sensibility which is not disturbed by anything she experiences or witnesses. There is something splendidly pagan and primitive about her, and she is represented at the time we first meet her as having the power to evoke from others various reflections of her own kindliness and understanding. Implicitly, the author establishes Pilate's capacity for placing herself in harmony with the laws of the earth and nature. Within the orbit of Morrison's moral vision, these laws have to do with the truths of the human heart. They are the necessity to demonstrate courage, endurance, sympathy, and desire to help others, while surviving with dignity. (p. 136)

The story of Pilate is part of a black family history which spans almost a century of American history. It is given special enrichment through the tracing of many lives. More notably, it forms a fascinating parallel with the odyssey of her nephew Milkman, who is the other chief character in the story. The fullness of the book even incorporates within it an ironic twist on the Faulknerian theme: the collapse of a proud, white Southern family, and the faithful black retainer who continues to serve with humility and devotion. Braided in with the lives of the black people is also a brief story of the decline of a white family whose men killed Pilate's father…. The dominant motif in the book, however, is not revenge, but the proud realization by a black family of who and what they are. Morrison's fiction is the opposite of Richard Wright's in this respect. Where Wright finds no sustaining values in the past of black people, Morrison celebrates the past. Pilate, Macon, and Milkman, whose last name is Dead, did not just drop from nowhere. They go back to a long line of succession. There was a beginning. A source. It is this knowledge which gives them a sense of renewal; even Macon experiences renewal in a small way. (p. 138)

The design of the book is sprawling and the narrative texture depends on a great many cumulative effects. Together with the author's allusions and indirect use of archetypal patterns about Pilate, she never lets us lose sight of the fact that Pilate is a woman grounded firmly in the social reality of black society. Pilate's twenty-year odyssey, and her subsequent life in the small town in which she finally settles not far from her brother (to his rage, embarrassment and shame over her unconventional life), enables the author to move further than in the previous novel in her discussion of black society and women—married and unmarried.

The young Pilate, alone and completely dependent on her own resources, cannot find acceptance…. [Her] life takes on a habitual pattern. She is either asked to leave the community, or she is deserted by these people who simply disappear during the night, since they are migrant workers. Pilate, however, resists any sense of permanent personal displacement. (p. 141)

The writer is careful not to make Pilate into a romantic Pantheist. Hence, we see Pilate appraising her situation, the social scene, and debating the means of personal salvation available to her. She does this with no semblance of self-pity, sentiment, and brooding introspection…. Like Sula, she decides to take "the free fall," but in a different way.

She rejects the traditional image of woman by cutting off her hair, binding it into a turban and wearing clothes functional to her way of life. With two people now to support (daughter and granddaughter), she looks around the social scene, and realizing that throats are thirsty as long as there is prohibition, she becomes a bootlegger, making and selling wine and whiskey. The author stresses that Pilate never loses her humanity, nor debases herself and other women by allowing traffic in women flesh. She only sells wine and whiskey (author's italics). There is no consumption on the premises. Thus Pilate soon enjoys that status so difficult for black women (and white women) to acquire—economic independence. As an economically-independent woman, she is able to function outside of patriarchal values and rise successfully above the social forces which are a constant threat to the black woman. (pp. 141-42)

Interestingly enough, while Morrison presents women who eventually free themselves somehow from an unnatural life, Pilate's daughter and granddaughter are portrayed differently. Although leading a natural life in some respects, they are essentially weak women. (p. 145)

Ironically, Pilate, who is able to break out of the enclosures of conventional thinking and make a brave and happy life for herself, cannot inspire either woman in her house to follow her example. The author tries to get around it by hinting that Reba is somewhat simple-minded, and that Hagar is one of those pretty, spoiled black women who either want to kill or die for love. Perhaps the more plausible answer is that Pilate exercises individual will, whereas the others simply do not.

The explorations of the lives of these women reveal a growth in the author's feminist consciousness not present in the previous novel. Alternatives are possible, says the author, and in the character of Pilate she creates a woman who finds life worth living and lives it. Perhaps, Toni Morrison would not care to be discussed in terms of feminist consciousness, but the fact remains that her depiction of Pilate stresses that Pilate's pattern of living does not follow the achievement pattern associated with successful men. Pilate is always the humanist….

The order of things is questioned and judged not only from social and moral viewpoints, but also from the metaphysical. If Pilate is not accepted by kin and society, she is very much at home with her dead father, who appears before her periodically with advice. One piece of advice is to go back to the cave and collect the bones of the dead man, which she does. It makes for the extraordinary ending to the book: for the bones are really those of her father. Their proper burial adds a note of the classic to the details of family history. (p. 146)

Life and death, then, hold no terrors for Pilate, whose sense of contact with this and other worlds is a natural one. She is able to survive in a society which denies her "partnership in marriage, confessional friendship, and communal religion."… The author concludes her tribute to Pilate by commenting that Pilate makes a life for herself in which for sixty-eight years she has shed no tears since the day Circe offered her white bread and storebought jam. In return for rudeness, she extends politeness, and her concern for troubled people ripens with the years. Yet for some reason, as in Sula, the woman who dares to live by her own rules must die. True, Pilate doesn't disappear from life at the early age that Sula does, but she is rendered with such loving detail that her death from the shot of a black killer comes as a shock to the reader….

Needless to say, in Pilate Morrison finds a powerful voice that fulfills the promise of a personality who has resolved the seminal conflict between the claims of nature and the claims of culture. However, Song of Solomon, unlike the writer's previous novels, gives men a more prominent place, and specifically Milkman, son of Macon Dead and nephew of Pilate. The book is fairly equally divided between the respective journeys of Pilate and Milkman. Both take the standard path of the formula observed in mythology: separation, initiation, and return. The connection with mythology is elusive. (p. 147)

Certainly, one hears overtones of the Jason myth and his quest for the Golden Fleece in Milkman's search for gold and his desertion of Hagar, whose name means to forsake. But, since Morrison is working with a reality of her own which is not primarily connected with logic, science, and related fields, her language is often symbolical, and particularly her use of names….

What we have in Song of Solomon, with Milkman's story, is that constant in American literature—the undertaking of the journey to free oneself. Pilate's efforts to liberate herself from cramped conditions of living are a result of society's rejection of her. Milkman's energies are concentrated on liberating himself from the confining and bitter atmosphere of his father's home, from the role thrust upon him—being his father's flunky—and from the provincial town in which he lives. (p. 148)

Milkman's journey arrests his selfish egotism and puts him on a whole new path of thinking about himself and the world. He learns about isolation, terror, suffering, survival, joy, triumph, and coming together. Though the ending is deliberately ambiguous, because Guitar is waiting for him with a gun, we get a strong feeling that Milkman will live. Pilate has instilled in him the life-affirming principle, and Milkman will be able to return with his newfound knowledge and help others. (p. 149)

Morrison's tracing of Milkman's journey through Pennsylvania and Virginia can be regarded, in many places, as in the tradition of the picaresque, in which each episode brings the protagonist into contact with some aspect of black society. But, in fact, it can more profitably be examined as a journey in which each place becomes a test of character and soul, with the results that the hero grows in understanding as he learns bits of family history and starts piecing it together. History becomes a choral symphony to Milkman, in which each individual voice has a chance to speak and contribute to his growing sense of well-being.

The pattern is something like this. In Reverend Cooper's parsonage, Milkman hears that it was right in this room that Pilate's snuff box was soldered. The information makes him feel "real."… He also learns more details about his grandfather's murder, as well as the fact that the killers were never brought to justice. It forces him to think about justice and injustice, something that as the son of a prosperous black man he has not had much occasion to do. (pp. 150-51)

His next step is to survey the acres which his grandfather cleared single-handed, and which are now as overgrown as his grandfather found them. The sight arouses his admiration and pride in his ancestor and he feels diminished because of the life he has led personally. Later, attacked by black men, he realizes that the flaunting of his prosperity (well-cut suit, expensive luggage, good Scotch) is an affront to those less fortunate than he. Finally, faced with the unknown when he goes on a hunting expedition with older black men, he proves his manhood and achieves harmony with nature and man in the forest.

None of these episodes is fully realized, but they form a chain. Together with Milkman's increasing excited realization that he is no longer on the scent of gold, but looking for his origins, we discover the change from callous, selfish, uncaring man to caring man. In the end, the revelation that the town in which his great grandfather lived had just about everything named after him, and that there is even a legend about his ancester, brings him exultation.

It is this legend surrounded in the romantic myth of man flying which raises some problems for me. The story holds that Milkman's ancestor lifted his arms one day and soared into space toward Africa, leaving wife and twenty children behind…. The effect of the story on Milkman is electrifying: "Oh, man! He didn't need no airplane. He just took off; got fed up. All the way up! (author's italics)…. No more bales!… Nor more shit!… Lifted his beautiful black ass up in the sky and flew on home … and the whole damn town is named after him."…

All of the events of the journey, then, coalesce in a single vision—flying. The black man must fly, thinks Milkman. The book's structure reinforces the idea. It begins with the unsuccessful attempt of a black man to fly on the day Milkman is born, and ends with the story of the successful flight of Milkman's ancestor. A question is inevitable: flight from what, one asks? Poverty? Home? Wife? Children? Yes. It is the traditional poor man's divorce, common in life and in fiction…. It is interesting that Toni Morrison, whose attitude on desertion of family in Sula is uncompromising, should have softened her thinking. (pp. 151-52)

Anne Z. Mickelson, "Winging Upward, Black Women: Sarah E. Wright, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker," in her Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent American Fiction by Women (copyright © 1979 by Anne Z. Mickelson), The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979, pp. 112-74.∗