[Toni Morrison] has achieved major stature through the publication of only three novels. The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) are brief, poetic works which explore the initiation experiences of their black, female, adolescent protagonists. Song of Solomon (1977) is a much longer but still lyrical story relating Macon (Milkman) Dead's search for familial roots and personal identity. Milkman's development is framed and illuminated by the maturation stories of three women important in his life, and the presence of these subplots in the tale of a male protagonist is a good indication of the importance of female initiation in Morrison's thought.

For Toni Morrison, the central theme of all her work is [love]…. Certainly, this theme is evident in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Song of Solomon, their female characters searching for love, for valid sexual encounters, and, above all, for a sense that they are worthy. (p. 541)

In Toni Morrison's novels, she joins her basic theme with the initiation motif, and the initiation experiences, trying and painful as they are, fail. Pilate invents her own standards and lives almost outside society, a choice which eventually brings tragedy upon her family. Sula rebels and is rejected. Nel marries; Corinthians takes a lover, and both are diminished. Hagar and Pecola attempt to transform themselves; Hagar dies, and Pecola goes mad. All live lives of profound isolation in a society which does not want them. (pp. 542-43)

[The Bluest Eye] is effective because of the importance of its theme and the skill with which the inevitability of the failed initiation is developed through the compelling foreshadowing encounters. This device keeps the story convincing even while distancing Pecola from the reader, perhaps the final dramatization of her hopelessness and her eventual ostracism from a society which would rather destroy than accept her.

Though the initiations of Sula Peace and Nel Wright also fail, Sula differs from The Bluest Eye in both complexity and the assignment of responsibility. Here, while it is still made clear that Sula and Nel are undervalued and that their families legislate toward the initiation failure, both girls make specific decisions and choices which also contribute. Pecola struggles with the fate assigned to her; Sula and Nel help to choose their fates.

Like The Bluest Eye, Sula is highly episodic, and flashbacks dramatize the damage done to adult family members who influence and shape Sula and Nel. In Sula, as in The Bluest Eye, the protagonists undergo a series of experiences, each incorporating racial and sexual overtones, but here the encounters fall into two categories: those undergone individually and those suffered together. The division is important, for the experiences within the families have made the girls what they are as individuals; the experiences outside the families, all shared, indicate one of Morrison's most important points in the novel—the personalities of Sula and of Nel, could they have been merged, would have amounted to one whole person.

Just as their friendship is essential to their well-being as children, so would their learning from one another's faults have made them adult women capable of well-being. The real tragedy in Sula is that Nel and Sula are unable to learn that lesson; their friendship ruptures and they live isolated, frustrated lives. The interrelationship of the girls' personalities, symbolized by their friendship, and the recurring sexual and racial themes provide unity; the results are powerful and effective. (pp. 548-49)

Separated by Nel's resolution to settle for respectable calm, both women live lives of desperate isolation; Sula becomes the scapegoat for the town's ills; Nel lives a cold, severely respectable life as a put-upon woman. Symbolically, neither ever achieves a truly sustaining sexual union. When, finally, they do meet again, for Nel, meeting with the dying Sula is merely a part of her "respectable" role; they converse, but they do not come together, and it takes still longer for Nel to realize that the great loss she has suffered is really the destruction of their friendship, the one chance they had to learn to be full, complete women.

Sula, a more multifaceted book than The Bluest Eye, uses the maturation story of Sula and Nel as the core of a host of other stories, but it is the chief unification device for the novel and achieves its own unity, again, through the clever manipulation of the themes of sex, race, and love. Morrison has undertaken a more difficult task in Sula. Unquestionably, she has succeeded.

Song of Solomon is a somewhat more hopeful book than The Bluest Eye or Sula; Milkman's quest is ironically successful, and this note of modified hope is echoed in the female initiation patterns in that one of them leads to happiness—at least temporary happiness—for the initiated, First Corinthians Dead. Morrison reveals her admirable tendency to adapt rather than to adopt traditional patterns in these initiation stories by delaying the initiations of both Corinthians and her cousin, Hagar Dead, until the women are well beyond their teens; Corinthians is in her forties; Hagar is in her thirties. The device is successful, indicating the extreme difficulty of the black woman's search for self-determination, and certainly the results of these initiations underscore that point.

The initiation of Pilate Dead, however, takes place during her adolescence, as is traditional. During the main action of Song of Solomon, Pilate, aunt of the protagonist, Milkman, has no real identity at all, and in a long flashback, Morrison reveals the reasons for this lack as she recounts Pilate's initiation experiences. Pilate has never known her mother's name, and her father's, that of the first Macon Dead (Milkman's grandfather), was invented by a careless, belittling white official. (pp. 553-54)

[Pilate] painfully learns that she is not welcome in any community…. Twice, she joins bands of pickers and gets on well with them until she takes lovers who report that she has no navel. Taking the lack to be a sign that she is unnatural, the groups expel her. When she finds a haven on an isolated island off the coast of Virginia, she contrives to conceal her belly from her lover, and after their baby is born, refuses to marry him, reasoning that she cannot hide her lack of a navel from a husband forever. She is cut off from permanent sexual commitment, a symbol in Morrison's work for fruitful maturity….

Pilate's initiation is complete; she has learned the lessons of the world. She knows the danger of the white world because it blew her father off the fence; she has learned that the black world cannot or will not truly accept her. Being strong, she undertakes, then to build a world of her own….

But Pilate's place within those boundaries is marginal; she is the black district's bootlegger, and people come to her house for goods, not for companionship. Her world is both huge and small…. It is small in that it includes almost no people except her daughter, Reba; her granddaughter, Hagar—and her father's ghost; "'I seen him since he was shot…. It's a good feelin to know he's around. I tell you he's a person I can rely on. I tell you something else. He's the only one'."… Her father's spirit becomes the source of the wisdom around which she constructs her life. (pp. 555-56)

Pilate does not really understand her father's messages at all; she cannot because she does not know her family history. The self-definition she builds, the world view she constructs based upon his advice keeps her sane and active, but it further isolates her, cuts her off from her community. Pilate's initiation has failed because her family have not been able to equip her for success, and the resulting singularity also colors and controls the lives of her daughter and granddaughter. The failure of Pilate's way of life foreshadows Hagar's tragedy. (p. 556)

It is significant that Hagar's single act of rebellion takes place during Milkman's first visit to her home, for he is responsible for her long delayed initiation. The cousins become lovers and remain lovers for years. For Hagar, the commitment is absolute …; Milkman represents something of her own, and he also represents a regulated life quite different, potentially, from the careless, disorganized life of her family. But Milkman never considers Hagar seriously as a mate, and he finally breaks off the affair.

With nothing on earth to cling to but her concept of herself as Milkman's lover, Hagar fails her initiation test. She sees herself only as she imagines he sees her and comes to doubt her own very great beauty. In her view, that is the one means she has to hold Milkman, and holding Milkman is the only thing worth doing. When she comes to believe that he prefers another kind of beauty, she has nothing, and she determines to kill him. (pp. 557-58)

All her life Hagar has known (as all of Southside knows) that the white community has no use for her; all her life she has known that she is only marginally tolerated by the black community. For a time, she has believed that her beauty, passion, and desirability were the keys to a life structured around Milkman. When he rejects her, when it is time for her to initiate herself into a life of her own, she cannot, and when even violence fails her (her attempts to murder Milkman abort), she decides to transform herself. She intends to sacrifice her one great asset, her beauty, to change herself into the kind of woman Milkman will love and value forever. Even this attempt, impassioned, chaotic, and pitiful as it is, fails, and in the process, Hagar becomes fatally ill. She cannot possibly succeed because nothing in her life has prepared her to define herself; she cannot succeed even in imitating Milkman's "real" girl friends because nothing in her background arouses in him a sense of her true value. There remains nothing else for her to do but to die.

At first glance, the story of Milkman's sister, First Corinthians Dead, seems to be a sharp contrast to the tragic story of Hagar, her cousin, though like Hagar's initiation, Corinthians' is delayed until late in her life, and also like Hagar's, it centers around her willingness to meet the needs of a man. But unlike Hagar, Corinthains manages the accommodation. (pp. 559-60)

Her most important test comes when she meets and falls in love with Henry Porter, who does yard work for a living. The pair date like teenagers, but Porter never meets the Deads; Corinthians dreads her father's reaction…. Eventually, Porter forces the issue, telling Corinthians that she must defy her father or give up her lover. When Corinthians makes her choice, she does so by subjugating and humiliating herself completely…. (p. 561)

Once her choice is made, Corinthians is happy with it; she suppresses the hatred born of shame…. She even summons the courage to move away from the Deads' home and into a place she and Porter share. The sexual phase of her initiation, like the economic phase, seems to be acceptable to her, given the fact that she can make the necessary accommodations. And there is one further factor here. In a very real way, Corinthians has rejected her father's false values, values assumed and copied from whites, by embracing Porter, for Porter also has a secret life. He is one of the Seven Days, a band of black men who avenge their race every time the white community murders a black. (p. 562)

Song of Solomon, then, offers three portraits of women whose initiation experiences fail because their families have not prepared them for the transition into fruitful maturity. Each of the three defines herself only according to the standards and desires of a beloved man: Pilate lives her entire life under her misapprehension of her father's messages; Hagar dies because she cannot be the kind of woman Milkman desires; and Corinthians abandons the self-image she has cherished for a lifetime to find menial work in a white-controlled world and to find sexual release with a man who demands that she submit completely. Of the three, only Corinthians has any chance for even modified happiness. Corinthians' slim chance makes Song of Solomon Morrison's least despairing portrait of the black woman's condition. At best, this note of hope is muted.

In her fiction, then, Morrison has united her theme, the explorations of love, and a traditional device, the initiation motif, along with a series of brilliantly dramatized foreshadowing events, skillfully made frames, and splendid characterizations. The resulting novels are compelling statements of the failure of human values. The inversion of a traditional motif—that is, the treatment of failed initiations—is successful, its effect devastating. The achievement is remarkable, making it clear that Toni Morrison is, indeed, a major American novelist. (p. 563)

Jane S. Bakerman, "Failures of Love: Female Initiation in the Novels of Toni Morrison," in American Literature (reprinted by permission of the Publisher; copyright 1981 by Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina), Vol. 52, No. 4, January, 1981, pp. 541-63.