Toni Morrison weaves a web of such surpassing delicacy and grace that the reader is ensnared for the duration of her mythic journey. Her fables unfold in the landscape of dreams, and the plot of a Morrison book is useful only insofar as it illuminates the allegory she is working. The meanings of Tar Baby … continue to reveal themselves to me slowly, but it's clear that Morrison works her magic charm above all with a love of language. Her soaring lyrical style carries you like a river through the book, sweeping doubt and disbelief away, and it is only gradually that one realizes her deadly serious intent. In Tar Baby she deals with tension; tension between master and servant between men and women, between blacks and whites, and between the younger and older generation of blacks. The theme of racial tension underlies the book like a bedrock, anchoring it firmly in reality despite her sometimes silly fights of fantasy….

An orphan, Jadine was raised by her aunt and uncle Sydney and Ondine Childs, lifelong servants to an eccentric white couple named Valerian and Margaret Street, who have retired to an estate on an obscure Caribbean island. During her visit, the madness that passes for everyday life between the Streets (who have educated Jadine in the finest schools) and the elder Childs is interrupted by the intrusion of an American black man named Son….

Morrison deftly draws the parallel between sexism and racism; Jadine's only choice is which trap to fall into. (p. 40)

Something in Jadine's refusal to submit to Son diminishes her as a woman. In her assimilation into white culture has she lost so much of her connection to her roots, abdicated so much of her responsibility to her people, that she must spend her life with a white man who sends her a coat made from the skins of brutally slaughtered baby seals? The recurrence of such violent images underscores the theme of racism, and its parallel to sexism. Jadine is trapped by both, and she is pursued by inner demons: the women who haunt her dreams, offering their breasts to her, the feeling that she can't compete with the "statewide pussy" of Son's former wife. Jadine is neither black woman nor white woman; the subservience of her aunt and uncle to their white employers is as much an impossibility for her as the militance Son wishes upon her. Michael, the forever absentee son of the Streets, has encouraged her to have political consciousness, but she is hopelessly vain and self-centered. And where, in reality, is there for her to go?

In Emma Bovary's time it was society that limited women. When oppression has become internalized, as it has in the women who fear success and the realization of their own power, society no longer needs to impose explicit external limitations. Jadine has been educated to think like a man; yet she is unable to live like a man without forgetting her ancient properties. Here the ironic detachment of the novelist mirrors the detachment which has served as a survival tool through generations of oppression. Morrison offers no options for her heroine; in fact she is a good deal more sympathetic to Son, who is one of the most fully rendered, sexy, interesting male characters I've encountered in a woman's novel for quite some time. Son adores Jadine; with the respectful love of, say, John Lennon for Yoko Ono. But Son's love makes demands on Jadine that she is unable to fulfill without losing herself. Who is the tar baby in the title?… This is an unresolved mystery of the book, whose strength ultimately lies not in its story, but in the vitality of Morrison's prose: the voice of the matriarch survivor…. [Her] prose is extravagant and rich, informed by a femaleness as mysterious as the story, and as fecund as the Caribbean island on which it takes place. Perhaps what Morrison tells us about Jadine is that she is no longer either female enough or black enough, culturally speaking, to retain this power. (p. 41)