SOURCE: "Failures of Love: Female Initiation in the Novels of Toni Morrison," in American Literature, Vol. 52, No. 4, January, 1981, pp. 541-63.

[In the following essay, Bakerman explores the attempts and failures of women to initiate themselves into both personal and social maturity in a culture in which they are automatically considered outsiders in the novels of Toni Morrison. ]

Toni Morrison, contemporary writer and senior editor at Random House, has achieved major stature through the publication of only three novels. The Bluest Eye (1970)¹ and Sula (1973)² are brief, poetic works which explore the initiation experiences of their black, female, adolescent protagonists. Song of Solomon (1977)³ 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

Beauty, love. . . . Actually, I think, all the time that I write, I'm writing about love or its absence. Although I don't start out that way. . . . But I think that I still write about the same thing, which is how people relate to one another and miss it or hang on to it . . . or are tenacious about love.⁴

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.

Traditionally, the initiation rite is painful but enlightening, and the chief theme of novels of novels of adolescence has been identified as "the individual's search for genuine values."⁵ Morrison's early works explore the results for black women when the values are real and powerful but are designed primarily for middle-class whites. This concept certainly appears importantly in Song of Solomon, but that book also explores what happens to women whose values (and value) are determined by the men who control their lives. From the outset, these values are known by some of Morrison's female characters to be useless, even damaging, to them. Claudia, the narrator of The Bluest Eye, for instance, recognizes her position.

Being a minority in both caste and class [being poor, black, female], we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. (p. 11)

For Pecola Breedlove, Sula Peace, Nel Wright Greene, Pilate Dead, Hagar Dead, and First Corinthians Dead, as for many other female characters,

Female aspiration is a joke. Female rebellion may be perfectly justified, but there is no good universe next door, no way out, young potential revolutionaries can't find their revolution. So they marry in defeat or go mad in a complicated form of triumph, their meaning the inevitability of failure.⁶

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.⁷ 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.

The Bluest Eye employs two frames; the outer frame demonstrates the elementary school reader standards for family behavior and beauty. The inner frame is the family life of the MacTeers; the younger MacTeer daughter, Claudia, tells us the story of her friend, Pecola Breedlove, and in doing so describes her own stable family as a point of comparison and contrast.

Pecola seems to have been born knowing that the Breedloves were damaged people, undervalued by both whites and blacks. She wishes to emerge not only from the isolation of childhood, but also from the isolation of this family stigma: They are poor, and they are ugly.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had accepted it without question. (p. 28)

Because white children appear to be beloved by both white and black adults, Pecola determines to achieve beauty and acceptance by acquiring blue eyes.

Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed. Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope. To have something as wonderful as that happen would take a long, long time. (p. 35)

Morrison's point is clear:

When the strength of a race depends on its beauty, when the focus is turned to how one looks as opposed to what one is, we are in trouble. . . . The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it. Physical beauty has nothing to do with our past, present or future. Its absence or presence was only important to them, the white people who used it for anything they wanted—⁸

But there is no one to explain this point to Pecola. Her parents, Cholly and Pauline, have accepted the idea that they are ugly and in doing so have come to hate one another. Equally importantly, they do not know how to love; and they cannot give their children a sense of self, for they have none of their own. Cholly, parentless, set adrift by the death of his guardian, taunted and humiliated by white men during his first sexual encounter, does not know about nurturing love, and feeling love, he is incapable of expressing it healthfully:

Cholly was free. Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt He was free to live his fantasies, and free even to die, the how and the when of which held no interest for him. . . . Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him. (pp. 125-26)

Indulging those perceptions and appetites, Cholly courts and marries Pauline, but she cannot teach him, for she, too, has been isolated and unloved.

Slight as it was, this deformity [a maimed foot] explained for her many things that would have been otherwise incomprehensible: why she alone of all the children had no nickname; why there were no funny jokes and anecdotes about funny things she had done; why no one ever remarked her food preferences—no saving of the wing or neck for her—no cooking of the peas in a separate pot without rice because she did not like rice; why nobody teased her; why she never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace. Her general feeling of separateness and unworthiness she blamed on her foot. (p. 86)

Pauline's isolation is exacerbated by the couple's removal to the North, where she is unlike other blacks and unaccepted by them. Eventually, her loneliness and Cholly's futile struggle to support them decently destroy every possibility of love, and they learn to use their children as weapons against one another.⁹ The impending failure of Pecola's initiation, then, is first foreshadowed by the failure of love within her family.

There are a series of these lesser, foreshadowing encounters, all centering on failure of love, equated with the failure to be accepted or even to be considered worthy of acceptance. Frequently, these encounters have sexual overtones, for positive initiation is symbolized here by healthy sexuality, and we meet Pecola at the onset of menstruation. She and her friends, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, like other girls, are curious, puzzled, and enticed by their sexuality. For Claudia and Frieda, questioning is colored with romance:

My sister comes in. Her eyes are full of sorrow. She sings to me: 'When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls, someone thinks of me . . . ' I doze, thinking of plums, walls, and 'someone.' (p. 7)

For Pecola, it is tinged with terror:

What did love feel like? she wondered. How do grown-ups act when they love each other? Eat fish together? Into her eyes came the picture of Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove in bed. He making sounds as though he were in pain, as though something had him by the throat and wouldn't let go. Terrible as his noises were, they were not nearly as bad as the no noise at all from her mother. It was as though she was not even there. Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence. (p. 44)

The foreshadowing encounters also incorporate the motifs of race and ugliness, so that at every turn the reader is made to understand that Pecola's state is hopeless. Even the most casual exchanges teach her that she is unworthy. At school, the boys taunt her; she is the scapegoat for their own humiliation and pain,

'Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya dadd sleeps nekked. Black e mo .. . '

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned selfhatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path. (p. 50)

Buying the Mary Jane candies that she likes to eat because of the blond, blue-eyed child on the wrapper, Pecola is made aware that for many people, she doesn't really exist:

He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl? . . .

She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition—the glazed separateness. She does not know what keeps his glance suspended. Perhaps because he is grown, or a man, and she a little girl. But she has seen interest, disgust, even anger in grown male eyes. .. . it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes. (pp. 36-37)

And she assuages her resulting, unearned shame with "nine lovely orgasms with Mary Jane. Lovely Mary Jane, for whom a candy is named" (p. 38).

As they multiply, the foreshadowing encounters grow more painful and frightening. Seemingly befriended by a pretty little girl, the darling of the teachers and the demon of the other children, Pecola begins to relax, only to discover that she's being tricked into revealing "humiliating" facts about her family in exchange for Maureen's specious information about sex.

'Did you ever see a naked man?'

Pecola blinked, then looked away. 'No. Where would I see a naked man?'

'I don't know. I just asked.'

'I wouldn't even look at him, even if I did see him. That's dirty. Who wants to see a naked man?' Pecola was agitated. 'Nobody's father would be naked in front of his own daughter. Not unless he was dirty too. . . . '

'How come you said 'father'?' Maureen wanted to know. (p. 55)

The most terrible of the rejections occurs when a young boy makes her the scapegoat for his own pain, which stems directly from the fact that his mother, embracing white, middle-class standards, forces him to reject his own blackness and invests her affection in her cat.

How beautiful, she thought. What a beautiful house. There was a big red-and-gold Bible on the dining-room table. Little lace doilies were everywhere. . . . Potted plants were on all the windowsills. A color picture of Jesus Christ hung on a wall with the prettiest paper flowers fastened on the frame. She wanted to see everything slowly, slowly. . . . She was deep in admiration of the flowers when Junior said, 'Here!' Pecola turned. 'Here is your kitten!' he screeched. And he threw a big black cat right in her face. She sucked in her breath in fear and surprise and felt fur in her mouth. The cat clawed her face and chest in an effort to right itself, then leaped nimbly to the floor. (pp. 69-70)

Pecola is unable to save the cat from further torture and she is unable to save herself, for Junior's mother, interrupting, cannot allow herself to see the moment for what it really is; to do so would be to acknowledge kinship with Pecola, poor, ugly, and black, "'You nasty little black bitch. Get out of my house'" (p. 72).

Thus, Pecola is carefully taught that there is no one to love her, that whites do not see her, that blacks scorn her. For Pecola, the healthy sexual encounter symbolizing initiation into the adult world is forbidden, for when someone does see her as lovable, it is her father, and he rapes her.

The sequence of his emotions was revulsion, guilt, pity, then love. His revulsion was a reaction to her young, helpless, hopeless presence. . . . Guilt and impotence rose in a bilious duet. What could he do for her—ever? . . . What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his elevenyear-old daughter? If he looked into her face, he would see those haunted, loving eyes. . . . How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return it? How? ... a bolt of desire ran down his genitals, giving it length. . . . His soul seemed to slip down to his guts and fly out into her, and the gigantic thrust he made into her then provoked the only sound she made—a hollow suck of air in the back of her throat. Like the rapid loss of air from a circus balloon. (pp. 127-28)

The resulting baby dies, but Pecola lives, the victim of failed initiation, though she makes one more attempt to come to terms with the world. Because her prayers have come to no account, she seeks the aid of a magician. If he can give her blue eyes, all will be reversed. The result is bitter and ironic; she finds the only refuge available to her—madness. Through her false belief that she has, indeed, acquired blue eyes, beauty, Pecola escapes to the deepest isolation of all.

The damage done was total. She spent her days, her tendril, sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear. (p. 162)

For the community, Pecola's madness, coupled with her family history, excites scorn rather than sympathy. She becomes the scapegoat not merely for frustrated children, but for all of society. She assumes

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health. . . . Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. (pp. 162-63)

The novel 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.¹⁰ 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.

Both the Peace and Wright families are essentially fatherless; thus, the girls learn their most important lessons from their mothers, and in each case, the mother fails her daughter. Helene, Nel's mother, is absolutely conventional, being "constantly on guard for any sign of her [own] mother's wild blood" (p. 17), and she passes her rigid attitude about sex along to Nel. She seems strong and capable, but on a journey south, Nel watches her mother cringe before a white railway conductor under the disgusted, scorn-filled, impotent eyes of a group of black soldiers. The effect is lifelong:

If this tall, proud woman, this woman who was very particular about her friends, who slipped into church with unequaled elegance, who could quell a roustabout with a look, if she were really custard, then there was a chance that Nel was too.

It was on that train . . . that she resolved to be on guard—always. She wanted to make certain that no man ever looked at her that way. That no midnight eyes or marbled flesh would ever accost her and turn her into jelly. (p. 22)

Nel's individual initiation hardens her so that when the final, terrible test of her friendship with Sula comes, she turns her back on love and affirmation and finds refuge in that hardness—and in isolation.

Sula's home is governed by her grandmother, Eva, and run by her mother, Hannah. Both women are popular with men—Eva has a troop of male friends, Hannah a succession of lovers, but though they feel genuine love for them, "it was manlove that Eva bequeathed to her daughters" (p. 41), neither is able to express her affection for her children in a way that is acceptable or apprehendable to them. Sula's perceptions about sex are not formed by one of the initiation experiences, but rather are accumulated over the years by her mother's promiscuousness.

Seeing her step so easily into the pantry and emerge looking precisely as she did when she entered, only happier, taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable. Outside the house, where children giggled about underwear, the message was different. So she watched her mother's face and the face of the men when they opened the pantry door and made up her own mind. (p. 44)

These perceptions are, however, also colored by her individual initiation experience which occurs when she overhears Hannah talking to a friend about their daughters:

'You love her, like I love Sula. I just don't like her. That's the difference. . . . '

She only heard Hannah's words, and the pronouncement sent her flying up the stairs. In bewilderment, she stood at the window fingering the curtain edge, aware of a sting in her eye. Nel's call floated up and into the window, pulling her away from dark thoughts back into the bright, hot daylight. (p. 57)

It is significant that Nel's call draws Sula into their most crucial shared initiation. Both girls have been prepared for it by their families, but they have been prepared to fail.

This preparation for failure has, however, been social as well as familial. Their friendship has sustained them under some societal and familial pressures, and they know it.

Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and all that freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers . . . they found in each other's eyes the intimacy they were looking for. (p. 52)

One preparatory initiation episode occurs when the girls are threatened by four white boys, newcomers in the community who assert themselves by tormenting black children on the way home from school. Sula, generally the leader in their comradeship, determines to end the problem, and she does so by slashing off the tip of her left forefinger before their eyes, "'If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I'll do to you?'" (pp. 54-55). While, in a sense, she has solved the immediate problem, and while the girls have become "blood sisters," she has reacted with the violence which is her family pattern, and she has clearly indicated that while she can act, she does so irresponsibly. Nel reacts by refusing to consider herself really a part of the moment. The pattern of failure is set; just as they will never be free of family influence, they will be unable to cope with the pressures of society except by damaging themselves.

Their ultimate joint initiation occurs on the river bank, immediately after Sula's rejection by her mother and very shortly after the blood rite. The initiation confirms their unity, their sexuality, and their joint responsibility for what is about to happen; Morrison sets up the moment by a heavily symbolic description of play.

Sula lifted her head and joined Nel in the grass play. In concert, without ever meeting each other's eyes, they stroked the blades up and down, up and down. Nel found a thick twig and, with her thumbnail, pulled away its bark until it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence. Sula looked about and found one too. When both twigs were undressed Nel moved easily to the next stage and began tearing up rooted grass to make a bare spot of earth. When a generous clearing was made, Sula traced intricate patterns in it with her twig. At first Nel was content to do the same. But soon she grew impatient and poked her twig rhythmically and intensely into the earth, making a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig. Sula copied her, and soon each had a hole the size of a cup. Nel began a more strenuous digging and rising to her knee, was careful to scoop out the dirt as she made her hole deeper. Together they worked until the two holes were one and the same. When the depression was the size of a small dishpan, Nel's twig broke. With a gesture of disgust she threw the pieces into the hole they had made. Sula threw hers in too. Nel saw a bottle cap and tossed it in as well. Each then looked around for more debris to throw into the hole: paper, bits of glass, butts of cigarettes, until all of the small defiling things they could find were collected there. Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass.

Neither had spoken a word. (pp. 58-59)

They are interrupted by a little boy, Chicken Little, and, still playing, still seemingly happy, Sula grasps his hands, swinging him about in a great circle—until their hands slip apart, and he is thrown into the river.

The water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank. The pressure of his hard and tight little fingers was still in Sula's palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing. Both girls stared at the water. . . .

The water was so peaceful now. There was nothing but the baking sun and something newly missing. (p. 61)

The initiation is complete; their friendship has been promising, but they have been shaped to failure. Their maturity is flawed because they successfully conceal their part in the death, and they will never have really successful unions with men because those unions are doomed to be marked with blood and pain.

The complete failure of the initiation is not apparent at first; Nel marries, and on the wedding day, Sula leaves town to be gone for years, exploring the outside world.

Nel's marriage, however, is limiting rather than defining. Morrison makes clear that Nel's life-long search for conformity is the result of her mother's training and Nel's refusal to admit to herself that she has any responsibility for Chicken Little's death. The marriage provides her with respectability, a house to keep, children to rear, but it is doomed both through her own and her husband's lack of self-worth. The union is made because Nel is a tool for Jude's ego, his sense of maturity having been denied him by society.

So it was rage, rage and a determination to take on a man's role . . . that made him press Nel about settling down. He needed some of his appetites filled, some posture of adulthood recognized, but mostly he wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply. Deep enough to hold him, deep enough to rock him, deep enough to ask, 'How you feel? You all right? Want some coffee?' And if he were to be a man, that someone could no longer be his mother. (p. 82)

When Sula returns, years later, the initiation failure is dramatized, for she engages in an affair with Jude. The discovery of the affair ends their friendship; both women are to remain incomplete—and isolated—for life.

Sula undertakes the affairs because she is a damaged personality:

hers was an experimental life—ever since her mother's remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The first experience taught her that there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow. . . . For that reason she felt no compulsion to verify herself—to be consistent with herself. (pp. 118-19)

Nel cannot cope with the affair because of her resolution, formed on that train south, to be hard; never to be "soft" before the eyes of any man. Further, to admit that Sula's frailty is human would be to face her own part in the accidental murder of Chicken Little. She does not do so for years, not until after Sula's death, when Eva, Sula's grandmother, forces the question:

What did Eva mean by you watched? How could she help seeing it? She was right there. But Eva didn't say see, she said watched. 'I did not watch it. I just saw it.' But it was there anyway, as it had always been, the old feeling and the old question. The good feeling she had had when Chicken's hands slipped. She hadn't wondered about that in years. 'Why didn't I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?'

All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula's frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity, and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little's body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment. (p. 170)

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 selfdetermination, 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. Even the circumstances of Pilate's birth dramatize her rootlessness; immediately

after their mother died, she had come struggling out of the womb without help from throbbing muscles or the pressure of swift womb water. As a result .. . her stomach was as smooth and sturdy as her back, at no place interrupted by a navel. (p. 27)

The first years of Pilate's life are, nevertheless, promising, almost Edenic; she and her father and brother live and thrive on their Pennsylvania farm until a powerful white family covets their land and murders the first Macon Dead. The murder is the first step in Pilate's initiation; "I saw Papa shot. Blown off a fence five feet into the air. I saw him wigglin on the ground'" (p. 140).

On her own—she and Macon soon separate after a quarrel over a man he has murdered and over gold buried at the murder site—her initiation continues, for she painfully learns that she is not welcome in any community; "'I was cut off from people early. You can't know what that was like'" (p. 141). Twice, she joins bands of pickers and gets on well with them until she takes lovers whoreport 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 uniqueness marks her:

It isolated her. Already without family she was further isolated from her people, for . . . every other resource was denied her: partnership in marriage, confessional friendship, and communal religion. Men frowned, women whispered and shoved their children behind them. (p. 148)

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.

Finally Pilate began to take offense . . . when she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. . . . Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. Throughout this fresh, if common, pursuit of knowledge, one conviction crowned her efforts: since death held no terrors for her (she spoke often to the dead), she knew there was nothing to fear. That plus her alien's compassion for troubled people ripened her and . . . kept her just barely within the boundaries of the elaborately socialized world of black people. (p. 149)

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. Her vision is broad as a consequence of giving up "all interest in table manners or hygiene" and acquiring in its place "a deep concern for and about human relationships" (p. 149). 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'" (p. 141). Her father's spirit becomes the source of the wisdom around which she constructs her life.

It was right after Reba was born that her father came to her again. Pilate had been extremely depressed and lonely after the birth . . . and she spent some dark lonely hours along with the joyous ones with the baby. Clear as day, her father said, 'Sing, Sing,' and later he leaned in at the window and said, 'You just can't fly on off and leave a body'. . . . And she knew he was telling her to go back to Pennsylvania and collect what was left of the man she and Macon had murdered. (p. 147)

Pilate does sing; she sings often (and her song is a major clue in Milkman's search for the family origins, one of Morrison's cleverest, most effective foreshadowing devices). Furthermore, she returns to the scene of the murder and reclaims the dead man's bones which she carries about with her throughout her life, but these gestures of obedience, the center of her world structure, are informed by an overwhelming irony.

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.

Hagar is the center of her mother and grandmother's attention; "they did their best to satisfy every whim Hagar had" (p. 92), but the youngster is not like her family.

Hagar was prissy. She hated, even as a two-yearold, dirt and disorganization. At three she was already vain and beginning to be proud. She liked pretty clothes. Astonished as Pilate and Reba were by her wishes, they enjoyed trying to fulfill them. They spoiled her, and she, as a favor to their indulgence, hid as best she could the fact that they embarassed her. (pp. 150-51)

Most of the time, Hagar is successful at hiding her feelings about her mother and grandmother. Only once, when she is seventeen, does she speak out, and then she speaks elliptically and takes care to heal the brief breach. She says,

'Some of my days were hungry ones'. . . .

'Baby?' Reba's voice was soft. 'You been hungry, baby? Why didn't you say so?' Reba looked hurt. 'We get you anything you want, baby. Anything. You> been knowing that'". . . . [Pilate's] face was like a mask. It seemed . . . that somebody had just clicked off a light. . . . Reba's had crumpled. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Pilate's face was still as death, but alert as though waiting for some signal. Hagar's profile was hidden by her hair. She leaned forward, her elbows on her thighs. . . . The quiet held. . . .

Then Pilate spoke. 'Reba, She don't mean food.' . . . Pilate began to hum. . . . After a moment, Reba joined her, and they hummed together in perfect harmony. . . .

When the two women got to the chorus, Hagar raised her head and sang too. (pp. 48-49)

As always, Pilate turns to her father's misunderstood command as a way of solving problems, a way of making sense of perplexing life. Conditioned to this response, loving her mother and grandmother, and ignorant of any other option, Hagar joins in. The moment passes; the chance for understanding or change is gone, and Hagar moves forward to her initiation unprepared. The overwhelming love of her immediate family will not be enough.

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; "Totally taken over by her anaconda love, she had no self left, no fears, no wants, no intelligence that was her own" (p. 137); 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.

Hagar. Killing, ice-pick-wielding Hagar, who, shortly after a Christmas thank-you note, found herself each month searching the barrels and cupboards and basement shelves for some comfortably portable weapon with which to murder her true love.

The 'thank-you' cut her to the quick, but it was not the reason she ran scurrying into cupboards looking for weapons. That had been accomplished by the sight of Milkman's arms around the shoulders of a girl whose silky copper-colored hair cascaded over the sleeve of his coat. .. . As regularly as the new moon searched for the tide, Hagar looked for a weapon and then slipped out of her house and went to find the man for whom she believed she had been born into the world. (pp. 126-27)

Her mother and grandmother take the only steps they know; they respond with violence—Pilate beats her—and love, "All they knew to do was love her and since she would not speak, they brought things to please her" (p. 308). But that is not enough; it never has been, and Milkman's friend, Guitar, thinking of Hagar and reasoning through her problem, correctly identifies it as isolation. Hagar has never learned to cope with the world, has never learned who she is because her mentors—Pilate and Reba—also do not know. There has been no community to love and teach her, no place for her to belong except the home of which she disapproves.

Pretty little black-skinned girl. What had Pilate done to her? Hadn't anybody told her the things she ought to know? He thought of his two sisters, grown women now, who could deal, and the litany of their growing up. Where's your daddy? Your mama know you out here in the street? Put something on your head. You gonna catch your death a cold. Ain't you hot? Ain't you cold? Ain't you scared you gonna get wet? Uncross your legs. Pull up your socks. I thought you was goin to the Junior Choir. Your slip is showin. Your hem is out. Come back in here and iron that collar. Hush your mouth. Comb your head. Get up from there and make that bed. Put on the meat. Take out the trash. Vaseline get rid of that ash.

Neither Pilate nor Reba knew that Hagar was not like them. Not strong enough, like Pilate, nor simple enough, like Reba, to make up her life as they had. She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her—and the humor with which to live it. (p. 307)

But Hagar has neither inner strength nor humor; Morrison sees her clearly as the symbol of the "wild," outside-thecommunity faction of the poor black district of their Midwestern town, the faction that has neither roots nor structure, that can rely upon its own untutored intensity:

there was something truly askew in this girl. . . . here was the wilderness of Southside. Not the poverty or dirt or noise, not just extreme unregulated passion where even love found its way with an ice pick, but the absence of control. Here one lived knowing that at any time, anybody might do anything. Not wilderness where there was system, or the logic of lions, trees, toads, and birds, but wild wilderness where there was none. (p. 138)

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, Corinthians manages the accommodation.

Until well into adulthood, Corinthians, like Pilate, has absolutely no identity of her own:

She was First Corinthians Dead, daughter of a wealthy property owner and the elegant Ruth Foster, granddaughter of the magnificent and worshipped Dr. Foster; who had been the second man in the city to have a two-horse carriage. (p. 197)

but even that identity is fragile, for Corinthians' father is bitter toward her and her sister, Magdalene.

The disappointment he felt in his daughters sifted down on them like ash, dulling their buttery complexions and choking the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices. Under the frozen heat of his glance they tripped over doorsills and dropped the salt cellar into the yolks of their poached eggs. The way he mangled their grace, wit, and self-esteem was the single excitement of their days. (pp. 10-11)

Corinthians cannot turn to her mother for support or enlightenment because Ruth Foster Dead is herself helpless, abandoned, and immobilized by the death of her father and the scorn of her husband.

In their own eyes, Macon and Ruth Dead have done their best by their daughters, for they have been sent to the finest colleges and have traveled abroad. The result is, however, that the two are over-qualified for roles as wives of rising black professional men, and the white world will offer them no jobs except as domestics. For years, they spend their time making artificial roses to sell to a local department store, pitying their mother, and being browbeaten by their father. Finally, Corinthians rebels and secretly becomes the maid of the town's "lady author"; to do so, she must deny herself and assume a mask.

Corinthians was naïve, but she was not a complete fool. She never let her mistress know she had ever been to college or Europe or could recognize one word of French Miss Graham had not taught her. . . . Actually, the work Corinthians did was good for her. In that house she had what she never had in her own: responsibility. She flourished, in a way, and exchanged arrogance occasionally for confidence. The humiliation of wearing a uniform . . . and deceiving people was tempered by the genuine lift which came of having her own money rather than receiving an allowance like a child. (p. 190)

The first step in Corinthians' initiation is partially successful; she has asserted herself and stepped away from her father's shadow. The value of the effort, however, is dimmed by the lies and repression she must practice to sustain her new life.

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:

Corinthians knew she was ashamed of him, that she would have to add him to the other secret, the nature of her work, that he could never set foot in her house. And she hated him a lot for the shame she felt. Hated him sometimes right in the middle of his obvious adoration of her, his frequent compliments about her looks, her manners, her voice. But those swift feelings of contempt never lasted long enough for her to refuse those . . . sessions where she was the sole object of someone's hunger and satisfaction. (p. 194)

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:

He did not move. In a panic, lest he shift gears and drive away, leaving her alone in the street, Corinthians climbed up on the fender and lay full out across the hood of the car. She didn't look through the windshield at him. She just lay there, stretched across the car, her fingers struggling for a grip on steel. She thought of nothing. Nothing except what her body needed to do to hang on, to never let go. Even if he drove off at one hundred miles an hour, she would hang on. Her eyes were shut tight with the effort of clinging to the hood, and she didn't hear the door open and shut, nor Porter's footsteps as he moved around to the front of the car. She screamed at first when he put his hand on her shoulders and began pulling her gently into his arms. He carried her to the passenger's side of the car, stood her on her feet while he opened the door and helped her ease into the seat. In the car, he pressed her head onto his shoulder and waited for her soft crying to wane before he left the driver's seat to pick up the purse she had let fall on the sidewalk. He drove away then to number 3 Fifteenth Street, a house owned by Macon Dead, where sixteen tenants lived, and where there was an attic window, from which this same Henry Porter had screamed, wept, waved a shotgun, and urinated over the heads of the women in the yard. (p. 199)

Once her choice is made, Corinthians is happy with it; she suppresses the hatred born of shame:

Standing there, barefoot, her hair damp with sweat and sticking to her cheeks like paint, she felt easy. In place of vanity she now felt a self-esteem that was quite new. She was grateful to him, this man who rented a tiny room from her father, who ate with a knife and did not even own a pair of dress shoes. A perfect example of the men her parents had kept her from (and whom she had also kept herself from) all her life because such a man was known to beat his woman, betray her, shame her, and leave her. Corinthians moved close to him, tilted his chin up with her fingers, and planted a feathery kiss on his throat. (p. 201)

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. However, the fact remains that to live with Porter, she must subjugate herself utterly.

For the careful reader, this compromise calls into serious question the ultimate worth of Corinthians' choice. Guitar, Milkman's friend who has been so right in his assessment of Hagar's problem, has, at one point, tried to dissuade Hagar from her headlong passion for Milkman, and his comment to Hagar also holds true for Corinthians:

'Could you really love somebody who was absolutely nobody without you? You really want somebody like that? Somebody who falls apart when you walk out the door? You don't, do you? And neither does he. You're turning over your whole life to him. Your whole life, girl. And if it means so little to you that you can just give it away, hand it over to him, then why should it mean any more to him? He can't value you more than you value yourself.' (p. 306)

The answer is that to both Hagar and Corinthians, life has no worth without the men they love; they have no identity save the reflection of themselves in the eyes of those men. Hagar has never learned to value herself; Corinthians' pride is arid and useless in the society in which she finds herself. Perhaps she is luckier than Hagar—but quite possibly, Morrison suggests, she is not—and the reader is left to wonder how long Porter will value a life found valueless in the eyes of its owner.

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.

¹ Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). All further references are indicated in the text.

² Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973). All further references are indicated in the text.

³ Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). All further references are indicated in the text.

⁴ Jane S. Bakerman, "The Seams Can't Show: An Interview with Toni Morrison," Black American Literature Forum, 12 (1979), 60.

⁵ Frederic I. Carpenter, "The Adolescent in American Fiction," English Journal, 46 (1957), 315.

⁶ Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 158.

⁷ Other commentaries about the initiation experience and/or the Bildungsroman include Suzanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930), pp. 1-10 especially; Lionel Trilling, "The Princess Casamassima," The Liberal Imagination (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1953), pp. 55-88; and Jane A. Bakerman, "The Long Journey from Somersetshire: A Commentary on the Apprenticeship Novel," Indiana English Journal, 6 (1971), 14-20. These sources show that for the traditional adolescent hero, the acceptance of society's tarnished values symbolizes the ability to be "mature," to be accepted and to live successfully within the society. For Morrison's female characters, that option is not viable.

⁸ Toni Morrison, "Behind the Making of The Black Book," Black World, Feb. 1974, p. 89.

⁹Eye incorporates the failed initiations of Cholly and Pauline Breedlove in flashbacks, a device common in Morrison's work. Further, Pauline's comments about her responses to the North give compelling evidence of the problems of transplanted southern black women.

¹⁰ One of the most fascinating motifs in Sula is the exploration of mother-daughter relationships, and in the flashbacks, Morrison provides insight into the relationship between Sula's mother, Hannah, and her grandmother, Eva, as well as that of Nel's mother, Helene, to her grandmother, Rochelle. In both cases, the difficulties stem not simply from the women's personalities, but also from the poverty and racial pressures which have shaped them.