Amanda MacDonald, “’The Future was Sunset:’ Trauma, Intention, and Empathy in Toni Morrison’s Trilogy,” 3rd Place.
In Toni Morrison’s trilogy, she presents the community as both an influence and contribution to psychic healing and the recollection of the fractured self in the post-traumatic moment. The characters in each of the three novels: Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise come together to commune with one another and create spaces that facilitate healing, growth, and forward movement through these spaces. Trauma theories proposed by Sandor Ferenczi in the early twentieth century center the empathic response and listening as a healing, interpersonal exercise when bearing witness to trauma. These psychoanalytical theories provide evidence of the community-based, collectivistic examples of psychic healing later imagined by Morrison.
This essay proposes that intention, empathy, and imagination are foundational components to the communal facilitation of the return to the Self necessary after experiencing trauma. It also explores the concept of bearing witness to trauma in such a manner that remains centered on the survivor—particularly their speaking and believing the truth of their own narrative. Finally, it asserts the possibility of empathetically bearing witness and simultaneously providing the space for the survivor to be able to recreate and rewrite their narrative in a comprehensible way. Through the intentional and empathic understanding of one another, experienced traumas, and any unconceivable behavior that manifests from those traumas, humans are not only able to reach a point of relationality amongst one another, but can heal through the community that is formed based on the mutual understanding of traumatic experience, as showcased in the community facilitated by the haunting of 124 Bluestone Road, the apartment building on Lenox Avenue, and the abandoned embezzler’s mansion-turned Convent housing Consolata and other four women.
Western culture has historically maintained social stigmas surrounding mental health and wellness, hindering the creation of community around such topics. In the past 20 years, with the rise of social media and the concept of a global culture, there is rampant over- and mis- use of terms pertaining to psychology and mental health that leads to a generalized, uninformed understanding of the psyche and human behavioral response to trauma. Primary eyewitnesses of trauma are regularly met with disempowering and retraumatizing language that affirms their position in the experience as the victim. As a result, people that experience trauma, who will be called survivors within the parameters of this research, are made to feel shame and responsibility not only for what happened to them, but a responsibility that their narratives must be clear and sensical to the person that they choose to share their experience with—the witness. The witness has a fundamental responsibility to honesty, empathy, and intention toward the survivor and their account: allowing the survivor to act as a guide through the traumatic event as they have experienced and been affected by it. This includes accepting the shape of the narrative in whatever form it takes, as exemplified through Consolata’s meeting and listening to Pallas for the first time: “[the conversation] was wine-soaked and took an hour; it was backward and punctured and incomplete, but it came out—little one’s story of who had hurt her” (Paradise 173). Consolata accepts Pallas’ story without questioning or suggestion, allowing her to recount her trauma on her terms, in whatever order the events present themselves. Trauma also creates an inherent layer of responsibility among members of society: the responsibility of reciprocity to our fellow human to bear witness to the horrors that may plague them in life, trusting that if similar horrors should ever visit us, they too will do the same.
In the characters’ journeys through their traumas and back to themselves, Morrison not only proposes, but imagines examples in her Trilogy that the black community is and has been able to provide mental health support to one another, acted as therapists and sources of psychic support (and as a means of survival with limited access to those resources), and has done so with lasting, community building results. Her narratives act as opportunities for the readers to similarly become witnesses to trauma within the narrative. In her essay, “Memory, Creation, and Fiction,” Morrison says, “I want my fiction to urge the reader into active participation in the nonnarrative, nonliterary experience of the text, which makes it difficult for the reader to confine himself to a cool and distant acceptance of data” (328). This active participation is what creates a survivor-witness relationship between the characters on the page and the readers bearing witness to their trauma. Bearing witness to trauma helps the survivor to believe their own experiences, which are often beyond the bounds of human comprehension, causing their trauma to feel, and therefore be, unbelievable.
In her writing of the Trilogy, Morrison was inspired to write by real people and events out of black history. Through active engagement with her novels, readers can simultaneously engage with the forgotten (and therefore—up to the point of witnessing—unbelievable) moments of American history. In Beloved, the inspiration was the story of Margaret Garner, a black woman born in pre-Civil War America who escaped from slavery with her husband and four children, and when being recaptured by U.S. Marshals, killed her youngest daughter to prevent her from living a life in slavery. Although Garner was born and died in slavery, Richard Perez in “The Debt of Memory: Reparations, Imaginations, and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” sheds a new light on her identity as imagined by Morrison, “By reaching into the archive and reconstructing Garner’s story, then, Morrison recuperates her personhood and imbues her via fiction, with a narrative afterlife for her extraordinary deed” (193). The imagination is critical in the processing of trauma and re-writing the personal narrative to fit in traumatic events, in Beloved and the other novels in the Trilogy. For Jazz, Morrison was inspired by a photo from James Van Der Zee’s Harlem Book of the Dead which Stephen Knadler discusses in his article, “Domestic Violence in the Harlem Renaissance: Remaking the Record in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Toni Morrison’s Jazz.” He states, “In writing Jazz, Morrison has remarked in interviews, she was inspired by a 1928 photograph … of a young woman in a coffin who had refused to name the lover who had shot her and had likewise refused to ask for medical attention or summon the police so her lover could escape” (112), and much like her reconstruction of Margaret Garner’s story, Morrison too draws on this photograph and the woman in it to create a narrative about the that time and place in history. As Knadler notes, Morrison, “wants to create a revisionist historical novel that will then become a lens for reading backwards into … the Harlem Renaissance” (113), which she does through Joe’s affair with Dorcas, that leads to his shooting her while in a dissociative state searching for his own mother, Wild, and her allowing herself to die so that he would not be convicted of murder. Finally, in Paradise, Morrison sources her inspiration for the towns of Haven and Ruby in the Reconstruction Era and the historic persecution and oppression of all-black towns throughout the American West. The point of view shifts in each chapter of the novel, and the chapters are entitled with the character about whom the story is centered. These chapters present us with snapshots of each character’s trauma and what led them to the Convent, which further helps to provide context on the men attacking the Convent: residents, and Fathers in the town of Ruby.
In Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, Morrison utilizes her own construction of the narrative to engage the active participation of the reader. In Beloved, the hardly perceptible transitions between the past and present (usually distinguished by the reference or a person or place known pre- or post-enslavement) cause the reader to question their position in timespace while navigating the maze of Sethe’s memories and trauma. In Jazz, the spaces that she leaves in between the characters’ narratives allow for the reader to absorb the account to which they just bore witness, and then come back to with a more wholistic understanding once their experience has been broadened by their complementary physical and psychic movements between the North and South. The novel feels like an improvisational opportunity for the characters to approach their demons and darkest fears with the power to re-imagine them. In Paradise, Morrison concludes with an exemplary framework of empathetic community through the women of the Convent, who build community in collective memory, holding space for one another’s shifting identities in and outside of their traumatic experiences, with which the readers can actively participate. In “Programmed Space, Themed Space, and the Ethics of Home in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” Shari Evans highlights the primary way that readers can participate with the novel, “Morrison’s ethics of home demands that we engage in this work of questioning and revising the narratives of our spaces and work toward a practice of empathy and connection in which the multiplicity of interpretation and insight is valued” (383). Against the backdrop of the highly exclusionary town of Ruby, engaging to the point of empathy and connection is often done on the outskirts of town, at the Convent, which provides the women of the town the distance required to begin questioning their home space.
Morrison transports the readers back in time to different memories within a character’s timeline, in order to engage and become witnesses to the trauma and begin understanding it. Readers must participate in a methodological, multi-conscious approach to the characters to begin to understand them, and resist letting the character’s traumas overwhelm the other layers of identity. Multi-consciousness is the awareness and empathic consideration of all layers of trauma that may impact or encompass a person’s identity. In Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois defines double-consciousness as “two-ness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (3), and this two-ness made sense for a black man living in a world ruled by his white oppressors. However, an expansion upon the concept of double-consciousness is required to be able to bear witness honestly and empathically to the compounded, complex traumas in Morrison’s body of work, and especially the trilogy. Multi-consciousness considers the multiple fractures in identity that are present for all the characters, especially the women, encountered in the novels. In addition to being black in a white supremacist society, Sethe, Violet and the women on Lenox Avenue, and Mavis and almost all the women at the Convent all had their consciousness further fractured as women. Synthesizing this element of their identity with their role as wives, mothers, and matriarchs, and considering the generational, adopted, and internalized traumas that have accrued over time and generations, their perspective has been affected by oppression and trauma far past the point of doubling their consciousness.
Since the characters’ identities have been fractured and re-fractured over the course of lifetimes of trauma, the distance between them and their community is greater than they can comprehend. In “Cracked Psyches and Verbal Putty: Geography and Integrity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Marilyn J. Atlas looks at the way Morrison explores, “the return of characters to mental health through their retracing the geography of the past and healing the mental fissures created from the trauma[s]” (65). It is their retracing of the past, which spans time, geography, and the (re)memories that live there that allow the characters to begin filling in the mental fissures caused by trauma, and to begin reclaiming those parts of themselves. This experience is not exclusive to Jazz and is seen and felt throughout the entire trilogy. This return to mental health requires the settling of each character’s multi-consciousness. For Sethe, her returned daughter “Beloved, then, functions as a supernatural memory relived for the sake of psychic and spiritual rehabilitation” (Heinze 180), which also shows the connections between the supernatural and the psyche. Each of the protagonists has something in their lives that functions as a supernatural memory that must be relived and processed for the sake of their own rehabilitation back to self, created a connection of haunted spaces across the trilogy. In Jazz, this supernatural memory is Dorcas’ photo of the mantle of the fireplace, which manifests as “a sickness in the house” (28) and serves as a supernatural memory for both Joe and Violet and prompts their individual rehabilitations back to self as well. In Paradise, it is the Cadillac that Mavis steals to ride to Ruby, Oklahoma, and where her twins Merle and Pearl died. Although she has the Cadillac painted magenta pink after she leaves her husband and “the ‘other children’ . . . what they would always be now” (21), that space inside the car always remains where her twins Merle and Pearl were abandoned in the heat to die. Their claim over this space in the car and in Mavis’ memory and is later confirmed in the “night visits” from the twins. In these supernatural moments, the spirits of the twins were transported in her memory from the Cadillac) to the Convent, “She still heard Merle and Pearl, felt their flutter in every room of the Convent” (171), and “When they were in front of Mavis’ bedroom door she didn’t open it. She froze. ‘Hear that? They’re happy,’ she said, covering her laughing lips” (182). While these night visits represent the unprocessed trauma also follows a survivor from location to location, they also represent the possibility of engaging with those traumatic memories, processing them, and inducting them into a greater narrative as a result of the intentional engagement with them.
The Convent, once “an embezzler’s folly” (3), and then later purchased by nuns and turned into an Indian school, “where stilled Arapaho girls once sat and learned to forget” (4), held the memories of those who lived there before Connie and the nuns, as well as the current residents’ memories too. Mavis is very traumatized by the abuse that she endured at the hands of her husband, but she is transformed in the Convent. She refers to herself as “the one who couldn’t defend herself from an eleven-year-old girl, let alone her husband. The one who couldn’t figure out or manage a simple meal, who relied on delis and drive throughs, now created crepe-like delicacies without stopping everyday” (171). The before and after comparisons of relying on delis and drive throughs, to creating crepes and similar delicacies, shows the effect the space and circumstance can have on changing and healing the human identity. The actual space of the Convent was where Mavis healed and learned to see herself as capable, but how she did this lies in the community of women there. Her mental health improved considerably as she was able to become more in touch with herself, as facilitated by Consolata, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas. By connecting with the women in her living space and forming a community, Mavis was able to locate her individual identity and intentionally approach the fractures in it with care and understanding to heal her psyche.
In addition to the supernatural memories in the novels, the characters battle with their own conscious memories, as well as rememories, a term Morrison coins in Beloved. As Sethe warns Denver, “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world” (Beloved 36). This proves to be an omen for all the characters encountered in the three novels. If memory is the intentional and voluntary recalling of past events as they are understood within a greater, cohesive narrative, rememory, like traumatic memory, is the involuntary recollection of difficult memories. Rememory is attached to places and things which trigger rememory in the mind of the inhabitant or passerby and remain displaced within the survivor’s larger narrative framework. Places hold trauma and settings become their own characters, personified by shifting and changing to match, meet, or accommodate the beings that reside within them. In Beloved, for instance, Sethe’s house is described repeatedly as almost human, “124 was spiteful” (3), “124 was loud” (169), and finally, “124 was quiet” (239). Not only is the house personified, but it is personified as an organic, moody, shifting entity, just as alive as the residents within its walls. Likewise, the narrative of Jazz is heavily dependent on its setting in New York City, “The City,” who had not only a life of its own, but an influence over the lives of the people who lived in it. Violet and Joe are narrated as being particularly connected to the City, “They weren’t even there yet and already the City was speaking to them” (32). Like the house in Beloved, in Jazz the city takes on human agency, described in changing detail: “The city thinks about and arranges itself for the weekend” (Jazz 50); “And when spring comes to the City … There is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition: the range of what an artful City can do” (117-18). Just like the house on Bluestone Road, The City is an organic, living entity that moves and changes with the lives of the people living there. Finally, in Paradise, the personification is two-fold: in the Oven which is a living center for Haven and an empty symbol for the town of Ruby, and in the Convent. We see this geographical personification in the descriptions of the Oven, “No family needed more than a simple cookstove as long as the Oven was alive, and it always was. Even in 1934 when everything else about the town was dying … the Oven stayed alive” (14). The Oven not only provides sustenance through its utility, but it offers a symbolic foundation for the town as a gathering place that initially eradicates the social hierarchies that relegated some Black women to kitchens and others to fields. The Convent’s location outside of Ruby shows how it is just as lost in the concept of timespace as the women who are staying there, “No need to hurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other” (Paradise 3). The women in the Convent are isolated from community not only through their traumas and consequent psychic disconnect, but by great geographic distances as well. Ultimately, the characters are all able to experience change and find themselves in these settings, because the locations are undergoing changes and shifts right alongside them and prompting the changes within the characters.
Morrison’s creation of these settings as characters causes the readers to understand the greater context of the individual characters and where they come from, as a necessity to being able to comprehend the entire story. In “Cracked Psyches and Verbal Putty: Geography and Integrity in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” Marilyn Atlas speaks on this use of setting as a means of psychic healing, “Morrison uses geographical images to explore the grotesque realities of her character’s lives, turning grotesque, cracked characters into viable, potential ones, examining the internal geographic space within each human mind, spaces that can be made and remade” (63). Through her narratives Morrison helps readers to understand location and geography as not just physical spaces, but as spaces where intentions can be set, and new lives can be forged. The geographic space of the mind is where identity is formed—it is where memories live, narratives are created, and life is processed. For Morrison, as Denise Heinze argues, “apocalypse is the necessary antecedent to renewal” (93), meaning that there must be a total breakdown of oneself—a personal apocalypse—before there is a rebuilding, and we see this breakdown in each of the three novels. When the characters are ready, Morrison provides a dedicated, themed space (albeit not free from rememory) ready for this rebuilding to occur. For Sethe, the manifestation of Beloved’s ghost was not enough to process her trauma. It was not until her home life was entirely disrupted and the necessary apocalypse of Beloved’s attempt on her life occurred that she was able to process this. For Violet Trace, she was not able to process the trauma of her childhood and the death of her Mother until after she attempted to cut Dorcas’ face at her own funeral. Additionally, she was not able to process the trauma of her mother Rose Dear’s suicide until she returned to the well where she died, after the event at Dorcas’ funeral that led her to be called “Violent” by the community. On the flipside of the marriage, Joe did not intend to kill Dorcas when he set out to look for her. He was a hunter who was morally opposed to killing women and later feels deep regret for what he did. Carrying a gun while trailing down an animal was a perfectly normal action for a skilled tracker and hunter like himself. The issue is that, exactly like Violet when she ran into her funeral brandishing a knife, Joe forgot Dorcas’ humanity because of the things Dorcas said to him, triggering the rejection wound of never feeling chosen by his Mother (Beloved 187–91). As he begins his search for Dorcas, he shifts back and forth throughout time when he was trying to track down his mother, Wild, showing how physical objects and actions can trigger rememory as well.
As these memories and rememories surface, it is the responsibility of the reader to sift through and make sense of them, primarily by means of empathic listening. This extends beyond the simple intake of facts and experience and extends to allowing oneself to feel and experience the narrative alongside the survivor recounting it. Although unreliable, the narrator in Jazz engages in empathic listening when trying to make sense of the unconceivable actions in the novel as we see when it recounts about Violet that, “she got reasons. Even if she crazy. Crazy people got reasons” (175). This fundamental understanding that the actions being taken by the survivor make sense in the greater context of their narrative allows both the narrator and reader to reach greater levels of understanding as they move forward in the plot. In “Narrating the Self and Other: Trauma, Language, and the Empathic Listener in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy,” Shari Evans writes, “Crucially, by imagining an empathic listener, the space of Morrison’s narrative[s] heals trauma by integrating it into a new articulation of self and a community while recognizing the contrary and destructive impulse to protect the self through silence or compliance with an already articulated role or story” (144, emphasis added). The key is the imagination of the empathic listener even in the absence of one. Evans continues, “individuals remain connected to and controlled by who hears, sees, and imagines them” (151), and therefore, by imagining their own empathic listener, the survivor also can control who they are connected to by controlling who is hearing, seeing, and imagining them in their personal psychic spaces. Even if the distance between oneself and one’s community feels too great to bridge, it is possible to begin bridging that gap through the use of imagination. Carolyn Jones, in “Traces and Cracks: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz” continues to build this idea that “memory and storytelling are the exercise of an imaginative faculty that helps one to live harmoniously with the self, the human community, and the past (483), and the imagination does not discriminate between the imaged empathic listener, or the one physically in front of the survivor: both forms of imagination act as a means, and an invitation to live harmoniously within the Self.
Readers witness much more complex forms of trauma in the characters of the Trilogy: racially rooted generational trauma, adopted traumas both from oppressors and unhealed community members, and trauma that takes hold and lingers in physical spaces, which causes difficulty in the process of self-harmonizing and healing. However, Beloved acts a bridge throughout these physical and emotional spaces, as Eric Meljac in “Beloved as a Symbolic Bridge: Symbolism and Connected Space in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” proposes that “It is Beloved, as a ghost, who acts as metaphoric bridge for many spatial aspects in the novel” (38). This is true for the entire Trilogy as well. By acting as a bridge from the self to the other, and aiding in the formation of community, Beloved’s ghost, Dorcas’ photo, and Mavis’ Cadillac all act as counters to the greatest obstacle to empathic listening and community silence, and help to propel the characters into the new chapter of their life. In “Trauma, Healing and the Reconstruction of Truth,” Clara Mucci describes silence as a means of transferring trauma “by never divulging their stories, [survivors] feel that the rest of the world will never come to know the real truth. It becomes a chain, transferred to the next generation, and so on” (36), and continuing trauma as a cycle throughout generations, transcending timespace. It is through the telling and re-telling of events that experiences both positive and traumatic become real. Their reality is rooted in their ability to be observed, witnessed, and therefore processed.
Each character featured throughout the three novels has experienced trauma in some way and all their interactions must be analyzed in layers: considering the surface level interactions first, then considering the trauma of the individual, and finally reflecting on trauma that manifests at the communal level. This communal reflection becomes necessary as the ripple effect of trauma is felt at the communal level, and so the healing must trace and follow the hurt I order to be effective. The ghost of Beloved can be interpreted as the supernatural memory that persists throughout the novels in the form of generational trauma and acts as the bridge between Joe and Wild, Violet and Rose Dear, Mavis and Gigi, and Consolata with each of the other four women at the Convent. The behavior of the characters, specifically within the household of Beloved is often driven by fear and rooted in trauma, both in their inner worlds, as well as in their interactions with one another. There is one fear that exists on a communal level, across generations, that acts as a binding factor to those who have this shared experience:
Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning—that Beloved might leave … Before Sethe could make her understand what it meant—That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up. (Beloved 251)
Beloved’s “leaving” and Sethe’s fear also contain the embedded fear of the loss of memory. As the memory of Beloved takes hold in the residents of 124, this fear dissipates because the possibility of its loss is reduced drastically. However, the acknowledgement of a memory is not enough to process it. As evidenced in the relationships between Beloved and Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, they are all accepting of her presence and interact with her memory daily. However, the household eventually spirals into the obstacles and triggers that come from living with unprocessed trauma, until Beloved must be exorcised with the help of the neighborhood and community. Similarly, although Paul D has been on the move for years, when he returns to 124 and Denver questions how long he will stay, this acts as a trigger to Paul’s own unprocessed trauma, “The phrase hurt him so much he missed the table. The coffee cup hit the floor and rolled down the sloping boards toward the front door” (43). Sethe immediately responds by scolding Denver, “you must not know what you need either. I don’t want to hear another word out of you” (Beloved 43), and then jumps to clean up the mess and bring the cup back to the table for Paul D, who is feeling ashamed for the way he has acted (44). From a perspective lacking context of the greater picture and of the specific experiences of the people sitting at that dinner table, this would seem like a father figure’s temper got the best of him, and the mother figure moves with haste to soothe his mood and the situation. However, from an empathic and actively engaged perspective, readers can reach the understanding that, “When he was drifting, thinking only about the next meal and night’s sleep, when everything was packed tight in his chest, he had no sense of failure, of things not working out. Anything that worked at all worked out” (221). This is a man who hopes to have located a home, with a woman who also feels like home, but has spent his whole life coming and going, being questioned about when he will leave again, and leaving spaces before he can be ejected from them. Although Denver does not mean to call out his absence and is in fact only looking for reassurance of her own fears of abandonment, “ever since I was little she [Beloved] was my company and she helped me wait for my daddy” (205), this is exactly what happens in Paul D’s mind, as the narrative of his trauma continues to be the lens through which he is interpreting life (at the start of the novel). Sethe, finally, tries to act as the glue to hold everything together, the strong foundation that the family can rest and regroup around. Although this interaction at the dinner table can be interpreted in many ways, allowing the time and space that is required to read through the novel also allows us as readers to understand the characters better and learn about why they do what they do. Reflecting on the past experiences with the characters, just as they have done with their own pasts, readers are able to approach the behaviors and identities of these characters with new frameworks into which they better fit.
In Jazz, that same sense of community is formed, but this time between the friendship Violet Trace and Alice Manfred they form after Dorcas’s death, which positions Alice as Violet’s empathic witness. Alice is clearly aware of Violet’s levels of trauma and distress due to recent events in her life. Ultimately, the community fostered in this relationship and the empathy offered to Violet led to her revisiting the well where her mother committed suicide and inflicted a grave abandonment and unworthiness wound on her psyche, “seeded in childhood, watered every day since, fear had sprouted through her veins all her life” (Jazz 85). Although Alice was no longer acting as a mother to Dorcas, when Violet releases her birds on the day of Dorcas’ funeral, birds that had served as surrogate daughters, she made room for herself to be a daughter, and Alice stepped in as a nurturing mother figure to help Violet heal her mother wound. Violet’s relationship to trauma and memory echoes Sethe’s relationship to her own trauma as symbolized in the physical manifestation of Beloved, who grows larger as she is fed and nurtured, and calls into question the way that trauma reacts when it is interacted with, nurtured, and/or repressed. For Violet, what would appear on the surface as being an unhealthy obsession with her husband’s dead mistress and her own childlessness, when informed by the way that Violet processes trauma: that being, finding placeholders and symbols to which she can funnel her grief, as exemplified by her care for and impulsive release of her birds, and a deep need to understand the motivations for people’s actions since she never understood the reason for her mother’s suicide and ultimate rejection of her (Jazz 4). With this context, readers can understand that Violet learning everything about Dorcas was her way of making peace with the affair and her husband’s infidelity by falling in love with her too. For Violet, it was simple to run to Dorcas’ funeral and try to cut her face because at the time, Violet did not see her as human, and only understood Dorcas through her own personal, psychic wounds. As she began to learn the inner workings of her life and relationships, she grew a love and understanding for Dorcas and was forced to look back on her own actions, “why was she proud of trying to kill a dead girl” (94). This connection that she formed with Alice is what led her back to the well and ultimately back to herself and the repair of her marriage to Joe.
In Paradise, although Ruby was supposed to be a form of Paradise for the residents, the very founding of the town was rooted in compounded generational trauma. The first piece of town history and collective memory in Ruby is the traumatic death of its namesake:
Ruby. That sweet, modest laughing girl whom he and Steward had protected all their lives. She had gotten sick on the trip; seemed to heal, but failed rapidly again. When it became clear she needed serious medical help, there was no way to provide it. They drove her to Demby, then further to Middleton. No colored people were allowed in the wards. No regular doctors would attend them. She had lost control, then consciousness by the time they got to the second hospital. She died on the waiting room bench while the nurse tried to find a doctor to examine her. When the brothers learned the nurse had been trying to reach a veterinarian and they gathered their dead sister in their arms, their shoulders shook all the way home. (113)
Although the residents of Ruby were able to create a life and community outside of the framework of racial oppression, they were not able to base the values of that town outside of colonial, patriarchal framework. The Founding Fathers of Ruby, Oklahoma (unintentionally) carried over the utopic framework from the U.S. forefathers’ “American Dream,” and their brand of Paradise was a fundamentally exclusionary one, whose reputation stretched to the only other location within 90 miles of them: The Convent. In the communities of the town of Ruby and in the Convent on its outskirts, Morrison challenges the very concept of Paradise by presenting it as a subjective entity. There is the Paradise in the town of Ruby, of the Founding Fathers and the Reverends, which reflect the colonial, patriarchal framework upon which America was built, and then there is the Paradise of Consolata and the women staying at the Convent. Even after the town of Ruby was formed and the women had an all-Black space to develop their lives and identity, that space remained male centric and patriarchal, causing the women to seek out a more inclusive space apart from these traditionally oppressive frameworks. Through physical and mental geography, Morrison supports these distinctions through her storytelling. In Jazz, the concept of Paradise is considered as well, from the perspective of love and relationships, as Dorcas ponders “the paradise that could make a woman go right back after two days… All for Paradise!” (Jazz 63), and the concept of loving an idea of a relationship with someone more than loving the actual person. Magali Cornier Michael defines Morrison’s approach to the concept of Paradise as being an exploration of “coalition processes that are more accommodative, caring, and loving, rather than exploitative, and that are aimed principally at survival and at moving toward a new, alternative form of non-hierarchal justice, rather than at maximizing power and winning” (644), and re-imagined the concept of agency through a collective lens. These characteristics of Paradise as exploitative and focused on power and winning reflects the patriarchal paradise of Ruby, as well as the unhealthy “I can’t live without you” mentality of possessive romantic love that overarches the entire narrative in Jazz. The alternative accommodative, caring, and loving environment reflect what Consolata was facilitating for the woman at the Convent, and what Alice offered to Violet in Dorcas’ post-mortem.
Morrison’s Trilogy shows the reflective relationship between fiction and reality and provides hope in the form of the characters as evidence for psychic healing through empathy, intention, and imagination. Morrison admonishes readers at the end of Beloved, “It was not a story to pass on . . . It was not a story to pass on . . . This is not a story to pass on . . .” (Beloved 274–75). Similarly, the stories in these novels may not be stories to pass on, but they are stories to share and remember, and stories around which community can (and should) be formed. When Morrison says that the stories should not be passed on, she means in the way that Sethe passed her rememory on to Denver, Rose Dear passed her rememory to Violet, and the Founding Fathers of Ruby passing their rememory onto their sons and community: as trauma begetting more trauma. The stories are not to be passed down in the form of generation trauma, but instead as generational healing. As Carolyn Jones puts it in “Traces and Cracks: Identity and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Jazz,” “the story cannot be passed on—that is, the story must be told” (Jazz 481), and even more importantly, empathetically listened to. Morrison shows that there are forms of remembering that are rooted in trauma that may even be re-traumatizing to the survivor, and there are forms that are rooted in healing and the return to the self, made possible using one’s imagination. With the foundations of empathy, intention, and imagination, Morrison shows the ways in which community can act as the catalyst of healing of generational and psychic traumas. Just as this is possible for characters in the Trilogy, to whose trauma the readers are bearing witness, it is possible too for the reader to find the same sense of comfort and community for themselves.
Works Cited
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