Who is tar baby in sula

This makes Tar Baby a transitional text following her first three novels, which are set in neighborhood locations. They are recognizable neighborhood locations.

Morrison is drawing from her background as someone who grew up in Lorain,Ohio. In Tar Baby, we move outside small-town borders, outside U. In many ways, Tar Baby is a radical departure from what goes on in Song of Solomon. I want to argue—and please do argue with me—that we need to think about a Morrison quartet, as opposed to a Morrison trilogy.

There are some streams of thoughts in Tar Baby that we will see in other novels. Therefore, we need to think about this book as on par with the other seven books. But she also decided to do something radically different from Song of Solomon and got back on track when she wrote Beloved. That was my initial thought. It's clear she set a very different path for herself, but I don't think we should be in a hurry to dismiss it as an exercise in identity.

I think it's reductive to view Tar Baby as a book about what it means to be black: Jadine is therefore the villain in the book as she goes back to Europe. I have some problems with that. I want to spend the next few minutes arguing that Tar Baby works out elements that are found in the later works, though it does so by prefiguring the concerns about selfhood, racial allegiance, and community taken up in the later novels.

I'll explain what I mean by that. Tar Baby is set on an island in the Caribbean. Whereas Song of Solomon is about Milkman's quest to achieve a state of wholeness by unearthing his genealogical roots, Tar Baby gives us Son and Jadine—two characters marked by their rootlessness. Jadine is described at various parts in the novel as an orphan or as someone lacking the ancient properties, while Son is, in Morrison's terms, an undocumented man, a man who carries his original dime, a man who was born and bred among the folk in Eloe, Florida.

Jadine is cosmopolitan. In Tar Baby we see a collision between a cosmopolitan sensibility and a provincial sensibility. In the contemporary sense of that word "cosmopolitan," Jadine invokes in my mind more about the magazine of that same name than the true sense of the term, because cosmopolitanism is actually the ability to be comfortable in a variety of cultural settings.

The contemporary use has more to do with a bourgeois facility with consumption. In many ways, Jadine is just as provincial as Son. She's not really cosmopolitan. So does Son. Although they're both purveyors of village values, they're located in different phases of capitalism endeavor. Son is still rooted in a barter economy. Jadine is in the realm of consumer capitalism. These are two radically different phases of capitalism. They're irreconcilable. In her fiction, Morrison rarely treats dualism as anything but the fount of reductive thinking.

What keeps us from reaching the conclusion that this is actually what's going on is that Tar Baby is often read as solely racial commentary. When this novel was written, in , there was a lot going on. In the transition of American writing, we had reached the end of the Black Arts Movement, which I mark with the speech that Ntozake Shange gave at Howard University in She came on the scene during the late s and early s.

For Colored Girls is an example of black-art cultural politics in that it started off as a play that was performed in bars. It was a grassroots endeavor. It went from there to Broadway.

In many ways, that was the end of the Black Arts Movement, because it was a moment when the anti-Establishment had gotten to Broadway. It has more or less sanctioned certain kinds of African American cultural expressions.

Tar Baby is Morrison's attempt to riff on two things that in were in need of critique. I want to argue that Tar Baby critiques the Black Arts and Black Power Movements, not only in terms of their often less-than-critical approach to racial difference. One of the things that comes to mind from that period is the Black Nationalist poet Haki Mahdhabuti asking for the state of Montana as a route to racial harmony. Those movements contested that what gave political action or artistic endeavor its value was that it was produced in black minds.

On some level, it came down to if a black person said it, it must have value, which led to some uncritical thinking on the part of African Americanists in what was then called black studies. The other thing is that Morrison's novel critiques—if only implicitly—the Feminist Movement, particularly in terms of what we've known as second-wave feminism. She does this in at least two ways. First, in the relationship between Jadine and Margaret, we see two very different strains of feminism at work.

There's Jadine's notion of being a self-created woman—one who is beholden to no one but herself. She's done this by infantilizing him: going through his closets and discarding his clothes, controlling him to the point of tying his shoes and having him fed by Sydney.

In other words, this is the vulgar feminism that my students talk about when I ask them if they're feminists. They say, "No, I'm not a feminist. I don't hate men.

I'm not a lesbian. I don't want men to think that I'm all about women being better than men. Margaret, rather than doing what Jadine has done, which is to make herself, has taken over as patriarch. She's standing in for Valerian, which means she hasn't done anything with herself at all. At the time that this book was published, Morrison's place in American literature was both secure and tenuous. It was secure in the sense that the literary establishment had lauded her with awards.

She was a senior editor at Random House. She really was a part of the establishment. On the other hand, it was also tenuous, because from the late s onward, when we started to see a higher level of visibility on the part of women writers, black men came to view black female literary production as oppression, as a threat. When For Colored Girls came out, not having seen the play—because part of the Black Arts and Black Power manifesto was you didn't need to have seen it to have an opinion about it—I just knew that For Colored Girls was an attack on my manhood as a black man.

Therefore, it needed to be condemned. There's a real politics at work there. There's this notion of keeping it in the family. That very language, in my view, invokes a patriarchal authority that has everything to do with silencing women when they dissent from the party line. The Black Arts and Black Power movements have been heavily dominated by men—even though women are very involved in those movements.

From the very beginning, the people who were the spokespersons were men, most notably Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, who edited the watershed anthology Black Fire. Morrison's Tar Baby wants us to ruminate on how we got to this place. How did we come to the point where men get a chance to say what they want to say, and it's immediately co-signed?

I want to argue in the strongest terms that I don't think this book should be isolated from the rest of Morrison's canon. I think it's dangerous to do so because it leads us to the conclusion that this was a frivolous exercise. I want to argue that it's anything but that.

If it's not part of a quartet of novels, it's at least a companion text and a template for what will happen later. Certainly, it sutures together Morrison's first phase, where she's working out village values, and Morrison's latter phase, where she's working in terms of the revisionist ruminations on acts of self-recovery. In this latter phase she begins to look internally at those aspects of black experience that can be traced to our experiences as people who were once property.

Those three books— Beloved , Jazz , and Paradise —really do ruminate strongly on what it means to be a people who were once property. I also want to make some other connections. Dorcas in Jazz , is, in my view, the prefigurement of what will become Jadine. This is chronologically speaking in terms of setting [much of Jazz takes place in the s; most of Tar Baby takes place in the s], not in terms of publication dates of the novels.

This passage on page in Jazz leapt out at me. This is Dorcas talking:. Not yet. I think I see him everywhere. I know he's looking and now I know he's coming. I could be anything, do anything—and it pleased him. Something about that made me mad. I don't know. Then I do it how he likes it. I never wear glasses when he is with me and I changed my laugh for him to one he likes better.

I think he does. I know he didn't like it before. And I play with my food now. Joe liked for me to eat it all up and want more. Acton gives me a quiet look when I ask for seconds. He worries about me that way. Joe never did. Joe didn't care what kind of woman I was. He should have.

I cared. I wanted to have a personality and with Acton I'm getting one. I have a look now. One of the things that makes me say that that's a prefigurement of Jadine is what she does. She's becoming a model. In the s when a widespread advertising culture and the flapper girl emerged, one of the things that happened was a magazine culture enveloped the country. We got the idea of a "look.

On the one hand, there are some issues with style, but also women became the object of spectacle. That spectatorship becomes a serious part of what it means to be visible as a woman. Jadine is also a revision of Sula, which is to say that she is a woman who has an affinity for the paints and clay that Sula lacks. Whereas Sula's artistic sensibility turns on itself and becomes dangerous, to use Morrison's words, Jadine's imagination can find space in either academia or the arts, either as a photographer or a model.

I'm not necessarily sanctioning this idea of being a model, but it's important to trace these strands to the other books. Morrison could not, I argue, have written Tar Baby without having written those first three books. We can't understand what happens in Tar Baby unless we read the next three books.

The evidence of that is Tar Baby happens in what was the present. What makes it a book different from all the other books is that it does not invoke the past. It happens in a contemporary present. Why is that important?

I'll say something about that in just a bit. Morrison does not endorse either of these postures as be-all end-all settings where Jadine can achieve a measure of safety and security. We'd be really foolish to dismiss these settings because Jadine is, like Sula, a figure of radical autonomy.

That's the term I want to hammer away at, this idea of radical autonomy. In Beloved , radical autonomy is a dangerous proposition, largely because slavery, having destroyed the communal impulse, makes such a posture alienating and self emanating. Note: By radical autonomy I refer to instances where individuals like Sethe or Sula act out of their investment in satisfying their own interests, apart from the needs or concerns of the larger community, which indicates their hubris and largesse.

In Jadine, on the other hand, radical autonomy can be asserted against the way that patriarchy and sexism demand that woman's legitimacy be intimately linked to male endeavor. One of the things that I want to say in conjunction with the Lepow essay is we should not dismiss Jadine's desire to be a person of her own design.

When we read Tar Baby only as a kind of racial melodrama, in many ways the first thing that's going to be lost is that impulse that actually holds up as admirable: Jadine's desire to be a whole person of her own making. It can't have been easy to leave Philadelphia and go to Paris—even though they tell me Philadelphia is the Paris of the West. The only difference is we eat salad after dinner instead of before.

Son takes every opportunity to challenge Jadine and accuse her of not being from anywhere. Jadine's achievement is that she represents the courage that articulates what seem to be, on their face, heretical positions. For example, when she asserts Picasso over the makers of an African mask, insisting that the former embodies art while the latter embodies superstition, if we read the comment through the Black Arts Movement, then we conclude that she's out of touch with reality.

An Afrocentric perspective would say the mask is higher than Picasso. In Flash of the Spirit , Robert Farris Thompson says, "Don't none of you all need to be talking about African masks, because the bottom line is there is no such thing as an African mask.

Far from being an image understood in continental terms, African masks can only be understood within the context of the cosmological perspective of a particular place on the continent, a particular group of people.

Part of what Jadine identifies for us is that the process by which Picasso copies the mask is different from the process that led to the making of the mask. It's clear where her affinities lie. She is Euro-centric.

We can critique her for that. But maybe you don't like Picasso. We also have to draw important links between Son and Sethe, both of whom engage in acts of violence, meant to establish their sense of integrity—at least in the psychological sense.

Son kills his wife by driving his car through his house. Sethe kills her baby to prevent her from being taken back into slavery. When you look at Beloved , Sethe's act is intimately tied to the collapse of the community mechanism that would have kept her from killing her baby.

It all goes back to that feast. Folks get mad at the feast. They see Schoolteacher coming to town with slave catchers and yet they don't go to and warn Sethe.

She takes matters into her own hands with what she thinks of as her resources. On the other hand, Son's act is very similar, and it leads to very similar results. Again, it's this radical autonomy that I'm talking about.

Like Lutie in Ann Petry's novel The Street , who kills a man who tried to rape her and then, in a fit of despair, abandons her son, Sethe's act occurs because she loses the ability to take stock of her resources.

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Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. Literature Poetry Lit Terms Shakescleare. Download this LitChart! Teachers and parents! Struggling with distance learning? Our Teacher Edition on Sula can help. They aren't the most emotionally stable bunch, and this likely has an impact on Sula. They are perhaps one reason she loves Nel's house so much. There aren't any neighborhood boys or drunks there, and Sula can just enjoy the peace and quiet.

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