Toni Morrison - God help the Child

Unravelling Multiperspectivity in Toni Morrison’s God help the Child

 

The constant shifting between the narrative voices and perspectives in Toni Morrison’s God help the child (Ghtc) forces the readers to directly engage with the text. By becoming an active part in the creation of meaning, the readers “correlate different perspectives” (Bode 2011 198) and bridge or “fill in the gaps” (cf. Isar 1988 1005) which in turn allows them to question the normative ideological framework and its stereotypes or assumptions about race and gender.

In Part I of the novel the readers are already confronted with a very complex narrative set-up, as they are challenged to find correlations (cf. Bode 2011 198) between the stories and recounted memories of four female first person narrators. While the homodiegetic narrations of Bride, Brooklyn and Sofia mostly narrate feelings and events that are related to a narrative present (“we are sitting” (Ghtc 23), “Something bad is happening to me” (Ghtc 8) with the occasional flashbacks to a more immediate past (Bride’s break-up with Brooker or Bride’s hysteria when Brooklyn finds her beaten up after she confronted Sofia), first person narration of Sweetness seems to frame the entire novel and open up a greater socio-historical context. Unlike the narrative voices of the other three female characters, she is not an experiencing I. Looking back as an elderly woman in a retirement home, Sweetness remembers the “traumatic” moment of her daughter’s birth and her own ambivalent feelings and reactions to it. Although her daughter was born in post-Civil Rights era in 90s where “the law was against discrimination” (Ghtc 6), Sweetness’s worldview and, consequently, her “schooling” (Ghtc 178) are determined by skin-colour “the lighter, the better” (Ghtc 4) and her own experiences in in a world of “skin privileges” (Ghtc 43). When her own child turned out “really wrong” (Ghtc 3) by becoming “blue-black right before my eyes” (Ghtc 5), her daughter became not “just […] a colored woman” (Ghtc 6), in her eyes she became the embodiment of a “throwback” (Ghtc 3), an archetypal black other of fear, negation, absence and negativity (cf. Morrison 1990 747). Having been shaped in a racially segregated America, where there “were two Bibles […] one reserved for Negroes […] the other […] for white people’s hands” (Ghtc 3), Sweetness is convinced that her daughter’s “terrible color” (Ghtc 5) not only ruined her marriage it also twisted a mother’s relationship with her daughter. She couldn’t just “plain love her” (Ghtc 43), she had to protect her from the harsh realities by “be[ing] even tougher” (Ghtc 178), keeping her child at an emotional and physical distance. Even years later as her feelings of guilt and shame that are connected to “baby, Lula Ann” (Ghtc 4) and her regrets about being a “bad mother” (Ghtc 43) threaten to take hold of her, Sweetness blocks those memories. She refuses to deal with their “burden” (Ghtc 177). “Push[ing] them away” (Ghtc 177), she denies all responsibility: “It is not my fault. So you can’t blame me” (Ghtc 3).

However, by directly engaging with the readers right from the beginning Sweetness not only forces them to consider her colour-coded point of view and the socio-historical “circumstances” (Ghtc 177), but also the conditions of readers’ own knowledge of “how the world is, how it works and how it changes” (Ghtc 178), especially in combination with different perspectives of the other female I-narrators. Most importantly of theses voices is that of her successful daughter Bride who now seems to live in a world which has “shed its frumpy past” (Ghtc 10), where “things have changed” (Ghtc 176) and where “color” is no longer the single determining factor in social relationships and hierarchies. Although colour and race are still an issue, as seen for example her relationship with the medical student who tried to use her to “terrorize his family, a means of threat to this nice old white couple” (Ghtc 37), she has reinvented herself as a “new black” (Ghtc 33) beauty, redesigning not only her outer appearance with the help of a “‘total person’ designer” (Ghtc 33), she even sheds the name her mother gave her and becomes “Bride. Just Bride” (Ghtc 85). Although this act of renaming is linked her new identity as a successful business woman, more importantly it is her attempt to take control over her own black self. By rejecting what Derrida calls her mother’s act of “originary violence” (cf. Dawes 1999 216) that forcibly imposes a sign upon her and with it the most arbitrary relationships, she also rejects her mother’s authority to control and categorize her as the other. Like her mother she is, however,  not completely successful in shaking off the past and “pretend[ing] it didn’t matter” (Ghtc 32). Confronted with her childhood lie, the “performance in […] court” (Ghtc 42) that made her mother proud but “helped put an innocent women [Sofia] in prison” (Ghtc 156) for child rape, Bride’s “thrillingly successful corporate woman façade of complete control” (Ghtc 133) begins to crack: “I am melting away”. She loses control over that carefully self-styled identity the markers of her sex (pubic hair, breasts, menstruation) seem to be “erased” (Ghtc 13) and “changing [her] back into a little black girl” (Ghtc 97). Although Bride tries to right her wrongs by confronting recently paroled Sofia which results in her being beaten “half to death” (Ghtc 24), like her mother she becomes stuck in her scary memories (Ghtc 82) that seem to have left deep “cuts [that] festered and never scabbed over” (Ghtc 134). As her body begins recover from the physical trauma, she starts on a journey that eventually leads her to back to her (ex-) boyfriend. On her way, however, she encounters with Rain and Queen no only a kindred spirit and another failed mother, but two literary foils that essentially function as a bridge between presence and absence, self and other, past and present which might help Bride to discover the woman she wants to be (Ghtc 8) and force the reader to find more explicit links between the narrative perspectives to fill the “silent” (Ghtc 155) gaps.

By introducing multiple heterodiegetic counter-perspectives with changing focalizers from part two onwards, the readers are not only given more information to complete picture and assemble the narrative. Although Brooker’s third person narrative gives voice to a male point of view on the difficulty to overcome childhood trauma, however, the loss of Adam who in “death became his [Brooker’s] own life” (Ghtc 147) distorts his perspective, making him somewhat impaired or even “falliable” (Bode 2011 217). Only after his violent confrontation with Bride, who decides to tell the truth (Ghtc 156) and an intervention from Queen, Brooker begins to examine his position: “I risk nothing. I sit on a throne and identify signs of imperfection in others. […] I write notes about the shortcomings of others. Easy. So esasy. What about my own?” (Ghtc 160). Similarly the reader who in these heterodiegetic interludes looks at the narrated events from a critical distance is forced to question not only reliability the information or the narrator who presents it but also their own assumptions about race and gender, the ideological framework and even decoding practices, thus, the text challenges the readers to “identify the signs of their own imperfections” how they fill the gaps and understand the world which colours the way they create meaning. 

Works Cited

Bode Christoph, The Novel: An Introduction (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)

James R. Dawes, "Language, Violence, and Human Rights Law," Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 11. 2 (1999), 215-249

Derrida Jacques, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)

Iser Wolfgang, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach”, in The Critical Tradition, ed. David H. Richter. (London:St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 1002-14.

Morrison Toni, God help the Child (London: Chatto & Windus, 2015), Kindle Edition.

Morrison Toni, “The Struggle to Depict the Black Figure on the White Page”, Black American Literature Forum 24.4. (1990): 747-760