Village Literature
An Exploration of Toni Morrison’s Spirituality in her novel Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon uses archetypal symbolism and unique imagery to portray how African Americans depended on their folklore and spirituality to survive. “Thus, Morrison's style contains key elements of "African modes of storytelling" which provide "a way of bridging gaps between the Black community's folk roots, and the Black American literary tradition" (Wilentz 61)” (Van Tol, p.3) Morrison’s storytelling and imagery give Milkman Dead’s life a religious, fable-like atmosphere, the title of the book itself being an allusion to the collection of love poems in the Old Testament. For example each character is named after a west-African
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Milkman Dead’s journey is crucial element to Morrison’s allegory, the odyssey of the being the base of the hero’s story in all ancient influential literature. This journey allows him to shake his self-pitying, sheltered life and experience revenge, reciprocal love and teach him what he wants out of life. This cave where Aunt Pilate supposedly hid her gold is a meeting place, representative for a meeting place for the hero and mythological deities. “Passing through the cave represents a change of state, also achieved by overcoming dangerous powers.” (JC Cooper) Milkman was lead to this cave by his father (whom the intention of stealing the gold) as well as Pilate who serves as his spiritual shaman. This first stop is only one time his life is dramatically altered by a visit to this cave. The first time, he leaves the cave to travel the Shamilar, Virginia and learn about himself. Once Milkman thinks he’s achieved this, he returns to the cave to bury Pilates fathers bones. She is then gunned down by Guitar, who was driven mad by his need to greedily take revenge, and control the white man through his murderous cult. Pilates gold was for his planned murders of white men. “She stood up then, and it seemed to Milkman that he heard the shot after she fell.” (Song of Solomon …show more content…
The names of every member of the Dead family each have a mythological or biblical meaning. The sisters or Milkman Dead, Magdalene and Corinthians are both characters in the Old Testament of the Catholic Bible. Ruth Dead, Milkman’s mother, a name taken from the Israli Book of Ruth, which tells the story of a woman who accepts her place in the Jewish faith despite her being a non-Israelite. This connects to the fact that Ruth is a rich, upper class sheltered woman married to a married alone to man in a place she does not understand. Next is Circe, whom Milkman meets in Shalimar. Circe turns out to be the midwife who assisted in the amazing births of Macon and Pilate. Morrison uses this as an allusion to Homers Odyssey, Circe being a beautiful witch who led men to their doom. Naming such a maternal figure after a temptress is a unique decision, done for the purpose of giving Circe more characterization as a woman. Digressing into the subject of Pilate herself as a character, Her own name was taken randomly from the bible by a father who could not
In the first part of the novel, Milkman is his father's son, a child taught to ignore the wisdom of women. Even when he is 31, he still needs "both his father and his aunt to get him off" the scrapes he gets into. Milkman considers himself Macon, Jr., calling himself by that name, and believing that he cannot act independently (120). The first lesson his father teaches him is that ownership is everything, and that women's knowledge (specifically, Pilate's knowledge) is not useful "in this world" (55). He is blind to the Pilate's wisdom. When Pilate tell Reba's lover that women's love is to be respected, he learns nothing (94).
Milkman thought the bag that Pilate had was filled with the dead white mans gold, but when he reaches Pennsylvania he realizes that he is wrong. He found out the truth when he meets ancient Circe. Ancient Circe is a woman he meets and she represents a person who is linked to Milkman’s past.
Macon, perhaps instigated by never having a mother and seeing his own father killed, has always appeared to be a cold and unforgiving parent even to his other children besides Milkman, but since Macon heard that his son¹s nickname was ³Milkman² he has seen him as a symbol of his disgust for his wife and lost a lot of respect for his son and became even colder towards him. The only time Macon did spend time with Milkman, he spent it boasting about his own great upbringing, warning him to stay away from Pilate and telling him about the embarrassing actions of Ruth. This is the manner in which Morrison establishes the relationship between Macon and Milkman in the first part of the book.
The idea of complete independence and indifference to the surrounding world, symbolized by flying, stands as a prominent concept throughout Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon. However, the main character Milkman feels that this freedom lies beyond his reach; he cannot escape the demands of his family and feel fulfilled at the same time. As Milkman's best friend Guitar says through the novel, "Everybody wants a black man's life," a statement Milkman easily relates to while seeking escape from his sheltered life at home. Although none of the characters in the story successfully take control of Milkman's life and future, many make aggressive attempts to do so including his best friend Guitar who, ironically, sympathizes with Milkman's situation, his frustrated cousin Hagar, and most markedly his father, Macon Dead.
In Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, men discover themselves through flight. While the motif of flight is liberating for men, it has negative consequences for women. Commonly, the women of Song of Solomon are abandoned by men, both physically and emotionally. Many times they suffer as a result as an abandonment, but there are exceptions in which women can pick themselves up or are undisturbed. Morrison explores in Song of Solomon the abandonment of women by men.
The character Pilate in Song of Solomon is portrayed in the role of a teacher or "guide". She tends to be a spiritual leader as well as a spiritual guide for Milkman and the rest of the society. It could be argued that she is the main cause of Milkman's liberation and better being. She represents the motherly love and gives the spiritual education that Milkman needs, in order to go through the monomyth process. She teaches Milkman the necessities of life not with severity but rather by means of being her own self. Her being connected to her heritage and traditions is also involved in changing Milkman into the hero. Pilate is not the typical teacher that a reader could expect to have in his or her classroom. Pilate is to a certain extent, very mother like and caring towards Milkman. She gives Milkman what he feels he can't get at his rich home, care and affection. When Milkman is alone, it is at Pilate's house that he finds comfort, not only from the people but also from the surroundings of the house. He feels comfortable being in a neighborhood of people that are of lower class than him. Pilate takes on the role of mother to Milkman by showing how a family is supposed to be, which is not divided like his house, but rather caring and loving towards one another, like the environment at Pilate's house. As Joseph Skerrett points out, Pilate does begin teaching Milkman, starting from their very first meeting. Her whole lesson with how the word "hi" sounds like the "dumbest" word and that if someone was to be greeted with a hi, they should "get up and knock you down" seems to get Milkman to notice her. Her role as a parental guide changes to that of one of the teacher and she tries to teach him what is right and wrong. She exemplifies to Milkman how life should be led. She shows him how goals in life should be aimed for and how they should be accomplished. For example, her whole lesson on how to make the perfect egg shows Milkman how even something as little as frying an egg has consequences to it.
In Song of Solomon, through many different types of love, Ruth's incestuous love, Milkman and Hagar's romantic love, and Guitar's love for his race, Toni Morrison demonstrates not only the readiness with which love will turn into a devastating and destructive force, but also the immediacy with which it will do so. Morrison tackles the amorphous and resilient human emotion of love not to glorify the joyous feelings it can effect but to warn readers of love's volatile nature. Simultaneously, however, she gives the reader a clear sense of what love is not. Morrison explicitly states that true love is not destructive. In essence, she illustrates that if "love" is destructive, it is most likely, a mutation of love, something impure, because love is all that is pure and true.
Milkman is born on the day that Mr. Smith kills himself trying to fly; Milkman as a child wanted to fly until he found out that people could not. When he found, "that only birds and airplanes could fly&emdash;he lost all interest in himself" (9). The novel Song of Solomon is about an African American man nicknamed Milkman. This novel, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was first published in 1977, shows a great deal of the African American culture, and the discrimination within their culture at the time Song of Solomon takes place. In part one, the setting is in a North Carolina town in the 30's and 40's.
When one is confronted with a problem, we find a solution easily, but when a society is confronted with a problem, the solution tends to prolong itself. One major issue that is often discussed in today’s society that has been here for as long as we’ve known it, is racism. Racism is also a very repetitive theme in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Almost every character has experienced racism whether it be towards them or they are the ones giving the racism in this novel. Racism is a very controversial topic as many have different perspectives of it. In Toni’s novel, three characters that have very distinct perspectives on racism are Macon Dead, Guitar, and Dr. Foster. These characters play vital roles throughout the novel.
Freedom is heavily sought after and symbolized by flight with prominent themes of materialism, classism, and racism throughout Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. The characters Milkman and Macon Dead represent these themes as Macon raises Milkman based on his own belief that ownership of people and wealth will give an individual freedom. Milkman grows up taking this idea as a way to personally obtain freedom while also coming to difficult terms with the racism and privilege that comes with these ideas and how they affect family and African Americans, and a way to use it as a search for an individual 's true self. Through the novel, Morrison shows that both set themselves in a state of mental imprisonment to these materials
ames are one of the first identifiers a person is given, and yet as infants they are given no choice in this identifier that will be with them for the rest of their lives. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon the use of the biblical names Hagar and Pilate serve as a means to show the importance of defining the path of one’s life for one's self, as supposed to letting one's name define it for them. Through juxtaposition and parallels, Morrison teaches a universal lesson of the importance of self definition.
He concludes by seeking reconciliation with Pilate and helping her carry out a sacrament of kinship by burying the bones of her father properly near his home. He begins thinking gold will free him from dependence on his father; he finds that he becomes free only as he throws off the influences of his father and absorbs the lesson of interrelatedness that Pilate has been living all her life. His thin-soled shoes fall apart on rough terrain; his three-piece suit labels him a stranger; the sense of superiority these city clothes represent makes the backwoods people whose help he needs want to kill him. But when he trades his suit and shoes for their army fatigues and hunting boots and goes hunting with them in a ritual test of fellowship, these same men give him the clue that leads to his discovery of his family history and an introduction to the woman (significantly, one whom social convention might label a commodity) with whom he has the first truly reciprocal relationship of his life. The same newly-awakened sensitivity to other people that he exercises in his relationship with Sweet allows him to see the parallel between the song "Solomon don't leave me here" that he hears children singing and the story he has heard of his own grandparents and realize at last that the characters in the song are real people, in fact, his own ancestors.
Song of Solomon tells the story of Dead's unwitting search for identity. Milkman appears to be destined for a life of self-alienation and isolation because of his commitment to the materialism and the linear conception of time that are part of the legacy he receives from his father, Macon Dead. However, during a trip to his ancestral home, “Milkman comes to understand his place in a cultural and familial community and to appreciate the value of conceiving of time as a cyclical process”(Smith 58).
In Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison gives us a list of characters whose lives all revolve around the basic principle that completes us all, love. Morrison's most grounded character is Pilate Dead. Although Pilate may not say much, she is one of the most important and beloved characters in the story. She is loved not only by Milkman but also by the readers. As Morrison says “[Pilate is very large] because she is like something we wish existed. She represents some hope in all of us,” (“An Interview with Toni Morrison” 419). Pilate Dead is many things to many different people. She is a mother, a savior, a role model, a woman of great strength, and a woman filled with mystery.
Pilate Dead is a major character who stands out from the other characters in Song of Solomon. Pilate Dead does not represent the stereotypical weak, dependent woman that the novel depicts through the female characters that are in the story. The women in Song of Solomon were seen as subordinate to their significant other and lacking the strength to live on their own. However, Pilate demonstrates a strong, dependent women who is capable of surviving on her own without showing any inferiority to men. Her strength and independence is shown through her lifestyle, her relationship with other characters, and her death.