Contemporary African-American Fiction, Volume 1

Description

Contemporary African-American Fiction, Volume 1 is a collection of scholarly essays and recent reviews of the best of contemporary African-American literary fiction, including the following titles:

• A Mercy by Toni Morrison


• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead


• The Mothers by Brit Bennett


• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 


• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Modern
• African
• América
• Literature
• Contemporary history
• African people
• Modern history
• African American
• American
• Contemporary
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Novel
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438182025
• Langue: English

Extrait

Contemporary African-American Fiction, Volume 1
Copyright © 2019 by Infobase
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Contents Chapters Her Dark Materials: John Milton, Toni Morrison, and Concepts of "Dominion" in A Mercy REVIEW: Colson Whitehead Brilliantly Reimagines the Underground Railroad The Mothers by Brit Bennett The Unbroken Line: Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing Empathy Is Not Enough (On The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas) Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing Support Materials Acknowledgments
Chapters
Her Dark Materials: John Milton, Toni Morrison, and Concepts of "Dominion" in A Mercy
2011
Introduction
In Toni Morrison's 2008 novel, A Mercy , the mistress Rebekka Vaark gives the journeying Florens an authenticating letter that twice describes their domicile as "Milton" (110). Appearing two-thirds of the way through the novel, this detail strongly suggests what has been only hinted at until this point: that the writings of John Milton (1608–74) are an important presence herein. My aim in this article is to explore A Mercy 's subtle and complex engagement with the work of the seventeenth-century poet, statesman and political activist. I argue that Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) significantly informs Morrison's representation of life in Virginia, Maryland and New England in the 1680s and '90s. The novelist's engagement both with that poem and with its status in that specific time and locale is key to A Mercy 's central concerns: the nature of freedom and oppression, of power and powerlessness, and of good and evil.
In his keynote address at the Toni Morrison Society Conference of July 2008, Marc Conner declared that "the context of the seventeenth century, of Descartes and Milton … opens all sorts of doors into Morrison's worlds, particularly her relation to Modernity" (5). In the same speech he suggested that Adam and Eve's banishment "at the end of Paradise Lost … has been a meditation for Morrison," pointing out that "her novel Paradise … is hardly her first investigation into the concept of Paradise and its loss" (4). Several scholars have analyzed the ways that Tar Baby and Jazz as well as Paradise— in their portrayals of flawed and/or lost utopias—engage with the Genesis stories of the Creation, and of Adam and Eve's temptation and fall. 1 Yet (with the exception of Conner's remarks) there has been a regrettable critical silence on the subject of Morrison's dialogue with Milton's version of these events. To some extent, this is not surprising: from one perspective, no two authors writing in the same language could have less in common, and the stern-faced, Puritan-leaning, white Englishman does not immediately come to mind when we think of Jadine and Son, Joe Trace and Dorcas, or even Consolata and Deek. The interactions with Milton in A Mercy , however, are sufficiently charged that it would be an act of wilful scholarly oversight to ignore this intertextual relationship any longer. 2
It is in A Mercy that Morrison most obviously shares Milton's preoccupation with (if not his perspectives on) the conflicts between order and chaos, reason and sexual desire, and the divine and the human. His fascination with the nature of power and government, with the status of women, with the relationship between Puritanism and Roman Catholicism, with the limits of language and literature, and even with the viability (or otherwise) of binary oppositions, resonates significantly in the contemporary work. Morrison's allusions to Paradise Lost at once unpack Miltonic certainties and exploit Miltonic uncertainties and ambivalences, and in so doing, contribute to the scrutiny of the nascent Enlightenment world-view and of the transition into constructions of "America" that A Mercy enacts.
Concepts of "Dominion"
In contrast to the scant critical attention paid to the subject of Milton and Morrison, scholars have written extensively on the subject of Milton and America. This scholarship contextualizes what might be at stake, politically, in Morrison's own engagement with Milton in the interventionist version of American history and identity that is A Mercy . In 1845, in his introduction to the first American edition of Milton's prose works, the editor and critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold claimed that "Milton is more emphatically American than any author who has lived in the United States" (Stevens 789). In recent decades scholars have both reiterated and challenged the conventional wisdom that the poet's republicanism, reforming brand of Protestantism, and stake in individual liberty have an exceptional resonance within dominant American ideologies, and they have explored the various and often conflicting uses to which his work has been put in American religious, political and literary discourses. For example, in his 1964 work, Milton in Early America , George F. Sensabaugh argues that "Milton moved through the whole cultural community, impressing not only poets but also editors and free-lancers, statesmen and lawyers, doctors and clerics" (viii), that "before the end of the eighteenth century he had become a household and a community word" (5), and that at that time it was common to cite "Milton and scriptural authors as peers" (12). While numerous scholars have examined Milton's role in the intellectual underpinnings of the Revolution and the early Republic, Sensabaugh's study contributes usefully to consideration of A Mercy because it demonstrates that copies of both Milton's prose and poetry were in circulation in the Colonies during the earlier period in which the novel is set. 3 Among his most significant observations, for my purposes (and one to which I shall return), is that Cotton Mather "paraphrased three times from Paradise Lost " in his history of New England published in 1702, Magnalia Christi Americana (36). 4 The subversive power of Morrison's own intertextual relationship with Milton in A Mercy is due in no small part to the way she destabilizes his erstwhile assuredly dominant role, as quasi-scripture, and quasi-myth in the historical decades that are her focus.
It is clear from the vast quantity and lively discursiveness of scholarship on Milton that his work, and in particular his famous epic poem, has no fixed meaning and gives rise to no single line of interpretation. Anyone familiar with Morrison's writing knows that the same is true of hers. It would therefore be fraudulent to claim, in its depiction of the lives of Florens, Lina, Sorrow, Jacob, and Rebekka, that A Mercy somehow refutes or subverts a stable, identifiable and consistent Miltonic perspective or ideology. Rather than making broad and ultimately indefensible generalizations, therefore, this article depends on close readings of both the novel and the poem. I focus on the implications of specific echoes, reversals and transformations, showing that particular moments of Morrisonian revision of particular motifs in Paradise Lost are fundamental to the novelist's examination of the instability of freedom, of power, of happiness, and of goodness. My starting point and organizing idea in this process is the four-syllable Latinate word "dominion," which dominates the closing pages of A Mercy . The unanticipated, long and formal sentence in which it is intoned three times—"to be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing"—stands out in the otherwise simple diction and syntax of Florens's mother's pidgin cadences (165). The sentence as a whole reads as a sermonic interpretation of or aphoristic conclusion to the narrative that precedes it, and the repeated noun, with all its connotations of power and mastery, and its biblical and literary genealogy, repays close scrutiny.
While this is an important word in the Book of Genesis, where God gives Adam and Eve "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth" (1:26), it is a hugely significant concept in Paradise Lost , where it involves a range of connected meanings. Adam echoes Genesis in talking of the "dominion given" to Eve and himself, by which he means the right to rule over other living creatures (IV.430; VIII.545). Satan, in turn, uses it to mean "power" when he urges his forces to pursue "honour, dominion, glory and renown" during the war in Heaven (VI.422); in a striking juxtaposition, the Heavenly Host praise Messiah, after his victory in that war in Heaven, addressing him as "Son, heir and Lord, to him dominion given" (VI.887). The same sense is echoed by Sin, with unconscious irony, when she erroneously believes she is acquiring "new strength" and is "dominion given" after Satan's supposed triumph (X.244). Milton, as narrator, later uses the word in another sense, to mean "kingdom" or owned territory in referring to Adam's "dominion" (V.751), while Satan uses it in the same way to describe the "spacious empire" of Chaos (II.974; 978). It is also used in the poem to connote abusive power held by one human being over others. For example, Michael's revelation of the future in Book XII includes the tyrannical Nimrod, who "arrogate[s] dominion undeserved / Over his brethren" (XII.27–28). This prompts Adam's indignant assertion that "man over men" God "made not lord" (XII.69–70). Michael explains that since the Fall, man's debased irrationality has led to some men fulfilling the curse on Ham, to be " servant of servants ": in other words, to be slaves (XII.104; original emphasis).
Adam's dismay at the