Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women's Writings

8. “Both the Law and Its Transgression: ”Toni Morrison’s Paradise and “Post”–Black Feminism

8 “Both the Law and Its Transgression” Toni Morrison’s Paradise and “Post”–Black Feminism NOELLE MORRISSETTE How can a writer of what Toni Morrison describes as “race-specific yet race-free prose” be defined as a black feminist author? (1993a, 211) Morrison’s reference to her own practice in this phrase stands in contradiction to the themes and characters readily apparent in her body of writing. From Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, which gave voice to the shared struggles of Claudia and Frieda MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove to cultivate a sense of self-worth and beauty as young black girls, to Sula Peace’s quest “to make [her] self,” as a New World woman, rather than be weighed down by the restrictions placed upon black women (and perpetuated by them) in Sula, black feminist themes and characters appear at the center of her works. Morrison’s focus here and elsewhere, on the lived experience of being young, black, and female, provides ample material for black feminist criticism. Indeed, Morrison’s works of the 1970s and early 1980s were used as case studies for the newly developing field of Black feminist criticism. As Barbara Smith, Deborah McDowell, and Barbara Christian discussed the parameters of the field and their collective goals, Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye and Sula were constantly invoked to answer the questions, “what is Black feminist literature?” and “what is Black feminist criticism?” In fact, the debate between Smith and McDowell, encompassing several years of Black feminist thought, raised but did not resolve the tension that exists between black feminist criticism and black feminist literary criticism. Barbara Smith feels that “the politics of feminism have a direct relationship to the state of black women’s literature,” asserting that 139 “criticism makes a body of literature recognizable” (1994, 411). But more than this, Smith observes, unlike the white feminist movement, which was an “essential precondition” to the flowering of feminist literature and criticism, there is no political movement for black women’s experience. She asserts contentiously that “until a black feminist criticism exists we will not even know what these [black women] writers mean” (412). Equally contentious is Smith’s claim that “black feminist criticism applied to a particular work can . . . expose for the first time its actual dimensions” (417). Her subsequent discussion, which focuses on Sula as “a lesbian novel” and therefore a Black feminist work as well, was countered by Deborah McDowell who found such an equation of lesbianism and feminism only approximate, and because of the limitations it contained assuming an isolationist position (Smith 1994, 417; McDowell 1994, 432). McDowell critiqued Smith of overgeneralizing to fit black women’s literature into categories imposed by an ideological position that “subsumes far more black women writers . . . than not into the canon” (McDowell 1994, 432). Raising the important question of the relationship of black feminist criticism to literature, McDowell cautions against reading literature as polemic, which runs the risk of reducing art to a political viewpoint and depriving it of aesthetic consideration. She writes, “political ideology and aesthetic judgment . . . must be balanced ” (433). However, a “balance” between ideology and aesthetics may be impossible. As she herself asserts, she is “against critical absolutism ” (438). The demands of political ideology often work in tension, not in tandem, with aesthetics, because ideology usually demands an absolute position. As the interchanges of Smith and McDowell suggest, there are aspects of Morrison’s writing that help to define her as a Black feminist writer, as one who concentrates on and speaks through the lives and struggles of Black women. But there are also ways in which her selfdescribed strategy of writing in a “race-specific yet race-free prose” has led Morrison beyond some of these traditional aspects defining Black feminism. In fact, Morrison has been transgressive within the discourses of Black feminism—and feminism in general—over the years of her writing, particularly by incorporating racial ambiguity in combination with class issues into her work. Paradise represents Morrison’s greatest transgression. The specific features of Paradise—of laws and especially of women who are “both the law and its transgression”—suggest ways in 140 CULTURAL SITES OF CRITICAL INSIGHT which black feminist practices, critical and creative, can transform themselves while continuing their exploration of American culture, history and society. By considering the ramifications of a post–Black feminism , which can self-consciously address the problems that are presented...