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Chapter Three: Ruptures/Disruptions of the Motherline: Slavery, Migration, and Assimilation: Song of Solomon, Beloved
- State University of New York Press
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THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER EXAMINED women’s disconnection from the motherline in and through identification with specific normative gender discourses , namely, those of the family, beauty, motherlove, and female fulfillment . This chapter considers how the African American motherline itself is fractured by historical trauma, in particular slavery, migration, and assimilation . Black women, in the task of cultural bearing, pass on to each successive generation the teachings of the motherline, in particular the values of the funk and the ancient proprieties. Individual women, as explored in the previous chapter, may become disconnected from the African American motherline and disavow the values it represents as a result of interpellation in specific hegemonic gender beliefs. While the emphasis in the previous chapter was on individual disconnections, this chapter considers how the line itself is attenuated through historical and cultural change. Migration, assimilation, and slavery seriously impaired black women’s ability to perform their maternal function as cultural bearer and hence weakened the motherline in two significant ways. Assimilation, the first theme considered, often results in black families, particularly among the middle class, seeking to emulate the hegemonic script of family relations in which the husband is dominant and the woman subservient and submissive. When African American women assume the traditional (white) role of wife they forsake the funk and in particular the ancient properties of traditional black womanhood because women cannot be both ship and harbor in a patriarchal marriage that assumes women are inferior to men and assigns them exclusively to home and the reproductive realm. This chapter, through a consideration of the character Ruth in Song of Solomon, explores how Ruth, schooled in the ways of assimilation, is socialized to be a traditional wife in a patriarchal marriage and how this in turn brings about the loss of the ancient 73 chapter three Ruptures/Disruptions of the Motherline Slavery, Migration, and Assimilation: Song of Solomon, Beloved properties and funk and results in Ruth’s disempowerment. Consequently, Ruth cannot convey the teachings of the African American motherline. Migration, the second theme considered, also causes a weakening or more specifically dissolution of the African American motherline. Migration to the urban cities of the North geographically separated women from the rural folk of the South; the place wherein the values of the African American motherline originated and where they are most fully and fastidiously sustained. While cultural bearing, the passing on of the teachings of the motherline, may take place in other times and places, Morrison’s fiction attests to the difficulty of such a task, as is made evident with Hagar from Song of Solomon, the second woman considered in this chapter. Pilate performs cultural bearing with her nephew, the adult Milkman and, in so doing, becomes a mender of broken motherlines and healer of those wounded by such breakages. Pilate seeks to impart the teachings of the motherline to her granddaughter, Hagar, but she cannot save Hagar as she did Milkman. In the North, the motherline has been worn thin, stretched across time and distance. Slavery, the final historical event considered, ruptured, as did migration, the African American motherline by separating families through sale. As is made apparent in Beloved, slavery, more than any other cultural institution or historical event, damaged the African American motherline by denying African people their humanity and history. In her fifth novel Morrison seeks to symbolize this loss in the character of Beloved and to render it psychologically manifest through the character of Sethe. Morrison’s aim here, as with the themes of migration and assimilation, is to render explicit the historical causes of motherline rupture and disruption and to portray the devastating consequence of such for African American people. RUTH: “CERTAINLY MY DADDY’S DAUGHTER” Michael Awkward argues that “[Morrison] dissects, deconstructs, if you will, the bourgeois myths of ideal family life. Through her deconstruction, she exposes each individual element of the myth as not only deceptively inaccurate in general , but also wholly inapplicable to Afro-American life” (McKay 1988: 59). But Morrison does more than document the harm that comes with measuring oneself against an ideal you cannot achieve; she also shows the ideal to be an illusion: all is not happy in that green and white house of the primer in The Bluest Eye. Awkward argues that the “emotional estrangement of the primer family members (an estrangement suggested by the family’s inability to respond to the daughter Jane’s desire for play) implies that theirs is solely a surface contentment. . . . [The family is] . . . made...