Signifying Circe in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon shares with Homer's Odyssey a profound concern with naming. Names are obscured, replaced, and eventually revealed in both epic poem and novel.¹ They possess a transformative power at times: Odysseus does indeed become No Man, the name he uses to trick the Cyclops, when he arrives home as a nameless beggar; in Morrison's novel the man whose name is changed to Macon Dead is murdered, and his descendants transfixed in a spiritual death. Names in Song of Solomon are deeply implicated in issues of narrativity: this is a story about naming, and its characters frequently bear names which denote their narrative function, for example Pilate, who acts as a guide to the protagonist Milkman Dead, or Sweet, the woman he wins after completing his ordeal in Shalimar. Certain names allude to other stories: Hagar, Ruth, Rebecca, and First Corinthians have obvious biblical associations in keeping with the novel's title. The midwife, Circe, a pivotal figure in the puzzles of naming and narrative around which the novel is structured, is the only character to bear a name from Greek mythology. Yet while she so obviously signifies a Homeric intertext and the patrilineal literary history that is its legacy, Circe simultaneously subverts this tradition, sending the protagonist on a journey that resembles the master narrative, but is destabilized by other discourses. The integrity of the narrative is accordingly stretched between a system of dualities: men's and women's stories compete for authority, Western mythic traditions are contested by African folklore, and the myth of the catabasis, the descent to the Underworld, is challenged by a fantasy of ascent manifested in the folktale of the man who could fly.

In this essay I focus on how Morrison employs the figure of Circe to position her novel both within and beyond the classical tradition of the catabatic narrative. Toni Morrison graduated with a minor in classics from Howard University in 1953, and it is obvious that her academic training informed Song of Solomon.² This, her third novel, is distinguished from much of her other work, which explores the experience of black American women, by its focus on a central male character, Milkman Dead. Milkman, the son of a prosperous slumlord in an unnamed Michigan city, is set on a quest for his history and identity that leads him back to Virginia and the Gullah traditions of his ancestors. That Song of Solomon is structured as an archetypal heroic saga was immediately recognized when it made its debut in the late 1970s. In an early essay on the novel, A. Leslie Harris identified a mythic structure that conforms to the male initiatory pattern. Harris' analysis was exclusively concerned with Milkman's role as an archetypal hero whose childhood is narrated as a series of events "resonating with symbolic and archetypal significance,"³ beginning with a miraculous birth (the first black baby to be born in Mercy Hospital), proceeding to a period of alienation from his family, and culminating in a quest ostensibly for gold, but also for his genealogy. Other characters in the novel can be mapped onto this mythic grid. Milkman's childhood friend and eventual antagonist, Guitar, functions as an alter ego, while women such as Pilate and Circe correspond to the positions of helpers and threshold guardians.⁴

This early literary criticism identified Milkman's quest as an exponent of a Rankian mythic structure, which valorizes the male initiation pattern. This is a completely legitimate reading of the text, but one with limitations. The resolution of the novel, which implicates a female oral tradition and African folktale, suggests a more subversive approach to the familiar mythic structure. Later scholarship posits that Morrison manipulates the male initiation theme to expose it as problematic. Gerry Brenner and Michael Awkward recognized that Morrison employs the mythic archetype to articulate a male narrative which allows women to function only as a supplement in the androcentric narrative of a hero's quest.⁵ I would like to expand upon this reading by providing a closer inspection of the novel's classical...