Introduction

Many of Toni Morrison’s novels explore the roots of contemporary social conflicts in historical settings that range from the years immediately surrounding the Civil War (Beloved [1987]) through the 1970s and beyond (Paradise [1998]), but her newest work chronicles the disordered world created by European colonization. In A Mercy (2008), Morrison retells the story of the peopling of British North America in a dystopian register. Her portrait of the British colonies in the 1680s seems designed to correct the powerfully idealizing image of colonial encounter of an earlier generation, reflected so famously in Nick Carroway’s colonial fantasy of “aesthetic contemplation” and his sense of the “wonder” arising in the minds of Dutch sailors as they encountered “the fresh, green breast of the new world” in the concluding paragraphs of The Great Gatsby (1925). Carroway goes on to relate this green breast of seemingly untouched nature to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and the greenbacks that seem to promise Jay Gatsby so much more than they can deliver. Early in A Mercy, Morrison similarly identifies the natural world with money when she introduces the Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark making his way from a sloop to the Virginia shore through a dense fog, one distinguished from other fogs by its color: “thick, hot gold,” a “blinding gold” that Jacob experiences as dreamlike, and that he soon misses as he passes through it and regains a measure of control over himself and his surroundings. This blinding, golden Virginia fog will govern Vaark’s actions as the novel progresses, descending upon him in the form of an urge to build a manor house unseemly in its grandiosity, superfluous for a man without heirs, and fatal to its builder, as he dies trying to complete it. Long before Thomas Sutpen arrives in Yoknapatawpha County, a similar compulsion possesses Jacob Vaark to establish a legacy for himself at the house he names Milton in the unspecified northerly region where he dwells. The central trope of the novel involves the young slave woman Florens, who writes her story of desire and betrayal by a mother and a lover on the walls of this empty house built by her dead master.

Morrison stresses that Vaark is in many ways a good man, sensitive to others and susceptible to the beauty around him. His evident self-restraint and gentleness lead people to bring him vulnerable young women who need protection. Moreover, the building of the manor house unites the novel’s characters in an effort that gives them pleasure, even when they recognize its extravagance. The novel unfolds the countervailing pressures on Vaark in an early passage resembling Fitzgerald’s famous ending, when the narrator reflects on a new-world aesthetics of antiquity, loveliness, and plenitude: “Once beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking” (12). Yet his consciousness shares this sense of beauty and possibility with histories already complicated and painful: his personal history of poverty, abuse, orphanhood, and abandonment in the Old World; chronic disputes among the European powers over control of the colonies and their trade; brutal religious conflicts among Christians, including accusations of witchcraft that form one of the novel’s chief scenes; and the struggles of indigenous communities to retain control of land to which they lay claim. (The novel’s title page is based on a colonial era map illustrating native territories.) Landing on the Virginia shore, Vaark reflects on the outcome of Bacon’s Rebellion six years earlier as precipitating the consolidation of gentry power, hardening racial categories, and producing a slave-based caste system. “In short,” Morrison writes, “1682 and Virginia was still a mess” (11); the novel then dramatizes the predominantly European sources of that chronic disorder and its deep-laid, enduring patterns of violence and misery. These psychological and social patterns are summed up in the novel’s closing words by Florens’s mother, named with an untranslated Portuguese phrase suggesting her incomprehensibility to her daughter, to whom she belatedly offers this life lesson: “to...