The Invisible City in Toni Morrison's Beloved

CHARLES SCRUGGS The Invisible City in Toni Morrison's Beloved Adam was therefore the father ofboth lines ofdescent, that is, of the line whose successive members belong to the earthly city, and of the line whose members are attached to the City in heaven. But after the murder ofAbel . . . there were two fathers appointed, one for each of those lines of descent. Those fathers were Cain and Seth; and in their sons, whose names had to be recorded, indications of these two cities began to appear with increasing clarity in the race of mortals. Augustine, The City of God When a woman get in trouble, Everybody throws her down, Looking for yo' good friend None can be found You better come on In my kitchen It's goin' to be rainin' outdoors. Robert Johnson, "Come on in my Kitchen" In speaking of her relationship to an earlier male tradition within the Afro-American novel, Toni Morrison told an interviewer: "... I always missed some intimacy, some direction, some voice. Ralph Ellison and RichardWright—all ofwhose books I admire enormously— I didn't feel were telling me something. I thought they were saying something about it or us that revealed something about us to you, to others, to white people, to men."1 Morrison is perhaps speaking here of the "public" orientation of Wright and Ellison's writings. To say that Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 3, Autumn 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1 610 96Charles Scruggs they addressed themselves to others, white people and men, is to say that they spoke to the majority or to the elite groups of the society; not necessarily with that intention only, but as a necessary result of their desire to speak in terms of public policy and high culture. That was their chosen forum and their milieu. Morrison, with more formal education than either Wright or Ellison, has always set her fiction in the common life, not uncritically, but with the same concentration on domestic space, domestic relations, and the small scale that characterizes the novels ofJames Baldwin. (Even on the cosmopolitan canvas of her novel Tar Baby (1981), she is essentially focused on the "local habitation.") In her memorial address in honor of Baldwin's life and art, Morrison both paid homage to his engagement in the world ("Yours was the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges") and recognized the quality that their works shared, something like "intimacy" (to "go as a stranger in the village and transform the distances between people into intimacy with the whole world").2 The intimate implies the domestic, and the themes that Baldwin and Morrison share — of love, family relations, the extension of these concerns into the larger world — revolve around the house. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison's characters remain, for the most part, isolated in their houses, debilitated in various ways by the devastating myths of white society. The bluest eye is Lacan's invidia, the gaze that petrifies. Pauline Breedlove pours her passion into the house ofher white employers , but the space of her own home lacks intimacy — its "furniture had aged without ever having become familiar."3 In contrast, Claudia's house is space made place by the presence of love, yet that love remains insular, rarely crossing the threshold into the community. In SuIa, Morrison begins to explore the possibilities of an autonomous community, but SuIa dies alone in Eva's labyrinthian house; she is a pariah because the community has not matured enough to recognize her independent existence.4 The community uses her to define its essence, but she cannot use it to locate herself. In Song of Solomon, the communities (Not Doctor Street, Danville, and Shalimar) thrive, but the house still reflects the enclosed, often warped, ego of individual community members . Circe transforms the Butlers' ersatz plantation manor into a pigsty, but she herself is transformed into a grotesque by her own revenge; Ruth is "pressed small" by her father's huge mansion and in turn arrests her own son's spiritual growth; Macon Dead industrializes his house, Toni Morrisons Beloved97 setting his daughters to manufacture...