The Economic Grotesque and the Critique of Capitalism in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981) contains a strong and multifaceted critique of capitalism. Although Morrison’s modes of attack on capitalist values are many and various, I will argue that her primary weapon is satire. That is, the follies and extravagances of her characters constitute an indictment of capitalism: their actions dramatize the ways that capitalist entanglements warp people’s feelings, desires, and thought processes. Because the characters in Tar Baby express the imprint of capitalist practices on their minds through concrete actions, the examples of commodified thinking are embodied and vivid; because these actions remain unexplained and cryptic, they involve the reader in puzzling out their meanings. Why is that beautiful woman making love to a fur coat? Why has this other woman forgotten how to use a knife and fork? Why does a wealthy American who has bought himself a whole Caribbean island sit immured in a greenhouse all day? Such bizarre habits share a common source in the economic system within which these characters live—hence my title’s reference to the economic grotesque. Morrison uses the economic grotesque to suggest the ways that capitalist practices saturate consciousness and distort basic processes of thinking and feeling. The philosophical principle operating here is that what people do for a living—their activity as economic agents—constructs their ways of being in the world.

This is of course a fundamental premise of Karl Marx’s thinking: “What [individuals] are . . . coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce” (Marx and Engels 42). Putting Morrison’s text into dialogue with some of the basic concepts of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867–94)—such as the commodity, commodity fetishism, exchange value, and the labor theory of value—enables me to elucidate some nuances of Morrison’s critique of capitalism, as it ranges from Son’s polemic against the capitalist Valerian, a straightforward denunciation of capitalism at the very limit of satire, to the more subtle insinuation of Marxian priorities in the descriptions of commodities like Valerian’s house and Jadine’s fur coat. I coin the term “Marxian satire”—a form of satire informed by Marxian values and concepts—to characterize Morrison’s technique for lampooning various kinds of capitalist folly.

Of course, the commodification of feelings and thought is not a concept that originates with Morrison; several neo-Marxist thinkers have elaborated on Marx’s notion that one’s mode of production shapes one’s thinking. Georg Lukács, for example, asserts that “the commodity relation . . . stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man” (100). Alfred Sohn-Rethel claims that it is the abstract nature of commodity exchange that first made abstract thinking possible (33). While not going so far as Sohn-Rethel, this essay traces the ways that the abstract nature of exchange carries over into the epistemology of the capitalist characters, fostering an abstraction or alienation from the material world and the people around them. The conditions of Jadine’s and Valerian’s work especially—Valerian’s dependency on exchange value and Jadine’s transformation of her body into a commodity in the fashion marketplace—have been formative for their subjectivity.

Most of the novel’s action takes place on the estate of Valerian Street, a white American who has used a fortune made in the manufacture of candy to buy a Caribbean island and to build a palatial retirement home. He presides over a household composed of his much younger beauty queen wife Margaret and his two faithful retainers, the black servants Sydney and Ondine; two indigenous island workers, Thérèse and Gideon, are hired to do yard work. Jadine, a successful model and the niece of Sydney and Ondine, is a visitor on the island at the start of the novel.

Philip Page points out that Valerian’s household “resembles a stereotypical antebellum plantation, with its aristocratic and bigoted patriarch, its neurotic white lady, its house servants caught between their class superiority over the field hands and their subservience to the whites, and its...