Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Home

The literary work of Toni Morrison is famous for its rich intertexuality, interweaving narrative, contemporary history, and tales and motifs from oral storytelling traditions. Her tenth novel, Home (2013), is no exception. It contains disturbing and dark narratives of childhood abuse, war trauma, and racial discrimination, which are offset by Morrison’s use of motifs from the tale of “Hansel and Gretel,” one of the best-known fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers and called “a great and ferocious classic” by Philip Pullman (84). I explore the interplay between trauma and fairy-tale motifs in Home, a novel that engages with central themes of Morrison’s previous work, such as gender, race, family, and empowerment. In this novel, Morrison envisages ways toward the resolution of trauma that contribute to developments in literary trauma theory and presents a new and stronger sense of positive closure to the thematics of trauma than has so far been the case in her fiction.

The Fairy-Tale Intertext

While Morrison’s use of folkloric material has been a lively area in Morrison studies since the early 1990s, critical attention has focused on the political and post-colonial dimensions of her fiction.¹ Justine Tally regards Greek and African mythological references as integral to Morrison’s oeuvre and suggests that the integration of myth and folklore in Morrison’s work has been underexplored, even in the extensive criticism on Beloved (xiv, xv). Sharon Rose Wilson argues that in Morrison studies, as in literary criticism in general, fairy tales are “too often dismissed as simple decoration that is not an essential part of a text” (2). Wilson states that attention to these tales is essential to understanding Morrison’s work because her “quest for full postcolonial identity” (86) is fully dependent on oral storytelling techniques. These views are endorsed by Morrison’s own frequent statements about the importance of folklore and myth to her fictional project. In her early essay “Memory, Creation, and Writing” (1984), Morrison explains that she uses fairy-tale references to add meaning to characters’ thoughts or actions. She illustrates this with the example of Milkman Dead, whose “confusion, … his racial and cultural ignorance,” is flagged when his thoughts turn to the tale of “Hansel and Gretel,” “a story about parents who abandon their children to a forest” (387).

In Home, Morrison returns to “Hansel and Gretel,” a story that has fascinated her throughout her career, using it as the novel’s intertextual framework to its central theme of trauma as an arduous process of coming to terms with past wounding. In a parallel to the fairy tale, Home is the story of the siblings Frank and Cee (Ycidra) Money, whose mutual love and support enable them to confront and eventually even integrate severely traumatic experiences. As Morrison has remarked in an interview, “A reason for Home is that I got very interested in the idea of when a man’s relationship with a woman is pure—unsullied, not fraught. … It could be masculine and protective without the baggage of sexuality. So the sort of Hansel and Gretel aspect really fascinated me” (“Toni”). Woven into the novel’s narrative fabric, the direct and indirect references to the tale of “Hansel and Gretel” in Home add meaning to the story of Frank and Cee and draw into play the genre expectations that belong to fairy tales and folktales.

The terms fairy tale, folktale, and myth, often used in Morrison criticism, are rarely defined precisely, and, indeed, the question of these genre definitions, even in folklore studies, is complex. I will discuss the matter briefly in order to present some characteristics of the fairy-tale genre on which folklorists agree and that inform my reading of the fairy-tale intertext in Home. There is no clear-cut definition that distinguishes the fairy tale from the folktale, and often folklore scholars use the terms interchangeably, sometimes even speaking of fairy folktale or preferring the term “magic tale” to either fairy tale or folktale (Ashliman 32). Attempts to define the fairy tale as featuring fairies or other magical beings in contrast to...