Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

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Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall
To advance their thematic defi nitions of continuity and inscribe the
motif of return, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall both eff ect literal
and metaphorical crossings of spatial, temporal, and cultural borders.
In Morrison’s Tar Baby and Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, the
movement of characters across geopolitical and cultural borders,
however, is for the purpose of reclamation and subversion. Reclaiming
an African and diasporic folk heritage, these crossings subvert not only
the distorted meanings imposed on that heritage but also the manifestations
of Euramerican cultural dominance. Using the structural
device of the journey as voluntary movement across space and time,
these two novels reverse and revise the historical journey of forced
migration of African people to the New World. Beginning typically in
the fi rst cities of Europe and the United States, this journey advances
to the Caribbean and concludes symbolically at the African “source.”
Th e literal crossings are mediated, however, with the confi guration
of the journey within a journey and a symbology of place that
situates folk communities in the rural south as crucial stopping points
in the preparation for the fi nal return. For Avey Johnson in Praisesong,
this place is Tatem, South Carolina. For Son Green and Jadine
Childs in Tar Baby, it is Eloe, Florida. Th ese rural communities in the
South represent a return to folk roots, to folk values and traditions
with which the protagonist must fi rst reconnect, then accept or deny.
Defi ning the character’s development and marking identity, these
places are vital links in the expression of the “return to the source” as
affi rmation of cultural continuity.
In creating a new dialogue with the “Tar Baby” tale and appropriating
its meanings to the very contemporary situation of a black
woman and a black man, Toni Morrison affi rms this continuity on one
level of meaning. “Tar Baby” itself is an example of cultural survival.
With origins in Africa, where the principle character is the trickster
fi gure, Anansi, the folktale has twenty-fi ve documented variants in
the English and French West Indies. 1 Joel Chandler Harris’s “Th e
Wonderful Tar Baby Story” is recognized as the fi rst published version
in the United States.
In the version Morrison uses, Harris’s Brer Fox character becomes
a farmer who attempts to outwit and trick Brer Rabbit by placing
a doll covered with tar on the side of the road. Th inking the doll is
human and wonderful, the rabbit attempts to make her acquaintance.
When the doll does not respond to his overtures, the rabbit hits it, fi rst