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

176
Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall
and frightened. Her response in this dream, which the narrator
tells us she “thought” or “willed” is, “I have breasts, too. . . . But they
didn’t believe her. Th ey just held their own higher . . . revealing both
their breasts except the woman in yellow. She did something more
shocking—she stretched out a long arm and showed Jadine her three
big eggs” (258–59). Jadine fi nally determines that these night women,
who “spoil her love-making” and take away her sex “like succubi,” are
out to get her, to “grab the person she had worked hard to become and
choke it off with those soft loose tits” (262). She does not understand
that in off ering her their breasts, these women off er nurturance and
even the opportunity to reconnect, to reestablish the bonds of racial
and gendered kinship she has denied and lost. 8
But the rescue attempt does not go well. Th e certainty of the night
women spoil the trip “back home,” and Eloe becomes for Jadine “rotten
and more boring than ever. A burnt-out place. Th ere was no life there.
Maybe a past but defi nitely no future and fi nally there was no interest”
(259). Representing a past and a folk culture from which Jadine is
irrevocably disconnected, to which Son is just as irrevocably linked,
Eloe is the place that directs the course of their relationship and their
development as individuals. After they return to New York, the diff erences
between this woman, who has denied her “ancient properties,”
and the “son” of Africa, who embraces his, become irreconcilable.
Each was pulling the other away from the maw of hell—its very
ridge top. Each knew the world as it was meant or ought to be.
One had a past, the other a future and each one bore the culture
to save the race in his hands. Mama-spoiled black man, will you
mature with me? Culture-bearing black woman, whose culture
are you bearing? (269)
Son fi nally likens Jadine to the tar baby in the folktale, to something
“made” by the farmer to attract and entrap. And the text intends for us
to see her as that, for ultimately the characterization of Jadine is not
a sympathetic one.
Th e tar baby archetype and the adhesive quality of tar itself,
however, inform the work on another level. In Jadine’s room at Isle
des Chevaliers, Son tries not only to press images of Eloe into Jadine’s
dreams, but he also tries to “breathe into her the smell of tar and its
shiny consistency” (120). Th e African woman has “skin like tar” and