Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni ...

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26 amanda putnam exclusion, and rejection. Their choices of violence—often rendered on those within their own community or family—redirects that powerlessness and transforms it. Wreaking havoc on societal expectations for their behavior and thoughts, these violent actions establish a new vision of African American femininity and femaleness. Black women are not powerless or without options; instead, they can create new patterns and refuse socialized gender and racial identities that attempt to constrain them. Sometimes their violent choices negatively affect other members of the African American community in which these female characters reside; however, it reflects the often racially motivated violence of the world around them. In other words, while the violence may be wasteful or even damaging to individual psyches and broader communities, it is also a reprojection of the white oppression that has been forced on their very souls. By taking the violence forced on them and redirecting it, these characters redefine themselves as compellingly dominant women. This pattern of violence emerges in some during early childhood. Realizing their own worth is in question, young black girls attempt to upset white oppression by redefining the limits of their power and powerlessness. Young black girls reacting to the oppressiveness of white dominance or to the stringency of traditional female-behavior expectations counter with physical violence to find strength within what often are positions of weakness. Likewise, other black female children react verbally to withstand the force of ever-present white-societal beauty standards that could otherwise crush their self-identity. Most of Morrison’s youthful characters learn about violence within a matrilineal home setting, when they are exposed to violence toward, and then from, their mothers and grandmothers. At times enslaved but always oppressed, these adult women characters are abused frequently by multiple sources: spouses, parents, employers, slaveowners, and community members. Consequently, the women’s mistreatment is then redirected toward others— often children—within the family. While painful to absorb, this redirection can also be seen as an additional mothering lesson—an instinctive message teaching black children coping mechanisms within a world that denies and exploits their self-worth. Maternal abandonment, either literal or emotional, is one common manifestation of these lessons in Morrison’s texts, often resulting in child-driven violence. Regardless of whether the abandonment is intentional or desired, the child perception of being abandoned often drives the child to act out violently. Disturbing the development of necessary community-based sentiments, such as empathy or social identification, the mother violence creates
fall 2011 / black women, gender, and families 27 children (and subsequently adults) who feel detached from others in their community, allowing the twisted familial violence to be perpetuated. Home, then, becomes a place to learn pain, while community becomes a place to act it out. Finally, Morrison establishes child murder as the ultimate form of mother violence, exposing the complexities of the mothering construct in terms of creation and destruction. By not only deciding on death for their progeny but also performing the murder themselves, these black women assert their motherhood over societal mores. By choosing death for their children, these mothers claim their motherhood in ways that are challenging to understand—yet, in doing so, these female characters achieve astonishingly powerful personas. In The Bluest Eye, nine-year-old Claudia begins to discover the need for rebellion when she encounters her invisibility in popular culture. Her hatred of white baby dolls begins with an aversion to a famous white child star. With an adult-like understanding of the inequities that occur daily due to skin color, Claudia shares her dislike of Shirley Temple, who danced with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a famous black tap dancer, in various films: “I couldn’t join [Freda and Pecola] in their adoration because I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me” 1 (Morrison 1994, 19). In Claudia’s explanation, it’s clear that she feels something has been stolen from her (and others like her)—and given to the white child star instead. The performance pairing of the adult black male and the small white girl highlights the absence of the small black girl performer—the performer who looked like Claudia. Instead of sharing the spotlight, the black girl becomes invisible, and Claudia’s feelings of anger due to that invisibility are projected onto Shirley Temple: someone out of reach and yet within view. Claudia’s feelings of black invisibility are magnified via the white baby dolls she receives as gifts. By dismembering them, Claudia disrupts the obsessive desire to worship white/light attributes, rejecting them for her own blackness. She rebels against white oppression, forcing others to see her and not a reflection of whiteness. The outward violence Claudia feels is not unlike the heartbreaking internal violence another black girl in The Bluest Eye, Pecola, demonstrates against herself for similar reasons. Despised by her mother and ignored by her father, Pecola is a tragic example of the destructive power of accepting white beauty standards. Realizing that the “white immigrant storekeeper” who she is buying candy from, shows only “distaste . . . for her, her blackness” (ibid., 48–49),
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