Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni ...

30 amanda putnam
generational and matrilineal. Many of the women in Morrison’s novels are
mothers who have been enslaved or otherwise victimized by intense racism
and oppression, which then embodies itself in violence toward their own,
albeit sometimes as a mothering tool.
The home, then, becomes both a place of inspiration and violence, mingling
the two in ways that are not easily separated. As bell hooks discusses in
“Homeplace,” the black domestic arena created by black women has been
crucial to the reassurance of black children and their self-identities. She states,
“Black women resisted [white oppression] by making homes where all black
people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in
our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we
could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public
world” (hooks 1990, 42). Connecting hooks’s point with Morrison’s stories
means realizing the possibility that daughters may have learned violent patterns
from loving mothers, as well as those who accepted white oppression.
In other words, some black mothers may have intentionally taught violent
behaviors to their daughters to prepare for their daughters’ future survival in
a world that devalued them. Claudia Tate states, “[T]here’s a special kind of .
. . violence in writings by black women—not a bloody violence, but violence
nonetheless. Love, in the Western notion, is full of possession, distortion, and
corruption. It’s a slaughter without the blood” (as quoted in Hinson 2001,
147). When children learn violence from within the home and from their
caretakers, it becomes ordinary and natural and, later, is incorporated into
their own behaviors and thoughts. Thus, while readers definitively notice
the violence between generations, often the characters themselves do not
articulate their feelings about the learned violent behaviors.
Even so-called “good” mothers in several Morrison novels show slight
violence at times toward their children, wreaking havoc on their self-esteem
and teaching them to engage in violent behavior with others. 4 In one of
the first scenes of The Bluest Eye, both Claudia and Freda get sick and the
narration reflects the impatience of their typically caring mother: “How . . .
do you expect anybody to get anything done if you all are sick?” (Morrison
1994, 10). Claudia’s narration continues: “My mother’s voice drones on. She
is not talking to me. She is talking to the puke, but she is calling it my name:
Claudia” (ibid., 11). The sick girls feel unloved and miserable, even though
their parents are normally nurturing and attentive. These simple acts of
slight violence evoke pity for the girls, while showing readers a world that is
often uncomfortable or painful: sometimes even loving mothers will inflict