Entangled lives: a dialogic reading of the characters Heed and Christine in Toni Morrison’s Love

Abstract

This article investigates the construction of character in Toni Morrison’s novel Love, arguing that its characters are dialogically constructed in multiple ways and that this relational structure reflects the novel’s thematic focus on interhuman relationships. The primary focus for the discussion is the way that various genres are brought into play in the presentation of two of the novel’s most central characters, Heed and Christine, whose fraught relationship occupies a central place in the novel. The reading of the novel reveals that its dialogic narrative structure refracts the manifold and complex nature of their relationship and shows how the life of one individual is entangled in the lives of other people. Blame cannot be located in one specific place or in one specific character and the novel’s narrative strategy thus defers stable conclusions.

Keywords:

• Toni Morrison
• Love
• African American literature
• Bakhtin
• dialogue
• genre

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Oliver Nyambi, English, University of the Free State, South Africa

Keywords:

• SUBJECTS
• Art & Visual Culture
• Cultural Studies
• Literature

In terms of theme as well as form, Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2003) can be described as an archetypal Morrisonian novel. Thematically, it places at the front what has been an underlying theme in many of her previous novels, namely love’s many different manifestations. Barbara Hill Rigney writes that ‘Morrison’s novels are always about love and its distortions, and also about slaughter, often with the blood’ (Rigney, 1991, p. 83). Love is never a simple and straightforward affair in Morrison’s fiction, and least of all in her eighth novel, which is a probing into interhuman relationships and into love’s many-faceted nature; friendship, infatuation, obsession, fascination, and even hatred. In The Bluest Eye (1970) the narrator addresses this issue directly by saying that ‘[l]ove is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly’ (Morrison, 1994a, p. 163). The characters in Love are complex and it is no simple matter to ascertain whether they are wicked, violent, weak, or stupid. Love is also a story about childhood and children. Their vulnerability and the way they fall victims to the adult world is a recurring theme in Morrison’s writing, from her literary debut The Bluest Eye and to her last novel God Help the Child (2015).¹

In terms of form, too, Love draws on features characteristic of Morrison’s fiction. Her novels are polyphonic, open-ended constructions that experiment with narrative voice and defer stable conclusions. They frequently present characters who commit horrible acts – in The Bluest Eye a father rapes his daughter; in Sula a mother sets fire to her son, and two girls kill a little boy; and in Beloved a mother kills her baby daughter. Notwithstanding, as the characters’ backgrounds unfold and contradictory perspectives emerge, judgment is postponed. It has been noted by several that Morrison’s narrative structures thus promote ethical discussions (Nissen & Morrison, 1999, p. 264).²

Love has received noticeably less critical attention than most of Morrison’s other work and Mary Paniccia Carden suggests that this is precisely because critics ‘tend to find the novel too familiar structurally and thematically, complaining that it revisits well-traveled terrain’ (Carden, 2011, p. 132) It has also received less praise from reviewers than most of Morrison’s other novels (Baker, 2013, p. 17; Kakutani, 2003; O’Connor, 2003).³ However, as Jean Wyatt states, although Morrison’s early novels are given the most academic attention, ‘her later novels are distinguished by their intricate craftmansship, by the various intriguing ways in which narrative style and structure reflect the novels’ content and invite the reader to contribute her own politics to the reading’ (Wyatt, 2017, p. 262) This is certainly true of Love, whose complex narrative strategies and play with different literary genres orchestrate the novel’s most salient themes. The novel investigates the complicated nature of interhuman relationships. It presents a broad array of characters who relate to each other in different ways; as family, as friends, as lovers, and as random acquaintances. It refracts the manifold and complex nature of their relationships and shows how the life on one individual is entangled in the lives of other people. One character’s actions are like rhizomes affecting the lives of others.

When asked by Nellie McKay how she handled ‘the process of writing’, Morrison responded: ‘I start with an idea, and then I find characters who manifest aspects of the idea – children, adults, men or women’ (Morrison, 1994c, p. 143). Character analysis and analysis of character construction can serve as textual openers and as ways of explicating Love. The self in her novels has been described as ‘a relative concept, decentered rather than alienated, relational rather than objectifying’, (Rigney, 1991, p. 45) and in Love this is even more noticeable than in her previous novels. Structurally, Love does not primarily follow a linear progression – the present of the novel covers a very short time span – but rather grows horizontally in complexity. It approaches its events and characters from different angles, adding perspectives, thus making relational patterns discernible but also interpretive closure difficult. This dual movement towards closure and openness could be seen as the working of Bakhtinian dialogue: ‘At the highest level of abstraction, this dialogue is between the two tendencies that energize language’s power to mean: the Manichean opposition between centrifugal forces that seek to hold things apart, and centripetal forces that work to make things cohere’ (Holquist, 1990, p. 69). Polyphony and dialogue are two sides of the same issue: ‘The polyphonic novel is dialogic through and through. Dialogic relationships exist among all elements of novelistic structure; that is, they are juxtaposed contrapuntually’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 40). There is always more than one way of assessing a character and an event, ‘in dialogism there is always more than one meaning’ (Holquist, 1990, 41).

Love’s characters are dialogically constructed in various ways: through the use of multiple perspectives, through the manner in which they form parallels and contrasts to each other, through the presentation of time, and through the use of different genres. The primary focus in the following discussion will be the way that various genres are brought dialogically into play in the presentation of two of the novel’s most important characters, Christine and Heed, who have a near-lifelong but extremely complicated relationship. Different parts of and aspects of their lives are represented by different genres and in this way, their lives emerge as narratives, intersecting and departing from each other. The principal genres in the presentation of these characters are the gothic, fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and textualizations of African American musical forms, like jazz and the blues, genres that together evince the cultural hybridity of Morrison’s African American aesthetics, drawing on specifically African American and white narrative traditions. Genres like these are not new to her work. Morrison has frequently incorporated gothic elements into her work and her most celebrated and original take on this genre is Beloved, in which the darkness of the Gothic is explicitly related to slavery and race. Her use of the Gothic in Love is more conventional but nevertheless eloquent. Although Morrison rarely writes about music, black music, like jazz and the blues, Morrison has stated that she has aimed to reconstruct the texture of jazz, spirituals, and blues in her writing (Gilroy, 1993, 181–182). In her own words, ‘[t]he power of the word is not music, but in terms of aesthetics, the music is the mirror that gives me the necessary clarity’ (Gilroy, 1993, 181–182). The relevance of classical tradition and of other central texts in the western canon to Morrison’s literature has been pointed out by several critics (Roynon, 2007). In Love the most compelling aspect of these genres is found in the way they work together in the presentation of characters. At times, they reveal parallels between the characters, at other times they bring out differences between them. Like the characters’ lives are entangled, so are the genres used to represent them, and the novel’s narrative strategies thus refract its central themes.

However, the discussion of genre cannot be separated from other dialogic mechanisms, such as the use of multiple narrative perspectives. Characters and events are seen from several different points of view, neither of which is clearly preferred over the other (Butler-Evans, 1995, p. 125).⁴ What is important is not any one of these perspectives per se but the manner in which they relate to each other through contestation and confirmation. Morrison’s novels thus reflect Bakhtin’s description of polyphony as the interaction between and interdependence of different consciousnesses (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 36). In Love the only character given a narrative voice is L, who replaces the third-person narrator in sections of the novel, but the stories and opinions of the other characters nevertheless dominate parts of the narrative. This perspectival dialogization of character is particularly important in relation to the late Bill Cosey. He may not be the main character in the novel, but there is no doubt that he is at the centre of the narrative, being the common denominator in the lives of all the characters. Cosey is not himself given a voice and it remains unclear whether he was a cold-hearted tyrant, or perhaps even a paedophile, or simply a normal man ruined by possessive women.

Another form of dialogism is achieved through the way the different characters form patterns of contrasts and parallels. Discussing the relationship between Nel and Sula in an interview with Robert Stepto, Morrison declared that ‘that there was a little bit of both in each of those two women, and that if they had been one person, I suppose they would have been a rather marvelous person. But each one lacked something the other one had’ (Morrison, 1993, p. 381). Relational presentation of characters is a central principle in Love. A character may share traits, dispositions, or contexts with other characters, but in other ways be quite different from them. Characters can for instance share social backgrounds but nevertheless develop diverging life trajectories. The parallels, or similarities, between the characters are centripetal forces that serve to open them up to each other while the contrasts between them are centrifugal forces that serve to separate them and instigate distance between them.

The dialogic oscillation between the past and the present is a dialogic cornerstone in Love’s narrative structure and a central idea in Bakhtin’s dialogism: ‘The present is not a static moment, but a mass of different combinations of past and present relations’ (Holquist, 1990, p. 37). Morrison’s narrative is layered in terms of time, and the text moves freely between the present and its many pasts. This insistent narrative interdependence of the past and the present contributes to the dialogization of the characters as no character can be understood solely on the basis of his or her present situation. It could be argued that this is a general principle in most literary texts. However, in Morrison’s texts the vacillation between past and present becomes a conspicuous feature of the meandering narrative structure.

Michael Holquist refers to Bakhtin’s dialogism as ‘an architectonics, a science of building’ (Holquist, 1990, 33) and the following pages will investigate the dialogic construction of two of Love’s main characters, Christine and Heed. The relationship between them illustrates novel’s careful and deliberate narrative architectonics.

Heed and Christine: two girls ‘already spoken for’

The lives of Heed and Christine are subtly intertwined; each is the other’s antagonist but also her greatest love. Like Sula and Nel in Sula, they seem like complementary personalities. It has even been argued that their relationship is one of primary narcissism, ‘marked as much by aggression as by love, by love as much as by aggression’ (Mellard, 2009, p. 710).

The Gothic is prominent in Love as the novel makes conscious use of several of its characteristics, verging on a Gothic parody. Mishiko Kakutani caustically remarks that ‘the story as a whole reads like a gothic soap opera’ (Kakutani, 2003), clearly considering its affinity with the Gothic a sign of poor quality. This is an overly simplistic reading. Love uses Gothic elements through what Bakhtin terms stylization. Stylization is a form of what Bakhtin calls double-voiced discourse: it ‘forces another person’s referential (artistically referential) intention to serve its own purposes, that is, its new intentions’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 189). It ‘stylizes another’s style in the direction of that style’s own particular tasks’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, 193). Love uses the Gothic as a device in the narrative to underline the hold of the past over the present and the entrapment of women. According to Bakhtin, since stylization implies the use of another person’s discourse, it inevitably to some extent objectifies it, but it does not become an object. In Love the Gothic is objectified to the extent that its use borders on parody, yet it never becomes parody as its intention, or rather its function, does not oppose or reverse that of the Gothic, and it does not use the Gothic ironically. Parody ‘introduces into that discourse [someone else’s discourse] a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 193).

The sense of a dark and haunting past that impacts the present is central in the Gothic, so also in Morrison’s novel where its characters struggle under the pressure of its secrets and oppressive events. This past is strongly felt in relation to two of the novel’s central settings: the house on Monarch Street and the now derelict Cosey Hotel on the beach; the most important places in the lives of Heed and Christine. These houses represent conventional Gothic traits and reflect the central role of architecture in many Gothic texts, both as plot components and as atmospheric elements. DeLamotte contends that

[t]his kind of architecture is the repository and embodiment of mystery. Specific secrets are hidden in it, and to discover them one must confront the mystery of the architecture itself: its darkness, labyrinthine passageways, unsuspected doors, secret staircases, sliding panels, forgotten rooms. The architecture is also a repository and embodiment of the past. (DeLamotte, 1990, p. 15.)

Such places are governed by what Bakhtin calls the chronotope of historical time:

[t]he castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past. The castle is the place where the lords of the feudal era lived and … the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture, in furnishings, weapons, the ancestral portrait gallery, the family archives and in the particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. And finally legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels (Bakhtin, 1981, pp. 245–246).

Classic literary Gothic architecture, like the castle, can be read symbolically and literally as a repository of a historical and an ancestral past, and is an eloquent setting for psychological drama as well as family feuds. It conceals and confuses and is thus an uncanny impediment to knowledge and clarity.

Love is set in modern times and contains no actual castle. However, Sandler Gibbons’ description of the Cosey family’s relationships as courtly – ‘Mr Cosey was royal; L, the woman in the chef’s hat, priestly. All the rest – Heed, Vida, May, waiters, cleaners – were court personnel fighting for the prince’s smile’ − is only one of many elements that illustrate the relevance of Bakhtin’s description of the castle and castle time to Love (Morrison, 2003, p. 37). Both One Monarch Street and the Cosey Hotel are saturated with the past of the Cosey family. The former, in which Heed and Christine live, is reminiscent of the mansion in a Victorian Gothic tale: ‘the house was graceful, imposing, and its peaked third-story roof did suggest a church. The steps to the porch, slanted and shiny with ice, encouraged caution, for there was no railing’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 19). The descriptions of the house are invested with multiple symbolic meanings. Its icy steps are symbolic of the icy atmosphere inside the house where the two elderly women have been living for more than twenty-five years with their mutual hatred for each other as their most important raison d’etre. The slanted and icy steps also suggest the dangers of slipping upon entering the house, of losing one’s footing. The house and its inhabitants need to be dealt with cautiously. Moreover, the steps and the allusions to falling foreshadow the ending of the novel.

The Cosey house represents a conflation of the past and the present. It is a reminder of former glory, but its inhabitants refuse to acknowledge the passing of time. While Heed and Christine still think of it as number one Monarch Street, the house is no longer number one, neither in terms of address nor in terms of social importance. When Junior asks Sandler for the address, he cannot even remember the number of the house that was once the focal point in the community: ‘It 1410 or 1401, probably’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 14). For the community, the Cosey House, as well as its inhabitants, is now an anachronism, a symbol of decadence and past grandeur. Morrison’s novel thus establishes an intertextual relationship with one of the most well-known American southern Gothic stories, William Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’, in which Emily Grierson is a remnant of Jefferson’s ambivalent past of class, patriarchy, and slavery. Outdone by time, she has become the responsibility of the community and her once imposing house the symbol of death and decay. The Cosey house is also the repository of strange and uncanny life stories: Bill Cosey, who many thought died a mysterious death; his son, who died tragically as a young man; his daughter-in-law May, who became crazy; his controversial child bride Heed, who inherited both the house and the resort; and his pretty granddaughter Christine, who left when barely an adult and returned as a mature woman with a life story no one knew. Morrison revises Faulkner’s Gothic tale by placing African American characters at the centre of conventionally Gothic events, while in Faulkner’s story the only African American character, Tobe, is a conspicuously marginal presence.

The Cosey hotel has an even stronger Gothic air since it is now closed down and has become solely the site of past events. It is an abandoned and derelict building, an example of what Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny calls ‘dead houses’ (Vidler, 1992, p. 19); abandoned houses, boarded up and conspicuously empty. The house is empty apart from the attic which contains boxes of items from the past; papers, toys and other articles that bring back times forgone. It is in the process of being swallowed by the sea, facing its inevitable destruction: ‘… Up Beach is twenty feet underwater; but the hotel part of Cosey’s Resort is still standing. Sort of standing. Looks more like it’s rearing backwards – away from hurricanes and a steady blow of sand. Odd what oceanfront can do to empty buildings’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 7). Water, as well as vegetation, is slowly eating at the house, producing an apocalyptic atmosphere. These houses are the frames of Christine’s and Heed’s life together, and they symbolize the women’s former prominent social position as well as their fall from the throne.

History, lineage, and inheritance are central elements in Love and the main sources of conflict between Heed and Christine. Morrison’s novel is in many respects a family saga, the story of a family dynasty – a story rare to come by in the African American tradition. Neither One Monarch Street nor the Cosey hotel contains family archives in the traditional sense, but the many items from the past that furnish the houses and are packed and stowed away in suitcases and boxes have a similar function. They are records of times and people no longer there. Christine prefers to live in L’s old quarters because ‘[u]nlike the memory-and-junk-jammed rest of the house, the uncluttered quiet there was soothing’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 89). Stories about the past inhabit the houses, and much of the novel is a matter of retrieving past relations and incidents that will throw light on the present. Bill Cosey’s ancestral past forms an important part of the larger story woven from the many individual stories. Cosey embarked on his career much as a protest against his father Daniel Cosey, better known as Dark, who acquired his wealth by feeding the police sensitive information about the black community. This becomes quite literally the Dark secret, a secret involving racial treason; the tainted background better kept concealed. Bill Cosey sought to neutralize this ignoble aspect of his heritage by spending his inherited money on ‘things Dark cursed: good times, good clothes, good food, good music, dancing till the sun came up in a hotel made for it all’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 68). However, Dark’s treason cannot be erased and Cosey is haunted by it all his life. It is the cause of his estrangement from his first wife, Julia, who ‘froze when she learned how blood-soaked her husband’s money was’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 68). Racial matters impinge on Cosey’s life and are thus inserted in the heart of the Gothic.

The conflict between Heed and Christine is partly a feud over hereditary rights, as an important source of their conflict is the Cosey fortune and property. The antagonistic relationship between Christine, the granddaughter of the house’s former owner, and Heed, his second wife, is reflected in the architecture of the house they live in. Christine lives in the basement in the servants’ quarters, while Heed lives upstairs in her room on the third floor. This upstairs and downstairs scenario reminiscent of a Victorian novel accentuates the novel’s class issues. Heed, who comes from the bottom of the social ladder, has replaced Christine, the youngest member of the Cosey family. Perhaps one would expect these two feuding women to live in darkness in this Gothic setting. However, contrary to such expectations Heed’s room and Christine’s kitchen are brightly lit, as if they are trying to keep shadows and danger at bay:

Like the kitchen below, this room was overbright, like a department store. Every lamp – six? ten? – was on, rivaling the chandelier. Mounting the unlit stairs, glancing over her shoulder, Junior had to guess what the other rooms might hold. It seemed to her that each woman lived in a spotlight separated – or connected – by the darkness between them (Morrison, 2003, p. 25).

The symbolic significance of this physical setting is manifold. The dark stairs both connect them and separate them. They allude to how the women’s isolated and self-centered lives are connected through their present mutual hatred for each other. The darkness of the space that separates the women also symbolizes the still unknown events of a dark past that hides some of the reason behind their reciprocal antagonism.

The othering and oppression of women have been central subjects for the Gothic as a genre (Hogle, 2002, p. 10) and are also prominent themes in Love. The family’s patrilineal transfer of power and influence should have been broken with the death of Bill Cosey as there are no male heirs. However, both Heed and Christine are confined by the patriarch Bill Cosey, both before and after his death. Neither of the two women has anywhere else to go and each sees herself as the rightful heir to his fortune, as ‘the sweet Cosey child’ to whom he bequeathed his house. Heed, who has not left One Monarch Street for years, still resides in her quarters as Mistress of the house. She is presented as a half-crazy, or at best highly eccentric, elderly woman leading the life of a recluse, a life still conditioned by past events. Her character invites comparison to similar female characters in Gothic narratives, such as Miss Havishham in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) and Faulkner’s Miss Emily. In addition to their physical confinement within their houses, they also share an uncanny preoccupation with a now dead and absent husband or lover. Heed and Christine’s entrapment is social withdrawal and seclusion, common features in Gothic romances: ‘most of these books are about women who just can’t seem to get out of the house (DeLamotte, 1990, 10), something which can be traced back to the physical entrapment of women in classic Gothic works. Heed and Christine are two such women who just cannot seem to get out of the house, metaphorically speaking, since they cannot let go of the past represented by the house. In Gothic novels the confinement of women by patriarchal forces are often placed centre stage and the deeds of the past, often the result of paternal abuse of power, must be revealed and confronted.

In their present lives Heed and Christine may be adversaries, but as young children they were best friends, seemingly inseparable, until Bill Cosey married Heed when she was only eleven years old and made their friendship impossible. The genre of the fairy tale is used to show similarities as well as differences between Heed and Christine and shows the complexity of their relationship. Christine’s childhood was in many ways a blessed one; she was the only grandchild of a rich and respected man, and grew up under material circumstances not available to many black girls of her time, but before she met Heed she was lonely. In the context of Christine’s life story, the fairy tale genre is used ironically signalling a reversal; the story has a happy beginning but ends miserably:

Once there was a little girl with white bows on each of her four plaits. She had a bedroom all to herself beneath the attic in a big hotel. Forget-me-nots dotted the wallpaper. Sometimes she let her brand-new friend stay over and they laughed till they hiccuped under the sheets.

Then one day the little girl’s mother came to tell her she would have to leave her bedroom and sleep in a smaller room on another floor. When she asked her mother why, she was told it was for her own protection. There were things she shouldn’t see or hear or know about (Morrison, 2003, pp. 95–96).

Up to a point, it fits into the Cinderella tale. It is not Christine’s mother who dies, but her father. This partly makes her the responsibility of her paternal grandfather, who remarries after the death of his beloved wife. He marries Heed, who then becomes the evil stepmother, and Heed’s presence, if not her personality, ruins Christine’s life and makes her unhappy. Christine’s enchanted childhood ends abruptly, and she is evicted from her ancestral home.

Heed’s life is also narrated through fairy tale formulas, and the opening of the following passage resembles ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, the tale about the little girl who strayed from the assigned path and got trapped by the wolf: ‘Once a little girl wandered too far – down to big water and along its edge where waves skidded and mud turned into clean sand’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 78).

The fairy tale genre, appropriate in the context of childhood, unites them as it presents both of them as girls about to face changes in their lives. In the context of Heed, too, the genre is used ironically. Heed’s life story fits different parts of the Cinderella tale than Christine’s does. Much like Cinderella, she lives under poor conditions when she finds her prince, Bill Cosey, who, despite being a couple of generations her senior, is still a very eligible man and in many respects fits the role as prince; his successful resort is his kingdom, and he is handsome and impressive. The genre of the fairy tale is overtly mentioned earlier in the novel in relation to Bill Cosey’s hotel: ‘… the fabulous, successful resort controlled by one of their own. A fairy tale that lived on even after the hotel was dependent for its life on the people it once excluded’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 42). However, love is absent from their marriage and Heed never manages to fill the role as lady of the manor. While Cinderella admirably fits the dress of a princess, Heed is ridiculed and laughed at when she dresses like a lady. Even her wedding dress is symbolically too big for her, and the other women hide it so it cannot be fitted – just like they do not want her to fill her role successfully. The comfort and position her marriage to Bill Cosey promises turn out to be but a mirage. Despite her position, she has spent her life fighting for acceptance and slaving for people who hate her. In fact, her life after her marriage to Bill Cosey bears resemblance to Cinderella’s before her transformation into a princess. She is forced to wait on, even feed, May, who hates her, much like Cinderella was forced to serve her evil stepmother and stepsisters.

The fairy tale is a genre that does not allow for much ambiguity. Good and bad are clearly separated and deceit is always revealed and never pays off in the end. Love’s deconstructive treatment of the fairy tale results in reversals and complications. For example, one element promised by the fairy tale is eternal happiness, but in the story of Heed’s and Christine’s lives the absence of ‘they lived happily ever after’ is striking. Love is a central component in the lives of Heed and Christine. Ironically, however, it is the main source of their unhappiness since they have both been deprived of their love for each other. According to L, when Bill Cosey chose Heed he ‘chose a girl already spoken for […] The way I see it, she belonged to Christine and Christine belonged to her’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 105). In Christine’s version of the fairy tale, Heed is both evil stepmother and ‘prince’, her one true love. This mixing of roles is as impossible in a fairy tale as it is in Heed and Christine’s lives.

The relationship of Love to the fairy tale could be seen as containing an element of carnivalization. The relationship between Heed and Christine seen through the lens of the fairy tale contains several acts of reversals, including reversals of hierarchies. When Heed marries Bill Cosey, she changes the social order by causing the exclusion of Christine, who initially belongs there. The union between Heed and Bill Cosey is an ironic and carnivalesque reversal of the conventional final bliss of the fairy tale, and results in much fighting and conniving. The actions undertaken by Heed, Christine, and May are ludicrous and melodramatic: May and Christine hide Heed’s wedding dress; Heed sets fire to Christine’s bed (a fire L kills with sugar!); and Heed and Christine at times fight each other physically: ‘Once – perhaps twice – a year, they punched, grabbed hair, wrestled, bit, slapped. Never drawing blood, never apologizing, never premeditating, yet drawn annually to pant through an episode that was as much rite as fight’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 73). Their outrageous behaviour blurs the personal tragedies of the story by extracting comedy from them. The ambivalence of their relationship – the love-hate, young girl-grown woman, upstairs-downstairs constellations – reflects the ambivalence that Bakhtin identifies in Rabelais and ascribes to carnival: ‘For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis’ (Bakhtin, 1984b, p. 2).

However, the fairy tale-like happiness is used without irony to describe Christine’s childhood and her childhood friendship with Heed, which is portrayed touchingly as a pre-lapsarian idyll, ‘a time when innocence did not exist because no one had dreamed up hell’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 190). This was the time when they hiccupped carelessly from laughter under the sheets. Childhood is likened to a natural state that happens regardless of effort, whereas adulthood is pretentious and contrived. The first event that throws a shadow over their carefree happiness − ‘the birth of sin’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 192) – is not Bill Cosey’s marriage to Heed but his touching the young child Heed on ‘the place under her swimsuit where a nipple will be’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 191), following which he goes into Christine’s room to masturbate. Their meeting with sin and adulthood, and with a vague but deeply-felt guilt, is an experience that lies beyond words and cannot be talked about: ‘It wasn’t the arousals, not altogether unpleasant, that the girls could not talk about. It was the other thing. The thing that made each believe, without knowing why, that this particular shame was different and could not tolerate speech – not even in the language they had invented for secrets’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 192). This was the first germ of rot in their relationship and the incident that introduces the ‘first lie, of many to follow’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 191). The danger that threatens the kingdom of innocence is always growing up but when this process is forced or premature, childhood is tragically contaminated.

One Monarch Street and the Cosey Hotel, now Gothic anachronisms, were once idyllic, Edenic places, castles. The reasons for the loss of a pastoral world where they could be each other’s best love – is to be found within the pastoral epoch of their childhood. It reflects the Gothic romance: ‘In some cases, the physical loss of the pastoral world threatens to be also a psychological and spiritual loss through the discovery that the mystery of the Gothic place may well have some sinister bearing on, or even for a time be identical with, another mystery connected with that pastoral world itself’ (DeLamotte, 1990, p. 15). And it is this world Heed and Christine return to at the end, confronting the dark, supressed matter that disrupted the pastoral idyll of their childhood.

The interplay between the past and the present is visible in Christine’s relationship to her childhood. The silver coffee spoon she used when eating ice-cream is a symbol of her carefree and privileged life as a young girl. As a grown woman, bitter and resentful, she is trying to keep the memory of her happy childhood alive by eating with the spoon: ‘It was tiny, a coffee spoon, but Christine ate every meal she could with it just to hold close the child it was given to and hold also the pictures it summoned’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 22). The spoon joins the lives of Heed and Christine, and figures in both their fairy tale sequences in the text. Christine offers Heed the silver spoon and Heed takes it, an act which has symbolic overtones: Christine invites Heed into her privileged life, Heed accepts, but in the end she takes over and pushes Christine out. Albeit from different social backgrounds, the two were lonely little girls who formed a very special relationship.

However, their lives lived apart from each other as adults are quite different. While their childhood and old age are dominated by their mutual love and hate for each other, their relationship to men colours their adult lives. This stage of their life evokes the blues, especially the blues performed by female blues artists like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, and Billie Holiday. Although women’s classic blues had a wide thematic range, their signatory topics were relationships between men and women and matters of sexuality and love, typically presented in a gritty and far from conventional way. Angela Davis comments that it is revealing that the rather long list of themes found in women’s blues typically ‘does not include children, domestic life, husband, and marriage’ (Davies, 1998, p. 13). Some of these blues lyrics, like Ma Rainey’s ‘Sweet Rough Man’, could be seen as pandering to stereotypes, and present black women as the submissive victims of black masculinity: ‘He keeps my lips split, my eyes black as jet/But the way he love me make me soon forget’ (Davies, 1998, p. 247–248). However, subversive female behaviour and resistance to oppression and victimization can be discerned in other blues performed by women, such as Ida Cox’ ‘Bad Women Don’t Have the Blues’, which Angela Davies describes as ‘the most famous portrait of the nonconforming, independent woman’ (Davies, 1998, p. 38): ‘Wild women are the only kind that really get by/Cause wild women don’t worry, wild women don’t have the blues’ (Davies, 1998, p. 38). Some times these women are willing to resort to drastic means, such as in ‘Hateful Blues’, performed by Bessie Smith: ‘If I see him I’m gon’ beat him, gon’ kick and bite him too/Gonna take my weddin’butcher, gonna cut him two in two’ (Davies, 1998, p. 286–287). The blues offers a space for images of women as active, assertive, outrageous, and independent individuals that are far removed from images of women in sentimental literature and popular culture.

In many respects, Christine’s life as an adult is a blues narrative that evokes the classic and misogynist lyrics of blues like ‘Sweet Rough Man’, albeit with a hint of Ida Cox’s bad woman attitude. As a young woman Christine was stunningly good looking, but in her relationship with men she was treated without respect and eventually victimized. Her affairs often ended in melodramatic incidents, like confrontations with the police; ‘[c]ome to think of it, every serious affair she’d had led straight to jail’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 90) and resembles the transgressive stories presented by blues singers: her husband, whom she married when she was seventeen, she surprises in another woman’s arms; then she embarked on the search for a new husband and found three, ‘none her own’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 162), until she met the social activist Fruit, who was eight years younger than her, ‘so of course he pleased himself with other women’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 165) and then lastly Dr. Rio, to whom Christine was ‘a kept woman’, without fully knowing it. She thought she was special and was mortified at discovering how naïve she had been when she was ungraciously thrown out to give room for her replacement. The environments that Christine passes through, whether they are represented by politically radical social activist groups or the higher social circles of Dr. Rio, are all sexist and patriarchal, exploiting women and relegating them to marginal, disempowered positions. However, Christine does not timidly accept her fate; like transgressive blues women she shows anger and resentment against her oppressors. Her seven routine abortions are reminders of her unfruitful life yet are not seen as tragic affairs but rather as evidence of her refusal to accept whatever happens to her.

Both Heed and Christine could, at least on the surface, be seen as bad blues women. Heed’s marriage to Bill Cosey could also be read in light of the blues. Being a man of means and old enough to be her grandfather he is in most ways her superior and she has little say in her own life. He appears like a big daddy, a refined version of a bad man of blues. Jealousy, infidelity, and rage are salient components in her life as well, and there is little to remind us of a conventional love story. However, in contrast to Christine’s life, sexuality is virtually absent from the descriptions of Heed’s life, which is highly unusual in the blues, and Heed lacks the anger and attitude of the bad blues woman. There are no depictions of Heed as a sexually attractive woman. She appears to be almost devoid of sexuality and very far from images of women found in blues. She seems to have been transformed directly from the little girl who married the old man − and was quite happy when her newly-wed husband went out on business in the evenings of their honeymoon because she had colouring books and paper dolls to play with – to an arthritic elderly lady with nothing but revenge on her mind. She is not, as a blues woman would be, angry or jealous when her newly wed husband leaves her in the evenings. Except for her short affair with the hotel guest who came to collect his dead brother, there is little mention of Heed as a young adult woman, and even this, her single extra-marital affair, is associated with death because of her lover’s dead brother and her subsequent miscarriage. In the narrative present, Heed is both child and elderly body, something which Junior senses: ‘The woman looked to be in her sixties at least – hair made megablack by a thick border of silver at the scalp – but she had something of a little-girl scent: butter-rum candy, grass juice, and fur’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 24). The natural development from child to elderly woman seems to be missing and as we meet her in the present of the story, she is like a girl trapped inside an elderly woman.

Cosey’s marriage to Heed when she is only eleven years old sets time off balance; an older man marrying a child is a disruption of time’s natural flow. This disruption persists. While both in their sixties, Heed and Christine wear sanitary napkins which they throw away unstained. In an article on Nachträglichkeit, i.e. temporal incongruity or belatedness, in Love, Jean Wyatt observes that ‘[a] lack of temporal congruity characterizes all the stages of Heed’s subsequent life and, to a lesser extent, the stages of Christine’s life as well. At the simplest level, Heed and Christine are consistently out of phase with the biological time of their bodies – for example, with the stages of their reproductive cycles’ (Wyatt, 2008, p. 196). This conflation of time is not just a feature of the narrative in Morrison’s novel but also directly affects the lives of the characters in a manner that is debilitating rather than constructive since it shuts them off from real time.

In terms of race and colour, Heed, rather than Christine, evokes associations of a black blues woman, but they are both aware of and troubled by their racial appearance. Heed overhears a conversation between two hotel guests that alerts her to her physical appearance: ‘Good figure. Way past good; she could be in the Cotton Club. Except for her color. And she’d have to smile some of the time. Needs to do something with her hair…She’s hard to be around. Hard how? I don’t know; she’s sort of physical. (Long laughter.) Meaning? You know, jungle-y. (Choking laughter)’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 75). The implication is that Heed is too dark to be fashionable and too unsophisticated and primitive to match a man like Bill Cosey. Christine, in contrast, has ‘light skin, gray eyes, and hair threatening a lethal silkiness’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 163), and the sophistication and worldliness that Heed lacks − without it doing her any good. It is suggested more than once that her gray eyes, reminiscent of Dark’s eyes and thereby also of his racial treason, are the reason why Bill Cosey distances himself from her. Christine becomes aware of her ‘inauthentic’ looks. When she joined the activist group she ‘changed her clothing to “motherland”, sharpened her language to activate slogans, carried a knife for defence, hid her inauthentic hair in exquisite gelés’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 163). Although both Heed and Christine are pretty, neither of them can be proud of her looks in an uncomplicated way. Their racial appearance is used by people they encounter to categorize them and place them.

Less attention is given to the lives of Christine and Heed as adult women – the years they spent apart – than to their childhood friendship and to their antagonistic cohabitation as mature women after Bill Cosey’s death. The Gothic and the fairy tale are thus more prominent in the novel than is the blues narrative.

Falling in Love

Love has a dramatic and partly cathartic ending that brings about a change in the relationship between Christine and Heed. The ending of Love, taking place in the old Cosey hotel, releases the novel’s melodramatic potential. Heed’s fall down the ladder is a crucial moment that causes a reversal in the relationship between Heed and Christine. The use of the stairs as setting brings us back to the opening of the novel where the icy steps outside One Monarch Street foreshadow the ending. Stairs and corridors are familiar in Gothic settings, and they are also frequently used in film melodramas. In Love, too, stairs are crucial in the context of dramatic and important emotional incidents leading to change in the lives of Heed and Christine. The staircase and corridor figure in Heed’s fall from innocence and into experience as a young girl: ‘Heed runs into the service entrance and up the back stairs, excited by the picnic to come and the flavour of her bubble gum’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 190). As she ascends, she is elated, and the pink bubble gum accentuates her childishness. The event itself is even accompanied by melos, by music ‘so sweet and urgent Heed shakes her hips to the beat as she moves down the hallway’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 190). After her meeting with Cosey, ‘Heed bolts back down the stairs. The spot on her chest she didn’t know she had is tingling. When she reaches the door, she is panting as though she has run the length of the beach instead of a flight of stairs’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 191). Heed’s other, and physical, fall from the ladder in the attic as an elderly woman, is described in cinematic terms as this is how it is seen by Christine: ‘the falling is like a silent movie and the soft twisted hands with no hope of hanging on to rotted wood dissolve, fade to black as movies always do’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 177). Here, too, the downward movement corresponds to an emotional change. Before the fall, they each feel for the other ‘a hatred so pure, so solemn, it feels beautiful, almost holy’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 177). After the fall Christine is overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness and abandonment, and ‘[t]he holy feeling is still alive, as is its purity, but it is altered now, overwhelmed by desire’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 177).

The past, which has been omnipresent in the novel, is brought to the surface and confronted in an almost Ibsenesque manner; events of the past have impinged on the present. Skeletons of the past stir, literally speaking: ‘There in a little girl’s bedroom an obstinate skeleton stirs, clacks, refreshes itself’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 177). The Gothic setting of the dark and dusty attic with its boxes containing memorabilia from the past takes on a symbolic significance. It reflects the minds of Heed and Christine as they finally retrieve and confront elements from the past they have lived with and reworked in their minds, mostly the wrongs they each think the other guilty of. They have suppressed their unique childhood friendship as well as the episodes from the past that first introduced distance between them. The retrieval of Christine’s yellow bathing suit, the one she puked on after watching her grandfather, brings them back.

Despite the central position of Bill Cosey as mystery and object of hate and fascination, Love, like most of Morrison’s novels, primarily focuses on the lives of girls and women. Morrison has stated: ‘I have made women the focal point of books in order to find out what women’s friendships are really all about’ (Morrison, 1994c, p. 154), and what is ultimately the focal point in Love is the relationship between Heed and Christine. There are clear parallels between the endings of Love and Sula. Sula is also the story of a very special friendship between two girls, a friendship that breaks over a man, but here there is no reunion at the end, only Nel’s belated recognition of the fact that the person she misses the most in her life is her old-time friend Sula:

‘All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude’. And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. ‘We was girls together’, she said as though explaining something. ‘O Lord, Sula’, she cried, ‘girl, girl, girlgirlgirl’.

It was a fine cry – loud and long – but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow (Morrison, 1991, p. 174).

Morrison has described her intentions with Sula in the following way: ‘What I really wanted to say about the friendship between Nel and Sula was that if you really do have a friend, a real other, another person that complements your life, you should stay with him or her. And to show how valuable that was, I showed a picture of what life is without that person, no matter how awful that person might have treated you’ (Morrison, 1994b, p. 74). Love eloquently shows how the lives of Heed and Christine have been without each other, and it also hints at how their lives could have been had they stayed together. It is not their conflicts with Bill Cosey – grandfather, husband, and father figure – that have corrupted their lives; it is their emotional and/or physical distance from each other. Neither Christine nor Heed is complete without the other. If we look at the lives of some of the other female characters, like May and Junior, they are lonely women because they miss the close and reliable relationship to another woman.

For much of the text, love seems remarkably absent, and Susana Vega-Gonzales comments that ‘Love is more about the absence of love in the form of hate, betrayal, lust and deceit rather than about its presence’ (Vega-González, 2004, p. 218). However, what emerges in Love as the only true and certain thing from among the debris of deconstructed genres and broken lives is the true love between Heed and Christine. L, the novel’s ‘part-time’ narrator, describes it in the following way as:

a child’s first chosen love. If such children find each other before they know their own sex, or which one of them is starving, which well fed; before they know color from no color, kin from stranger, then they have found a mix of surrender and mutiny they can never live without. Heed and Christine found such a one (Morrison, 2003, p. 199).

It is the love of children, formed before an awareness of boundaries, prejudice, and social class, has been formed. Their love for each other transcends everything, and when Romen finds them, they lie in each other’s arms, one dead, the other living. Curiously, it is not even clear who is dead and who is still alive. The novel conspicuously obscures this fact.

Love ends like an illustration of its most important intertext, the passage from 1 Corinthians, 13:

I may be able to speak the languages of men and even of angels, but if I have not love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell. I may have the gift of inspired preaching; I may have all knowledge and understand all secrets; I may have all the faith needed to move mountains – but if I have not love I am nothing.

The ending is thus deeply ambivalent; Love is a story of wasted and troubled lives and an investigation into the adult world’s harsh treatment of children, but it also shows the existence of a love so strong it has survived a lifetime of neglect and abuse. In her last novel, God Help the Child (2015), the mother, Sweetness, now estranged from her daughter, says: ‘What you do to children matters. And they might never forget’ (Morrison, 2015, p. 43), lines that sound like they were taken from Love.

To conclude, Love tells the story of the different stages of the lives of Heed and Christine through the interplay of the genres of the Gothic, the fairy tale, and the blues narrative. The fairy tale portrays their mutual childhood bonds as well as the bad seed that eventually destroys childhood, and as their fairy tale-like openings go awry their lives become a Gothic melodrama. The blues narrative provides the characters, especially Christine, with subversive qualities that counteract the passive role offered by the Gothic and the fairy tale. Through carefully constructed patterns of parallels and contrasts, the constant interplay of past and present and of different genres, the novel weaves the destinies of the two characters together. These strategies also cause the novel’s themes to unfold. Love’s investigation into interhuman relationships and the nature of love is the theme most explicitly dealt with, but from this grow related themes, such as of the adult world’s cruel treatment of children and patriarchy’s oppression of women.

The various dialogic mechanisms between the characters in Love create a complexity that challenges its readers. Despite the final catharsis for two of its most important characters, the novel has an open ending. Who is to blame for the way their lives turned out is not clear. At the end of the novel Heed and Christine reflect on the nature of their relationship to Bill Cosey: ‘We could have been living our lives hand in hand instead of looking for Big Daddy everywhere. He was everywhere. And nowhere. We make him up? He made himself up. We must have helped’ (Morrison, 2003, p. 189). They realize that their picture of him does not equal him as he really was; into their image of him they have projected themselves and their prejudices and hurt feelings. The Bill Cosey they have spent their lives obsessing about is only part reality, the rest is imagination, and where the boundary between the two goes is uncertain. This absence of stable conclusions and answers create a dialogic space where the readers can enter the text. Morrison has been quite explicit about the role of the reader in relation to her texts: ‘My writing expects, demands participatory reading […] My language has to have holes and spaces so the reader can come into it’ (Morrison, 1994d, p. 164). Thus, reading becomes an ethical act that demands of the readers that they, in assembling the pieces of the narrative, confront their own preconceptions and agendas.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Inger-Anne Søfting

Inger-Anne Søfting is an Associate Professor of American Studies in the Department of Languages and Literatures at The University of Southeastern Norway. Her PhD was in the field of African American literature. She has published articles on Toni Morrison, Jean Toomer, and Cormac McCarthy. Other research interests include the Gothic, literature and the environment, and literature and music.

Notes

1 This article is based on a part of a chapter from my unpublished dissertation Genre Polyphony in African American Literature (Søfting, 2020).

2 See for instance Axel Nissen: “Sula is centrally concerned with right and wrong interpersonal relationships forged by bonds of kinship, marriage, and, not least of all, friendship. What does it mean to be good? What is evil? What does it mean to be a friend?”

3 Houston Baker, Jr. chides reviewers for what he calls “the intellectual shallowness and implicit critical contempt” (17, 2013) with which the novel has been received. For less than enthusiastic reviews.

4 This is also noted by Elliott Butler-Evans in relation to Song of Solomon: “What is dialogically significant here is the manner in which individual consciousnesses present themselves as autonomous voices unmediated by either the narrator or Morrison, thereby opening the novel to numerous interpretive possibilities”.