Maternal Love/Maternal Violence
Inventing Ethics in Toni Morrison's A Mercy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11271835 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Naomi Morgenstern (University of Toronto, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 7-29 |
| Publication date | 2014-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlt071 |
| OpenAlex | W2165544531 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 5 |
From Eva Peace in Sula (1973) to Sethe in Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison has offered her readers numerous provocative examples of the mother-child bond. These examples turn on a fascination with subjectivity on the threshold of being and language. But they also locate their psychoanalytic and developmental struggles in the context of slavery's violent impositions and exclusions. Morrison's work returns repeatedly to scenes of traumatic separation and, in particular, to what might be called the primal scene of slavery—the separation of the enslaved mother and child—in order to take on the challenging task of exploring the relationship between racialized violence and the ethical demands of maternal love. This essay reads Morrison's engagement with some of these racial and maternal dynamics in A Mercy (2008), the story of a slave mother and her child whom she attempts to save in seventeenth-century Virginia. The specific setting of A Mercy, I argue, allows Morrison to develop a visceral correlation between ethical indeterminacy and geopolitical wilderness and to do so while telling another version of an American origins story. Giving and being given are central to the experience of slavery and survival in A Mercy; thus, Morrison's novel can be read with and used to elucidate psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche's account of the parent-child bond as an intergenerational gift or inheritance constituted by enigmatic messages. Finally, this essay also draws on Jacques Derrida's account of the “gift of death” to argue that Morrison's novel offers its readers a distinctly allegorical articulation of an original space for ethics reimagined as decisively maternal.
Criminology · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Culture · Psychology
The Voice of Silent Toxic Mothers in Morrison’s A Mercy and Albeshr’s Hend and the Soldiers
Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature
Slavery's Ghosts and the Haunted Housing Crisis
The Mother-Daughter Plot in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child
The land hoarding and land inspector dilemma in China
Women-Centered Diaspora in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
| Citations per year | 0.55 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |