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Essay Topics & Critical Commentaries*
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What is the significance of the title of the novel, Song of Solomon?
Identify the most significant symbol in the novel and justify your choice.
State one possible theme of the novel, and support your position.
Describe how the setting complements the primary themes of the novel.
Instructor's Opinion: Give your opinion on why Song of Solomon is considered an important novel in the canon of world literature, and why it was seminal in the nomination of Morrison as a Nobel Prize winner. See the links from the Nobel page and resource page for more information.
Valerie Smith, "Introduction,", in New Essays on Song of Solomon, ed. Valerie Smith, Cambridge University Press. 1995, 1-18.
Song of Solomon tells the story of Milkman Dead's unwitting search for identity. Milkman appears to be destined for a life of self-alienation and isolation because of his commitment to the materialism and the linear conception of time that are part of the legacy he receives from his father, Macon Dead. However, during a trip to his ancestral home, Milkman comes to understand his place in a cultural and familial community and to appreciate the value of conceiving of time as a cyclical process.
The Deads exemplify the patriarchal, nuclear family that has traditionally been a stable and critical feature not only of American society but of Western civilization in general. The primary institution for the reproduction and maintenance of children, ideally it provides individuals with the means for understanding their place in the world. The degeneration of the Dead family and the destructiveness of Macon's rugged individualism symbolize the invalidity of American, indeed Western, values. Morrison's depiction of this family demonstrates the incompatibility of received assumptions with the texture and demands of life in black American communities.
Pilate Dead, Macon's younger sister, provides a marked contrast to her brother and his family. While Macon's love of property and money determines the nature and quality of his relationships, Pilate's sheer disregard for status, occupation, hygiene, and manners is accompanied by an ability to affirm spiritual values such as compassion, respect, loyalty, and generosity.
Pilate introduces a quality of "enchantment" into the novel. The circumstances of her birth make her a character of supernatural proportions. She delivered herself at birth and was born without a navel. Her smooth stomach isolates her from society. Moreover, her physical condition symbolizes her lack of dependence on others. Her self-sufficiency and isolation prevent her from being trapped or destroyed by the extremely decaying values that threaten her brother's life.
Before Milkman leaves his home in Michigan, he perceives the world in materialistic, unyielding terms that recall his father's behavior. Indeed, the search for gold that sends him to Virginia reveals his perception that escaping from his past and his responsibilities and finding material treasure will guarantee him a sense of his own identity.
Milkman's assumption that his trip south holds the key to his liberation is correct, although it is not gold that saves him. In his ancestors' world, communal and mythical values prevail over individualism and materialism; when he adopts their assumptions in place of his own, he arrives at a more complete understanding of what his experience means.
Milkman's development rests partly on his comprehending the ways in which his life is bound up with the experiences of others and partly on his establishing an intimate connection with the land for which his grandfather died. These accomplishments attend his greater achievement: learning to complete, understand, and sing the song that contains the history of his family. Milkman comes to know fully who he is when he can supply the lyrics to the song Pilate has only partially known. The song, which draws on African and African American stories of blacks who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa, explains Milkman's lifelong fascination with flight. When Milkman learns the whole song and can sing it to Pilate as she has sung it to others, he assumes his destiny. He understands his yearning toward flight as a way in which his ancestral past makes itself known and felt to him.
Milkman's sense of identity emerges when he allows himself to accept his personal and familial past. His quest critiques the faith in self-sufficiency for which his father stands. Through his story, Morrison questions Western conceptions of individualism and offers more fluid, destabilized constructions of identity.
Barbara Hill Rigney, The Voices of Toni Morrison, Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 1991.
Clearly, the significant silences and the stunning absences throughout Morrison's texts become profoundly political as well as stylistically crucial. Morrison describes her own work as containing "holes and spaces so the reader can come into it" (Tate 1989,125), testament to her rejection of theories that privilege j the author over the reader. Morrison disdains such hierarchies in which the reader as participant in the text is ignored: "My writing expects, demands participatory reading, and I think that is what literature is supposed to do. It's not just about telling the story; it's about involving the reader ... we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience" (Tate 1989,125). But Morrison also indicates in each of her novels that images of the zero, the absence, the silence that is both chosen and enforced, are ideologically and politically revelatory.
Morrison's male characters ... imagine themselves in flight and are almost all in love with airplanes. ... In the tradition of black literature since Richard Wright's Native Son, however, the privilege of flight, at least in airplanes, is mostly reserved for white boys. Black males, in Morrison, fly only metaphorically, and then only with the assistance and the inspiration of black women. According to Baker, in his aptly titled "When Lindbergh Sleeps with Bessie Smith," "flight is a function of black woman's conjure and not black male industrial initiative" (105). ...
Song of Solomon opens with the image of attempted flight, as Robert Smith, ironically an agent of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance company, promises to "take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings" (3). Pilate (Pilot?) does not save him (as the reader always hopes she might and believes she could), but she sings him to his death: "O Sugarman done fly / O Sugarman done gone," and he, at least, "had seen the rose petals, heard the music" (9). And Milkman Dead, born the next day in Mercy Hospital, the first "colored" baby ever to claim that distinction, must, Morrison says, have been marked by Mr. Smith's blue silk wings, for "when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier -- that only birds and airplanes could fly -- he lost all interest in himself" (9).
Years later, Milkman and his friend, Guitar, are amazed by the mysterious, even mystical appearance of a peacock over the building of the used car lot where they stand. As the bird descends, Milkman mistakes it for a female, but Guitar corrects him: "He. That's a he. The male is the only one got that tail full of jewelry. Son of a bitch." Milkman, in all his innocent conviction of male superiority, asks why the peacock can fly no better than a chicken, and Guitar, who wants to catch and eat the bird, answers, "Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down" (179-80).
Morrison permits Milkman at least one experience of actual flight, if only on a plane, but even then "the wings of all those other people's nightmares flapped in his face and constrained him" (222). Mostly, Milkman's flight fantasies are in the form of dreams, and they evoke womb images more than an idea of freedom:
It was a warm dreamy sleep all about flying, about sailing high over the earth. But not with arms stretched out like airplane wings, nor shot forward like Superman in a horizontal dive, but floating, cruising, in the relaxed position of a man lying on a couch reading a newspaper. Part of his flight was over the dark sea, but it didn't frighten him because he knew he could not fall. He was alone in the sky but somebody was applauding him, watching him and applauding. (302)
In order to truly fly, however, Milkman must give up his male vanities, "the shit that weighs [him] down"; it is necessary to placate the violated female essence of his universe, atone for his mistreatment of Hagar, apologize for his failure to recognize the humanity of his sisters and his mother, exorcise the influence of his father, and embrace the teachings of Pilate, who is surely the one applauding and watching in Milkman's dream.
Whether or not Milkman fulfills these requirements, becomes a better human being, and actually flies as a reward on the last page of the novel is a subject for a great deal of critical controversy. According to Cynthia A. Davis, Milkman truly flies, and he represents the traditional mythic hero:
Milkman's life follows the pattern of the classic hero, from miraculous birth (he is the first black baby born in Mercy Hospital, on a day marked by song, rose petals in the snow, and human "flight") through quest-journey to final reunion with his double. And Milkman largely resolves the conflict between freedom and connection . . . he finds that his quest is his culture's; he can only discover what he is by discovering what his family is. By undertaking the quest, he combines subjective freedom with objective fact and defines himself in both spheres.... Only in the recognition of his condition can he act in it, only in commitment is he free. (333-34)
But even among classical heroes, there is the possibility of failure in flight, and Icarus always looms as example. At the opposite extreme of interpretation from Davis's analysis is that by Gerry Brenner, who argues that Morrison's treatment of Milkman is purely ironic, and that her attitude toward his search for his "gene pool" is one of disdain. Even the image of flight, in Brenner's analysis, is pejorative, representing "man's prerogative --to escape domestication, to fly from responsibility, in the name of self-fulfillment or self-discovery or self-indulgence ... he flies, indeed, from the burdens of doing something meaningful in life, preferring the sumptuous illusion that he will ride the air" (119). Morrison herself indicates that her rendering of myth in this novel is indeed ironic: "Sotto (but not completely) is my own giggle (in Afro-American terms) of the proto-myth of the journey to manhood. Whenever characters are cloaked in Western fable, they are in deep trouble; but the African myth is also contaminated" (1990, 226). Also evidence that Morrison's rendering of Milkman's character is ironic can be found in her own statement: "I chose the man to make that journey because I thought he had more to learn than a woman would have" (McKay, 428).
Certainly women suffer as a result of the male desire for flight. Milkman's ancestor, Solomon/Shalimar, was one of numerous slaves from Africa who could fly; according to the story Milkman is told, Solomon launched himself into the air from a cotton field one day, leaving behind his wife and twenty-one children. The cry of the abandoned woman, another primal scream from the jungle of female discourse, still echoes throughout the land in Ryna's Gulch, a testament to the irresponsibility of men and the proclivity of women to love them. Milkman, too, has abandoned every woman in his life, including the convenient Sweet, who warms the bed and bathes his body in the last sections of the novel. Pilate alone is the woman/mother who commands Milkman's respect and his love, for "Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly" (340).
Whether or not Milkman "rides the air" in the last lines, or whether he reenacts the suicide of Robert Smith on page one, jumping into space and delivering himself into "the killing arms of his brother," is, finally, ambiguous. Were Morrison to resolve this novel so neatly with Milkman's complete regeneration and reward, the reader's expectations about her recurrent and pervasive use of paradox, her refusal in every novel to adopt novelistic conventions about closure and resolution, would be disappointed.
Significant to Morrison's great strength as a writer is the fact that her style is imbued with contradiction and saturated with breaches of narrative continuity. And, according to Irigaray, a feminine style of writing, is "always liquid," always "resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea, or concept" to the point that "linear reading is no longer possible" (1985, 79-80).
As we shall also see in a later chapter on Morrison's rendering of history, concepts like linearity, progress, chronology, even development, are not primarily valuable in an analysis of her works, nor do they form a pattern for the structure of her novels. Morrison's structures are almost always circular, diffuse, organized by a radical standard of that which constitutes order. (This study, too, is deliberately arranged thematically rather than chronologically, in deference to Morrison's style and in an attempt to discount linearity as a value.) It would be worse than useless, for example, to talk about "plot development" in Morrison's novels; there is plot, certainly, but its revelation culminates or evolves through a process of compilation of multiple points of view, varieties of interpretation of events (and some of these contradictory), through repetition and reiteration. As there is no "climax," in the usual sense, so also there is no resolution, no series of events that can conveniently be labeled "beginning, middle, end."
Denise Heinze, The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels, University of Georgia Press:
Athens and London, 1993.
While Song of Solomon is generally seen as a myth of the male maturation, it also contains the subtext of Pilate's rite de passage and the ritual of cultural immersion. In her history is the process by which she acquires the values that will sustain Milkman and by extension, the black community. Pilate's initiation occurs much earlier than Milkman's. Having been raised in relative isolation in the edenic Lincoln's Heaven, Pilate is abruptly and cruelly cast out as an orphan into the greater reality. Her quest for acceptance, however, turns into rejection, her navel-less belly a semé of exclusion.
Thus, in a reversal of the male myth, her initiation does not result in integration into the community but isolation from it. She must reach an individual, though parallel, level of maturity: "When she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First, she cut off her hair ... Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her" (p. 149). Pilate must first deconstruct herself - symbolized by cutting off her hair - before she can reconstruct truth which in addition to her two maxims - that she does not fear death and she has "compassion for troubled people" (p. 150) - include traditional values. In her wanderings, Pilate has engaged in the hard work ethic: "Hoeing, fishing, plowing, planting, and helping out at stills" (p. 147). Formal education was not a waste. "I didn't mind it too much," she says, "matter of fact, I liked a lot of it. I loved the geography part. Learning about that made me want to read. And the teacher was tickled at how much I liked geography. She let me have the book and I took it home with me to look\ at" (p. 142). Had it not been for the child-molesting preacher, Pilate would have stayed in school. Instead, she takes her education on the road, learning geography and life through experience.
In addition, and more important than acquiring traditional values, Pilate, isolated from an uncomprehending society, develops compassion, a respect for people's privacy, generosity, and unrestrained laughter. "She gave up ... all interest in table manners or hygiene, but acquired a deep concern for and about human relationships" (p. 150). That concern leads her back to community, the natural and inevitable completion of her maturation process. Ironically, then, isolation from community inadvertently provides the means for Pilate to develop antistructure.
When Pilate returns to Southside she again endures rejection even though she eventually becomes the answer to Macon Dead's example of a good life. ... She represents the antithesis of her brother's way of life, though they essentially share the same values: hard work, education, and family. The difference, however, is again the motive behind these values....
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