Abstract

This essay focuses on the varieties of love in Toni Morrison’s novels. Love in a Morrison novel is always embedded in history, each character’s way of loving inflected by legacies from the ancestral past as well as from his or her personal past. Morrison has said that her novels are didactic. They teach a reader to think anew about love, race and gender. I differentiate in this essay between the early novels, which teach through character and plot and an occasional direct authorial statement, and the later novels, starting with Beloved, which challenge a reader’s preconceptions about love through more subtle structural means. For example, deferred disclosures or gaps in meaning in the later novels draw out a reader’s assumptions about love and then, through a narrative twist, prompt the reader to examine and re-evaluate them. Love comes in a different shape in each later novel, surprising conventional expectations – from love as the deep friendship between young girls in Love to Home’s conception of love as a disruptive force that produces profound change in the lover to the characterization of love in Jazz as something you innovate and recreate each moment. The subtle formal techniques that engage a reader’s own values in an ethical dialogue with the text constitute Morrison’s variation on the tradition of call-and-response central to African American art forms. An overview of love in the first four novels is followed by a close reading of three later novels: Beloved, Home and Jazz.