Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative - Critical Essay

(6.) I have excluded Sula and Beloved from the body of this argument. Although I have not used these two novels for this essay, they help to suggest the range of Morrison's handling of the passing theme. Sula, for example, never clarifies whether Tar Baby is actually black or white. "Most people said he was half white, but Eva said he was all white" (39). Along with Langston Hughes's "Who's Passing for Who?" and William Faulkner's Light in August, Sula highlights the complexity of passing by leaving the ambiguously raced character undefined. Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved, evokes the passing theme in a brief reference to a "bleached nigger" who gets his face shoe-blackened (260). Although this brief passage could allude to George Schuyler's Black No More, which describes how Snobbcraft and Buggerie were first bleached by Dr. Crookman's BLACK-NO-MORE machine and then later blackened with "shoe polish" (202), it more immediately suggests that race can be masked, complicated, and/or paradoxical.

(7.) See Morrison's discussion of race and writing in Playing in the Dark. In reinventing the passing narrative, Morrison effectively reveals her concentrated struggle to "free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains" (xi).

(8.) For a discussion of Morrison's "revisionary acts" against past authors and texts, see Awkward. Awkward positions Morrison's first novel against Ellison's Invisible Man, Dick and Jane stories, and other texts, but he does not explore how The Bluest Eye takes on the passing narrative. Morrison's revision of passing narratives may have remained unexamined because there is no central or quintessential narrative. Awkward's pairings allow him to position one specific text (Invisible Man) against another (The Bluest Eye). I have found it more useful to position Morrison's work against the dynamics of passing rather than against James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man or Nella Larsen's Passing.

(9.) Most people know this story through the 1959 movie, which changes Peola's name to Sara Jane, and so the allusion may be considered somewhat obscure. Although passing is not the central concern of either the book or the movie, scholars have been fascinated with this one aspect of the narrative, and so Morrison's allusion might be fruitfully read against this scholarship. See Berlant; Kawash 14-18; Smith; and Caughie.

(10.) For further discussion of the twin metaphors of invisibility and passing, see Wiegman 21-42.

(11.) The Bluest Eye also revises the traditional tale by focusing on a child and not an adult and then examining the responsibility of the community rather than the individual. Although these changes threaten to make the passing narrative unreadable, there are other allusions to the tradition. The classic scene of denying family, for example, takes place when Folly Breedlove refuses to name or claim her daughter, Pecola (87).