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South in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing, and home, The

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Lee, Catherine Carr

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As he grows older, Milkman's failures come from his sense of alienation. This alienation originates, in part, in his lack of awareness and insight and his inability to empathize with others. At the age of 22, he is still trapped emotionally in the symbiotic state of the infant; for, as Morrison writes, he had never "thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual, with a life apart from allowing or interfering with his own" (75). Limited as they are, his efforts to connect with his family end only in failure. He tries to forge a bond with his mother, by hitting his father in her defense, but he realizes that "there was no one to thank him-or abuse him. His action was his alone" (68). In turn, he resists his father's invitation to a shared understanding. Macon tries to explain his abuse by telling Milkman about Ruth's incestuous love for her father. Milkman responds with a sense of disassociation: it was "as though a stranger that he'd sat next to on a park bench had turned toward him and begun to relate some intimacy.... he himself was not involved or in any way threatened by the stranger's story" (74-75). He is blind to his selfishness in his relationship with his cousin, Hagar, who is Pilate's granddaughter. Morrison conveys both Milkman's self-perception and the inaccuracy of that perception in four taught sentences that follow the assault on his father: "Sleeping with Hagar had made him generous. Or so he thought. Wide-spirited. Or so he imagined" (69). When he tires of Hagar, he contemplates writing a note that demonstrates his utter self-absorption: he will tell her that he is leaving her for her own good, in order not to be selfish.

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Even Milkman's dreams and aspirations show his lack of imagination and engagement. Until his father offers him the prospect of finding Pilate's gold, Milkman has virtually no idea of what he wants to do with his adult life. He wants the gold to enable his escape from Not Doctor Street, yet he can "not visualize a life that much different from the one he had," writes Morrison (180). "New people. New places. Command. That was what he wanted in his life" (180). This litany of desires is curiously without detail. Later in the paragraph, ironically juxtaposed to his dreams of escape, Milkman thinks that "he wanted to know as little as possible" (180).

Milkman's alienation stems as well from his refusal to take responsibility. He exploits Hagar for twelve years, long after she has become "the third beer. . . . the one you drink because it's there" (91). His failure to accept commitment is evident in the "dream" he relates to Guitar, in which the plants in the garden grow rapidly over his mother, finally strangling her. Guitar wants to know why he did not try to help her, but Milkman insists that his mother enjoyed it; besides, it was a dream, he says, so he cannot be held accountable. Yet his own logic incriminates him, since he is not actually sure that it was only a dream. To his sister, "Magadelene called Lena," he insists that he has never interfered with the family, that "I live and let live," but that deliberate isolation is precisely his offense (216). He has never taken any notice of the conditions of their lives; he has lived with the members of his family as if they were strangers. As Lena tells him, he has been "peeing on" the family all of his life.

South in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: Initiation, healing, and home, The

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Lee, Catherine Carr

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