15 - Picturing American Democracy

Summary

Reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America alongside Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy reveals striking similarities and differences in how the two authors treat the entanglement of indigenous, black, and white histories from seventeenth-century America to the present. Both texts use vivid literary imagery to make concrete some of the intersectional dilemmas of race and gender. In Tocqueville’s case, the purpose is to instruct; in Morrison’s, however, it is to reinhabit the lives of those previously overlooked. Notwithstanding the similarity of their subject matter, the two texts are strikingly different insofar as Tocqueville’s presentation gives no room for the voices and perspectives of the victims of injustice. Nor does his fatalistic narrative suggest the possibility of concrete alternatives to these histories. Taken together, these two works raise broader questions about the sufficiency of fiction as a way of identifying and resolving dilemmas of race and exclusion in American society. In contrast to the inadequacy of Tocqueville’s “new science of politics,” Morrison seeks to project through her fiction a new world that points her readers toward novel ways of conceiving of freedom.