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“Breathing the Air of a World So New”: Rewriting the Landscape of America in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2013

JENNIFER TERRY
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Abstract

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

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Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , February 2014 , pp. 127 - 145
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Morrison, Toni, Beloved (London: Picador, 1987), 268Google Scholar. Subsequent references given in text.

2 Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 14Google Scholar.

3 See Brian Jarvis on the “acute sensitivity to the politics and poetics of space” in African American writing, arising from the historical experience of the “dislocations of the diaspora … segregation, ghettoisation and incarceration.” Jarvis, Brian, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 113Google Scholar.

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5 Nash Smith “traces the impact of … the vacant continent beyond the frontier on the consciousness of Americans,” looking at conceptions of a maritime empire, liminal wilderness pioneers, the “agricultural paradise in the West” to follow and the “master symbol of the garden.” Smith, Henry Nash, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1962; first published 1950), 4, 138Google Scholar. Considering various canonical writers, Marx identifies “a new, distinctively American … version of the pastoral design” in a recurrent pattern that combines the idealized landscape and garden idyll of an unspoiled virgin continent with a counterforce, often in the form of an intruding machine, representing “an encroaching world of power and complexity … history.” Marx, Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 32, 24Google Scholar.

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7 Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Picador, 1992), 14–15Google Scholar, original emphasis.

8 Ibid., 33–34.

9 Kolodny focusses on male-authored texts to uncover “the potency, the continued repetition of the land-as-woman symbolization in American life and letters,” and to probe this as an adapting but archetypal fantasy of harmony and nurture. Kolodny, Annette, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as History and Experience in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), ix, 4Google Scholar.

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14 Pearce, Roy Harvey, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, 2nd edn, rev. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Harvey Pearce in particular looks at “the development in the American mind of the Indian as a symbol for all that over which civilization must triumph.” Ibid., 73.

15 Indeed, Waegner, 94, notes, “when [Jacob] enters steamy Virginia … his arrival is suggestive of the European explorers' first footsteps in original landfall.” The use of a colonial-era map of East Coast territories on the title page of the hardback edition of the novel additionally highlights such concerns.

16 Several reviews of A Mercy note Morrison's invocation of these biblical paradigms. Lenora Todaro finds “the genesis of racist America, with Adam and Eve played by the Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark and his mail-order bride, Rebekka … cast out of this new American Eden.” Lenora Todaro, “Toni Morrison's A Mercy: Racism Creation Myth,” Village Voice, 18 Nov. 2008, available at www.villagevoice.com, accessed 10 April 2011. In his at times dismissive review, John Updike observes the depiction of “a new world turning old, and poisoned from the start.” John Updike, “Dreamy Wilderness: Unmastered Women in Colonial Virginia,” New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2008, available at www.newyorker.com, accessed 10 April 2011.

17 Morrison, Toni, Tar Baby (London: Vintage, 1981), 7Google Scholar. Subsequent references given in text.

18 “The men had gnawed through the daisy trees … In the huge silence that followed their fall, orchids spiralled down to join them” (8, emphasis added).

19 Tar Baby also elaborates different relations to the land, inflected by the history of colonialism: those who will own and occupy the new homes are of European and European American descent; the workers on the building project are “imported from Haiti,” implied to be nonwhite, economically dependent labourers; and the only group shown to exist in harmony with the forests is the chevaliers, “descended from some slaves who went blind the minute they saw Dominique” (153).

20 Casteel, Sarah Phillips, Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 16Google Scholar.

21 Morrison, Toni, Song of Solomon (London: Vintage, 1977), 226, 279–81Google Scholar. For a reading of this kind see Terry, Jennifer, “Buried Perspectives: Narratives of Landscape in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon,” Narrative Inquiry, 17 (2007), 93–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 The early nineteenth-century leatherstocking novels of Cooper have proved significant to much scholarship on ideas of American landscape and indigeneity, including that of Harvey Pearce, Nash Smith and Kolodny.

23 We are told that Lina becomes “one more thing that moved in the natural world” (48).

24 Deloria, Philip J., Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 101–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Looking at “images of Indianness” in European American disguise and performance, Deloria explores their potency in national culture as markers of both oppositional savagism and latterly, in a modern, nostalgic, primitivist turn, a more free “natural” other, “represent[ing] authentic reality in the face of … alienating mass society.” Ibid., 6, 74.

25 Phillips Casteel, 93, 92. Phillips Casteel considers how by “appropriating [iconic] rural and wilderness landscapes … diasporic writers of the Americas … position themselves to contest exclusionary narratives of the nation.” Yet, in doing so, they risk “reproducing the very conceptual structures” they seek to oppose. Ibid., 1–2, 3–4. Here the specific critique of “Native envy,” in which a primitivist identification with figures of indigeneity serves to bolster migrant claims to belonging, is shaped against the fiction of Joy Kogawa. Ibid., 101.

26 See Harvey Pearce, 74, 49, on the forging of “the Indian as the vanishing American,” an ambivalent figure of both censure and pity in the dominant imagination, but ultimately a “savage … who would inevitably be destroyed by the civilized.”

27 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2008; first published 1992), 197–201Google Scholar.

28 For an exploration of Morrison's dialogue with founding documents and the “American origins narrative,” see Babb, Valerie, “E Pluribus Unum? The American Origins Narrative in Toni Morrison's A Mercy,” Toni Morrison: New Directions, MELUS, 36, 2 (2011), 147–64, 147Google Scholar.

29 Waegner, “Ruthless Epic Footsteps,” 92.

30 For Morrison's portrayal of estranged African American experiences of American landscape through Paul D, see also 162.

31 There is an echo here of Paul D's condemnation of Sethe in Beloved, another example of the dehumanization of the black woman articulated in terms of nature or animality: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (165).

32 Wallace and Armbruster, “The Novels of Toni Morrison,” 216. Wallace and Armbruster's work moves across Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved and Paradise, considering culturally induced wildness, a transgressive wildness that exceeds culture, and the need for wildness to be integrated into and expressed through living ancestral traditions and folk culture.

33 Florens is also subject to a troubling definition of herself when on her journey she meets a group of young male Native Americans. Although they give her much-needed water and food, she experiences “misery and fright … [one] says baa baa baa like a goat kid and they all laugh and slap their legs,” afterwards carrying “an echo of [the] laughing boys” who likened her to an animal (102–3).

34 Florens is aware of this process: “it is the withering inside that enslaves and opens the door for what is wild. I know my withering is born in the Widow's closet” (160). In considering American Romance, Morrison discusses how “Americans’ fear of being outcast … of Nature unbridled and crouched for attack; their fear of the absence of so-called civilization” was outworked through a fabricated blackness that she terms Africanism. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 37–38.

35 She explains, “you wanted the shoes of a loose woman, and a cloth around your chest did no good” (166).

36 Buell, The Environmental Imagination, 21.

37 Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Vintage, 1995)Google Scholar. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” in Reesman, Jeanne Campbell and Krupat, Arnold, eds., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 7th edn, Volume C (New York: Norton, 2007), 808–19Google Scholar.

38 Attempting to redress a lack of dialogue between postcolonial and environmental literary studies, and shifting from a pattern of narrowly defined US nature writing, a recent Caribbean-oriented collection calls for “a sustained ecocritical focus on the ways in which race, gender, and other social vectors help constitute environmental experience.” Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Gosson, Renée, and Handley, George, “Introduction,” in Gosson, DeLoughrey, and Handley, , eds., Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 1–30, 4Google Scholar.

39 Phillips Casteel, Second Arrivals, 6.