Reflecting on the Residual: Toni Morrison, Race, Gender, and Strategic Essentialism

Abstract

My senior project focuses on Toni Morrison and one of her most contemporary books,Tar Baby (1981 ). I seek to show that in these novels, in her interviews, and nonfiction work Morrison disseminates dominant gender ideology. It is especially important to investigate her beliefs and how they come through her literature because Morrison is seen as a beacon of freedom, and readers, especially black female readers, are especially sensitive to absorbing residual notions of gender and sometimes race from Morrison's structure of feeling. Morrison says that she wants her characters, her readers, and herself to be free, but her views of "freedom" in racial relations simultaneously reproduce oppression in gender relations. Morrison's work shows that she still believes that women, especially black women, should conform to traditional gender roles. These roles seem natural to her, but they are not natural, only cultural and as such are assigned by the dominant of our culture and work to their benefit. She suggests that black women just have to try to grow as "free" individuals while also caring for and being responsible for everyone else in their lives in virtually every way possible. Morrison thinks that when she voices these ideas she is speaking from an individual sense of what is right, and that accepting these responsibilities is an essential part of woman's life. However, she does not realize how she has been conditioned by Ideological State Apparatuses to hold these values. My work will show how Jadine (Tar Baby) is affected by these values, and how black women in the contemporary moment are affected by them. As well as I will search for a politically useful way to read these novels, that does not leave readers vulnerable to Morrison's residual dominant beliefs

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