Be(e)ing and "Truth": Tar Baby's Signifying on Sylvia Plath's Bee Poems
1996; Duke University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/441881
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
ResumoIn Playing in Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison outlines a critical reading practice by which we might study in canonical (usually white male, sometimes white female) texts. As she defines it, Playing in Dark investigates the ways in which a non-white, Africanlike (or Africanist) or persona was constructed in United States, and imaginative uses this fabricated served (6). Morrison's readings of works by Cather, Melville, Twain, Poe, and Hemingway convincingly illustrate how an Africanist is used in their works. Ultimately, whatever literary strategies writers employ, Morrison argues that always choked representation of an Africanist presence in their work is a reflection of effects of a racialized society on nonblacks; misreadings, distortions, erasures, and caricatures marking Africanist in nonblack texts say more about writer's fears, desires, and ambivalences than they state any truth about African Americans (17). Some critical works already begun project Morrison suggests, such as Alan Nadel's Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and American Canon, Dana D. Nelson's The Word in Black and White: Reading in American Literature, 1638-1876, and Eric J. Sundquist's To Wake Nations: Race in Making of American Literature. Such work needs to expand into exploring Africanist in twentieth-century canonical literature.(1) The rereadings Morrison calls for can clarify both racial substructures of texts by significant precursors and ways Morrison's own fiction responds to call of her theory. In this essay, I would like to focus on one such response: Morrison's signifying repetition and revision in Tar Baby of bee queen from Sylvia Plath's bee poem sequence in Ariel, an intertextual relation which reveals an unacknowledged racial (and racist) dimension in Plath's poetry.(2) Near end of Tar Baby, Morrison describes in some detail life of queen of soldier ants on Isle des Chevaliers.(3) Following directly on departure of Jadine, description of ant queen appears as a commentary on Jadine's quest for self, thereby recalling - in both image of an insect queen and theme of female selfhood - Plath's bee sequence. This is of particular significance because many critics interpreted Plath's bee queen as emblem for a female self. Rereading through Morrison reveals this self to be a white self, constructed in part by fear and repression of blackness. Morrison's repetition and revision of Plath's bee queen in Tar Baby uncovers an Africanist in Plath's bee poems, a unnoticed by Plath critics. Furthermore, fiction, unlike criticism, allows Morrison a space for a corrective revision to such distorted representations of Africanism, a place in which truth of African American being can be told. Reading Plath through Morrison thus reveals American Africanism in Plath's bee poem sequence and limitations of Plath's (white) feminist vision; reading Morrison through Plath tells us other side of story and expands our understanding of limitations of Jadine's choice at end of novel. Furthermore, Morrison's novel self-reflexively comments on power relations at work when discourses make competing claims of epistemological and ontological truth. The ant queen parable in Tar Baby occurs immediately after Jadine's plane takes off for France, thus suggesting its role as commentary on Jadine's quest for self. Morrison details lives of soldier ants, who have no time for dreaming (250). Almost all of them are women because, as Morrison writes, the life of their world requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete there is little need for males and they are seldom produced (250). However, queen of soldier ants vividly remembers her bridal flight with a male, her one, first and last copulation (250). …
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