Destructive Love in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon
When an emotion is believed to embody all that brings bliss, serenity, effervescence, and even benevolence, although one may believe its encompassing nature to allow for generalizations and existence virtually everywhere, surprisingly, directly outside the area love covers lies the very antithesis of love: hate, which in all its forms, has the potential to bring pain and destruction. Is it not for this very reason, this confusion, that suicide bombings and other acts of violence and devastation are committed
in the name of love? In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, the reader experiences this tenuity that is the line separating love and hate in many different forms and on many different levelsto the extent that the line between the two begins to blur and become indistinguishable. Seen through Ruth's incestuous love, Milkman and Hagar's relationship, and Guitar's love for African-Americans, if love causes destruction, that emotion is not true love; in essence, such destructive qualities of "love" only transpire when the illusion of love is discovered and reality characterizes the emotion to be a parasite of love, such as obsession or infatuation, something that resembles love but merely inflicts pain on the lover.
As her "daddy's daughter", there is little doubt that a form of love exists between Ruth Dead and Dr. Foster; however, such love is not truly love because as evidenced by Ruth's subsequent life, the filial relationship better resembles an emotional dependence that Ruth took for granted (67). The great emotional schism within her that is the result of her father's death leaves Ruth dysfunctional: she is unable to emote towards other, especially her family. Instead, ...
... middle of paper ...
... Sunday man. He has instead become his cause, and the person behind that cause has been lost.
In Song of Solomon, through many different types of love, Ruth's incestuous love, Milkman and Hagar's romantic love, and Guitar's love for his race, Toni Morrison demonstrates not only the readiness with which love will turn into a devastating and destructive force, but also the immediacy with which it will do so. Morrison tackles the amorphous and resilient human emotion of love not to glorify the joyous feelings it can effect but to warn readers of love's volatile nature. Simultaneously, however, she gives the reader a clear sense of what love is not. Morrison explicitly states that true love is not destructive. In essence, she illustrates that if "love" is destructive, it is most likely, a mutation of love, something impure, because love is all that is pure and true.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, freedom is defined as the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants. While having the power to act independently seems easy to obtain at first, in reality the state of freedom is an untenable goal for many. In the novel Song of Solomon, the author, Toni Morrison, describes the journey of a young man finding his freedom. For most of Milkman’s early years he struggles to find meaning in life and become independent. His father, Macon, states that “money is the only real freedom there is” and urges his son to follow his footsteps to accumulate more wealth. Though Macon may feel more secure being financially stable, money is not freedom. Having money may help one become free, but money itself
When one is confronted with a problem, we find a solution easily, but when a society is confronted with a problem, the solution tends to prolong itself. One major issue that is often discussed in today’s society that has been here for as long as we’ve known it, is racism. Racism is also a very repetitive theme in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Almost every character has experienced racism, whether it be towards them or they are the ones giving the racism in this novel. Racism is a very controversial topic as many have different perspectives on it.
Names, as well as their origins, are very significant. The names in Song of Solomon, written by Toni Morrison, are no exception. While some characters share a common genesis for their names, others are dubbed due to unique events.
“Love and hate are two sides of the same coin” (anonymous). While these emotions are thought of as positive and negative respectively, they are really just different forms of passion. Passion drives everyone to make decisions in their life, and love and hate are the most common forms of passion. Everyone experiences love and hate and is prisoner to the reactions that these elicit from them. Emotions simply happen, and while they can be hidden or covered up, they cannot be consciously changed by the victim. People cannot control the emotions they feel, but they often choose to work towards intensifying their hate or love once they know they are experiencing it. Although these emotions are encountered by everyone at one point or another, they are misunderstood by society and usually accepted as opposites. Though love and hate are often thought of as antonyms, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his novel The Scarlet Letter, examines how they are fundamentally the same because of their intimacy and the power with which they shape people and society.
This passage marks the first of several types of love, and gives us an intuitive
The passage I have chosen to write about is from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, in which Milkman is passing through the town of Shalimar and manages to get himself involved in a brawl at a general store with one of the locals. Milkman suffers a few bumps, bruises and cuts and exits the store enraged. Concentrating on the way Milkman reacts to being the loser of the fight, this passage depicts how, when made an outsider to the people of Shalimar, Milkman’s dark side is shown as he resorts to racist, sexist and malicious language, illustrating that exclusion often times leads to violence and outrage.
Throughout history, religion held a strong meaning in people’s eyes; the theme Christianity seemed to be the mere focus as it was actually the only religion thoroughly presented in the post-colonial era. It is not surprising, then, that Beloved by Toni Morrison is a novel that expresses itself by having a correlation link with Christianity and the Old/New Testaments. While this novel has been subject to numerous interpretations, Beloved is seen as a sacred character that initializes her closely to other characters in the story because her similarities are exactly equivalent to the bride of Solomon in the Bible but the main purpose for the existence of Beloved was to show the formation of the mother-daughter relationship.
Often in stories, there is always a complex group of characters, each with their own wishes, wants, and baggage. Without expanding upon and giving their characters a personality, background, and purpose, authors fail to grasp the reader’s attention, as well as deny them a character to relate to. Toni Morrison, however, has not only understood and complied with this necessity, but has thrived under it. She has learned to write her characters as unique individuals with a life all their own, who are forced to face situations of life head on or run away from their problems, with what they do and with whom they interact, effectively shaping them for the rest of their lives. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon, Hagar Dead expresses a wide array of core psychological issues as well as employs a series of defenses as a means to distract herself from what she fears.
In Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, there are many different relationships that are formed between characters throughout the entire book. However, most of the time, any females in relationship are physically and emotionally abused by their partners. This abuse goes unpunished and is viewed as manly, and the feeling of superiority over women is passed down the generations, from father to son. Toni Morrison aims to highlight the ridiculousness of this ideology by showing the reader the male characters through the lense of their unacceptable conduct. Meanwhile, the abuse that the female characters have to go through is emphasized. However, through Milkman’s growth and understanding during his journey to Shalimar, and through the carefully thought
Society is in many ways is a cornerstone of civilization itself. Society is important and essential infrastructure needed to hold up civilization as we know it. To be in society means to be an active member interacting with other members. Although most humans actively participate in society, there are a select few that either refuse, get kicked out, or fall out from society. Isolation from society, I have found, has many different reactions to an individual’s well being. In many instances of isolation from society and civilization, people may experience feelings of deteriorating self confidence, anarchy, and a loss of humanity. These emotions can lead to a lack of identity and the belief that an individual is only good for what society deems
Love and hate are powerful and contradicting emotions. Love and hate are also the subjects under examination for several centuries yet even to the present day; it remains to be a mystery. For the past centuries, writers and poets have written about love showing that the stories of love can never fade way. For this essay, I will discuss three English literature sources that talk about the theme of love and hate. These are the poem Olds "Sex without Love”, the poem Kennel "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps and the story by Hemingway "Hills like White Elephants. I will use the poems to compare the traditional stance of sex that are within the parameters of marriage and love versus the belief that love is in itself an act of pleasure
Some may say love is just an emotion while others may say it is a living and breathing creature. Songs and poems have been written about love for hundreds and thousands of years. Love has been around since the beginning of time, whether someone believes in the Big Bang or Adam and Eve. Without love, there wouldn’t be a world like it is known today. But with love, comes pain with it. Both William Shakespeare and Max Martin know and knew this. Both ingenious poets wrote love songs of pain and suffering as well as blossoming, newfound love. The eccentric ideal is both writers were born centuries apart. How could both know that love and pain work hand in hand when they were born 407 years apart? Love must never change then. Love survives and stays its original self through the hundreds and thousands of years it has been thriving. Though centuries apart, William Shakespeare and Max Martin share the same view on love whether i...
On March 13, 1933, Joan Ruth Bader was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Celia Amster and Nathan Bader (Salokar & Volcansek, 1996). Ruth had an older sister, Marilyn, but she passed away at the age of six from meningitis; Ruth was one year old at the time. Cecilia, Ruth’s mother, stayed home and took care of Ruth while she grew up. Cecilia made sure that Ruth worked diligently in school and taught her the value of hard work. Cecilia was diagnosed with cancer while Ruth was in high school and the day before her daughter’s graduation she passed away (Salokar & Volcansek, 1996). One of the greatest influences on Ruth’s life was her mother and the values she instilled in her from a young age. Two of the greatest lessons that Ruth learned from her mother was to be independent and to be a lady, and by that she meant not to respond in anger but to remain calm in si...
causes more pain than it does happiness. This concept of love, as portrayed by countless works,
Victor Hugo once said, “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” Whether in Shakespeare’s tragic play about lovers doomed by fate, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s sonnet describing love, “Sonnet 116”, or O. Henry’s age old The Gift of the Magi, love motivates the characters and authors to make decisions that have a weighty impact on their lives. Throughout these works of literature, authors use love’s power to drive the plot forward to create good events within the characters’ lives. Love is a force for good because it makes people willing to forgive each other, it brings the best out of people in bad situations, and it