The Gender Roles Of Jazz By Toni Morrison

Jazz is my first Toni Morrison’s novel; it made me fall in love with her writing, and it was the reason I took the course with professor Wallace. Every time I re-read it, I discover new hidden details, and the characters open up in new light. Jazz is a story about love, abandonment, migration, the city, music and women. Moreover, women take center stage in this story set (mostly) in the Harlem of the 1920’s. It is a time of reevaluation of the old views and traditions, and introduction of the modern. It is also a period of the appearance of the New Woman that is characterized by a new found sexual freedom. Jazz is a story that embraces the change in the perception of women – away from servants, wives, mothers and sex objects – in order to depict complex women, complex desires and relationships between women. Morrison uses typical male associated traits – sexual desire, violence, and abandonment – in the depiction of her female characters. Therefore, these gender reversals are imparted on the women of Jazz; it reinforces their right to their own personalities. And yet, Morrison does more than just infuse her female characters with the right, and freedom, of imperfection, she also places the bond, the sisterhood, that is uniquely female, at the forefront of their relationships and of the story. Jazz features passionate, strong, independent and wild women; and there’s no one wilder than Wild.

She abandoned her son, Joe; she abandoned her duty. And in this she embodies the greatest failings of man: an animalistic wildness, an appearance that frightens others and the abandonment of family. She is also the embodiment of the New Woman, her wildness protects her from the cliché depiction of women as nothing more than housewives and gossip machines.

Morrison breaks the rules in depicting her women; they are anything, but traditional. Working around the topic of the New Woman, she talks about another stereotypical male behavior – sexual