Motherhood Traumatized

The novel Jazz and the play Antigone, though 2500 years apart, have very similar themes in many ways revolving around man as a social being. Sophocles and Toni Morrison have both scanned the systems of their times binocularly with an accuracy that makes history explain the disintegrated values of life. The political arenas contribute to the deteriorated human interactions, and they seem to define the course and the destiny of the main characters in both works. Patriarchy is the order complicated by the autocratic kingship in Thebes; Creon assumes the throne and makes a law that forbids burial of a corpse. The king’s law becomes quite intrusive to the people’s religious morality, and a girl, Antigone, as noted by Knox, volunteers to contend this injustice by appealing “not only to the bond of kindred blood but also to the unwritten laws, sanctioned by the gods, that the dead must be given proper burial…†(40). The obvious hatred the king has for the female gender complicates his reaction to the girl’s defiance. He executes her and his intoxication to wrath blinds him from sobriety which his son, Haemon, attempts to instill as he politely persuades him saying, “…haul your sheets too taut, never give an inch, you’ll capsize, and go the rest of the voyage keel up and the rowing-bench under†(96). Slavery preceding the Harlem Renaissance is the iron hand paralyzing families of the characters in Jazz. A white girl, Vera, conceives by a black lover, Lestroy, and the parents deem this a disgrace. They send her away to Baltimore from Virginia thus obstructing further interaction with Lestroy.  True Belle, a slave to Vera’s parents, is ordered to accompany her. This breaks True Belle’s family and the effect is felt by her children and the grandchildren too. The women’s disposition in both works bears much resemblance due to their connection to nurturance.  Antigone is at least duty bound towards her dead brother’s funeral rites amidst high political discrimination just as True Belle, Rose, May, Violet and Dorcas are obliged to fulfill some family roles during the peak of racial prejudice.The girl Antigone is an orphan since her mother committed suicide after she learned that her husband, Oedipus, was actually her own son. The parents had unknowingly landed into this incestuous marriage in fulfillment of a prophecy of doom. Oedipus, too embarrassed, went into exile, and his two sons Etiocles and Polynices killed each other over kingship. Creon, the next of kin, heir to the throne, and surrogate father to the two girls, Antigone and Ismene, was party with Etiocles in the initial revolts against Polynices’ kingship. He assumes the throne after the tragic deaths and the first law he makes based on his manifesto is that Polynices’ corpse “must be left unburied…carrion for the birds and the dogs to tear…†(230-231). The royal blood in Antigone’s veins pulsates vigorously and she defiantly challenges the law, as Bernard Knox notes, to “uphold her claim that divine law does indeed prescribe burial for all dead men†(38). Creon exerts excess pressure on family ties, and Antigone’s sensitivity reveals the strain in their past relationship. She tells Ismene that the law targets them, since traditionally women held a lion share in funeral rites (37-38). She is stripped of her rights, and her antagonism to the tyrannical system leads to her execution. Slavery another tyrannical system gives birth to worse malignancies that maim families, as expressed in the scenarios of anger, insanity, depression, mourning and suicide portrayed in Jazz. The sight of Antigone and Haemon “body enfolding body. . .†(123) excites the same anguish that the Harlem photograph of a murdered young girl sparks (Matus, 125). Premature

death of the youth supposed to tend the future results from the complexity of the political platforms.

 Antigone approaches her sister and enlightens her of the status quo and her stand in the matter. She must bury the corpse. Ismene pledges her loyalty to the king and the state and endeavors to convince Antigone against insolence to the law, but Antigone does not stoop that low. Antigone knows laws higher than those made by selfish rulers to defend the throne. She discerns Creon’s attitude to be egocentric and, as Knox notes, she employs a heroic temper against his decree to defend not only royalty but also her gender roles (51). She is all the way aware of the repercussions of insubordination to the Thebans laws, and more so to Creon’s, in his murderous anger against disobedience by females, but she proceeds to perform the symbolic funeral rite. Not once, but twice! This defines her in the society; women were the central figures in such rites of passage.  Creon does not have the least respect for women, the society, the families or even the gods. Antigone seems to see beyond his verbal claims, for while he declares that the land is “our safetyâ€, he conceals his ill motives; selfish gain becomes well revealed in his claim that “the city is the king’s-that’s the law!â€(825) The only practical way left for Antigone to defend her position becomes commitment to divine law which connects her to the past family.Creon blocks this with his indiscriminate rage probably because, as Knox points out, “in the context of fifth-century Athens her challenge to authority of the city-state and defense of a blood relationship had strong political overtones†(39). 

Antigone’s predicament becomes death and she has to sing her own dirge amidst an excess of threatening from the king. This inhumane treatment from a substitute father   who has a close blood relationship is a real betrayal of loyalty. She becomes excited in her gallant stand and refuses to share the glory of death with Ismene. Creon points out that, “they are both mad…†(632), and Ismene ascertains the same to be “true… the sense we were born with cannot last forever . . . commit cruelty on a person long enough and the mind begins to go†(634-636). The unique law is not the preliminary source of oppression in these girls’ lives; they have had such a rough ride under Creon’s guidance since they were orphaned that their mental faculties are sickened. Antigone may ordinarily be considered psychotic, especially when she becomes euphoric about death, but a proper glance at Creon’s principles justifies her behavior. The king, being the absolute in Theban law, executes judgment. Anarchy, which he genders to refer to Antigone and women at large, must be destroyed for men to rule without the least concern over who tends the future. 

He is not only killing Antigone but Ismene, his son, his wife and himself too! They are all connected, but he is too blind to this fact as he sends the girl to her death bed and dishonors the family bonds. Human life rotates around small axes which must keep rotating for continuity. Antigone opts for martyrdom when she realizes that Creon is attempting to fracture the main axle of her life. She does not see a future without respectable burial of her brother’s corpse, and when Ismene presumes her wrong, she sternly warns her that “you will make me hate you, and the hatred of the dead, by all rights, will haunt you night and day†(108-109). There is an encumbrance to living in the law made by the king, and death becomes quite endearing. The ruthless penalty statement is deemed charming by the victim in spite of it’s sourness. She bravely confesses her defiance before Creon and in fact dares her sister to shout her action from rooftops (100). She explains the difference between the men made laws and “the great unwritten,

unshakable traditions†(505) about which her life revolved and which at least allowed her to maintain her dignity and integrity as a woman in a male dominated system. She makes it vivid that she would not break the divine laws “out of fear of some man’s wounded pride, and face the retribution of the gods†(510-511). She draws clear demarcations about her values in life, and she is able to bear the death penalty to retain her self worth. Premature death steals her away from Haemon, her future husband, and he too commits suicide. Ismene in her cowardice becomes representative of the wishy-washy type that flows with the tide and bends low, arguing that “we are women, we are not born to contend with men… we’re underlings, ruled by much stronger hands….†(74-75).

Creon is a woman hater. The law he makes targets the two orphans and more so Antigone who seemed to have a backbone. The king claims to have no feelings for family members who threaten the country’s safety, but he is guilty of the same. This he realizes too late after he’s “ripped out, roots and all†(799). He begets death from Antigone’s death. His son Haemon kills himself due to anger stemming from Creon’s folly, his wife commits suicide on receiving the news of Haemon’s death, and his own life becomes too bitter to bear. It becomes his turn to cry for the mercy of death when all the ropes suspending his dear life become precarious. He is able to perceive his folly at long last. Creon, the murderer, the tyrant, wants to die now. It had appeared like Antigone alone salutes death as a friend! Finally, the worm has caught up with him, and he can now grasp the revelation that man is not “born infallible†(807).

The singers point to a predestination of doom in the house of Oedipus. They point to a genealogy that has suffered devastation “from one generation on throughout the race†(660), something following the children of a suicidal mother and an incestuous daddy, who had unknowingly killed his own father. The author is able to show a house disintegrating, leaving behind no one to tend the future. There is obvious instability in the orphaned children caused by their mother’s death. The resentment between the children, the two boys and later the two girls, pronounces a deficiency in temperance. This could have been a consequence of motherlessness. They lack moderation in their expression of ambition.

The importance of interpersonal respect and veracity in a house, a lineage, a society or a community is well communicated. There is no exemption given to a king or a race. Antigone’s morbid fascination with death is a cry of desperation in a system that divides her between several male masters she is obliged to obey. Antigone, due to loss of very dear people to death, switches to the world of the dead while still living. When a law is made with a death penalty attached in case of defiance, she grabs the opportunity to romance with death. She seems least interested in Haemon to whom she is betrothed, but instead solemnizes her commitment to a dead family member. As suggested by Creon, this girl acts mad, and the loss she has experienced seem to be the catalyst. The male dominance around her seems to complicate her martyrdom, and she automatically seeks freedom from further oppression. She perceives herself serving the dead relatives and thus becomes completely dissociated from her immediate responsibility to Haemon. Once left alone in the grave, Antigone accelerates her departure to the world of the dead. She won’t live even an extra minute for Haemon to at least embrace her in life, but like her mother, she commits suicide. 

Slavery is the evil in Toni’s era that deprives the black men in America of their family authenticity. In this novel a house has been traced through three generations, and the trauma of motherlessness has clearly been displayed in the children and grand children of True Belle. The daughters of True Belle, Rose and May, are left by their mom with an aunt, at the ages of eight and ten respectively. May and Rose grow up without true mother love needful for self realization. True Belle leaves Virginia at her master’s order to go to Baltimore with Vera, a white girl, who is thrown out by her parents after conceiving by a black man. For a lengthy time, True Belle is away. In her absence, Rose grows to be a family woman married to Mr. Dear. The political air becomes indignant to her husband’s attitudes, and he has to leave his family for his safety. He exits leaving Rose behind with five children. Everything this family owned is taken from them, and this, plus the pressures of nurturance, disorientates her mental faculties. She is unable to put up with mothering, and True Belle comes to rescue the situation. When True Belle returns, the stories she regurgitates to her daughter and grand children are full of Golden Gray. Rose feels nauseated considering that “the motherlove that rightfully belonged to [her and May] was lavished on a white boy†(O’Reilly 155). At the same time the stories gear the young mind of Violet, Rose’s daughter, towards associating whiteness and maleness with proper individuality. Rose’s failure at mothering is the fruition of True Belle’s absence when she was needed most, but unfortunately True Belle, instead of being sorry, worships the child who ate her children’s “only one apple†(Morrison 213). The therapeutic affection that a mentally unstable daughter ought to gain from the mother’s presence is lacking, and Rose eventually casts herself down into a well, and dies.

 May Belle left without a trace to display her insanity in a cane plantation by leading a wild life. Life has not taught her to be a mother, and so once she delivers Joe, she will not nurse or identify with him. Her personality trait is depicted as being lower than that of the meanest sow, and yet her thirst for men is unquenchable. She becomes the classic example that “local people used …to caution children and pregnant girls†(167) against illegitimate sexuality. She allows Golden Gray, the very boy who was mothered by True Belle in their stead, to supplant Joe. She was not given any unconditional love in her childhood. She cannot afford it for Joe and those who know her well have every reason to call her “Wildâ€. Her dwelling place, as substantiated by O’Reilly, is a burrow “outside and beyond the masculine realm of law, order, and reason†(160). Her “mode of communication is touch: the primal “language†of the body…when she does speak, she does so in song and laughter…the prediscursive “language†of the pre-Oedipal maternal space†(160). In fact, her behavior towards Golden Grey betrays the conspicuous “I†of the novel to be him because, as Jill Matus deduces, “…Wild does not- will not- reach out and touch her desperate son’s hand, she does touch and hug the narrator….†(136). This ties well with the association of Wild and “the young man of yellow hair†(167) as the narrator who towards the end of the novel confesses that “she has seen me and is not afraid of me. She hugs me. I am touched by her. Released in secret†(221).   

   Violet and Joe are the grand children of True Belle. Joe does not know his roots beyond Wild. Violet too seems to be unaware of an aunt called May Belle. Therefore, Joe and Violet get married and proceed with a normal couple’s relationship except for the two spontaneous miscarriages Violet experiences. Devastation follows their life, and at middle age, they find themselves in a crisis. The unmothered children in them helplessly scream for attention, and each goes through an episodic transformation in order to face the challenges of middle age.

Violet admires Golden Gray so much when her grandmother narrates how she nurtured him. She gets a picture of an ideal child and secretly falls in love with him. She has no better role model, and so this image that granny creates in her sticks out prominently. When thoughts of beauty and competitiveness are expressed, it’s “a young me with high-yellow skin instead of black, a young me with long wavy hair instead of short†(97) that floods Violet’s imaginations. She visualizes him as a girl and allows him to overthrow the non-established Violet in her, and yet at times she would imagine him a boyfriend and allow him to tear her girlhood. When her mother commits suicide, the reminiscence and the agony that she and her sibling went through with a mom who could not deliver the joy of “Eden†(Gen; 2:8) makes her swear not to ever have children. The cold scene of the well starts gnawing away her life, and when her granny sends her to the plantations to work, emptiness bothers her, and “the well sucked her sleep†(102). She unconsciously searches for the golden boy, and in fact one day when Joe falls on her from a tree, a relationship sparks very fast. Joe becomes a substitute that temporarily calms the surge, and as Matus points out, “she admits that when she was seeking Joe in the cane fields she was ‘holding onto him but wishing that he was the golden boy…†(134). Joe gets the hip service that the adored Golden Gray supposedly deserved, and this ignition maintains their marital fire.

 The city life is characterized by nasty blues in women though: “they are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because…a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down†(16). Violet’s life is full of symptoms of fractured personality, and as O’Reilley notes, she “seek[s] to forget and find the mother [she] lost through coping strategies of denial and substitution†(O’Reilley 154). The composition of her life is complicated by the mental dissociation due to the “ill-glued cracks and weak places beyond which is anything†(Morrison, 23). The death of Rose planted in her a phobia for motherhood, and her miscarriages along with an abortion she induced do not significantly bother her until menopause. Tears of an empty womb salute her middle age, and a drift of interest, as noted by O’Reilly, characterize her actions as “she attempts to find her lost self through mothering†(157). This leads her to being a surrogate mother to “Dorcas, the doll, the stolen baby, her hair dressing customers, and the parrot…†(157). The desire turns into panting, and she catches herself “staring at infants and hesitating at toys displayed at Christmas†(107). She switches off sexually, loses touch with Joe and does not realize when he gets into an illegitimate relationship with a teenager. Violet’s mental dissociation becomes a public issue- once she attempts to steal a baby boy. The loud laughter when trying to get away with the stolen baby betrays her sanity to the reader and of course her innocence to the people watching her (19-20). In another incident she “sat down in the middle of the street†(17) in broad day light not to forget the “outright attack on the very subject of a funeral ceremony†(9).

 She learns of her husband’s belated affair, when Joe murders Dorcas. Violet goes to the funeral with a knife to mutilate the dead body of Dorcas. At such a moment she is so detached from herself that she operates as a different distinctive personality. Violet decides to gather information about Dorcas, and she even attempts to ape her dancing steps to win Joe back. Her immediate reaction to Joe’s crime emphasizes her deteriorated mental condition. Her final decision to go to Alice, Dorcas’aunt (of all the people on earth), for her daily dose of tranquility through dialogue becomes a real perplexity to Alice and to the readers too. Yes, Alice assumes that she must have come to apologize, but no, not Violet. She has discovered a mom in Alice. She wants to be mothered, mend up her torn self, and Alice seems to have the skill. Alice’s dialogue with her becomes quite remedial, and for a season she carries the picture of Dorcas with her to hang it in her parlor. She and Joe exchange turns at night to go watch the still portrait. By and by each of them is able to identify the core of their problem and assemble the dismantled pieces. 

For a complete metamorphosis, Violet has to address the falsehood she had lived with since adolescence. She recognizes how she has suffocated her true self with the wrong proxies. She discovers how she had allowed other people’s indoctrinations to influence her personality, and she now reaches an important junction in life. She has two options: to kill images in her and live or to continue in deception and blow the fuse completely! She chooses life and dismisses all the false images that she has been carrying around. Anger overwhelms her over the characters that she has to kill in order for her to gain authenticity. The golden boy and the old Violet who wished to be white are the culprits.  She then gets into her mother’s shoes and understands her failures at mothering. She appreciates the situation and then forgives Rose and clears herself from any blames. This way, as noted by O’Reilly, she “recovers her own self. The dead girl inside her is brought back to life†(158). She excuses herself for failing and ascertains a fountain to draw strength from in order to live happily. The recovery makes her a reliable mother and a sweet wife. 

Dorcas also is affected so much by the tragic death of her parents. Her dad was among “over two hundred dead in East St. Louis…killed in the riots (57), and her mom perished in a fire related to the same riots. She is taken up by her aunt, and the transition into the city life is quite a challenge. Lack of maternal nurturance creates in her an inside nothing that greatly influences her behavior in life. Jazz music with all the indecency and craziness becomes quite intriguing to her especially because it sexually awakens her and ripens her for love. Dorcas ignores all the warnings against the “low stuff that signaled Imminent Demise†(56), she resists “her aunt’s protection and restraining hands, Dorcas thought of that life-below-the-sash as all the life there was. The drums…she remembered them as a beginning, a start of something she looked to complete†(60). The loss of her parents left her as the narrator puts it, with a “bright wood chip sank further and further down until it lodged comfortably somewhere below her navel†(61). She deems jazz music as a vehicle to connect her to her “paradise†(63), and before long, she is crazy and hunting for a lover. According to the narrator,

…Dorcas at least was enchanted by the frail, melty tendency of the flesh and the paradise that could make a woman go right back after two days, two! Or make a girl travel four hundred miles to a camp town, or fold Neola’s arm, the better to hold the pieces of her heart in her hand. Paradise. All for paradise. 

By the time she was seventeen her whole life was unbearable…. It is terrible when there is absolutely nothing to do or worth doing except to lie down and hope when you are naked, she won’t laugh at you. Or that he, holding your breasts, won’t wish they were some other way (63).

 Her relationship with a man old enough to be her own father reveals the desperation in her. Joe was very kind and indeed father like, and momentarily he quenches the thirst in Dorcas for Paradise. She gets everything she asks for shamelessly from Joe, “the cream-at-the-top-of-the-milkpail†(12), but still she is not satisfied. There is something else that the inside nothing hungers for and that Joe does not provide: personality. She leaves him to move with a young man, Acton, hoping to satisfy her satiety, but alas! anger between lovers brewed by the Jazz music intoxicates Joe, and he shoots her with a silent gun when he finds her wrapped in the arms of Acton. Dorcas, confused by life’s demand that she conforms to what men want, prefers to die from bleeding without revealing the murderer.

In all these women- Antigone, Rose, Wild, Violet and Dorcas- motherlessness is experienced quite early in life. They grow up to be very sensitive women venerable to much emotional trauma, insanity, matrophobia and suicide. It is not by accident that Antigone is executed. It seems that she welcomes the penalty with an enthusiasm that raises concern over her sanity.  The temptation to classify her as mad, as Creon presumes, may be prevalent. She by declaration chooses to defend the family but her real motivation as later revealed in her confession is to serve the dead. Knox notes that “she can at last identify the driving force behind her action, the private, irrational imperative which was at the root of her championship of the rights of the family and the dead against the demands of the state. It is her fanatical devotion to one particular family, her own doomed, incestuous, accursed house of Oedipus and especially to its most unfortunate member, the brother whose corpse lay exposed to the birds and the dogs†(49). She does not miss being a mother or even a wife, despite the fact that Haemon loves her so much. She eventually dies prematurely like her own mother, confirming the root of her heroic temper. Rose Dear finds it too challenging to mother her five children. She becomes psychotic and eventually commits suicide. May Belle lives in her feminine domain and cannot even nurse her own baby. She too is mentally sick and lives to die every day since “one swing of the cutting blade could lop off her head if she got sassy or too close, and it would be her own fault†(Morrison, 166). Violet ceased to live at her tender age of self discovery and allowed Golden Gray to supersede her. The ill glued fissures of her life become visible cracks by middle age and the scene of the dark well dims her life. She is a poor apology of a wife, and she cannot even give the unborn fetus a chance to live. She almost burst when she discovers Joe’s immorality, but thanks to Alice who helps her sew up her tattered life into one concrete piece, she chooses life. Dorcas is just too unbaked for life’s challenges, and she dies at the first exposure of an affair.

The play and the novel have both strongly explained the essence of our being. The diagnosis of the actual problem becomes a restorative ingredient as exemplified by Violet’s breakthrough. The women, mentioned above, who never reached that junction to repair the torn seams died prematurely. Sophocles too is able to dig into the past history of Thebes to explain the political tension and the abuse of the human rights precipitated by the power hunger. The safety of the families is ensured when there is balanced governance and stable political systems devoid of prejudice. The importance of proper nurturance during childhood is vindicated and specifically the prescription of unconditional love. The moral decay and the immorality observed in the youth are rooted in the deviation of their parents from the beaten path of life, as portrayed by the spread of an evil from one generation down the lineage. The biblical curse pronounced at Eden after the consumption of the forbidden fruit, “…I will multiply thy sorrow…and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee†(Gen.3; 16), is clearly vindicated. 

Works Cited

Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. Scofield 1909, 1917.

Knox, Bernard.  Introduction to Antigone. Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone. Translated by Robert Fagles, publication New York, Penguin, 1984.

  Matus, Jill. Toni Morrison. NY: Manchester University Press, 1998.

Morrison, Toni.  Jazz.  NY: Plume, 1992.

O’Reilly, Andrea.  Toni Morrison and Motherhood:  NY: State University of New York Press, Albany, 2004 Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone. Translated by Robert Fagles,       publication New York, Penguin, 1984.