중단된 사랑, 도래하는 공동체: 토니 모리슨의 후기 세 소설 『사랑』, 『자비』, 『집으로』를 사유하는 한 방식
Love Interrupted, the Coming Community: A Way of Reading Toni Morrison’s Love, A Mercy, and Home
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This paper is a critical attempt to reexamine Toni Morrison’s three novels, Love, A Mercy and Home, under the rubric of love and community. In the sense that Morrison is not so much concerned with the romantic relationship of her characters in the novels as with the promise of a communal achievement, the thematic combination of love and community appears to be strange bedfellows. However, I call attention to the uncanny themes that are significant for my purpose, which is to analyze the singular moment of community taking place in the wake of love interrupted. In A Mercy, a black girl of colonial America falls in love with a free black blacksmith, but the slave girl’s infatuation with him is interrupted by what I call the orphan’s complex melancholy. Ironically, the interruption of Florens’s love serves as a delayed rite of passage into her imagined community of mother and daughter. In Love, the love and friendship of two little black girls are interrupted by an evental situation in which one girl becomes a stepgrandmother of the other. The male desire of a wealthy patriarch, Bill Cosey, which has set his granddaughter at life-long odds with his child-bride, is finally ruptured by the truth of the original love between Heed and Christine. Thus their deferred sororal solidarity completes a ghostly community of the living and the dead. In Home, a poor black girl of a small town is fascinated by a young con man from Atalanta. Deserted in the jungle of the big city, her ephemeral romance is interrupted and, what is worse, her womb is destroyed. It is a local quilting community of black women that not only heals Cee’s trauma but also makes her feel at home in it. If anything, the black women’s community Toni Morrison imagines in (the) place of love interrupted may be referred to as a ghostly community which is coming as an uncanny reminder of the “something to be done” in American society.
Abstract
This paper is a critical attempt to reexamine Toni Morrison’s three novels, Love, A Mercy and Home, under the rubric of love and community. In the sense that Morrison is not so much concerned with the romantic relationship of her characters in the novels as with the promise of a communal achievement, the thematic combination of love and community appears to be strange bedfellows. However, I call attention to the uncanny themes that are significant for my purpose, which is to analyze the singular moment of community taking place in the wake of love interrupted. In A Mercy, a black girl of colonial America falls in love with a free black blacksmith, but the slave girl’s infatuation with him is interrupted by what I call the orphan’s complex melancholy. Ironically, the interruption of Florens’s love serves as a delayed rite of passage into her imagined community of mother and daughter. In Love, the love and friendship of two little black girls are interrupted by an evental situation in which one girl becomes a stepgrandmother of the other. The male desire of a wealthy patriarch, Bill Cosey, which has set his granddaughter at life-long odds with his child-bride, is finally ruptured by the truth of the original love between Heed and Christine. Thus their deferred sororal solidarity completes a ghostly community of the living and the dead. In Home, a poor black girl of a small town is fascinated by a young con man from Atalanta. Deserted in the jungle of the big city, her ephemeral romance is interrupted and, what is worse, her womb is destroyed. It is a local quilting community of black women that not only heals Cee’s trauma but also makes her feel at home in it. If anything, the black women’s community Toni Morrison imagines in (the) place of love interrupted may be referred to as a ghostly community which is coming as an uncanny reminder of the “something to be done” in American society.
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