Tragic mercies and other journeys to redemption: defining the Morrisonian tragedy

Abstract

Tragic Mercies and Other Journeys to Redemption: Defining the Morrisonian Tragedy problematizes current portrayals of tragedy and tragic acts in African American literature. Using Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a foundational text, I argue that Morrison executes a literary aesthetic that disrupts traditional constructs of the tragedy that elevate Eurocentric ideologies at the expense of Black identity and subjectivity. This aesthetic challenges the portrayal of the “tragic figure,” positioning it as an inadequate trope that nullifies the complexities associated with the lived reality of Africans/African Americans under repressive systems such as American slavery. Morrison reconfigures tragedy to illuminate a space that she calls the “tragic mode” in which her characters achieve a form of catharsis and revelation. I use Morrison’s signification of tragedy to build a theoretical paradigm that I call the Tragic Mercy which interprets tragedy and tragic acts, such as infanticide in her neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987), as events that symbolize activism against oppressive systems connected to racist capitalist patriarchal ideologies. The Tragic Mercy is the lens through which I define the Morrisonian tragedy, and I articulate it as an act that generates a physical and psychological journey that leads to redemption, catharsis, and reclamation. I connect this journey to several tenets of African American culture and history, which resist one-dimensional constructs of African American identity and subjectivity. For instance, I use several constructs associated with Black Feminism to demonstrate how the act/action/activism of the Tragic Mercy equips characters with agency under oppressive systems that would normally handicap their resolve. I also configure the journey in ways that parallel other cultural expressions that are ingrained in the African American psyche. For example, I liken certain themes to the reclamation of the vernacular tradition. In each instance, I demonstrate how Morrison’s literary aesthetic forces the reader to reassess the signification of tragedy as a means to validate the complexities associated with the African American experience. Further, I use the lens of the Tragic Mercy as a viable construct to interpret other works of African American literature, including Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus (1996) and Fucking A (2001), and Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner (2006). Using these themes, I position Morrison’s literary aesthetic as a narrative strategy that builds on African American literary and cultural traditions while simultaneously subverting detrimental Eurocentric ideologies.