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This chapter examines Morrison's use of the classical tradition to challenge, in A Mercy and Paradise, the prevailing mythology that has come to define colonial New England and the founding of the new American nation in the late eighteenth century. It examines the dialogue with John Milton's Paradise Lost and Ovid's Metamorphoses in A Mercy, and with Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana (and with Virgil) in Paradise. It discusses the concept of ‘representative men’, the ‘hero’, and Aristotle's ‘tragic fall’ throughout the oeuvre, particularly in Love and Song of Solomon. It demonstrates that the works' critique of America's Enlightenment-derived narratives of self-definition and racial identity takes issue with mainstream analogies between America and Ancient Greece and Rome, for example through the analogy between the Oven and the Greek koine hestia in Paradise.

Toni Morrison’s ninth novel A Mercy (2008) provides a fascinating account of the primeval nature of slavery in late seventeenth-century America. Not only racial but also gender divisions figure prominently in Morrison’s rewriting of this pivotal moment in the history of what later came to be known as the United States. Hence Morrison’s meditation on the faulty colonial inheritance in seventeenth-century America prompts a serious interrogation into the internal workings of racial, class and gender politics of the time. More concretely, Morrison issues forth a compelling critique of the harmful effects of the subservience to a European-imported ideology of patriarchal supremacy by dealing with the politics of representing normative masculinity. Morrison unravels the impositions of white patriarchy in her depiction of the white male characters that populate her novel, who either fail as patriarchs (the case of Jacob Vaark) or as subversive masculine models (the indentured servants Willard and Scully). (150 words)

A Mercy examines the ongoing struggle for self-ownership in an evolving society based on the hierarchies of race, class, and gender. This essay draws on neuroscience and social theories of memory and trauma to discuss how Morrison’s dispossessed characters vacillate between the New World bonding with strangers necessary for physical or spiritual survival and the prior life memories that preserve their sense of self. In this struggle between past experiences and future possibilities, memory often intrudes to block attempts at adaptation. Traumatic memories often keep characters from achieving such fulfillment. A Mercy captures the personal and social aspects of identity, with Morrison’s orphaned and transplanted characters revealing the vulnerabilities and fears that separate them from others at the same time that they connect characters with community. Sorting through personal and cultural forces that shape them, characters must develop a current relationship to the greater culture out of a personal history of prior social interactions. (154 words)

Chapter 1 considers two novels by Toni Morrison which are widely celebrated for undermining Enlightenment rationalism: Beloved and A Mercy. As critics often note, Morrison’s concept of rememory—an antirealist trope, premised on the supernatural irruption of the past in the present—achieves this by imagining an alternative history of slavery. Yet a complete picture of these novels requires an account of the way that Morrison structures rememory—quite remarkably and with palpable historical reservations—as a Catholic sacrament. The chapter therefore addresses a significant gap in scholarship on Morrison (who identifies as Catholic), but never does it imply that her religious vision is uncritical or pure. Rather, it suggests that the sacramental aspects of rememory are in constant tension with the sharp critique of Catholicism evident in both novels. That critique builds upon the sociological study of slave religion that Orlando Patterson developed in Slavery and Social Death, particularly his pioneering claim that “the special version of Protestantism” which arose in the American South as slave religion was, in key respects, theologically “identical” to Catholicism.

Drawing on critical theories of postcolonial melancholia (Gilroy, Cheng, Khanna), this chapter discusses the ‘re-memory’ of loss – both personal and cultural – as allowing the emergence of embodied black desire in Toni Morrison’s oeuvre. In particular, it rereads A Mercy as a representation of a “protoculture of melancholia,” in which all characters, across class, gender, and racial lines are haunted by memories not merely of loss but also of pleasure and eroticism. Melancholia as creative rather than as mourning without end becomes a healing process resulting in the assertion of the black body and of the black subject’s agency.

This chapter analyzes the depiction of old languages and new bodies in the novels of Toni Morrison. It examines the relationship between apocalyptic discourse and the ordinary, even banal forms of similitude that lie at the heart of everyday life and burden the lives of all who would seek change. It considers the politics and the poetics of similitude in Morrison's fiction and discusses her treatment of the idea of simile, the naming in Paradise and Tar Baby, and the conflict of signs in A Mercy.

This chapter examines the poetics of similitude and disavowal in Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy. It suggests that this work is Morrison's attempt to separate race from slavery and to see it and its imagined emergent subjectivities in an ad hoc state in America. It analyzes the meaning of the separate journeys of the characters of Florens and her master Jacob Vaark and the attempts of Jacob and his wife Rebekka to reach for similitude in order to survive. This chapter also suggests that there is always an irresistible transference of memory from one generation to another, despite an attempt at rupture.