Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy:

Critical Approaches

Edited by

Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally

 Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches,
Edited by Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally

This book first published 2011

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2011 by Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-3300-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3300-4

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally

Part I: Racially Constructed Space in A Mercy

Chapter I ...................................................................................................... 9
Eco-Critical Focal Points: Narrative Structure and Environmentalist
Perspectives in Morrison’s A Mercy
James Braxton Peterson

Chapter II................................................................................................... 23
The Politics of “Home” in A Mercy
Anissa Wardi

Part II: Intertextual Resonances in A Mercy

Chapter III ................................................................................................. 45

Miltonic Journeys in A Mercy
Tessa Roynon

Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 63
Contextualizing Toni Morrison’s Ninth Novel: What Mercy? Why Now?
Justine Tally

Chapter V .................................................................................................. 85
Salt Roads to Mercy
Keren Omry

Part III: Psychological Explorations in A Mercy

Chapter VI ............................................................................................... 103

“Nobody Teaches you to Be a Woman”: Female Identity, Community
and Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Mar Gallego
vi Table of Contents

Chapter VII.............................................................................................. 119

Orphanhood in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Susana Vega-González

Chapter VIII............................................................................................. 137

“Across Distances Without Recognition”: Misrecognition
in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
Shirley A. Stave

Contributors............................................................................................. 151
 INTRODUCTION

SHIRLEY A. STAVE AND JUSTINE TALLY

Toni Morrison’s comment that she wrote A Mercy to explore a time

before slavery was identified with race has been reiterated at every
conference session that has treated her most recent novel. However,
Morrison’s portrayal of the colonies that would eventually become the
United States is nuanced and intricate, exploring not simply raced issues,
but those of gender, religion, geography, among many other, and doing so
in ways that engage in an interface with a host of cultural artifacts and
foundational myths. Although A Mercy is one of Morrison’s shortest texts,
it is also one of her richest and requires cautious and meticulous excavation
to shed light on its complexity.
Which is not to say one can overlook issues of race, but rather that one
must consider race in an interplay with other social determiners, such as
gender and social class. Moreover, we must resist the trigger reaction that
interprets “race” to reference black-white relations, given that in colonial
America another different people lived here who were subjected to
biological mayhem as well as painstakingly plotted genocide.
This collection of essays, then, is intended as a reader’s guide to A
Mercy, a storehouse of various approaches that will provide Morrison
scholars and students with an assortment of avenues into the text. The
essays, taken as a whole, open up the text to a multiplicity of readings, all
set against a backdrop of cultural knowledge—including literature,
sociology, psychology, and history. The structure of this volume, however,
allows readers to focus on their own particular interests.
Hence, the collection begins with an exploration of space—geographic,
ecological, and domestic, among others. James Braxton Peterson’s essay
reads the novel through the apparatus of narratology, interrogating
Morrison’s use of focalization as it functions to direct reader attention to the
interaction of her characters with the environments they traverse. The
attention given to the geographic spaces through which the characters
travel—as well as the historical significance of those spaces for peoples in
the process of vanishing—raises questions about how and for what reasons
2 Introduction

the environment is valued—or not valued—depending on cultural ideology.

Peterson ties this layered perception of space to what he calls the
“ontological instability” of characters like Jacob (and, presumably, the
white land “owners” who will populate the land), who, unconsciously at
least, are aware of the impermanence of human endeavors. In contrast to
Jacob, Florens, already devastated by her spatial separation from her
mother, then re-traumatized by the witch-hunters’ treatment and the
blacksmith’s rejection, foregoes humanity and its zones completely to claim
“wilderness” for herself.
Anissa Wardi also explores issues of environment, but does so through
an interrogation of the concept of “home.” Wardi highlights the fact that,
with the exception of Lina, all of the other characters in the novel live on
and off of land whose original inhabitants have been dislodged or
destroyed. The assumption of an empty landscape to be had for the taking
forecloses the possibility that the white settlers will ever find a home, since
they are unable to recognize the significance of the natural world as
inherently linked to their own existence. Wardi distinguishes between the
figures of Florens and Sorrow, whom she sees as representative of the
African Diaspora, and Jacob Vaark, who prefigures generations of
European settlers and their descendants, and who exploit the land itself and
the bodies of the slaves as a result of their assumption of ownership.
However, Wardi argues that while neither Florens nor Sorrow can legally
possesses a “home,” at novel’s end, both occupy Jacob’s unfinished home,
claiming a space for themselves in the New World.
The second section of this work shifts from the geographical locatedness
of A Mercy to its placement within the tradition of literature that has
preceded the novel. Tessa Roynon explores the text’s interface with
Milton’s Paradise Lost and Comus, emphasizing specific images, words,
and tropes shared by both authors. Focusing initially on the concept of the
journey, Roynon points out the contrast between Milton’s Satan, who
travels to the newly created Earth with the intent of destroying the
paradisiacal harmony from which he is excluded, and Jacob Vaark, who
journeys to the New World hoping to re-enter Eden and establish a domicile
there. Another dissimilarity occurs in the journeying of Milton’s Lady,
protected by an “attendant spirit,” and that of Florens, left vulnerable to
both human and natural threats. Roynon maintains that the connectedness of
the two texts enables Morrison to critique the European colonial enterprise
and to underscore race, class, and gender in a way Milton did not take into
account. This critic goes on to claim that the Chaos prevalent in Milton is
echoed in A Mercy, but again with a difference. Whereas Milton, and others,
have identified the human response to chaos as either naming, in an
 Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches 3

endeavor to organize the chaos, or violence, which attempts to destroy it,

Morrison argues for a third and more beneficial response—the stillness out
of which art can be born, the path taken by Florens as she records her
narrative on the walls of Jacob’s unfinished mansion.
Justine Tally’s essay explores Morrison’s novel not in terms of any one
writer, but in terms of American foundational texts and myths as well as a
variety of pieces of literature. Her underlying premise, that A Mercy is an
allegory, links it not only with the Bible, but also with two other heavily
allegorical canonical American works—Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Tally reads the characters of Jacob
and Rebekka Vaark through their biblical namesakes, maintaining that
Morrison uses the dissonances between the sets of character, as well as the
Book of Ruth, to question the Western assumption of divine authority to
own land—and, by extension, people. The two American texts work
similarly, raising questions about individual rights, including the rights of
women, a subject A Mercy blatantly explores. Tally maintains that
Morrison’s text functions to challenge the ethics of American foundational
myths and to critique fundamentalist religious as well as post-9/11 political
ideology.
Keren Omry also reads A Mercy in conjunction with a different text, in
this case Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads, which, like the Morrison novel,
appeared in print after the bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001.
Omry’s reading segues particularly nicely with that of Justine Tally in that
both authors consider the significance of Judeo-Christian mythology as it
plays itself out in the incipient American landscape. Omry believes that
both Hopkinson and Morrison recognize the importance of re-telling the
stories of origin that underlie American culture, since fiction is vital to the
identify-formation of any people. This author sees Jacob’s journey as an
inscription of the American dream, with its focus on financial success at the
expense of domestic felicity. Further exploring the novel’s motif of
journeying, Omry considers the connectedness of literacy, knowledge, and
freedom, and argues that both authors construct literacy and aesthetics as
forms of response to the chaos that ensued from the acts of terrorism that
shook the Western world.
The final section of this collection of essay focuses on issues of identity
formation as tied to the psychological development of Morrison’s
characters. Mar Gallego-Duran’s essay examines the four major women
characters in the text, considering the survival strategies they adopt in the
face of the overarching patriarchy that restricts their legal, economic, and
social possibilities. All of the women have endured trauma, but, during the
time they are able to exist in an equitable community, they thrive, using the
4 Introduction

strategy of “rememory” that Morrison introduced in her novel Beloved.

Gallego-Duran maintains that each woman must engage with the
implications of motherhood in order to construct a workable, or in some
cases, destructive, understanding of self. Sorrow’s renaming herself
Complete after the birth of her daughter enables her to anticipate a life apart
from the others after their working partnership is dissolved, not because of
Jacob’s death, but by Rebekka’s betrayal of the other women. Florens’
survival, on the other hand, is predicated on her arriving at a viable sense of
selfhood through claiming her racial identity and rejecting motherhood.
While she is the only one of the women who possesses a voice at the end of
the novel, Gallego-Duran maintains that because Florens has removed
herself from community and perceives herself purely as individual, her
achievement, while it enables survival, is also limited and unsound.
Susana Vega-González’s essay treats orphanhood in the novel, both
literal and metaphorical, specifically insofar as African-American identity is
fraught with the knowledge of an original displacement from home and
family that was sustained through the institution of chattel slavery. In A
Mercy, all of the major characters are orphaned in one way or another; their
various responses to their shared plight determine whether or not they are
capable of re-creating a healthy sense of identity. Vega-González maintains
that the European alienation from the natural world further isolates Jacob
and Rebekka, while Sorrow, through motherhood, and Lina, through her
identification with nature, are able to overcome their orphaned status. It is
Florens, however, who makes a spiritual journey to identity that is
empowering and liberating. Reading the blacksmith as what Vega-González
refers to as one of Morrison’s “dual characters,” she maintains that he
functions as the Yoruba god Shango who guides Florens to a selfhood,
which, as her name portends, blossoms with possibility.
The final essay in the collection, by Shirley A. Stave, reads A Mercy
through a Lacanian lens, particularly focusing on Lacan’s concept of
misrecognition as it relates to the Mirror Stage. Stave argues that the
grandeur and vastness of the sparsely populated American landscape
functions as the mirror into which the Europes, particularly Jacob and
Rebekka, gaze and from which they evolve a sense of their own unity and
splendor. Like children who have not yet entered the Symbolic Order, they
see themselves as limitless and self-sufficient, requiring no community or
familial connections. When Rebekka must acknowledge Jacob’s mortality,
she abandons human contact altogether, seeking salvation in a mean-
spirited, vindictive God. Florens, on the other hand, possesses no sense of
self whatsoever once she no longer sees herself reflected in her mother’s
eyes. After her dehumanizing experience with the witch hunters and her
 Toni Morrison’s A Mercy: Critical Approaches 5

rejection by the blacksmith, Florens, Stave maintains, is completely lost to

humanity, capable only of destruction, both of herself and others.
While A Mercy will continue to be mined for its wealth, we believe this
collection of essays is a solid beginning, an opening of discourse, an
invitation to response, and a means by which Morrison readers can continue
their own interrogation and understanding of this text. Reaching back
through time, A Mercy compels a reconsideration of America’s origins and
invites speculation about the current political, social, religious, and
economic climate. As such, the novel is well worthy of thorough study; it is
the intention of the present volume to inspire further analysis and
discussion.

The Editors
July, 2011
 PART I:

RACIALLY CONSTRUCTED SPACE

IN A MERCY
 CHAPTER I

ECO-CRITICAL FOCAL POINTS: NARRATIVE

STRUCTURE AND ENVIRONMENTALIST
PERSPECTIVES IN MORRISON’S A MERCY

JAMES BRAXTON PETERSON

During a reflective moment in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Florens

recalls Lina’s claim, “We never shape the world she says. The world
shapes us.”1 Lina’s observation gestures toward a productive set of critical
approaches to Morrison’s nuanced narrative. In addition to considering the
environmental perspective within this neo-slave/liberation narrative, I also
argue that A Mercy generates readings that are both eco-critical and
cartographically focalized. Lawrence Buell defines eco-criticism as a
“study of the relationship between literature and the environment conducted
in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis.”2 Moreover,
focalization is deftly deployed in A Mercy in order to map the landscape of
early America through the varying perspectives of the novel’s characters.
Thus, A Mercy is a narratological study of early American landscapes
positioned as brilliant backdrops to a womanist liberation narrative. The
eco-critically focalized approaches to A Mercy include at least two
components: 1) Studious narratological and eco-critical readings of the
text that map the relationship between characters and the environment on
land and sea, paying particular attention to the tensions inherent in certain
characters’ perceptions of the environment and humanity’s relationship to
it. 2) Excavation of the maps of specific scenes/allusions in order to
engage in a literary cartography, at least to the extent that it yields new
understandings of old America specifically relevant to the readers’ full
comprehension of A Mercy. From a more structural perspective, A Mercy
is a multi-focal narrative. Thus, certain narratological approaches such as
the shifting points of focalization—first person versus third person versus
third person omniscient—require narrative maps.3
10 Chapter I

In her review of the novel, La Vinia Delois Jennings states: “The

telling of the novel rallies, chapter by chapter, between first-person and
third-person disclosures. The first-person confessions of Florens—a
sixteen-year-old part-African, part-European enslaved girl [...] initiates the
narrative. A third-person narrator from a limited perspective provides the
back stories for Florens, Jacob and the other characters who live or work
on Jacob’s burgeoning Virginia estate.”4 Upon close reading, A Mercy’s
narratological structure provides distinct eco-critical perspectives (or,
more accurately, focal points) which in turn invest the structure of the
narrative with environmentally construed themes and suggestions.
In Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative, David Herman
defines narrative “as a discourse genre and a cognitive style that relies
fundamentally on perspective taking.”5 Thus, through Herman’s
formulation, focalization becomes fundamental to our very understanding
of narrative itself:

[T]o say that an event or object or participant (in the storyworld) is

focalized in a certain manner is to say that it is perspectivally indexed,
structured so that it has to be interpreted as refracted through a specific
viewpoint and anchored in a particular set of contextual coordinates.6

There are a variety of indices that prompt readers to understand (or view,
if you will) formal manifestations of the focalized moments in a given
narrative. These include: articles (definite and indefinite), perceptive and
cognitive verbs, verb tenses and moods, pronouns, certain “evaluative”
lexical items, and certain syntax marked by particular points of view.
Additionally, Herman discusses the possibility of “Hypothetical
Focalization,”

which entails the use of hypotheses, framed by the narrator or a character,

about what might be or might have been seen or perceived—if only there
were someone who could have adopted the requisite perspective on the
situations and events at issue.7

It is in/through the relationships between hypothetical and (regular/

normal) focalization that certain eco-critical and narratological
understandings emerge in close readings of Morrison’s A Mercy.8
Florens opens the novel in a first-person narrative that emphasizes the
telling nature of the narrative itself and, at least in this incarnation of the
first-person narrative voice, the narrator comes to the precipice of
“omniscience.” She warns,
 Eco-Critical Focal Points 11

Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and
I promise to lie quietly in the dark. [...] I explain. You can think what I tell
you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in
dreams and during those moments when a dog’s profile plays in the stream
of a kettle. Or when a corn-husk doll sitting on a shelf is soon splaying in
the corner of a room and the wicked of how it got there is plain. (3)

Although I emphasize the “telling” and the “tell” in order to underscore

the narrative suggestiveness and the internal focalization established at the
outset, there are also various references to the hypothetical focalization
present in this passage in the discursive turns set up in the “I/You”
exchanges. You (the reader—hypothetically speaking) “can think” this
narrative is a confession “if you like.” If you do, then the narrator
hypothesizes that your (the reader’s) perspective will be dream like and/or
elusive/illusive, as is the imagery of a “dog’s profile in the steam of a
kettle” or when a toy mysteriously migrates from one place to another.
The storyworld “you” referenced here is actually the Blacksmith, but the
readerly/narratological effect is the conflation of the “storyworld – you”
with the “readerly you.”
In his critical survey of modern fiction and the ecological, Robert
Marzec revisits Joseph Conrad’s oeuvre in order to establish his discussion
of the representation of environments coveted by Western empires in the
modern world. For Marzec, the narratives of/about these environments

take on significance of a kind that calls into question the very ontological
grounds of comprehension for the narrators, characters, and texts. Thus,
for Conrad representation is a fundamental problem for the interaction of
human communities and environments in an increasingly globalized
9
landscape.

In the above passage/excerpt from A Mercy, the hypothetically internal

focalization of the narrative troubles the “ontological grounds of
comprehension” for the narratee (in this case the Blacksmith but also,
figuratively, the reader as well). The shifting imagery of the kettle’s steam
is an initial signifier of the novel’s thematic rendering of several eco-
critical focal points. In this particular case, the eco-critical focal point is
that of the internally focalized narrator, who is hypothesizing that the
narratee’s perspective will be fluid and elusive—a suggestion that points
to both the readers’ and characters’ perceptual limitations of the
environments depicted in A Mercy.
Florens’ internally focalized narration reflects her youth but also her
various perspectives as a narrator. Although this entree to the novel may
be, on first reading, disjointed and difficult to follow, Florens’
12 Chapter I

narratological glimpses into the perspectives of many of the main

characters and actors are instructive for the novel’s themes as well as for
the full-fledged characterization of Florens herself. Of particular note here
is her reference to a minha mae. Minha mae translates from the Portuguese
as “my mother.” Thus the fact that Florens’ narrator/narrative indexes “my
mother” as “a my mother” proves to be another example of the interpretive
purchase of reading A Mercy with focalization in mind.10 According to
Herman,

[C]hoices between indefinite and definite articles create [...] a binary

distinction between information that is given and information that is new
vis a vis the discourse. [...I]nsofar as given and new information will be
given or new from a particular perspective, the alternation between
indefinite and definite articles [...] marks objects, participants, and events
as filtered through someone’s perspective.11

Morrison’s alteration (not alternation) and juxtaposition of the focalizing

possessive pronoun “my” and the indefinite article “a” subtly suggest the
emotional and geographic distance between Florens and her mother—a
distance that grounds our understanding of Florens’ character and the ways
in which she is haunted by enslavement and abandonment as well as the
powerful significance of the novel’s title and the futile sadness of the
novel’s conclusion. The under- (or un-) developed environment that
separates Florens from her mother signifies the emotional distance and
early alienation that shape Florens’ character. The narratological use of
“a” to modify “my mother” indexes Florens’ emotional and environmental
relationship with her mother. It is yet another albeit more subtle example
of the novel’s eco-critical focal points.
The second chapter of A Mercy is focalized through a third-person
narrative centered on the consciousness of Jacob Vaark, “[...] a Church of
England Dutch trader [who] accepts [Florens] from [...] D’Ortega, a
Portugese Maryland planter, as partial payment for an outstanding debt.”12
In the following excerpt from the novel, the narrative of Jacob’s journey
instantiates a subtly complex eco-critical focal point:

In his own geography he was moving from Algonquin to Sesquehanna via

Chesapeake on through Lenape since turtles had a life span longer than
towns. When he sailed the South River into the Chesapeake Bay, he
disembarked, found a village and negotiated native trails on horseback,
mindful of their fields of maize, careful through their hunting grounds,
politely asking permission to enter a small village here, a larger one there”
(13).
 Eco-Critical Focal Points 13

In the first line, the narrator establishes a mild irony between the
suggestion that Jacob owns (t)his geography and is moving through
environments that are named according to the native peoples who were
settled there long before the colonial forces that he represents set about the
naming and claiming of the land. Of particular interest here is the allusion
to the Lenape region. The Lenape Indians were eventually renamed the
Delaware Indians by European colonialists. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, the Lenape were agricultural people, hunter-
gatherers who migrated throughout the Delaware, New York, and
Pennsylvania regions. Jacob’s geography is actually theirs, but of course
indigenous Americans did not conceptualize ownership in the manner that
Europeans did. For all his troubles with ownership—he is initially a very
reluctant slave owner—this passage helps to develop an important eco-
critical focal point that hinges on an unexplained cultural belief held by the
Lenape people. One of the tragic aspects of Jacob’s life is that his children
die at early ages. Although readers will not be exposed to this mortally
tragic set of narratives until later in the novel, the Lenape allusion, once
unpacked/excavated, is an element of the narrative that haunts Jacob’s
character, particularly his experiences as a father. According to
Harrington, “[a] new-born child, in Lenape belief, did not obtain a firm
hold on this world for some time after its arrival, its little spirit being
easily coaxed away by the ever-present ghosts of the dead.”13 Because
none of Jacob’s children ever “obtain a firm hold on this world,” this
passing allusion to the Lenape region can also be read as an embedded
allusion to the cultural belief systems of American Indians. This particular
tidbit, of the tenuous grip that Lenape children had on “this world,” again
underscores Marzec’s discussion of the unstable “ontological grounds” of
the modern eco-critical narrative—the point here being that this
ontological instability reflects the naturalistic quality of the environments
in which the characters of A Mercy exist and the colonially rendered
invisibility of native folk mores and cultural beliefs that center on certain
eco-critical relationships.
In addition, allowing these shifty or eco-critically subtle focal points to
emerge through complex readings, note here also that Herman’s language,
particularly terms such as “consciousness,” “spatiotemporal,” and
“perceptual,” helps to shift the burden from the visual senses that are
metaphorically emphasized in Genette’s oft-repeated query “Who sees?”
to the cognitive faculties that a more in-depth understanding of
focalization clearly requires. This becomes all the more perceptible
through the ways in which Jacob, via third-person narrative, directly
interacts with the environment, most notably with the animals that he
14 Chapter I

encounters. Because (in the excerpt above) Jacob is rushing toward his
destination, he dismounts only twice, once to free an injured raccoon. The
narrative claims that upon liberation, “the raccoon limped off, perhaps to
the mother forced to abandon it or more likely into other claws” (13, my
italics). Herman suggests that the lexical item “perhaps” is a key indicator
of (direct) hypothetical focalization featuring a counterfactual witness—in
this case, the raccoon and/or its mother. According to Herman, “perhaps is
an adverb with both alethic and epistemic functions, indicating both
possibility and doubt. More precisely, perhaps is a sentential adverb that
sets up a particular belief context, a candidate mental model.”14 This
hypothetically focalized passage within the narrative works to establish
Jacob’s compassionate interaction with animals.
Much of this theme is carried through in his interaction with his horse,
Regina. His compassion for his horse is reflected in his intermittent
comments about the extent to which he pushes her physically as he rides to
Virginia. When he stops for a respite,

he saw a man beating a horse to its knees. [...] Few things angered Jacob
more than the brutal handling of domesticated animals. [...] [H]is own fury
was not only because of the pain inflicted on the horse, but because of the
mute unprotesting surrender glazing its eyes. (32-33)

The hypothetical focalization here is that of Jacob’s perception of the

horse’s “unprotesting surrender,” which could just as easily be anger,
hatred, pity, or even acceptance. And if we accept Jacob’s compassionate
viewpoint of the brutalized “domesticated animal,” then, and here is where
Morrison’s manipulation of focal points is quite brilliant, readers/narratees
must also begin to question Jacob’s capacity to own human brutes, mostly
women, and why his compassion for “domesticated animals” somehow
does not extend to those domesticated animals that are human. This irony
is further present in and through the implication that Jacob is (allegedly) a
reluctant slave owner. Ultimately, Jacob’s focal points present an eco-
critical dilemma between ownership, ideology, and humanity. The
ideology of human enslavement somehow does not contaminate his love
for the creatures of the environment, yet his inability to appreciate the
humanity of his slaves is put into bold relief by his perspective on animals
and the background facts regarding the Lenape beliefs that provide some
ontological explication of certain tragic aspects of his life.
As the novel shifts back to Florens’ focalization, she is charged with
delivering a message to the Blacksmith so that he might return to her
owner and provide some medicinal relief from the family’s bout with
small pox:
 Eco-Critical Focal Points 15

Mistress makes me memorize the way to get to you. I am to board the Ney
brothers’ wagon in the morning as it travels north on the post road. After
one stop at a tavern, the wagon will arrive at a place she calls Hartkill just
after midday where I disembark. I am to walk left, westward on the
Abenaki trail15 which I will know by the sapling bent into the earth with
one sprout growing skyward. (39-40)

Florens’ first-person narrative here begins to develop a panoramic

viewpoint of the environment she must navigate in order to fulfill her
mission. Once again, Morrison deploys an environmental allusion (here to
the Abenaki trail) in order to suggest certain cultural, eco-critical focal
points that expand the reader’s sense of the characters’ situational
dilemmas. Interestingly, Florens is directed to memorize her journey—she
has to, at least cognitively, own her geography. Moreover, her memory of
the Abenaki trail will in ways (to the modern reader) signal the
disappearance of (i.e., the absence of memory of) those folk for whom the
trail was named. Again, Morrison references a geographic space to suggest
certain eco-critical readings of the folk for whom that space is named. In
an article on frontier justice and the legality of treaties, Ghere and
Morrison detail the unequal treatment of the Abenaki, especially when it
came to the settling of property disputes:

[...] Massachusetts officials found it [...] difficult to assess monetary

amounts to Abenaki loss of subsistence resources from blocked fish runs
or trespassing hunters. Moreover, from the English perspective, these
claims were less valid as property rights, and the officials were reluctant to
recognize them as legitimate losses.16

One nuance of the eco-critical interpretation of the Abenaki’s

relationship to English colonizers is that the assignment of material value
to the environment was one that derived exclusively from the European
perspective. One way that the Abenaki (and other American Indians) were
systematically displaced from the environment was through legal means
and/or legal remedies that devalued their relationships to the land. In
another essay on the Abenaki, Ghere (solo here) concludes that “[t]heir
‘disappearance’ from history resulted more from the ethnocentric views of
colonial observers and the misunderstandings of early historians than from
an absence of Indian inhabitants.”17 If history and the legal system directly
contributed to the erasure of American Indians—exactly what happened
according to many modern historical and anthropological accounts—then
Florens’ walk through the Abenaki trail might also signal her comparable
plight. After all, the narrative of A Mercy is etched in the walls of a
crumbling purposeless colonial residence. If Florens is to exist (even in her
16 Chapter I

own storyworld), she must avoid the fate of the people upon whose trail
her most important journey takes her. She will know this trail by “reading”
the environmental signal of the “sapling bent into the earth.” Her
record/memory of the image will assist her in the processes of mapping the
natural environment that she must traverse in order to locate the
Blacksmith. This connection between individual memory and environment
is an eco-critical perspective on the relationships between humanity and
environmental discourses.
Finally the Abenaki allusion signals the socio-historical context of the
Abenaki war (1675–1678): “The Abenaki war had two related levels.
Some Abenaki responded angrily to frontier lawlessness; others attempted
vainly to address the social insecurities which inflamed English-Indian
legal misunderstandings.”18 According to Ken Morrison, “[...] broader
cultural issues suggest that Indians’ real concerns lay less in receiving
justice in English courts than in thwarting the violence done to their own
social philosophies of law.”19 Morrison’s research establishes the
environment (referred to as territory or land) as an extremely important
priority amongst the Abenaki. The allusion to the trail at this point in
Florens’ first-person narrative summons an eco-critical movement for
American Indian liberation and their systematic attempt to resist and
“thwart” the oppressive forces against them.
The narrative of A Mercy continues to shift in focalization throughout
the novel, varying between several iterations of Florens’ first-person
narration and other characters’ third-person narrations, including those of
Lina, Rebekka, Sorrow, and Florens’ mother. Each of these shifts present
interesting examples of focalization, hypothetical focalization, and eco-
critical focal points, most notably Lina’s retelling of a colonial myth-
narrative:

One day a traveler climbs a mountain nearby. He stands at its summit

admiring all he sees below him. The turquoise lake, the eternal hemlocks,
the starlings sailing into clouds cut by rainbow. The traveler laughs at the
beauty saying, “This is perfect. This is mine.” (73)

Almost immediately within this narrative (at this point), Lina shifts the
focalization to that of the animals, especially an eagle: “Creatures come
out of caves wondering what it means” (73). The “it” is the travelers’
possessive declaration, and although the creatures may be wondering,
readers can deduce what “mine” means in this early-American colonial
context. The mother eagle in this narrative (yet another instance of
hypothetical focalization) is so disturbed by the strange reverberating
sound of the traveler’s possessive declaration and wicked laugh that she
 Eco-Critical Focal Points 17

attacks him. He promptly beats her back with his walking stick and she
falls, and according to Lina, “she is falling forever.” Lina concludes her
story within the narrative here, and Florens promptly asks about the
eagle’s abandoned eggs: “Do they live?” Here, Morrison fuses the
focalizations of Lina’s narrative with that of the abandoned eggs when
Lina replies: “We have” (73).
Throughout A Mercy, Lina occupies a narratologically marginal space.
She is enigmatic, and her stories, reflections, and expressions tend toward
an eco-critical analysis of the early American colonial environment. In a
scene in which Jacob and his servants are engaged in the work of
constructing his third house, the narrative is eco-critically focalized from
Lina’s perspective: “Lina was unimpressed by the festive mood, the jittery
satisfaction of everyone involved, and had refused to enter or go near it.
That third and presumably final house that Sir insisted on building
distorted sunlight and required the death of fifty trees” (43, emphasis
added). Lina sees the construction of the colonial home as destructive of
the natural habitat. Moreover, “[k]illing trees in that number, without
asking their permission, of course his efforts would stir up malfortune”
(44, emphasis added). She offers a cultural perspective that runs counter to
the European assumption of territorial domination. Linda’s eco-critical
focal point, however, finds validation in the story’s denouement.
Several other instances of focalization in A Mercy incisively help to
generate critically productive readings of the novel. The psychological
nature of Sorrow’s narrative and her (initially obscured) running discourse
with Twin provide an interesting example that underscores the import of
focalization both as a writing strategy and as a critical reading strategy. In
the opening chapter, in which the perception of A Mercy’s storyworld is
filtered through Florens’ first-person narrative, she recalls her first
encounter with Sorrow as follows: “Nor is Sorrow happy to see me. She
flaps her hand in front of her face as though bees are bothering her” (9).
Readers revisit this scene towards the end of the novel from a different
focal point:

When Florens arrived that bitter winter, Sorrow, curious and happy to see
someone new, smiled and was about to step forward just to touch one of
the little girl’s fat braids. But Twin stopped her, leaning close to Sorrow’s
face, crying, “Don’t! Don’t!” Sorrow recognized Twin’s jealousy and
waved her face away, but not quickly enough. (146)

Here, Morrison combines multiple internal focalizations with a narrative

that mostly employs variable internal focalization. In the multivalent
version, narrative perception resonates across various centers of
18 Chapter I

consciousness detailing distinct aspects of the storyworld—like Jacob’s

travels through the landscape versus Lina’s perception of nature. In the
multiple version, two “perceivers” narrate the same scene/experience/
encounter in the same environment, producing distinct versions of the
situation. This example then helps to highlight Morrison’s deliberate
manipulation of focalization and makes some strong suggestions about the
ways in which focalization can be used to establish an interface among
characters, readers, and the environment of the storyworld. Morrison’s
play on sorrow and happiness thematically reflects the instability of the
narrative, the perspective fluidity of the characters, and the cultures that
populate A Mercy.
In the end, Florens, crushed by the Blacksmith’s rejection, concludes,
“I am become wilderness but I am also Florens” (161). Her (e)merging
sense of herself as part of the environment derives first from her utter
willingness to transfer ownership of herself to the blacksmith, second,
from her travels through the wilderness to locate the blacksmith, and
finally from her wild and violent outburst in the confrontation with the
Blacksmith’s adopted son. The accretion of these experiences diminishes
her conception of herself as separate and distinct from the experiential
environments within which her life’s most tellable moments—including
her outdoor lovemaking sessions with the Blacksmith—occur. The main
character’s eco-critical focal points reflect certain themes within/across the
novel. And several of these themes are pervasive in the other characters’
narratives. When Lina claims that the “world shapes us,” she is making an
ontological claim about the relationships between the characters of the
novel, the world/storyworld/environment that they inhabit, and the
perspectives that they have/take. These eco-critical focal points function as
tethers that bind the characters to the wilderness, to an environmental
history that features lost Indian communities, and to the historical loss of
eco-critical ideologies.

Notes
1. Toni Morrison, A Mercy (New York: Knopf, 2008), 71. All other references to
the novel will be included in the text and will refer to this edition.
2. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and
Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard UP, 2001), 420.
3. In an article entitled “Focalization and the First-Person Narrator: A Revision of
Theory,” William F. Edmiston claims that “the concept of focalization has been the
subject of a great deal of debate. [...] Focalization is defined by Genette as a
restriction imposed on the information provided by a narrator about his characters”
 Eco-Critical Focal Points 19

(Poetics Today 10.4 [1989]: 729). Edmiston’s paraphrase of Genette’s definition

states that these restrictions manifest themselves in three ways/types.

A nonfocalized text or zero focalization, means that the narrator is

unlimited spatially and unrestricted in psychological access to the
characters. In internal focalization, the narrator is limited spatially but has
access to the mind of the focal character. External focalization also
involves spatial limitation, but this time the narrator has no psychological
privilege and is limited to the role of witness (730).

For Edmiston, Genette’s theorization of focalization is lacking in its inability to

account for all of the complexities and nuances of first-person narrative. In a
similarly critical vein, William Nelles, in an essay entitled “Getting Focalization
into Focus,” suggests that Genette’s terminology in his original definition of
focalization invites “critical confusion” mostly because in his original discussion,
even by his (Genette’s) own admission, he relies too heavily on metaphors of
vision where other cognitive descriptors might be more apropos or comprehensive.
Nelles reproduces Genette’s definition thusly: “The concept of focalization stems
from Genette’s interest in separating two elements of what used to be called point
of view: the difference, as he put it, between the question ‘who sees?’ and the
question ‘who speaks?’” (qtd. in William Nelles, “Getting Focalization into
Focus,” Poetics Today 11 [Summer 1990]: 366). Note that I am crudely
synopsizing these critiques. Suffice it to say that Genette’s concept of focalization,
the abstract aspect of “point of view” that attempts to capture the “who sees?” of a
given narrative, has proven to be one of the most contested (and discoursed)
concepts in the history of narrative. This suggests the extraordinary import of this
concept to the discipline and provides sufficient reason for its continued use in
applying narrative strategies to literary interpretation.
4. La Vinia Delois Jennings, “A Mercy: Toni Morrison Plots the Formation of
Racial Slavery in Seventeenth-Century America,” Callaloo 32(2009): 646.
5. David Herman, Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (Lincoln,
NE: U of Nebraska P, 2002), 301. Perhaps because he has the benefit of the
discussion generated by the aforementioned scholars or (and this is the more likely
answer) because he himself is a scholar deeply invested in cognition and/or
cognitive practices (especially as they apply to linguistics, literature, and
narrative), Herman wrestles a modicum of clarity from these contested discourses
on the concept referred to as focalization.
6. Ibid, 303.
7. Ibid. Herman exemplfies these indices and iterations of focalization and he too
finds Genette (and many of his critics) a bit lacking in that they do not (or cannot
through their respective theoretical formulations) account for what he christens
“Hypothetical Focalization.”
8. Briefly (and by way of recap) then, Herman defines the modes of focalization in
narrative as follows: 1) External focalization “involves a mode of perspective
taking transcending ordinary limits of space and time; characteristic of texts with
an ‘omniscient’ narrator” (322); 2) Internal focalization “involves perspective
20 Chapter I

taking associated with a center of consciousness, i.e., with the perceptual activity
of a storyworld participant” (ibid). Internal focalization generally manifests in
narratives in three ways: 1) fixed, where “the center of consciousness is singular,
remaining constant throughout the narrative”; 2) variable, where “there is more
than one center of consciousness over the course of the narrative, and each
focalizes different spatiotemporal segments of the storyworld”; and 3) multiple
(internal focalization), where “there is more than one center of consciousness over
the course of the narrative, and each focalizes the same (or at least overlapping)
spatiotemporal segments of the storyworld” (ibid). Note here that Morrison’s A
Mercy dwells mostly within the realm of variable internal focalization. There are
also two types of hypothetical focalization. Direct hypothetical focalization
“involves explicit appeal to a hypothetical witness,” and indirect focalization
“involves implicit appeal to a hypothetical witness, whose focalizing activity must
be inferred” (322). At issue now are the ways in which all of this focalization
theory finds applicable purchase in critical readings of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.
9. Robert P. Marzec, “Speaking Before the Environment: Modern Fiction and the
Ecological,” Modern Fiction Studies 55 (2009): 421.
10. In Portuguese, “a minha mae” means “the my mother” and it is generally the
way someone would refer to his/her mother. In addressing her, one would say,
“minha mae”—my mother—but in speaking about her, the correct form would be
“the my mother.” Morrison likely understood that most English-speaking readers
would not necessarily be aware of this and thus the narrative manipulation of
indexical articles is worth considering here.
11. Herman, 307.
12. Jennings, 646.
13. M.R. Harrington, “A Preliminary Sketch of Lenape Culture,” American
Anthropologist 15 (1913): 212.
14. Herman, 312.
15. It is likely that the Abenaki were among the first people in North America who
migrated here via the Bering Straits some17,000 years ago. These indigenous
populations spoke a variety of languages and had a diverse array of cultures,
customs and civil practices. One of the largest groups of these populations that
settled in New England (especially Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire) were
called Abenaki, the “People of the Dawnland.”
16. David L. Ghere and Alvin H. Morrison, “Searching for Justice on the Maine
Frontier: Legal Concepts, Treaties, and the 1749 Wiscasset Incident,” American
Indian Quarterly 3 (2001): 381.
17. David L. Ghere, “The ‘Disappearance’ of the Abenaki in Western Maine:
Political Organization and Ethnocentric Assumptions,” American Indian Quarterly
17 (1993): 193.
18. Kenneth M. Morrison, “The Bias of Colonial Law: English Paranoia and the
Abenaki Arena of King Philip’s War, 1675–1678,” The New England Quarterly 53
(1980): 364.
19. Ibid.
 Eco-Critical Focal Points 21

Works Cited
Buell, Lawrence. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture,
and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA, and
London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2001.
Edmiston, William F. “Focalization and the First-Person Narrator: A
Revision of the Theory.” Poetics Today 10.4 (1989): 729-44.
Ghere, David L. “The ‘Disappearance’ of the Abenaki in Western Maine:
Political Organization and Ethnocentric Assumptions.” American
Indian Quarterly 17 (1993): 193–207.
Ghere, David L. and Alvin H. Morrison. “Searching for Justice on the
Maine Frontier: Legal Concepts, Treaties, and the 1749 Wiscasset
Incident.” American Indian Quarterly 3 (2001): 378–399.
Harrington, M. R. “A Preliminary Sketch of Lenape Culture.” American
Anthropologist 15 (1913): 208–235.
Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative.
Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 2002.
Jennings, La Vinia Delois. “A Mercy: Toni Morrison Plots the Formation
of Racial Slavery in Seventeenth-Century America.” Callaloo 32
(2009): 645–649.
Marzec, Robert P. “Speaking Before the Environment: Modern Fiction
and the Ecological.” Modern Fiction Studies 55 (2009): 419–442.
Morrison, Kenneth M. “The Bias of Colonial Law: English Paranoia and
the Abenaki Arena of King Philip’s War, 1675–1678.” The New
England Quarterly 53 (1980): 363–387.
Morrison, Toni. A Mercy. New York: Knopf, 2008.
Nelles, William. “Getting Focalization into Focus.” Poetics Today 11
(Summer 1990): 365-82.
 CHAPTER II

THE POLITICS OF “HOME” IN A MERCY

ANISSA WARDI

In A Mercy, Toni Morrison explores the sites and politics of home, the
most fundamental way in which humans come into physical contact with
the nonhuman world. The novel provides models of social and ecological
habitation—how individuals place themselves in biotic and human
communities—from the displacement of indigenous people to the
consumption of natural resources to the trafficking in human flesh. Set at
the close of the seventeenth century, at the dawn of the slave trade when
race was not yet rhetorically constructed as an absolute category, A Mercy
links nation building—the creation and inhabitation of the country—to the
forced labor of Africans, the decimation of Native American nations and
the transmutation of earth into farms. The establishment of “home” in the
colonies is dependent on the dislodgment of others; thus the Diaspora,
represented materially as land and water, structures A Mercy and is
embodied in Florens and Sorrow. If Florens is untamed land, Sorrow, who
had “never lived on land,”1 is water. Together, they map a biophysical
environment inflected with African diasporic history. On the other hand,
Lina, the Native American servant on Jacob Vaark’s Virginian farm,
critiques the Europeans’ lack of harmonious habitation of the earth:

They would forever fence land, ship whole trees to faraway countries, take
any woman for quick pleasure, ruin soil, befoul sacred places and worship
a dull, unimaginative god. They let their hogs browse the ocean shore
turning it into dunes of sand where nothing green can ever grow again. Cut
loose from the earth’s soul, they insisted on purchase of its soil, and like all
orphans they were insatiable. (54)

Following this scathing critique, Lina tempers her sweeping admonition

of the colonists, excepting Jacob and Rebekka. Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch
farmer and landowner, sent away for Rebekka, a mail-order bride from
24 Chapter II

England, and they, together with Lina, initially attempt to live harmoniously
with the land. But in addition to farming, Jacob increases his wealth by
lending money. In fact, it is Jacob’s collection on the obligation owed to
him by Senhor D’Ortega that is the catalyst for his participation in the
slave trade. D’Ortega, who has lost his human cargo, cannot discharge his
debt unless Jacob accepts one of D’Ortega’s slaves. Jacob initially rejects
this offer, for he purportedly disdains the slave trade, and is repulsed by
D’Ortega’s life. And yet he is seduced by the grandeur of the estate:

[I]n spite of himself, [he] envied the house, the gate, the fence. […] So
mighten it be nice to have such a fence to enclose the headstones in his
own meadow? And one day, not too far away, to build a house that size on
his own property? […] Not as ornate as D’Ortega’s. None of that pagan
excess, of course, but fair. And pure, noble even, because it would not be
compromised as Jublio [the Ortega plantation] was. (27)

This moment shapes the novel in seemingly contradictory ways: it is

the catalyst for Jacob’s construction of his palatial estate—financed
through the slave trade—as well as his acceptance of Florens, a young,
Angolan girl, an act that provides the title for the novel. Jacob, the soon-
to-be financier of the Barbadian sugar trade, shows Florens’ mother an act
of mercy in accommodating her daughter into his home. Notwithstanding
Jacob’s merciful act towards a desperate mother, from Florens’ perspective,
she is being cast out from her only known home, the domain of the
Portuguese planter, and, more importantly, from a maternal homespace.
Florens is a symbol of the African Diaspora insofar as her painful status as
orphan mirrors the conditions of collective displacement:

Sometime during their journey, in one terrifying moment, they understood

that family, friends, and country were gone, never to be seen again.
Lineage, the most important source of social cohesion in African society,
was dissolved. Sons could no longer follow fathers or daughters their
mothers. The captives had been orphaned.2

What Florens cannot know is that her mother’s choice to exile her is a
protective gesture from Senhor D’Ortega’s sexual predation.3 Although
her mother’s desperate intent is a noble one, Florens is thrown out of a
maternal shelter and becomes an orphan, an exile, desperately seeking
home.
Home, which according to Johnson in Home, Maison, Casa, “hinges on
material dwelling places as well as abstract categories of being,”4 is
irretrievable for Florens, and Morrison underscores her diasporic experience
by punctuating her life with episodes of migration, arrival and return.