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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
Audre Lorde has remarked that for African American women, "oppression is as American as apple pie" (114). The fiction of Toni Morrison provides an exploration of the effects of dominant (white, male) American cultural values or "apple pie" ideology on the African American community, particularly its women, and does so in terms of what can be called the politics of appetite. This essay examines Morrison's representation of the way in which issues of gender and race shape appetite. It looks at the themes of hunger and cannibalism but focuses specifically on sugar. In Morrison's novels fruit pies and other sweet foods have a special significance. A particularly potent symbol for black women because of its association with stereotypes of femininity--"What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all that is nice"--and the history of slavery, sugar (and spice) being two of the main products of slave plantations, sugar acts as a signifier of race and gender power structures in her texts.(1) For the hungry, sugar has a seductive appeal, but sugar satisfies desire only temporarily, without providing sustenance, and it can also cause disease. I will argue that Morrison's novels expose the devastating effects of hunger wrought by dispossession and warn of the dangers for black women of assimilating American "apple pie" ideology, but that they also simultaneously highlight the nourishing values of a black cultural heritage.
Hunger
Morrison's novels demonstrate that, in a context of oppression and exploitation, black experience is epitomized by hunger. Morrison has said, "I think about what black writers do as having a quality of hunger and disturbance that never ends" ("Interview" 429), and her novels express that hunger. The opening pages of The Bluest Eye (1970), a text that explores the disabling effects of dominant bourgeois values on black women and the destructive results of the internalization of white definitions of beauty on black female identity, make it clear that racial discrimination and inequality are indexed by who eats what. Claudia, the narrator, notes how social exclusion is accompanied by a lack of access to food, and Rosemary's bread and butter foregrounds the relationship between dispossession and desire:
Rosemary Villanucci, our next-door friend who lives above her father's cafe, sits in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. She rolls down the window to tell my sister Frieda and me that we can't come in. We stare at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. (5)
This incident reflects the experience, of the whole community. Claudia remarks that the threat of homelessness "bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership," and the threat of want ensures that the women "canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves" (12). Through Pecola, the central character, Morrison highlights the potentially self-destructive dangers that such a ravenous appetite can breed, although Pecola is characterized not by hunger but by thirst. Pecola is taught by her community and her society that because she is poor, black, and ugly, she is worthless. Consequently, seeking acceptance and a positive sense of sell she wishes to be white, and every night she prays for a pair of blue eyes in the belief that they will make her beautiful and happy. While staying with the MacTeer family, Pecola becomes besotted with a picture of Shirley Temple on a cup. Pecola worships the white ideal of beauty and virtue represented by Shirley Temple and the milk.(2) Her sense of worthlessness is metaphorically represented as emptiness, as thirst, and she attempts to find meaning in her life, to fill herself, by imbibing white cultural values. The danger in this is first intimated when her love of the cup induces her to greedily drink most of the milk, thus depriving other members of the household, and ultimately culminates in Pecola's descent into insanity.
Like Pecola, Beloved is also greedy. In Beloved (1987), Morrison's revisionary account of slavery which explores the consequences of a mother's attempt to save her daughter from slavery by killing her, the hunger of Beloved, the murdered daughter who returns to live with her family, outstrips that of all Morrison's other characters. When Sethe, Beloved's mother, and Denver, her sister, and Paul D, her mother's partner, first encounter her, Sethe thinks that the young girl looks poorly fed, and, ironically, when she decides to let Beloved stay, she explains to Paul D that "Feeding her is no trouble" (67). However, as the novel progresses, Beloved's insatiable appetite and her desire for reparation threaten to destroy them all.
While Beloved is characterized by hunger, her hunger is only an extreme manifestation of the hunger, both literal and metaphorical, that all the characters in the book experience as part of the legacy of slavery. Moreover, given that 1987, the year of the novel's publication, marked 124 years since the abolition of slavery, the number of the house to which Beloved returns--124--suggests that this is a hunger that African Americans are still coming to terms with in the late twentieth century.(3) The only difference between Beloved and those around her is that she is more voracious: "She took the best of everything--first. The best chair, the biggest piece, the prettiest plate, the brightest ribbon for her hair" (241). When Sethe recognizes her daughter, in a desperate attempt to prove that she loves her, she gives Beloved everything she has: "lullabies, new stitches, the bottom of the cake bowl, the top of the milk. If the hen had only two eggs, she got both" (240). While Beloved hungers for love and Sethe hungers for forgiveness, all three women face literal starvation when their food and money run out. Sethe spends her life savings on food and fancy goods in an effort to satisfy Beloved, but she is insatiable because nothing can make reparation for her death.
As the jazz music that permeates the air conveys, the tragic events of Jazz (1992) are likewise driven by hunger. Morrison has said that she sees a close affinity between her writing and black music, and Nellie McKay comments, "Toni Morrison's work expresses something which until now has only been expressed in Black music" (13). Jazz suggests that this something is hunger. Alice Manfred hates the music, "But the part she hated most was its appetite. Its longing for the bash, the slit; a kind of careless hunger for a fight or a red ruby stickpin for a tie--either would do" (59). She listens to the lyrics--"When I was young and in my prime I could get my barbecue any old time"--and thinks, "They are greedy, reckless words" (60). Even the clarinets are called "licorice sticks" (120).
Set in 1920s Harlem, Jazz tells the story of a love triangle. When Joe and Violet Trace move from the country to the city, their relationship deteriorates. Violet stops speaking to Joe, and he complains that she gives the parrot--the only member of the household who ever mutters the words "I love you"--more attention than him. Joe's emotional malnourishment is symbolized by the fact that he no longer enjoys Violet's cooking: "Once upon a time, he bragged about her cooking. Couldn't wait to get back to the house and devour it. But he was fifty now, and appetites change" (69). He grows "hungry for the one thing that everybody loses--young loving" (120), and enters into an affair with a young woman called Dorcas. Arranging a room where they can meet to consummate their relationship, Joe says, "no point in picking the apple if you don't want to see how it taste" (40). The image of the Edenic apple not only evokes the illicit nature of their love but also creates a sense of foreboding. Like Pecola's obsession with blue eyes that sends her mad, and like Sethe's murder of her daughter, Joe's killing of Dorcas after she leaves him testifies to the dangerous possessiveness that hunger breeds in the dispossessed.
Like Joe, Violet is also hungry. She has had a hungry childhood, and her husband's affair exacerbates her hunger. Initially, her response to Dorcas is hatred, a hatred so intense that it leads her to slash the dead girl's face at the funeral. After this, Violet tries to understand why Joe loves the young woman and sets out on a mission to discover everything she can about her rival. In doing so Violet becomes obsessed with Dorcas and starts to copy her. When she performs the dance that Dorcas used to do, "It was like watching an old street pigeon pecking the crust of a sardine sandwich the cats left behind" (6). Only Alice Manfred, Dorcas's aunt and the woman who becomes Violet's friend, understands how Violet feels, because her husband deserted her for another woman and left her also "starving for blood" (86).
The Significance of Sugar
As well as exposing the devastating effects of hunger wrought by dispossession, Morrison highlights the dangers of assimilating dominant (white, male, bourgeois) American cultural values, or "apple pie" ideology, and she does this partly through her representation of sugar. Sugar plays a seminal part in the history of African Americans. The economic history of the West Indies, collectively known as the "Sugar Colonies," illustrates that slavery was founded on the sugar industry. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, millions of slaves were taken from Africa to work on sugar plantations, and the establishment of African slavery as the principal labor institution of European colonies is specifically related to the expansion of the sugar industry. Sidney W. Mintz has even stated that sugar was the cornerstone of British West Indian slavery (175). Sugar production was a very lucrative trade involving huge profits, and sugar hence became one of the most valuable commodities in the world. To a significant degree sugar was responsible for the wealth and growth of European empires and their cultures in this period. A West Indies governor, Sir Dalby Thomas, made this clear when in the 1690s he said, "The pleasure, glory and grandeur of England has been advanced more by sugar than any other commodity" (qtd. in Williams 124).
Sugar also plays a crucial part in the history of consumption. Susan Willis states in a footnote in her essay "Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison," "candy is often associated with capitalism" (42), and certainly the Caribbean sugar industry contributed no small part to the rise of mercantilism and worldwide commercial trade. Plantation owners grew sugar to make money, and the necessity of creating a market for their product resulted in the rise of coffee houses and...
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