Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity) Pervades Toni Morrison’s Novels

Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Philip Page. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

“The trauma of racism is...the severe fragmentation of the self” (Morrison, “Unspeakable”) (p. 26).

“With her exploration of splitness, Morrison renders the dividedness of the American and African-American cultures: objects are split, bodies are split, psyches are split, families are split, neighborhoods are split, a race is split, a nation is split” (p. 31).

“...the African-American perspective is always at least double, and because the American cultural body is always already fragmented, the American consciousness is inevitably multiple, and the human condition is caught in the endless play of alternatives” (p. 36).

“Pecola [The Bluest Eye] is thus driven to the double division of a split personality and a pariah. Since to a lesser degree most other characters suffer the same double division, the novel implies the inevitability of this pattern: intense external forces (especially racial, economic, and familial) severely strain the characters’ personalities, and in turn those divisions within characters tend to divide them further from others” (p. 51).

“Echoing the other splits, the narration is split among multiple voices.” (p. 53)

“The attempted fusion with another person is most fully exemplified in Sula and Nel’s relationship..Sula and Nel’s near merger into one consciousness...they have difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s…” (p. 68).

“With his multiple identities, Son is a trickster figure, Morrison’s most recognizable one (p. 122)...Having so many identities that he ‘did not always know who he was’…” (p. 124)...Tar Baby is a polyphonic novel (Butler-Evans; Paquet) that has multiple centers and central characters (Rigney) and in which each character seems to have multiple selves (Kubitschek) (p. 132).

Of course, as readers of this blog know, multiplicity is neither unique to Morrison nor a product of postmodernism, since it pervades Dickens, too (see June 2013 post) and is an issue with most novelists to one extent or another.