So Disturbing

Toni Morrison makes a point out of being very blunt in showing the cruel realities lived by characters in a Song of Solomon.  At first I thought her motifs where exclusively African American, and it made sense, well, because both she and the characters are African American. Then I realized her appreciations are more universal, and although it is undeniable that most of her dissertations apply to this specific minority, the truly deep ones are much more general.  

 

One of them is about incest and strange sexual behaviors. It seems to me that Morrison is very Freudian, believing that eerie sexual tendencies are to some point present, weather in a latent or manifest form, in a good chunk of the population. 

Incest or hints of incest or incestuous thoughts are everywhere. Milkman was in love with one of his cousins.  One of Macon’s daughters always defended his actions and was very close to him, something Freud would have called the Electra complex. Milkman was breastfed by his mother until an old age, something that may or may not be morally wrong, depending on the context. In this one, things were certainly dubious, as proven by their reaction when caught: “Ruth Jumped up as quickly as she could and covered her breast, dropping her son on the floor and confirming for him what he had begun to suspect – that these afternoons were strange and wrong” (p.15).

Certainly, the most likely case of real incest is that between Ruth and his father. 

This first evidence that the reader has of this is given in Chapter 1, which refers to Dr. Fosters’ thoughts toward his daughter: “Fond as he was of his only child, useful as she was in his house since his wife died, lately he had begun to chafe under her devotion. Her steady beam of love was unsettling, and she had never dropped that expression of affection that had been so lovable in her childhood. The good-night kiss was itself a masterpiece of slow-wittedness on her part and discomfort on his” (p.23). Yeah. And that’s not half as creepy as when Macon finds her wife naked and suckling on the fingers of her dead father. 

Having to type "incest" into the google image search-bar in order to endow my blog with a picture,  definetely got me on the dark side of the internet.

This is just a specific trauma that seems to be imbedded in the Dead family, but there are others. Maybe in a future blog I will look at each of the members of this awkward family in the way a psychodynamic psychologist like Freud would have.