| Character Analysis |
Valerian
As
the white controller, Valerian comforms all the characters who surround him to
what he wants them to be. He
educates Jadine, treating her as if she is white.
She is welcomed to live as he lives and has a close friendship with his
wife Margaret. Sydney and Ondine
are the servants they are because of him, feeling that they could never leave
him. He provides Son with all the
things he needs to be civilized. He
cautions Margaret of the calories she takes in.
He calls Therese and Gideon by different names.
Sydney
and Ondine Childs
The words of Sydney and Ondine and the lives they live contradict each other. They represent the people who break up their own race into different groups. Morrison makes a point about unity in starting the novel with 1 Corinthians 1:11, where in that section, it talk about divisions in the church, and how people should be perfectly united. This goes back to Morrison’s common idea of “finding your true self” that is brought out in all her novels. The Childs speak of Son as if he was a wild animal, tell him that “[their] people owned drugstores and taught school while [his] were still cutting their faces open so as to be able to tell one from the other.” It is funny for the Childs to be saying this while they are the ones still working under a white man. They do nothing to improve their, or to bring a better name to “their people.”
Son represents the black man, from a small black town. Jadine describes him as having mountains and savannas in his face, sketching a face so African as to look like Africa. In the context of the Tar Baby metaphor, he plays Brer Rabbit who gets himself stuck to the Tar Baby (Jadine). Like Brer Rabbit, the trap starts with his simply talking to the unresponsive Tar Baby. Her snobby attitude towards him makes him even more determined to know her, which is when he really gets stuck. Jadine throws Son back into the briar patch from which he came when she leaves him, at which point Son begins picking the tar out of his fur recovering from his addiction to Jadine. One key aspect of the Brer Rabbit story is that it was his own fault that he got himself stuck. With this metaphor of the black man, Morrison tells us that many blacks stick themselves in the traps in which they find themselves.
Therese and Gideon
Therese and Gideon represent the common black workers and the roots to which Son wants Jadine to return to. They possess the human tendency to tell tall tales that has for the most part been erased in our “civilized” world of imagination-stifling television and “facts.” They have personal mythologies, the dreams for which the likes of busily civilized Jadine does not have time that Morrison talks of when she compares Jadine to “soldier ants” that “have no time for dreaming” (290). It is the world to which Son wants Jadine to return. They enhance their lives with these vivid dreams of magic such as Therese’s magic breast and the wonders of America, the land of apples and televisions. While this perception of the world may not be as specifically accurate as the one granted us by science, it fully suffices for their walks of life. Knowledge of quantum physics and calculus would be superfluous in their simple culture of fishing and story telling. They know how to listen to dreams, for Therese knew that the mysterious chocolate-eater would reveal himself or be discovered soon because this came to her in a dream (104). She possesses a deeper understanding of everyday life than, for example, Margaret, even though many of her observations are not literally true. She instantly picks up on the fact that Ondine is “subdued by fear” and that it is because of the chocolate-eater. The abnormal silence of machete-hair’s (Ondine’s) machetes told her this; she hits the nail right on the head even though Ondine does not literally walk around with ever-clanging machetes in her hair. With these characters, Morrison shows us the non-inferiority of such cultures to modern culture.
