Racial Pride

         One of Morrison's reasons for assembling this diverse group of characters is to present her theme of racial pride.  Although each character may choose a different way of expressing it, all exhibit a pride that centers their world and influences their perspective.  The whites, namely Valerian and his wife Margaret, and accomplish this expression with characteristically white materialism.  Valerian spends his days brooding over his imported flowers from his Pennsylvanian home, and the couple's European style home clashes with the island's hitherto undisturbed natural beauty.  Valerian's regal attitude and "head of a coin profile" reveal his unwillingness to surrender his Anglo-Saxon ways even in the midst of a tropical paradise.

Sexuality

            Through sexuality, Morrison shows Jadine’s control, rather it be her having control of men because she is tempting, or being ran over because she is worn out. Jadine was created to catch someone or something in the beginning, and like tar baby, Jadine was later figured out and thrown out and made useless.  The power she had in the beginning of the novel, the power to make Son fall for her, the power of her education and modeling career, faded away with her loss of sexuality at Eloe.  

Like tar that will stick to anything, Jadine uses her sexuality to lure Son to her.  She has control and power over him, as she tells him to sleep with her, naked, but repeatedly tells him that she does not want to have sex.  Both nude, placing herself right beside him, Jadine is able to taunt Son with her sexuality.  After Jadine enters a relationship with Son, she believes she is superior as she comments on the other “sexually efficient men” who were “foreplay experts” and compares them to Son and his wildness and fumbling.  She has made her catch, feeling as if she has the power because she is the tar that has the power to stick to Son.  Being made into the tar baby and being able to tempt everyone was her power.

            During the trip to Eloe, Jadine feels as if she is lacking sexually.  After walking into her room while in Eloe, Rosa, a relative of Son, makes her feel naked after she forces her to put clothes on.  Jadine has been around, and no man or women has ever made her feel this naked before.  Soldier, another relative of Son, makes her feel as if she was a virgin again, competing to be the best after being told about Cheyenne’s “special gift.”  Instead of tempting her targets, she is no longer the best catch.  The dream does it for Jadine, pushing her over the edge with her own sexuality.  Each women who enters the room just happens to be black, and as they pull out their breast, she feels as if she has to compete, yelling, “I have breast too.”  Then the most shocking, the women in yellow who pulls out her three eggs, sends Jadine into tears as she realizes her lacking sexually and martial.  Jadine can not compete with the women of women, and her power was gone. 

Grotesque Characters

  Toni Morrison is often referred to as a Southern writer, mainly because she focuses her attention on traditionally Southern themes like the black-and-white hate relationship and feminine roles in the masculine world.  But she also implements distinctly southern character types.  In particular, Morrison creates a grotesque character that is intended to serve as a veritable funhouse mirror for society.  In Tarbaby, this character is Margaret, the wife of millionaire-turned-island-recluse Valerian Street.  Her grotesque qualities extend far beyond the merely superficial: she is also the by product of an adulterous affair that her father tried in vain to conceal, which may or may have not lead to the mental instability that caused her to sadistically burning and stabbing her young son Michael with pins.  Her grotesque-ness reflects badly on the other whites in a similar fashion as Terese and Gideon’s stealing casts shadows on the blacks. In this sense she in a successful character.  In and ending smacking of poetic justice, Margaret ends up reduced to doing the laundry and other menial tasks formerly reserved for the house servants.  Interestingly, Morrison does not treat Margaret’s fall from her throne as tragic.  Instead, she uses it as an example of things returning to their natural state, much in the same way that Margaret’s husband allows his prized imported greenhouse to be reclaimed by the island foliage.  This proves to be one of her central themes in Tarbaby.