Abstract
At the intersection of history and language, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison has sought to map a new territory of literary representations of race in American life. Her work provides a critique of the use of racialized language and fictive representations of an unknown, privately painful history of slavery, focusing on African American women who need to forge themselves new kinds of racial identities as they face social pressures at different times in U.S. history. Kovács contextualizes the themes of Morrison’s work as presented in a university classroom setting in Hungary and explores Morrison’s representation of history, language, and black women’s agency in her 2008 novel A Mercy. Kovács traces ways Morrison’s project of remapping representations of race has been transformed through the figure of its black female protagonist Florens, who tries to write herself out of slavery but ends up alone and mad, her community of women unable to help her. The chapter also explores students’ reactions to this fictional history of the invention of slavery and racial prejudice in colonial America and how students engage with literary criticism that examines racialized language depicting the failure of women’s agency.
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Notes
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Sethe’s concern with rememory seems similar to the way documents of slavery in The Black Book, a compendium of documents tracing the Black experience in America, triggered editors’ engagement and continues to engage readers (see Morrison 1974). Morrison was the in-house editor of the book in 1974, which later provided the germ not only for Morrison’s own Beloved but became for black Americans popular reading and talking matter about slavery through the 1970s and 1980s (Wall 2008, 142–3).
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Gustafson and Hunter (2010) start their introduction to a special issue of Early American Literature on alternative histories of early American literature with references to A Mercy . As they see it, the novel represents not the early America introduced by Perry Miller in his highly influential Errand into the Wilderness (1956), but the early American literature of new anthologies, monographs, and archival research that provide a more diverse story than that of the Puritan settlers (Gustafson and Hunter, 213). In other words, early American literary scholarhip is well on its way to reinscribing diverse readings of early America, yet these new accounts may not have reached a wider public. A Mercy can help with popularizing the new image.
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Edmund S. Morgan’s (1975) classic volume American Slavery, American Freedom explicates the problem of how the highly valued freedom of the colonies was dependent on slave labor. The profit slavery produced helped buy many of the freedoms early Americans boasted of. In his book, Morgan analyzes the role of Bacon’s Rebellion in the emergence of the twisted relation between slavery and freedom in the colony of Virginia and shows how it was related to the process of Virginia’s transition to slavery connected to race (cf. Chaps. 15 and 16).
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Kovács, Á.Z. (2022). Toni Morrison’s A Mercy in Hungary: Racialized Discourse in the Classroom. In: Mazzeno, L.W., Norton, S. (eds) Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94166-6_2
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