In Song of Solomon, it seems like love is what makes people grow up, both giving and receiving love. That is why some characters, namely Milkman, but also Ruth and Corinthians and Lena, do not seem to have grown up entirely.
Milkman is not "serious", so he is not grown up. He doesn't care about anythin but parties and running around with different girls, and he still lives with his family. It seems like love figures prominently in his life because he doesn't feel love towards anyone, including his parents and Hagar, and he has no direction like Guitar because he doesn't feel a lot of love towards a certain group of people (on a side note, it seems like Guitar's love for his people is what made him grow up--when he got involved in the Seven Days and in civil rights, he began to become more serious and felt he had a purpose in his life). However, he knows that he is not really living his life in a meaningful way--he says "his life was pointless, aimless, and it was true that he didn't concern himself an awful lot about other people. There was nothing he wanted bad enough to risk anything for, to inconvenience himself for"--and he wants to change that, so perhaps he is on the edge of becoming more adult (107).
One character who doesn't seem child-like at first glance but who had some child-like elements about her is Ruth. She loved her father desperately, and was not able to allow him to die, even when he wanted to. She loves Milkman, and is unable to let him live his own life and leave her. In this way she seems immature, because she clings to people who she is supposed to be able to let go eventually. Perhaps this is because she never received love from Macon. Macon is supposed to be her life partner--they are supposed to travel through life together, and even when their parents die and their children grow up they are supposed to have each other. But Ruth doesn't have that. She only receives coldness and hostility from Macon, and maybe the fact that she doesn't receive any love makes her unable to maturely accept that some of those whom she loves must leave her. In a way, this stops her from growing up.
One final interesting example of this is Corinthians. Corinthians was such a minor character that we didn;t really know whether or not she was invested in anythingin her life, or whether or not she loved anything, but since she wnet to college and came back and did nothing, and she never married, we can assume she never felt a great deal of love. She seems somewhat immature before she meets Henry Porter; she works as a maid, but she doesn't want her father to know because she is still afraid of him. She is unable to stand up for herself. After she meets Porter, though, she seems braver. After being at his house for the night, she walks back into the house with her hair loose, not caring if her family sees. She is more confident and content in her life, and thus more grown-up and less adolescent.
This idea is not supported by all of the characters in the novel, but it will be interesting to see whether or not Milkman grows up, and whether, when he does, if it was partially because he grew to love someone or something.
With Ruth, we see this a little further too, with her and Dr. Foster. Towards the beginning of the book there's a passage from his point of view in which he said that her demands for "goodnight kisses" continuing on into her teenage years unsettled him, and he wanted that to stop. In fact, it seems that she has always had a hard time communicating love in a normal way.
ReplyDelete"Love," broadly understood, is a powerful force in Morrison's work--and as you note, it can be destructive and inhibiting as well as empowering. Another word for what we're talking about might be "passion"--Milkman not only doesn't give any real love to anyone else (or receive any himself, apart from vague worship from Hagar and his mother), he isn't passionate about anything larger than himself. But Guitar shows how dangerous such "passion: can be--what murderous and dangerous extremes it can lead to.
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