Date of Award
5-2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Legacy Department
English
Committee Member
Dr. Angela Naimou
Committee Member
Dr. William Stockton
Committee Member
Dr. Rhondda Thomas
Abstract
An enslaved individual usually escapes or is manumitted before writing his or her narrative. But what if an individual composes that narrative while still enslaved? Toni Morrison teases out this question in A Mercy, a novel told in part by Florens, an enslaved African girl in seventeenth-century colonial America, who etches her narrative with a nail on the interior of a mansion, exhibiting her resourcefulness and desperation to write her story. However, a third-person narrator fills in the gaps of what Florens cannot know about the other characters. This other narrative voice becomes necessary because Florens suffers from the trauma of believing that her mother has abandoned her in favor of being with her younger brother, and consequently, this trauma creates narrative lacunae because Florens does not and cannot know everything. Even as Florens fixates on this separation, which influences all of her future decisions, she can invoke her own agency, based on her abject resistance of her feeling of loss so that she herself may become a spectral force that actively haunts the archive of slavery, not merely someone who is passively haunted. This archive constitutes an exploration of the factual and fictional narratives that broaden the scope of not only what happened, but also what could have happened, the latter being necessary due to the inaccessibility of a complete, unbiased history. Florens achieves a sense of queerness based not primarily on her sexual practices but because of her liberating resistance to linearity and alignment with abjection as recuperative power against her low social position as black, female, and enslaved. While she remains enslaved, Florens attempts to unsettle such a marginalized position, which results in her committing violence against the blacksmith and her composing a narrative addressed to him that attempts to push against the boundary between enslavement and freedom albeit this freedom extends only to her claim of subjectivity, not a legal upturning of these definitions, which shows that despite this power that Florens gains to deal with her loss, she is still caught in the system of slavery.
Recommended Citation
Holliday, Justin Allen, "Raising Specters: Queer Reclamation in Toni Morrison's A Mercy" (2015). All Theses. 2124.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_theses/2124