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Home as a Rosetta Stone for Toni Morrison’s Decryptions of the Masculine
Susan Neal Mayberry
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8080/2017.05.005
Alfred University, Alfred, New York, United States
This essay not only provides an original investigation of Toni Morrison’s 2012 novel, Home, but it carries on the examination of Morrison and the masculine that Susan Neal Mayberry began in her 2007 book published by the University of Georgia Press: Can’t I Love What I Criticize? Reflecting Morrison’s adroit ability to engage imaginatively with several subjects simultaneously, Home encapsulates most of the themes that have fueled her fiction, establishing itself, in New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani’s words, as “a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre”. The novel continues to track such well-known paths as white male houses versus black male homes, the disruption of classical and popular masculine myths, the free black male, the traveling Ulysses scene, African American trauma, and the possibility of redemption via unmotivated respect. It also explores some new directions such as a brother/sister partnership and the fiction of gender unveiled by masculine sartorial performance. Since her tenth book undeniably becomes a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Morrison and the masculine, “Home as a Rosetta Stone for Toni Morrison’s Decryptions of the Masculine” contributes to gender studies and to American/African American cultural studies.
Home, Toni Morrison, African American culture, black masculinity, gender studies
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