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Stefanie Mueller. The Presence of the Past in the Novels of Toni Morrison

The first sentence of this dissertation makes a concession or perhaps even offers a kind of apology: “In the last twenty years much has been said about the presence of the past in the novels of Toni Morrison”. Stefanie Mueller has two strategies to escape this dilemma, which seems to question her choice of topic. On the one hand she focuses on Toni Morrison’s most recent novels only, which have been less subject to the spawning Toni Morrison industry, on the other she approaches them from an unusual theoretical vantage point, which is defined by the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias, that is from a sociological point of view. At the centre of attention is the concept of the habitus – as a main determiner of the past and of (unconscious) memory, as well as Elias’s opposition of outsider and established. The latter opposition allows for a more precise exploration of phenomena of marginalization, e. g. in Beloved and in Paradise. Mueller begins with a discussion of her main theoreticians Elias and Bourdieu, especially of the concept of the habitus, which is taken to be neither subjective nor entirely objective in nature, though placing a definite emphasis on social relations. She offers the definition that the habitus “comprises the schemes of perception, action, and appreciation that agents apply to the social world” (33). These are transmitted “unconsciously”, taken for granted and objectified in institutions, they are even “the source of the constancy of social relations and hierarchies” (37). One may well wonder at this point why such a social embeddedness, which is unconsciously acquired in socialization, should be applied to the African Americans, whose strategies of self-fashioning are characterised not so much by integration into a single habitus or accommodation to given institutions of the establishment, than by a state of schizophrenia, of being between more than one habitus and signifying upon the established norms, of experiencing two or more souls in one body. Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis would here perhaps be most appropriate. It is significant in this context that Frantz Fanon, the great theoretician of double consciousness and masking besides Du Bois, is not among the sources consulted. Perhaps the search for a new theoretical approach to Morrison’s novels leads to a simplificaAnglia 2014, 132 (2): 429–431