Tar Baby - Toni Morrison

In Search of a New Femininity

There is an external consciousness throughout Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, one which narrates the pageant of nature on the Isle des Chevaliers. And, at the end of Chapter 10, as Jadine’s plane lifts away toward Paris and she struggles to push away the nagging emotional aftermath of a failed relationship, this external consciousness takes hold of the text and makes a forest of her path to womanhood.

The “soldier ants” anecdote does not emerge from Jadine’s mind; it is rather a central metaphor in the external life of the rainforest. But it is concluded with her sentiments toward Son, “the man who fucked like a star”. (292) And the queen, though in control of the reproductive fate of the colony, the sex of her brood, and the armies of purposeful women, still wistfully reflects upon the time when she was girlish and vulnerable, the man she allowed to give her the “one, first and last copulation”. (291) The fact that a narrative voice offers up this information leads one, at first, to believe that the passage is the prediction of an unwritten future for Jadine. She is flying to Paris to “eat her own wing muscles”, to sustain herself on her own faculties, and to mentally digest her girlish flight with Son. And she now feels capable of this, “having refused to be broken in the big ugly hands of any man”. (275) Jadine exerts an amount of control over situations throughout the text, just as she corrected the slight flaw in her fingernail with “two swift strokes” of her emery board. (290) And it is reasonable to believe that her time in Paris will be without “shoulders and limitless chests”. Despite all of her previous psychological conflict with the “night women”, it is not difficult to believe – even though it is sudden – that she is ready to join the colony, to engage in “the life of their world” which “requires organization so tight and sacrifice so complete.”