The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,96

to Stein’s exploration, however, is the question of the relationship of freedom for women to sexuality and knowledge. In this quest, we see again the difference she makes. Three Lives moves from the contemplation of an asexual spinster’s life—the Good Anna—in its struggle for control and meaning, to and through the exploration of a quest for sexual knowledge (which Stein calls “wisdom”) in the person and body of Melanctha, an Africanistic woman; to the presumably culminating female experience of marriage and birth—the Gentle Lena. That Stein chose a black woman for the examination of the erotic suggests and theatricalizes the uses of Africanism to represent and serve as license to address illicit sexuality.

Although Stein has her tongue in her own cheek for much of the text, has firm opinions that she puts in the mouths of others, and is forthrightly comic, even parodic in some passages, we are eager to follow her fairly radical look into the true lives of these women, but in only one of them (Melanctha) does the sexual repression of the other two not only disappear, but its repudiation becomes the central theme of Melanctha’s and Stein’s enterprise. The black woman alone provides access to a meditation on sexual knowledge, and it is of utmost importance that the author calls Melanctha’s flirtations, her wanderings alone down to the docks and railroad depots to look at men, her promiscuity—all this she calls an eagerness for wisdom. The “very black” Rose is labeled promiscuous, but the half-white Melanctha is searching for knowledge. This difference in labels for presumably identical behavior is distancing and functions as a covert manner of giving dignity to one kind of inquisitiveness and discrediting another simply by marking a difference in the color of the inquirer’s skin. Further differences are notable when the comparison is between the white servants and the black women. Neither Anna nor Lena is curious about sex. Good Anna never entertains the possibility of marriage or a love. Her “romance” is with her first close friend, Mrs. Lehntman. Gentle Lena is so terrified, dull, and uninquisitive, Stein does not have to speculate on the legal sexual intercourse that takes place between Lena and her husband, Herman. She simply delivers four children, dying with the last and leaving her husband quiet, content, and himself a nurturer. Only Melanctha has courage, feels the attractive power of her black father, and the weakness of her pale yellow mother, senses that her identification with her passive mother will give her no respect; she is free to roam the streets, stand on corners, visit the scene of black men at work on the railroad, at the docks; to compete with them in fearlessness, trade barbs with them, tease and escape from them—and to talk back to them. It is Melanctha’s authoritative voice that examines, articulates, and questions erotic heterosexual love, which combats the middle class’s ideal of domestic/romantic union, and which boldly enters the field of male-female encounters as a warrior—a militant. It is interesting to me that in her probe of the value of carnal knowledge, Stein looks not toward the very black Rose, the one she ascribes unmorality and promiscuity to, but to the half-white, college-educated Melanctha. It is as though, fearless as she was, Stein could not bear to investigate these very intimate matters on the body of a very black woman—the risk of such an imaginative association seems to have been too much for her. One feels her disdain of Rose, but her admiration of Jane’s loose behavior, like Melanctha’s, is ambivalent and rendered in clearly elevated and cynical language. Jane Harden is identified as a “roughened woman. She had power and she liked to use it, she had much white blood and that made her see clear….Her white blood was strong in her and she had grit and endurance and a vital courage.” There is no mistaking Stein’s codified values and opinions regarding race. She is identifying her own self with the white blood that makes for clarity and strength and vital courage, but is working its sexual expression out on the not-white blood that courses through these bodies in apparently two separate veins. The ludicrousness of these claims of what white blood is capable of in its generic transfer of power, intelligence, and so on is, of course, emphasized by the fact that in the same breath, if not paragraph, we witness the behavior of completely white people, people with all-white blood who are passive, stupid, and so