A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
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Book Summary Information
Author: Toni MorrisonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-08-11
ISBN: 0307276767
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780307276766
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of A Mercy
Book Review: The New Slave Narrative
Summary: 3 Stars
The genre of the slave narrative can be very off putting to some readers. The genre is often marked by its confusing use of language, and sometimes their uncomfortably harsh or violent subject matter. Toni Morrison's 2008 novel, A Mercy, continues the tradition of the slave narrative as far as the structure is concerned, however Morrison is able to bring a new unique element to the subject of the slave narrative. The book's plot is hard to follow at times, and the language is hard to wade through and somewhat inconsistent, however I would recommend this book to readers because Morrison's take on the slave narrative is unique in the fact that she doesn't focus just on black slaves but she focuses on the physical and emotional enslavement of women in the early seventeenth century. By writing a more all encompassing slave narrative Morrison is able to bring a larger demographic into the genre, making it more accessible to a wider audience.
All of these women share their stories in Morrison's novel through a stream of consciousness narrative. Their stories are told in individual chapters where the language and dialect is used to characterize the speaker. The story is told in a loose first person narrative that is sometimes purposefully inconsistent. There is no narrator between you and the reader making it difficult to figure what is going on at times. However, Morrison uses an experimental form and puts the last scene of the book first in an attempt to frame the story. When one reads this book one could be frustrated with the lack of definite plot and direct characterization, however the substance is there, one just has to be patient to put it all together. A Mercy addresses several large themes such as, physical and mental enslavement, mother-daughter relationships, the commodity of life, greed, and the human need for love and affection. The most significant of these themes is the difference between physical and mental enslavement. We see that slaves weren't just forced into a physically subordinating role but many times they unknowingly took on a subordinating mindset, and we seen this take hold in Florens. At one point Florens loses herself in an act of violence, and she is she is "a slave by choice" (167). Meaning she has been told for so long that black slaves are wild and violent that she begins to believe it, and act out violently.
Lina, Sorrow, and Florens are the women who work on the Vaark farm. They share the labors, and daily adventures of trying to run a farm. They all represent a different kind of slave. Florens, being a black slave born in America, was traded when she was a small child by her mother. She sees the event as an act of abandonment, when really her mother sought to give her to Jacob Vaark in an attempt to give her a better life, rather than be left be raped by the crude men on the plantation. Florens is haunted by this event, making her perpetually starved for attention, and it is the depravity of love that drives her to commit horrible acts of violence, that ultimately force Rebekka to put her up for sale, and abandon her as well.
Sorrow is a young white girl, who was the lone survivor of a shipwreck of the ship she worked on with her father. Sorrow is described as being " a bit mongrelized." Sorrow is mistaken for a boy when she was rescued from the ocean, because she was raised working on a ship among men, a place where she was undoubtedly taken advantage of because she is pregnant. When Rebekka is broken by the death and birth of her children, Sorrow is made whole by the birth of her daughter, as she realizes she is a part of something bigger than herself. She tells the baby " I am your mother, and my name is Complete." Sorrow renames herself, and is able to become a different person through the birth of her child.
Finally there is Lina the Native American Slave who was orphaned when her tribe was taken out by disease. Lina and two boys hid in a tree while the bodies of her familys where devoured by animals. When she was finally rescued she was taken to live among Presbyterians, who pronounced her people to be heathens. Lina accepts this title because she is " Afraid of once more losing shelter, terrified of being alone in the world without a family." However, after a strong attempt to assimilate into the Presbyterian culture they too " abandon her without so much as a murmur of fare well." She is then traded to Jacob Vaark to work on his farm. Lina is the only female on the farm till Rebekka comes, and although they share some animosity toward each other in the beginning they are united in their attempt to run the farm. Lina shares with Rebekka the remedies, and practices the mother taught her before she died. She also takes care of the women when it is cold, and they are near starvation, because she knows how to fish . However, at the end of the book Rebekka tells Lina she must stop sleeping in a hammock like she is used to. The embittered Rebekka tries to strip Lina of her native habits, many of which saved her life. By the end of the novel we see that the women had " always been tangled strings among them. Now they were cut. Each woman embargoed herself; spun her own web of thoughts unavailable to anyone else." The women are torn a part by Rebekka's anger and frustration, and her attempts to disassociate from them.
Toni Morrison takes the slave narrative to a new level in A Mercy. By setting the novel in this specific time in history she is able to tap into a unique time in American History where the slave trade was just beginning, and was not limited to black slaves, but included white and Native American indentured servants. She also shows that one doesn't have to have the title of `slave' to be a slave. We see that Lina is a slave to her circumstances, because she is afraid of being abandoned again. Florens is not only a black slave, but she is also a slave in the sense that she is a slave to her need for affection. Rebekka is also a slave to her situation, because she is sent to America to marry in hopes of a better life, and she is a slave to making her new situation work, and she ends up deserted and embittered. Sorrow is the only one who is able to have something to tie her down, and that is her child. Morrison incorporates different types of slavery into her novel. She address mental and physical slavery, and essentially what it means to be orphaned or abandoned in new, and isolating place. She emphasizes that all of her characters are slaves to their situation, and that they must go to great length to maintain what little stability they have gained in their lives. By being able to include more than just black slaves into her narrative Morrison makes her book more accessible to a wider range of people.
Summary of A Mercy
National BestsellerOne of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in ?flesh,? he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother and a daughter-a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.African American Books
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