Following the traces of female desire in Toni Morrison's 'Jazz'.

Toni Morrison's exploration of desire seeps into every aspect of her novel Jazz, from the richness of her style to the content matter of her love triangle. She moves from clarinets on Harlem street corners which awaken desire in passers-by to an eighteen-year-old girl with a pock-marked face awakening desire in a fifty-year-old married man. What becomes clear, however, is that Morrison is not simply telling the story of the conflicting sexual desires of Violet Trace, her husband Joe, and his eighteen-year-old lover Dorcas. Rather, she is theorizing the nature of desire, particularly African-American female desire, and its effect on narrative. In Jazz, Morrison broadens traditional approaches to desire by considering factors of race and gender and by removing female desire from its rut of sexual embodiment.

Specifically, Morrison suggests that sexual desire becomes the only desire operative when the fulfillment of other desires is denied and that what African-American women currently most desire, and what is currently most denied to them, is subjectivity, the consciousness needed to act as a subject. She then lays out a subject formation process needed to fulfill this desire for subjectivity and suggests that this formation is instigated by the violent element in female desire and culminates in a process of female bonding based on recognizing other women as subjects.(1) Finally, through the setting of her story, Harlem in the 1920s, she brings out the significance of her vision of black female desire by contextualizing it within the African-American desire embodied in the Harlem Renaissance.

Morrison begins her story with sexual desire because that is the only level of desire her character Violet initially understands. The narrator tells the plot of this desire quickly in the first two pages:

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on

Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old

girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad

and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman,

her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead

face they threw her to the floor and out of the church.... There was

never anyone to prosecute [Joe Trace] because nobody actually saw him

do it, and the dead girl's aunt didn't want to throw money to helpless

lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn't

improve anything. Besides, she found out that the man who killed her

niece cried all day and for him and for Violet that is as bad as jail. (3-4)

Driven by his sexual desire first to seek out Dorcas and then to kill her "to keep the feeling going," Joe has created his own jail or personal hell; and driven by her sexual desire into the jealous rage that makes her slash the dead girl's face, Violet has also created her own jail. But Violet and Joe do not stay in their self-created jails because Violet learns of her desire for subjectivity, the desire that Morrison's book theorizes and bases on the theory of jazz.

The Blueprint of Jazz

In Jazz, Morrison highlights how contemporary black female desire has derived from the cultural context of an African-American heritage to include an element of violence as it struggles, with the aid of female bonding, toward its object of subjectivity. And the music denoted by the title of her novel, jazz, becomes the blueprint for her theory of black female desire. She sees desire, like jazz, as both a creative and violent force, and, also like jazz, she sees desire creating solo voices within a community. Speaking of Alice Manfred, Dorcas's aunt, and her interpretation of jazz, the narrator tells us:

It faked happiness, faked welcome, but

it did not make her feel generous, this

juke joint, barrel hooch, tonk house,

music. It made her hold her hand in

the pocket of her apron to keep from

smashing it through the glass pane to

snatch the world in her fist and

squeeze the life out of it for doing what

it did and did and did to her and

everybody else she knew or knew

about. (59)

The emotion connected to this juke joint music is not happiness or generosity but the desire to be someone not molded by the world as she is, and this desire instigates a violence to do something to this world that so obstructs her.

The importance of jazz in Morrison's novel is emphasized by its running as a motif throughout the text. The novel begins with a sound, a rhythm, rather than a word: "sth." And the novel itself is constructed as variations on a theme. The theme, the simple plot of the Joe-Violet-Dorcas triangle, is presented, as we have seen, in the first paragraph, and the rest of the novel presents variations on this theme. The narrative point-of-view switches to various characters either through focus or through the literal handing over of the narrative instrument so that each character can perform his or her own improvisation of the theme. Morrison sees the African-American novel as the form that has taken over the function of jazz in the black community (McKay "Introduction" 1),(2) and Jazz has certainly taken over its form as well as its function.

The function of jazz is to speak desire, and in Morrison's novel, jazz becomes the voice of desire. It is created by musicians to give voice to their buried desires, and jazz, in turn, awakens its listeners' buried desires, seen first as sexual desires and then as the desires that make Alice want to "squeeze the life out of [the world] for doing what it did ... to her" (59). In an interview with Nellie McKay, Morrison explains that the reason jazz speaks desire is because, as McKay puts it, it has no "emotional closure" ("introduction" 1). Morrison explains that "jazz always keeps you on the edge. There is no final chord" ("Interview" 411). She sees this unfulfilled desire, this "quality of hunger and disturbance," as being specifically related to African Americans; it is "an ineffable quality ... that is curiously black" ("interview" 409).

In The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond, Joachim Berendt also connects jazz to desire. He defines the sound of jazz as that of "the human voice, plaintive and complaining, crying and screaming, sighing and moaning" (149-50), and he calls this sound "expressive," "erotic," "earthy," full of "sorrow and lostness," and "gripping" (159). The blues, a type of jazz that Berendt calls "the essence of jazz" (162), is most readily defined through an emotional definition as the feeling of those who want what they don't have--and, more particularly, aren't "allowed" to get.

Langston Hughes leaves no doubt in our minds about the historical connection of jazz rhythms to the black desire for freedom and of this desire's connection to violence. In Montage of A Dream Deferred, he uses jazz rhythms in poems about the inevitable violence lurking behind dreams too often crushed. The speaker in "Harlem" answers the question "What happens to a dream deferred?" with another question, "... does it explode?" (268). Characters in Morrison's novel also hear the dangers of desire--the notes of rebellion--in jazz: "The lowdown music ... had something to do with the silent women and men marching down Fifth Avenue to advertise their anger over two hundred dead in East St. Louis, ... killed in the [race] riots" (57).

Not only is jazz thematically connected to violence, but it is structurally connected to it as well. The structure of jazz is simultaneously creative and violent and is often described with a suggestively violent vocabulary. In "Jazz as Social Structure, Process, and Outcome," David Bastien and Todd Hostager refer to its "basic turbulence" and "frictional sounds." This turbulence is based on the uncertainty of what will happen as the music unfolds due to its improvisational nature (150) and is a result of jazz's "frictional sounds, ... which certainly can be interpreted as arising from a friction between two different harmonic systems," that of the European tradition and that found in African music (164). Berendt describes the sounds of jazz rhythms as "hard, direct," and "eruptive" (149-50), and he suggests that in jazz there is a "tendency ... to create tension only to dissolve it immediately and then to create new tension that is again dissolved" (164), leading one to ask whether undissolved tension explodes.

Jazz is also the perfect vehicle for suggesting that the object of desire is subjectivity: Jazz wouldn't be jazz without the improvisation of soloists. Specifically, what's most important about jazz soloists is not that they be technically the best but that they find their own flair and style. Berendt tells us that "phrases are created that belong to the player as expressions of artistic personality" (156), while Bastien and Hostager state that "improvisation is the assumed and expected mode of individual behavior" (151). These characteristics of the jazz soloist resonate with Morrison's own idea of black female subjectivity as something that cannot be specifically and universally defined. She instead suggests that each woman has to discover her own musical flair and style.

Additionally, jazz is relevant to Morrison's view that subjectivity is formed with the help of others. Bastien, Hostager, and Berendt agree that the soloist does not play in a vacuum--that the group is imperative to the determination of the soloist and to the construction of jazz. Bastien and Hostager remind us that "only on a simplistic and formal level is the soloist truly in charge of the artistic direction of the performance, for the solo is clearly both enabled and constrained by the background" (164). Berendt points out that, because of the inability to claim conclusively the group or the soloist as the most important element in jazz, jazz has been called both "the music of the collective" and "the music of boundless individualism" (161). Basically, the subject cannot exist without the ensemble.

Desire in the Harlem of the 1920s

An important element in the theory of desire as it is derived from jazz is that the soloist can be either male or female. While most of the instrumental soloists were male, black female vocalists such as Bessie Smith and Sara Martin were the backbone of the tradition. However, by setting her story in the Harlem of the '20s, Morrison reminds us of how the Harlem Renaissance, one historical enactment of this desire, omitted the female element from its dominant political discourse despite the number of black women contributing to the movement.(3) This enactment of desire retained the necessary element of violence and ultimately saw its object to be subjectivity, but it was a black male desire driving toward a black male subjectivity.

Harlem is an appropriate backdrop to Morrison's novel because of its historical connection to desire both as the object of desire during the Great Migration of the first part of the twentieth century and as the place where desires were fulfilled during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. On January 7, 1921, the New York Dispatch published an article entitled "The Hope and Promise of Harlem" which presented the economic security of Harlem as the reason for its ability to answer dreams: "Here, where money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years, a happy, thrifty people are working out a greater destiny for the Race, by solving their economic and political problems day by day" (qtd. in Vincent 75). Through the comparison of the money in Harlem to the most "eloquent lover," Harlem itself takes on the role of the "eloquent lover" whose role is to satisfy every desire.

In Morrison's text, Harlem is connected to desire both through these historical events--Joe and Violet come to Harlem in 1906 as part of the Great Migration, and the story itself is set in 1926, the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance--and through descriptions of the city itself as an object of and vehicle for desire. The narrator of Jazz, an unnamed observer in the community whose distance from Morrison's viewpoint varies, describes her feelings toward the City in terms of a lover.(4) She says, "I'm crazy about this City.... A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things" (7). She further explains that the city "does pump desire" (34) and, because of that, becomes what its inhabitants desire.(5)

Morrison suggests that the desire of this historical moment was to be "more like the people they always believed they were" (35)--to find, in other words, the subjectivity they always knew they possessed. Historically, Morrison's view that subjectivity was the object of this desire is accurate. A great driving force of the Harlem Renaissance was to present a new subjectivity for the "Negro." This "New Negro," as he was called, was not the supposedly intellectually and spiritually inferior being that whites had built their systems of first slavery and then racism upon nor the brutal animal that they claimed emerged after WWI. He was a "man." On October 10, 1919, Roscoe Dunjee, addressing a white audience, would claim in the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch that "... the cornerstone upon which rests all of our difficulties is YOUR UNWILLINGNESS TO RECOGNIZE THE NEGRO AS A MAN. Now the Negro is a man, and a free man" (qtd. in Vincent 65). An article in the New York Amsterdam News entitled "The Spirit of the New Negro" further defined this new subjectivity by claiming that the New Negro was independent as an individual and part of a group that was independent as a race, which meant he was free to think and act as a subject and to support himself economically, politically, and spiritually through what was provided by his people (qtd. in Vincent 74-75).

During the 1910s and '20s, the desire for this "New Negro" resulted in violence. This violence was not indiscriminate but directed at that which obstructed the struggle for subjectivity. After WWI, white veterans returned to reclaim their old jobs, expecting the black men and women who held them to return to their lower-status positions. Instead, African Americans rebelled in the race riots mentioned in Morrison's text.

Morrison is definitely presenting the Harlem of the 1920s as an historical moment which enacted the theory of desire depicted in jazz. The desire of this Harlem has subjectivity as its object and includes an element of violence. Morrison is also a new solo voice reinterpreting and improvising on the themes of desire, violence, and subjectivity. She introduces the term female after the term black to suggest a gendered theory of desire.

The Keynote of Jazz

By including female, Morrison is following the tradition of Bessie Smith and Sara Martin and noting the omission made by those stating that the goal of the New Negro was to be a "Man." The task Morrison sets for herself in reinterpreting this goal is to introduce the concept of a black female subjectivity separate from that of a black male. She suggests that black females must have a consciousness of themselves not as adjuncts of black males but as a power in their own right. A corollary to this new theory of black female desire is that it opens up space for a new concept of male subjectivity not based on the sexist, patriarchal term Man but on the ability to recognize women as subjects.(6) Ultimately, Morrison shows that sexism and racism are interlocking systems of oppression in the dominant ideology of Western culture and that black women must achieve not only the mental state of seeing themselves as subjects(7) but also the social state of being recognized as subjects by dominant cultural discourses.

How does this novel accomplish the task Morrison sets for herself? How does it theorize a black female desire that posits subjectivity as its object and that, in turn, frees black males from their desire to be "Men"?(8) It does so by setting forth the story of how Joe, Violet, and Dorcas's "love" triangle turns into Joe, Violet, and Felice's triangle when Felice, Dorcas's best friend, steps in for the dead Dorcas. The implication is that the two scenarios will be identical, that whatever variations are presented in the second will be based on the same chordal structure as the first. And this chordal structure is that dominant desire, the inherently violent desire constructed by the dominant ideology, will drive the narrative. As we shall see, however, this is not the case, and the second scenario actually presents a new interpretation based on a different chordal structure.

On the surface, Jazz seems like an enactment of Teresa de Lauretis's implication in Alice Doesn't that "narrative demands sadism" (103), that a violent male desire (what I am calling dominant desire) drives every narrative and that women have no option but to be the objects through which male subjects move. Thus, the second scenario must be some kind of reenactment of the first, in which Joe shoots Dorcas when he catches her dancing with another man and Violet, in a jealous rage, slashes the dead girl's face at her funeral. Even the narrator erroneously predicts that, because "narrative demands sadism," violence will also result from the desire inherent in this second "scandal" but that "what turn[s] out different is who shot whom" (6).

Morrison, however, does something different in the narrative of her second triangle. Its uniqueness is emphasized by the fact that her narrator, colonized so well by her environment, doesn't expect it. She is as surprised as her readers are when the second scenario does not mimic the first, but replaces death with life and destruction with creativity. She says,

... I missed it altogether. I was sure

one would kill the other. I waited for it

so I could describe it. I was so sure it

would happen. That the past was an

abused record with no choice but to

repeat itself at the crack and no power

on earth could lift the arm that held

the needle. (220)

What turns out different is the driving force behind the narrative, the power that lifts the needle, a force we're so unused to seeing that even the narrator doesn't expect it. This force behind the second scenario is black female desire.

Shrinking Violets

In order to understand the difference embedded in a narrative driven by female desire, we must first understand the process of one driven by dominant desire. Exploring the repressive nature of a dominant desire for objectification and power in her first scenario, Morrison shows how this desire both marks black women's bodies and colonizes their minds. She assures us that Joe's violent shooting of Dorcas is not an isolated incident but that every "[news]paper laid bare the bones of some broken woman. Man kills wife. Eight accused of rape dismissed. Woman and girl victims of.... Woman says man beat. In jealous rage man" (74). But Morrison expands this view of desire's physical violence to include a psychological violence as well. While dominant desire literally kills Dorcas, it figuratively kills Dorcas and Violet as subjects long before the trigger is pulled--and, ironically enough, Joe himself after the trigger is pulled.

Morrison is as concerned with dominant desire's psychological "killing" of female subjectivity as with its physical killing of women themselves. Because this desire fixes women as its objects, it "allows" them to be subjects in very limiting ways--in ways that reinscribe their object position, in ways that reenact a Foucauldian view of subject as also "subjected to." For example, as such objects, all that women "subjects" can "desire" is to become the object of a man's desire.

The very existence of Violet, because she is a female "subject" of dominant desire, is reduced to wanting to be wanted by Joe. When she discovers that Joe desires Dorcas, she plots to win Joe back by learning all that she can about Dorcas so she can become her. Such a project, of course, has to fail, so Violet then resorts to drinking sodas to rebuild her ass and thus attract Joe once again. Clearly, Violet has no sense of herself as one of Morrison's female subjects with her own desires.

It is significant that Violet's "ass," or lack thereof, becomes Morrison's trope for women's discredibility through dominant eyes. In this interpretation, woman is not "lack" to be filled by man; rather, lack suggests "non-woman." As "ass," she is the tangible, secure object of the male gaze. As "ass," she is also, yet again, reduced to her body. Violet's devout dedication to drinking sodas--to changing herself from the "non-woman" she has become back into the "ass" she so much wants to be--shows just how much she is colonized by this sexist, racist ideology.

Dorcas, on the other hand, seems at first glance a more independent subject than Violet. She doesn't seem subjected to Joe, as he is the one who rushes to satisfy her demands. She even says, "With Joe I worked the stick of the world, the power in my hand" (191). But Dorcas is uncomfortable with this type of power and thus captures the most sought-after male in her community, Acton, a male who "owns" his women and constructs them--what Dorcas calls giving her a "personality" (190). This "personality" is the object that molds to Acton's desire, and Dorcas is finally happy.(9) She explains,

Acton, now, he tells me when he doesn't

like the way I fix my hair. Then I do

it how he likes it. I never wear glasses

when he is with me and I changed my

laugh for him to one he likes better.

(190)

Dorcas's letting herself bleed to death may belie the pleasure she says she feels as an object, or it may be the culmination of such thinking, since dying at the hands of her ex-lover is the ultimate "romantic" position--a position that truly gives her a "personality."(10) But given these insights into what Dorcas desires, we begin to wonder which is more violent, Joe's literal killing of her or Joe's and Acton's psychological killing of her subjectivity.

Morrison recognizes that the blank page Dorcas has become is more than just the passive receptor of patriarchal scratchings--it is also white. She recognizes the intertwined sexism and racism of dominant desire that insists that, in order for black women to desire to be a patriarchal object, they must also desire to be white.(11) Morrison makes sure we know that the black women in this community straighten their hair, a fact emphasized by Violet's doing much of the straightening herself as an unlicensed hairdresser. And she shows how much Violet's mind has been colonized by the importance of whiteness by having her say that the woman she should be is "white" and "light" (208). Violet is also convinced that Joe's desire for Dorcas stems from her being both younger and "whiter" than she. Finally, Morrison reminds us how colonized women perpetuate colonization by having the black woman Violet most admires when she is young instill in her a desire for this white beauty.

The ironic twist in this first violent scenario is that dominant desire ends up killing Joe as a subject, too. It becomes clear that the male subject created by this desire is dependent on having an object, and if the object is removed, the subject, figuratively, dies. When Dorcas becomes the object of another man, Joe's act of shooting her is not just a revengeful one. He hopes to fix the image of her in his mind so that he can always have his object with him. In a Keatsian gesture, Joe tries to "sear her into his mind, brand her there against future wear. So that neither she nor the alive love of her will fade or scab over" (28-29). But Morrison shows the horror and the error of this Romantic tenet: A woman dies, and Joe's desire fades, killing his will to act, his subjectivity, and leaving an almost zombie-like Joe crying and staring out his window.

Violent Violets

Through the second scenario in Jazz, Morrison shows that female subjectivity derives from female not dominant desire. The site for the emergence of this new female desire is Violet herself. Violet explains her transformation to Felice. Before, she had an image in her head of whom she should be: "White. Light. Young again" (208), an image of the "perfect woman," the object of dominant desire. Felice asks her what she did to this image and Violet replies, "Killed her. Then I killed the me that killed her." When asked "who's left," Violet says, "Me," saying it "like it was the first she heard the word" (209). Here, Violet lays out three stages in her transformation: the killing of the "object me," the killing of the "killing me," and the creation of the "subject me."

Drawing on jazz as a model of desire, Morrison sees that female desire must reckon with violence as well as creativity--Violet must kill parts of herself before she can create herself.(12) Such a conviction will make many feminists uneasy, myself included, who for political and/or pacifist reasons want to see violence as a tenet only of dominant desire. But this violence of female desire is not the same as that of dominant desire. It is not the violence of a male dominant subject, the "randy aggressiveness" Joe "enjoy[s]" with Dorcas (29). Nor is it the violence of a female dominant subject, the jealous violence that makes Violet slash Dorcas's dead face or that makes the narrator think Violet will shoot someone in the second scenario (6). Rather, it is the violence used to resist dominant violence, the physical violence used by many black women in Violet's community to fight back. We're told that "black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose" (77). It is also the violence directed against the internalized patriarchal subject and derived from a metaphorical reading of Violet's violent action--it's what Violet's slashing of Dorcas's face comes to mean to her: the killing of the "object me."

Violet consciously rejects and kills her "object me" when she comes to terms with Dorcas. As I've said earlier, she begins her obsessive drive to discover all she can about Dorcas because she wants to become her and thus regain Joe's attention. But in the midst of her obsession with Dorcas, Violet steps back and realizes that "not only is she losing Joe to a dead girl, but she wonders if she isn't falling in love with her, too," as "she is having whispered conversations with the corpse in her head" (15). This conspiring connection between two "objects" is the first step in destroying the female object position as it disrupts the dominant ideology that casts women as rivals. Additionally, Violet is at first attracted to Dorcas's apparent power, but then recognizes it as the part in both of them that lives to please men. She finally sees her violent attack on Dorcas's dead body as a metaphorical attack on the patriarchal object that both are supposed to be.

Violet unconsciously starts to kill her "object me"--to publicly rebel against her object position--before she slashes Dorcas's face and causes the community to call her "Violent" instead of "Violet." The disruption at the funeral starts the name, but it is implied that the community explains that action as jealousy and thus contains it (4). What can't be contained is Violet's previous random, unexplainable acts that make her a threat to the community because they break the image of whom she should be, a patriarchal object, and of how she should act, as a patriarchal subject. For example, her suddenly sitting down in the middle of the street instead of going about her business of being the "mule o' the world"--the "ass," the patriarchal subject/object--makes them gossip. The fact that she irrationally frees pet birds that were meant to be caged, leaving the parrot who mimics "I love you" out in the cold to fend for himself, makes them raise their eyebrows. It is as if she has let herself instead of the birds out of her cage, out of the position the community expects her to fulfill. She has refused to be lulled into accepting that position by the rote repetition of "I love you" by a male who doesn't even understand the meaning of the words. Such deviations--such killings of the "object me"--lead the community first to call her crazy and then to call her "Violent."

The second stage of Violet's development into a "subject me" is represented by her killing this violent part of herself. She recognizes this "killing me"--"that other Violet"--who "saw how the ice skim gave the railing's black poles a weapony glint" (89) and who "knew the knife was in the parrot's cage and not in the kitchen drawer" (90). We, however, are not actually shown how she "killed the me that killed her" (209). But we are left to wonder what prompts Violet to kill this stage. How does she know that the "killing me" doesn't represent the "subject me" she desires? This prompter is her female desire, emerging from the depths of her psyche, a desire for a subjectivity different from what she's already seen.

Blooming Violets

Morrison depicts the eruption of Violet's desire for subjectivity in both her language and her actions. First, we're told that Violet would suddenly feel "the anything-at-all begin in her mouth. Words connected only to themselves pierced an otherwise normal comment" (23). The narrator further emphasizes the rebelliousness and unusual nature of this desire by referring to these occurrences as "collapses," "a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own," and "a wayward mouth" (24). Second, we're told of Violet's suddenly "abnormal" behavior when she tries to steal a woman's baby and when she suddenly sits down in the middle of the road. The narrator explains that the impetus for these behaviors come from the "cracks" or "dark fissures" in the "globe light of the day," in the everyday activities sanctioned by dominant ideology, and she further implies that these cracks provide glimpses into a rebellious psyche. The narrator elaborates:

I call them cracks because that is what

they were. Not openings or breaks, but

dark fissures in the globe light of the

day. She wakes up in the morning and

sees with perfect clarity a string of

small, well-lit scenes. In each one

something specific is being done

... but she does not see herself doing

these things. She sees them being

done. The globe light holds and bathes

each scene, and it can be assumed that

at the curve where the light stops is a

solid foundation. In truth, there is no

foundation at all, but alleyways,

crevices one steps across all the time.

But the globe light is imperfect too.

Closely examined it shows seams, ill-glued

cracks and weak places beyond

which is anything. Anything at all. (22-23)

The globe light of the conscious mind, generated by a dominant system, does not show women as agents: Violet "does not see herself" acting as a subject in these scenes governed by dominant ideology. The cracks into the unconscious mind, however, show that this globe light--this dominant ideology--has "no foundation at all." Beyond the globe light is the "anything at all" of the unconscious mind. Erupting from the psyche through these dark cracks is the "anything at all" of female desire which pushes through Violet's conscious sense of how she should be and makes her act from a place deep within her.

In Jazz, Morrison goes on to remind us, first, that this disruptive, female desire is unfamiliar and initially threatening by having Violet afraid of it and, second, that we must learn to decipher it by having Violet initially misinterpret it. Violet's initial response to these outbursts is to "shut up" (23). And the first time she tries to act on this desire she thinks that what she wants is a baby. Not knowing that what she really desires is herself, she misreads her desire through the dominant lens which allows mothers to experience subjectivity through their children. She, however, does reject her misinterpretation and returns the baby before anyone could prove she was going to take it, but she still doesn't know how to turn her unusual promptings into a "subject me."

Violet moves to the third stage of creating her "subject me" when she recognizes the erupting subject position of another women, Dorcas's aunt Alice, who is afraid of the "juke joint, barrel hooch, tonk house, music" because it speaks of a "complicated anger" (59). We are told that, when Violet and Alice talk in Alice's kitchen, "something opened up" (83). That something is the possibility of subjectivity. Morrison sees two aspects to this last stage of her subject formation process: First, women must recognize each other as subjects, and, second, the new subjectivity must be cemented through action.

It is significant that this last stage in Violet's subject formation needs more than just her own motivating desire for subjectivity. She also needs to see this new subjectivity emerging in other women--she needs to recognize women as subjects. This process of forming a subject through recognizing an other as subject is what Jessica Benjamin calls "intersubjectivity." Like Morrison, Benjamin sees the aspects of self as innate, something that "each individual brings with her from infancy--agency and receptivity toward the world." But before these aspects can be inscribed in a subject position, they must be recognized. This recognition occurs when person A recognizes person B as a subject independent of A's fantasies of B, when she "acknowledges that the other person really exists in the here and now, not merely in the symbolic dimension." Thus, for Benjamin, the intersubjective mode becomes a place "where two subjects meet, where both woman and man can be subject" (93).

bell hooks adds another dimension to this intersubjective mode, which is politically determined by an African-American context. She shows that the subject formation process is dependent on both employing the subject-recognizing gaze denied African Americans and on being gazed upon as a subject instead of an object, hooks elaborates:

That way "downhome" black folks

had of speaking to one another, looking

one another directly in the eye

(many of us had old folks tell us, don't

look down, look at me when I'm talking 

to you) was not some quaint country.

gesture. It was a practice of resistance

undoing years of racist teachings

that had denied us the power of recognition,

the power of the gaze. These

looks were affirmations of our being, a

balm to wounded spirits. They

opposed the internalized racism or

alienated individualism that would

have us turn away from one another,

aping the dehumanizing practices of

the colonizer. (39)

What becomes specific to Morrison in her gendered subject-making process is that the "other" that must be recognized as a subject must be a female for the process to be effective. She shows this process specifically working in the interaction between Violet and Alice. At first, Violet and Alice don't recognize each other as subjects. Alice sees Violet as the crazy, violent woman who "would end up in jail one day" (79). Violet thinks of Alice as either "a dignified lady" (6) or just as Dorcas's aunt. But during the course of their conversation, Violet says, "I'm not the one you need to be scared of." When asked who is, she says, "I don't know. That's what hurts my head" (80). It is in figuring out what hurts Violet's head and what makes Alice angry that the two come to see each other as subjects.

Also necessary to Morrison's subject formation process is the testing out of a new subjectivity through action to cement it into place. Her belief can be read as an extension of Patricia Hill Collins's conviction that "the struggle for a self-defined Afrocentric feminist consciousness occurs through a merger of thought and action" (28). This need for completing change through action is another reason for the second "triangle" in Jazz. We've seen that it is used to show the reader what a narrative driven by female desire looks like. It is also used to show that Violet is really developing a new subjectivity. When placed in an identical situation, she acts differently.

The first sign that the day Felice walks into Violet's life is not going to repeat the Dorcas scenario is heralded by the fact that "on this day, ... [Violet] didn't care about her missing behind because she came out the door and stood on the porch with her elbows in her hands and her stockings rolled down to her ankles" (197). Violet doesn't "care about her missing behind," and Morrison no longer uses the word ass because Violet, on this day, is no longer trying to make herself into a patriarchal object.

Violet's subjectivity, however, is very new: She's just "returned Dorcas's photograph to Alice Manfred. But the space where the photo had been was real." Violet, thus, at first slips, and when she sees Felice "she easily believed that what was coming up the steps toward her was another true-as-life Dorcas, four marcelled waves and all" (197). Her initial reaction is that Felice "makes [her] nervous. She makes [her] wonder if this fine weather will last more than a day." She wonders if her new subjectivity will last because Felice "make[s her] doubt [her] own self" (198).

Violet, however, does act differently. She invites Felice in. They talk. Something opens up. Violet shows Felice a female subject and looks at her as a female subject. Felice thinks, "... there is nothing crazy about her at all" (202). She tells us, "She doesn't lie, Mrs. Trace. Nothing she says is a lie the way it is with most older people" (205). Violet tells Felice, "If you don't [change the world], it will change you and it'll be your fault cause you let it" (208). She tells her, "Now I want to be the woman my mother didn't stay around long enough to see" (208). And Violet says "me,"

like it was the first she heard of the

word.... Not like the "me" was some

tough somebody, or somebody she

had put together for show. But like,

like somebody she favored and could

count on. A secret somebody you

didn't have to feel sorry for or have to

fight for. (209-10)

Violet acts out of her new subjectivity.

The added by-product of Violet's subjectivity is that Joe, too, finds a new subjectivity of his own--a subjectivity based on a male desire that acknowledges the objectifying quality of his patriarchal gaze and begins to form a new gaze which recognizes women as subjects. He finally learns that "she ain't prey" (175) to be hunted, and he is drawn out of his zombie-like state.

Joe, thus, begins to treat Violet as a female subject. When she brings him his food, he says, "Thank you, baby. Take half for yourself." And Felice notices "something about the way he said it. As though he appreciated it ... like he meant it" (207). He also treats Felice as a female subject. She tells us, "I like when he looks at me. I feel, I don't know, interesting. He looks at me and I feel deep--as though the things I feel and think are important and different and ... interesting" (206). Joe is no longer looking with the patriarchal gaze. He is instead seeing a subject who feels and thinks. Joe is acting out of his new subjectivity based on his new male desire.

Grown People

Morrison ends Jazz with three people exploring the power of subjectivity and its resulting possibilities for love. Talking of Violet's and Joe's new love, the expression of their new desires, the narrator explains,

It's nice when grown people whisper

to each other under the covers. Their

ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and

the body is the vehicle, not the point.

They reach, grown people, for something

beyond, way beyond and way,

way down underneath tissue. (228)

Violet and Joe are reaching for something "way beyond" the confines of dominant desire and for something "way, way down underneath tissue"--for their buried centers of black female and black male desire.

Felice is also acting out of her center of black female desire, and the narrator emphasizes how unique such a position is by telling us that Felice's "tempo is next year's news" (222). We know that her actions are those of a female subject because " ... whether raised fists freeze in her company or open for a handshake, she's nobody's alibi or hammer or toy" (222). She is no longer an object to be beaten or used or played with, but a subject to be recognized and respected.

At the end of Jazz, Morrison leaves us with an understanding of black female desire as a desire antithetical to dominant desire and steeped in the need to recognize women as subjects. What is new in her understanding of female desire is its need of violent as well as creative elements. What becomes hazy is whether Morrison is speaking only of a black female desire or is theorizing a more universal concept of female desire seen in a new light because of the African-American context of jazz and the Harlem of the 1920s. But what is most important about Jazz is that today it has a readership involved in the creation of a discourse about black female desire that wasn't articulated in the 1920s and that will be heard and will have the power to "make me, remake me." As Jazz says to its readers and as I say to mine, "You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now" (229).

Notes

(1.) Seeing violence as a tenet of desire is not new, but discussions of such violence generally cast the desirer as male (see Bersani and Clayton). Theorists of female desire have generally discussed its circular, non-climatic, inclusive nature--a nature with no room for violence (see Irigaray).

(2.) See also Morrison, "Rootedness." Morrison elaborates, "For a long time, the art form that was healing Black people was music. That music is no longer exclusively ours; ... it is the mode of contemporary music everywhere. So another form has to take that place" (304).

(3.) At the 1993 UW-System Women's Studies Conference, Laurie Green reminded us of the role women played in the political movements of the time in her paper "Joans of Arc or Florence Nightingales: Contested Images of Black Womanhood in the Garvey Movement and Their Legacy Today." Although Amy Jacque Garvey, in a 1925 editorial in the Negro World, challenged, "Mr. Blackman, watch your step! Ethiopia's queens will reign again, and her Amazons protect her shores and people. Strengthen your shaking knees, and move forward, or we will displace you," Green's point is that "this emergent new consciousness and new force did not get explicitly developed as a deeper conception of full and genuine liberation by either the inheritors of Black nationalism nor of feminism" (8).

(4.) There has been much discussion of the sex of Morrison's narrator, who is referred to only by the pronoun I. The most convincing argument for a female narrator that I've heard occurred during Nellie McKay's forum discussion at the First Toni Morrison Conference in 1995, "Jazz in Jazz." An audience member pointed out that the opening sound of the book, "Sth," which, if you listen to Morrison's reading of Jazz, sounds like the tongue clicking on the teeth, is a sound made predominantly by black women.

(5.) Morrison does make this claim, but she complicates the issue first by suggesting that it is so because its inhabitants won't admit that Harlem doesn't fulfill their dreams and second by questioning the economic security that the Harlem of the Renaissance is supposed to represent. She questions this security by focusing not on the black elite of the Harlem Renaissance but on the common black people of Harlem who saw economic fluctuation and who went through several jobs to keep food on the table.

(6.) For an elaboration of this discussion, especially as it developed during the '60s and '70s of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, see Wallace.

(7.) Many current black feminist writers are showing how black women's minds are "colonized" by dominant ideology (see hooks 155). For a discussion of the controlling images used to oppress and colonize black women, such as the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare mother, the Jezebel, and other controlling images of beauty, see Collins 67-82.

(8.) Jazz is a truly contemporary text in its insistence that black men don't have to be left behind in black women's struggle for liberation. I am reminded of Nikki Giovanni's poem "Woman," which suggests that in the '80s black women had to leave black men behind: "she decided to become / a woman / and though he still refused / to be a man / she decided it was all / right."

(9.) See Coward for a discussion of how a dominant system uses "female" desire to perpetuate itself and of how a reward of pleasure is offered to offset the psychological damage done to women during the process.

(10.) We have seen that Dorcas has been what Gubar calls the "blank page" to be written on and created into an art object by the male artist. We should resist, however, seeing Dorcas's letting herself bleed to death as changing her into Guber's female artist using the only materials available to her, her body and her blood. Gubar's artists participate in a resistance to authority in which Dorcas has no part.

(11.) Exploring the white standard of beauty imposed on black women and the resulting psychological damage is a theme throughout Morrison's work. See especially The Bluest Eye.

(12.) Jazz is not the first novel in which Morrison has explored female violence. But in her other novels, female violence has fallen into two categories: First, women are violent when a man refuses them their object role or refuses to take on his assigned subject role (see Hagar's response to Milkman in Song of Solomon and Mrs. Breedlove's response to her husband in The Bluest Eye); and, second, women are violent out of what I call motherlove (see Pilot's violent protection of her daughter and granddaughter in Song of Solomon, Eva's killing of Plum in Sula, and Sethe's killing of her baby girl in Beloved). Both these types of violence are "self-less," not motivated by a sense of self as a subject, and contrast with Violet's "self-full" violence in Jazz.

Works Cited

Bastien, David T., and Todd J. Hostager. "Jazz as Social Structure, Process, and Outcome." Jazz in Mind: Essays on the History and Meanings of Jazz. Ed. Reginald T. Backner and Steven Weiland. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991. 149-65.

Benjamin, Jessica. "A Desire of One's Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space." Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986. 78-103.

Berendt, Joachim E. The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond. Rev. Gunther Huesmann. Trans. H. and B. Bredigkeit, et al. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill, 1992.

Bersani, Leo. A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature. Boston: Little, 1978.

Clayton, Jay. "Narrative Theories of Desire." Critical Inquiry 16.1 (1989): 33-53.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Coward, Rosalind. "Female Desire and Sexual Identity." Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the 1980s: Selected Papers. Ed. Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, et al. Amsterdam: Benjamine, 1985. 25-36.

de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Giovanni, Nikki. "Woman." Cotton Candy on a Reiny Day. New York: Quill, 1980. 71.

Green, Laurie Beth. "Joans of Arc or Florence Nightingales: Contested Images of Black Womanhood in the Garvey Movement and Their Legacy Today." UW-System Women's Studies Conference, U of Wisconsin-Parkside, 7 Oct. 1993.

Gubar, Susan. "`The Blank Page' and the Issue of Female Creativity." The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 292-313.

hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End P, 1990.

Hughes, Langston. "Montage of a Dream Deferred." Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage, 1990. 221-72.

Irigaray, Luce. "When Our Lips Speak Together." This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 205-18.

McKay, Nellie Y. "An Interview with Toni Morrison." Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 396-411.

--. "Introduction." Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Ed. McKay. Boston: Hall, 1988. 1-15.

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.

--. "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." Black Women Writers, 1950-1980. Ed. Mad Evans. New York: Anchor, 1984. 339-45.

Vincent, Theodore G., ed. Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance. San Francisco: Ramparts P, 1973.

Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Dial, 1979.

Elizabeth M. Cannon is currently finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation is entitled "What Violent Violets' Want: Female Desire in Contemporary Women's Fiction."