Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home” in Toni Morrison's HomeAuthor(s): Mark A.

Tabone
Source: Utopian Studies , Vol. 29, No. 3 (2018), pp. 291-308
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/utopianstudies.29.3.0291

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Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home” in Toni Morrison’s Home

Mark A. Tabone

abstract
This article argues that there is a utopian impulse animating the work of Toni
Morrison that is best manifest in the figure of “home.” It turns to utopian scholars,
Morrison scholars, and Morrison herself to theorize home-as-utopia in Morrison’s
work and discusses the novel in which it finds its fullest expression, 2012’s Home.
It explicates how, against a demythologizing dystopian portrayal of 1950s America,
Morrison posits utopia not as an ideal or blueprint, or as an enclave or other space,
but instead as an everyday ethical practice. It links Morrison’s idea of home to Ernst
Bloch’s concept of heimat as well as what Lucy Sargisson describes as “a system of
social exchange . . . marked by the desire to give.” It thus sheds light on the “home”
that, according to Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, “has provided an ongoing hopeful thread
interweaving [Morrison’s] novels” and defines Morrison’s search for “paradise.”

keywords: Toni Morrison, Home, utopia, dystopia, African American

At the dreamlike conclusion of Toni Morrison’s 1998 novel Paradise, two

women, Piedade and Consolata, watch a ship head into port. Its crew and

Utopian Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2018

Copyright © 2018. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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Utopian Studies 29.3

passengers prepare for a moment of rest, writes Morrison, “before shoulder-

ing the endless work they were created to do down here in Paradise.”1 After
more than three hundred pages dedicated, as Tom Moylan observes, to con-
fronting “the complexities of Utopia itself,”2 Morrison’s final words on utopia
contain two critical ideas worth unpacking.
First, Morrison posits paradise in terms of “endless work”: the kinds of
collective labor, perpetual diachronic change, and purposeful world-making
that define utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope. Hope, writes
Bloch, has us bid “farewell to the closed, static concept of being” and compels
us toward “true action in the present” amid a ceaseless historical “process which
is unclosed both backwards and forwards.”3 “The world is full of propensity
towards” an “intended something,” writes Bloch, and the movement toward
this hoped-for “new” something only occurs when “the difficult processes of
what is approaching enter into concept and practice.”4 Johnny R. Griffith echoes
Bloch, as well as Moylan’s description of the critical utopia,5 in elaborating on
Morrison’s words: “Paradise, the text reminds us, can never be an achievement
but is forever a work-in-progress, permanently under construction, a rejection
of the same, a moving toward the new. Our future lies not in the establish-
ment of a moral, social, or political haven or the faithless execution of a moral
program . . . but in constantly setting off away-from-here, imagining a better
future and reaching toward it, perhaps even realizing it, and then . . . setting off
once again for an even better one. This, it seems, is the endless work we, too,
were created to do.”6 Part of this work is, of course, the work of the utopian
imagination itself, of educating desires and directing efforts for a better world.
Elsewhere, I have examined how Paradise engages in this work;7 this essay situ-
ates Paradise amid the broader context of Morrison’s long writing career, the
“endless work” she has continued well into her eighties, to argue that there is a
utopianism animating her work as a whole. The utopian horizon toward which
Morrison’s efforts reach, with all of their changes of direction, is the idea—and
the ideal—that she simply calls “Home.” After examining what utopia-as-home
means for Morrison, this essay discusses the ways in which Morrison’s “Home-
work” is manifest in what Irene Visser calls “perhaps the most optimistic of
all her work,”8 her novel Home (2012). Specifically, at the novel’s conclusion,
Morrison depicts an affirmative “beloved community” that enables healing,
belonging, and self-determination. In doing so, she rejects nostalgia and escap-
ism to posit utopia not as an ideal or blueprint, or primarily as a space, but
instead as concrete, and “endless,” ethical practice.

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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

Morrison discusses the “world-as-home that we are working for” in an

essay entitled “Home,”9 presented at the 1997 Princeton University “Race
Matters” conference while she was at work on the manuscript for Paradise.
In this essay, Morrison notably goes out of her way to distinguish between
“home” and the “imaginary landscape” she calls “Utopia,” which, she
writes, is “never home.”10 However, this quite clearly involves a termino-
logical and not a philosophical difference from Bloch. Morrison dismisses
“utopia” as “pure wishful thinking,” the colloquial, escapist, and passive
understanding of the term that Bloch also discarded and rethought.11 This
is related to the second key idea in Paradise’s closing sentence: its loca-
tion of utopia “down here,” that is, in the historical world rather than in
the escapist realm of fantasy. In  Morrison’s words, this is a reorientation
“away from an impossible future or . . . probably nonexistent Eden to a
manageable, doable, modern human activity.”12 Despite the negative con-
notation she applies to the word utopia, what Morrison outlines here clearly
resonates with Bloch’s distinction between the fanciful, “abstract” utopia,
a notion both writers dismiss as politically useless, and the “concrete” uto-
pia, which for Bloch is “fully attuned to the tendency of what is actually
real, to the objectively real possibility to which this tendency is assigned,
and consequently to the properties of reality which are themselves uto-
pian, i.e., contain future.”13 The intersection between Bloch’s concept of
the concrete utopia and Morrison’s writing has already been noted by
Heike Raphael-Hernandez in one of the few existing book-length studies
of African American utopian aesthetics. “Concreteness,” she argues, is a
defining property of this aesthetic. In her chapter on Morrison’s Beloved
(1987), Raphael-Hernandez discusses the transformations in and around the
“home-site” of 124 Bluestone Road, the haunted house that, she argues,
becomes a place of healing when “thirty women combine their power and
succeed in exorcising the ghost.”14 Morrison teaches readers about this con-
creteness by contrasting 124 Bluestone with the abstract plantation fantasy
of “Sweet Home.” The latter, writes Jewell Parker Rhodes in the inaugural
issue of Utopian Studies, is a dystopian “spoiled Eden,” corrupted by the
violence of slavery and a simultaneous denial of this violence in order to
fantasize into existence a utopian and ahistorical “sweetness.”15 By contrast,
Morrison’s concrete utopianism is firmly grounded “down here,” in part by
virtue of her work’s tendency to confront, and attempt to overcome, the
violence of history.

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Utopian Studies 29.3

As it does for Morrison, “home” has special significance as a utopian locus

for Bloch. This is readily evident in Bloch’s rehabilitated concept of heimat,
which “designates humanity’s ‘feeling at home in existence’”; importantly,
this “signifies an instance of arrival rather than origin.”16 In an essay on utopia
in the African diaspora, Bill Ashcroft writes, “It may lie in the future but the
promise of heimat transforms the present” and “looks beyond the sense of
marginality, beyond exile and loss.”17 Themes of marginality and exile, dias-
pora and displacement, are ones with which Morrison’s “Home” essay shows
her to be deeply engaged. Above all for Morrison, home connotes “searches
and yearnings for social space that is psychically and physically safe.”18
Conceptually, it anchors her work’s confrontations with issues such as “legiti-
macy, authenticity, community,” and “belonging,” especially regarding issues
of race.19 Morrison sharply contrasts home with what she calls the “house of
race,” the paradoxically confining yet alienating regime of race—complete
with its “house rules”—in which she must do her work. She also uses this
metaphorical house/home distinction to emphasize that her concerns are not
merely spatial; utopia-as-home is a safe space but also “an intellectual home;
a spiritual home; family and community as home.”20 Regarding race, Morrison
envisions a home where differences are preserved but do not matter, where
there is “racial specificity minus racist hierarchy.”21 Morrison’s “home” is also
an “open house”: a world, as she puts it, “already made for me, both snug
and wide open, with a doorway never needing to be closed.”22 This “open-
ness” signals how, for Morrison, utopia is not an exclusive isolated island, or
a hermetic domestic enclave, or a constrictive social program; it maintains an
openness to the historical world outside. Yvette Christiansë argues that faced
with the historical “legacy that landed slaves in the so-called ‘New World’”
and its “fragmenting effect,” Morrison’s work engages with the “imperative
to remember, and to desire to belong together as community,” while chal-
lenging historical tendencies that “might make of the abstract idea of com-
munity another edifice of yet more embargoes against openness.”23 Indeed,
Morrison explores this very danger in her portrayal of Paradise’s exclusionary
all-black community of Ruby and its disastrous inverted repetition of utopian
American exceptionalism.24 This openness, exemplified by Paradise’s other
utopian community, the all-women community called the Convent, is of a
piece with the postmodern feminist utopianism described by Lucy Sargisson,
which seeks to transition “from a politics of exclusion to a politics that is open
to difference.”25

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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

The “endless work” of Morrison’s fiction entails the constant “­renovation”

of the world in and of which she writes. It also involves working through a
number of contradictions: “how to be both free and situated; how to con-
vert a racist house into a race-specific yet non-racist home. How to enunci-
ate race while depriving it of its lethal cling?”26 In her essay, Morrison hints
that Paradise’s “convent” community may be the closest she had come, but
ultimately, these issues “remain in my thoughts as aesthetically and politi-
cally unresolved.”27 Nevertheless, the utopian quest for home in Morrison’s
work is visible throughout her career. Evelyn Jaffee Schreiber has chronicled
how home, conceived as a community of “psychic support . . . that can allow
characters to safely relieve trauma and survive it,” even heal, is “an ongoing
hopeful thread interweaving her novels.”28 Schreiber discusses these psychi-
cal manifestations of home beginning with Morrison’s first novel, 1970’s The
Bluest Eye, and tracking them through 2008’s A Mercy.
Morrison’s tendency is to use her novels’ home spaces as fictional labora-
tories for exploring the utopian (and dystopian) potential of various kinds of
communities. Most frequently, she draws out these potentialities by counter-
poising two or more “homes,” as she does in Paradise’s contrast between patri-
archal Ruby and the matriarchal Convent and in that between the grounded
reality of Beloved’s 124 Bluestone Road and the plantation fantasy of Sweet
Home.29 This tendency is already visible in The Bluest Eye’s contrasting fam-
ily environments: the strict but comparatively safe and nurturing MacTeer
household, the stifling false utopia of Geraldine’s bourgeois home, and the
ruinous dysfunction of the abandoned store inhabited by the Breedloves.
In Sula (1973), Morrison repeats this experiment by contrasting the uptight
Wright home with the freedom and diversity of Eva Peace’s “open” house.
The latter, as Melanie R. Anderson has observed, represents a “zone of trans-
formation and possibility” that Morrison revisits via Pilate Dead’s home in
Song of Solomon (1977) and Paradise’s Convent.30
The utopian home in 2012’s Home, like Bloch’s heimat, is figured as an
arrival rather than an origin. The main contrasts in the novel are drawn
between the home in Lotus, Georgia, where Frank “Smart” Money and
Ycidra “Cee” Money finally arrive at the narrative’s conclusion and two loca-
tions that qualify as their “origins.” One of these, interestingly, is the same
“no-count, not-even-a-town-place” of Lotus,31 the “adopted” home of Frank
and Cee’s childhood, where they moved in with their grandparents after
their family was driven from its previous home in Texas by a racist mob.

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Utopian Studies 29.3

Lotus itself does not—seemingly cannot—change, and this underscores how

the utopian transformation that occurs in Home has less to do with physical
space than with changes that take place in the two protagonists. The other
place of contrast is the Jim Crow United States in which the novel is set. When
asked about his place of origin, Frank answers, “Aw, man. Korea, Kentucky,
San Diego, Seattle, Georgia. Name it I’m from it” (28). Frank is seemingly
from “everyplace,” but when considered alongside his family’s forced dis-
placement from Texas, Frank’s response punctuates how this is tantamount
to having no home at all. Frank and Cee’s “origins,” and their personal histo-
ries before arriving “home,” are thus rooted in displacement itself.
Visser writes that the narrative of the Moneys’ homecoming derives
from Morrison’s penchant to draw upon folklore and myth. In particular, she
discusses Home’s influence by the tale “Hansel and Gretel,” in which young
siblings struggle to make their way home after their abandonment in the men-
acing woods. For Visser, Frank and Cee’s homecoming is akin to a “fairy tale”
ending, the reason for the novel’s “optimism.” Following Jack Zipes, Visser
argues that the novel concludes “in accordance with the . . . utopian function
of fairy tales to provide hope” and that hope in Home is “inscribed in the cura-
tive and restorative forces of community and family. The ending of the novel
provides a sense of closure that is not the complete erasure of past hurt but
which poses the transformation of evil and affirms the healing potential of
trauma through . . . narrative.”32 Crucially, this working through of trauma
separates Morrison’s concrete utopia from abstract “fairy-tale” wish fulfill-
ment, especially because of the undeniably historical nature of that trauma.
Despite the possibility that Frank and Cee may live “happily ever after,”
the majority of Home’s narrative is concerned with trauma and its testimony.
Visser observes that this, too, reflects “the function that fuels the plots of
fairy tales,” which are “fraught with merciless aggression, vicious brutality,
and deadly hostility,”33 as Morrison’s novels also tend to be. In Home, these
attributes characterize the American “house of race”—the dystopian “bad
place”—where her protagonists originate. Set in the early 1950s, Home’s frag-
mental narrative alternates between an anonymous, third-person narrator
and the first-person testimony of Frank Money. Frank, who resembles “shell-
shocked” war veterans in Morrison’s other novels, has recently returned from
the Korean War, suffering from what would now be called post-­traumatic
stress disorder.34 The narration works through the trauma of Frank’s war
experience, including Frank’s repressed murder of a young Korean girl,

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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

as well as trauma linked to the burial of a murdered black man that Frank
and Cee witnessed as children. The plot begins with Frank’s escape from a
mental institution, where he awakens after a drunken blackout, and follows
him from Seattle to Atlanta to rescue his sister. Cee is in danger of dying
because her employer, a doctor, eugenicist, and “heavyweight confederate”
(62) has been drugging and performing “scientific” gynecologic experiments
on her. The narrative also relates Cee’s earlier flight from Lotus to Atlanta
with her boyfriend “Prince” and her subsequent attempts to make it on her
own after Prince steals her grandmother’s car and abandons her. Frank, prone
to spontaneous outbursts of violence, eventually locates Cee and carries her
out of the doctor’s house after a conspicuously nonviolent confrontation, at
least on Frank’s part. Frank and Cee then return to Lotus, where a group of
the town’s women nurse Cee back to health. Both Frank and Cee are able to
work through their respective traumas, and only then do they subsequently
“arrive” at the “Home” announced by the novel’s title and its final word.
Narrating the trauma of the siblings’ stories not only performs the thera-
peutic function of such testimony;35 the narrative also functions in the man-
ner of what Ralph Pordzik calls the “demythologizing dystopia,” “in which
mutually exclusive versions of history are implicitly placed in confronta-
tion in order to stress the fact that the past is not a set of established truths
in which all further developments originate, but rather a contested site of
­cultural codes, each designed to preserve (or efface) a particular version of
cultural and national identity.”36 Home’s return to the Korean War era is, says
Morrison, an attempt to “take the scab off the ’50s, the general idea of it as
very comfortable, happy, nostalgic.”37 Against this narrative, Morrison coun-
terpoises the uncomfortable stories of her black protagonists’ experiences in
1950s America. Candice L. Pipes discusses how the story of Frank’s return
to a segregated United States from “America’s first ‘integrated’ war” is used
“to signify the wars black soldiers have had to fight on two fronts,” includ-
ing both physical and psychical battles on the home front.38 Frank’s vow to
save Cee, so that there will be “no more watching people close to me die.
No more” (103), explicitly conflates her with friends killed in Korea and with
the murdered black man whose burial they helplessly witnessed as children.
This is one of multiple instances when Morrison’s narrative moves seamlessly
between the violence in the Korean and the American “war zones,” and in
doing so, Home offers a political countermeasure to the nostalgia of what
Fredric Jameson calls “libidinal historicism,” which, “for Americans at least,”

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Utopian Studies 29.3

posits an idealized 1950s as “the privileged lost object of desire.”39 Morrison’s

potent counternarrative contests the eutopian fantasies of “Leave it to Beavers
and Doris Day” that, as Erin Penner puts it, “enable Americans to ignore the
systemic racism of the era.”40 Home demythologizes this 1950s just as Beloved’s
Sweet Home demythologizes the idealized South of the 1850s as a nostalgic
pseudo-utopia laden with racial baggage and historical denial.
Consistent with utopian and dystopian literature, however, Morrison’s
temporal displacement strategy is also a means of cognitive estrangement that
allows her historical-fictional “world” to critique the world of the extratextual
present. Although the slogan “Make America Great Again” had yet to appear,41
Morrison has been clear that Home takes aim directly at contemporary roman-
ticized 1950s nostalgia and its racial connotations. In a 2013 interview, she
observed, “I heard these people [regarding] the first election of Barack Obama
they were saying we want to take our country back and I was wondering, ‘Back
to where?’ and it was really the ’50s.”42 Just as, at the end of the novel, Frank
exhumes the corpse of the murdered man, and with it, his own traumatic
past in order to give it a proper burial, Morrison digs up a dystopian 1950s in
the present. Indeed, as Frank and Cee experience or witness violence, bodily
violation, segregation, public humiliation, and de facto incarceration—Cee in
the doctor’s house, Frank in the mental hospital—the siblings’ journey maps
systemic racism, including the confluences between systemic institutions such
as medicine and law enforcement. Through episodes such as the “random
search” Frank is subjected to in a city where, he is told, “cops shoot anything
they want” (31), Morrison charts parallels between her novel’s fictional history
and the America of 2012, when at least 1,146 Americans were shot by police
in the previous year and when in New York alone more than half a million
citizens, 87 percent of them black or Latinx and 89 percent of them totally
innocent, were subjected to the city’s “stop and frisk” policy.43
Home’s depictions of racialized trauma dramatize its lingering, inter-
generational consequences for what Morrison calls the “body-mind.”44 After
Frank’s escape from the mental hospital, the Reverend Locke, a minister who
helps him leave town, observes, “You lucky, Mr. Money. They sell a lot of
bodies out of there . . . to the medical school. . . . [Y]ou know, doctors need to
work on the dead poor so they can help the live rich” (12). This episode reso-
nates in multiple ways as it anticipates the medical objectification of Cee’s
body by “Dr.  Beau”; it allusively equates Frank’s experience at the civilian
hospital with his survival of the war that mutilated the bodies of his friends

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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

Mike and Stuff; and it instantiates Morrison’s book-length treatment of the

­antagonism between “the body as consummate home” and the “estranged
body, the legislated body, the violated, rejected, deprived body” constructed
by the ideologies and inequalities in the “house of race.”45 Through Frank’s
and Cee’s experiences, Morrison foregrounds how, as George Yancy writes,
“Black embodiment is constructed as a site of disposability,” as well as how
“Black bodies are profiled and policed according to a racist logic that is
grounded in the fantastical necessity to protect white spaces from the Black
body’s criminal intrusion.”46 This is depicted in Home when Frank appears in
Dr. Beau’s house and the doctor fires an unloaded gun “at what in his fear
ought to have been flaring nostrils, foaming lips, and the red-rimmed eyes of
a savage” (111). The doctor reflexively constructs Frank’s body as violent and
criminal even though what occurs is “no theft. No violence. No harm. Just
the kidnapping of an employee he could easily replace” (112). As Yancy argues
using contemporary examples such as the shooting of unarmed black motor-
ist Renisha McBride by a panicked white homeowner, black embodiment
remains a site of profiling, violence, and dehumanization in the twenty-first
century, as it was in the 1950s of Frantz Fanon. Morrison’s dystopian portrayal
of America critiques the present by highlighting these very congruencies.
In the process, the novel skillfully pairs its backward-looking critique of nos-
talgia with a forward-looking critique of post-1950s narratives of overstated
racial progress.
All of this is entwined with what, in Morrison’s work, represents the
definitive dystopian scenario: “home-lessness.” Early in The Bluest Eye, Claudia
MacTeer makes this clear when she describes homelessness as the worst of all
possible worlds:

Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life. The threat of being
outdoors surfaced frequently in those days. Every possibility of
excess was curtailed with it. If somebody ate too much, he could end
up outdoors. If somebody used too much coal, he could end up out-
doors. People could gamble themselves outdoors, drink themselves
outdoors. Sometimes mothers put their sons outdoors, and when
that happened, regardless of what the son had done, all sympathy
would be with him. . . . There is a difference between being put out
and being put outdoors. If you are put out, you go somewhere else;
if you are outdoors, there is no place to go.47

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Utopian Studies 29.3

Morrison also makes clear that the “physical fact” of being “outdoors” also
has its “metaphysical” dimensions related to “caste and class.”48 The dysto-
pian elements in Home focalize how, as Pipes observes, “if home is belonging
and safety and security, then African Americans are, by definition, always not
at home.”49 Frank, whose “homelessness” is literalized as he spends most of
the narrative sleeping on trains or in strangers’ homes, articulates this when
he observes, “You could be inside, living in your own house for years, and
still, men with or without badges but always with guns could force you, your
family, your neighbors to pack up and move” (9), as he was forced to do as
a child. For Cee, homelessness is bound up in her very origin: after her fam-
ily’s eviction, she “was born on the road” between Texas and Lotus (44). The
metaphysical connotations of this physical fact are voiced by her step-grand-
mother, Lenore: “Decent women, she said, delivered babies at home.  .  .  .
Although only street women, prostitutes, went to hospitals when they got
pregnant, at least they had a roof over their head when the baby came. Being
born in the street—or the gutter, as she usually put it—was prelude to a sin-
ful, worthless life” (44). Although Lenore shelters the family in her house, her
words and actions punctuate how the exiled Moneys are still not at home in
Lotus. Lenore has internalized aspects of a prevailing American ideology that
prove pernicious, self-negating, and unhomelike. As guardian of Frank and
Cee, whose parents are often absent due to the demands of work, Lenore is
unkind to both, and Cee in particular is dependent on Frank for any care she
does receive. Lenore treats Cee like a “gutter child” (129), an outsider within,
and as Cee internalizes attitudes that Lenore transmits across generations,
“homelessness” is integrated into her very identity: “She had agreed with the
label and believed herself worthless” (129). In addition to the racial, class, and
gender disadvantages she faces, Cee’s troubles are exacerbated by Lenore’s,
and by extension society’s, low assessment of her and the desire for belonging
it engenders.
However, it is paradoxically because of the predominance of such negative
content that in Home, there is hope. Morrison’s dystopian critique educates
and inflames readers’ desires for what should be otherwise. As Moylan writes
of dystopias, “The creative encounter with the realities of the social system
leads not to doubt and despair but to a renewed focused anger that can then
be tempered with hope and vision.”50 The arc of Cee’s narrative best reflects
the “hope for a sustainable transformation” that Raphael-Hernandez sees
in Beloved,51 that can be found throughout Morrison’s fiction, and that may
be most visible in Home due to the uncharacteristically overt positivity of
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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

its ending. Both siblings search for home in the novel: Frank in the military
and later with a woman named Lily, Cee in Atlanta with Prince and later in
Dr. Beau’s picturesque suburban house. Not until the pair’s embattled return
to Lotus, however, do they finally “arrive.” Frank delivers Cee, bloodied,
febrile, and barely conscious, into the care of “Miss Ethel” Fordham, who
responds, “I got work to do” (116). Asking no questions, Miss Ethel takes in
Cee and bars Frank from the house while she and the community’s women
collectively nurse Cee back from the brink of death. They relocate their
quilting circle to Miss Ethel’s house, and as the women stitch quilts, they
also mend Cee’s broken body. Frowning on “the medical industry” (122),
they apply a number of folk remedies, but none is as effective as the “work”
of caring itself. As the narrator makes clear, it is “the demanding love of
Ethel Fordham, which soothed and strengthened [Cee] the most” (125). As a
space of care and healing, the community not only stewards Cee’s recovery.
It transforms her. Symbolically adopting the ethos of her new community,
Cee takes up quilting herself. She at last can tell Miss Ethel, “This is where
I  belong”  (126), and her arrival at “home” provides the novel’s strongest
expression of utopian hope.
Cee’s newfound belonging reflects how, in response to the caring com-
munity around her, Cee’s healing is psychical as well as physical, and for
Morrison, the transformed person Cee becomes is crucial to her being-at-
home. In 1991, Leah Hadomi added the term intopia to the utopian lexicon to
describe texts in which the “alternative world” or “good life” is “emotionally
dominated and depicted as internal. The protagonist of the Intopia experi-
ences a utopian drive toward fulfillment of his or her inner self by viewing
others, society, and nature through alternative perspectives. The inner quest
toward the better utopian self is described as the protagonist’s striving to
understand both oneself and the other, and one’s commitment to society.”52
Invoking Bloch’s discussions of Freud and Faust, Raphael-Hernandez argues
that such “transforming protagonists” are often used in African American
women’s literature as figures of “utopian surplus” and uses Beloved’s character
Denver as an example.53 In Home, Cee’s comparable transformation is dra-
matic and unambiguous:

This Cee was not the girl who trembled at the slightest touch of
the real and vicious world. Nor was she the not-even-fifteen-year-
old who would run off with the first boy who asked her. And she
was not the household help who believed whatever happened to
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Utopian Studies 29.3

her while drugged was a good idea, good because a white coat said
so. Frank didn’t know what took place during those weeks at Miss
­Ethel’s house surrounded by those women with seen-it-all eyes. . . .
They delivered unto him a Cee who would never again need his hand
over her eyes or his arms to stop her murmuring bones. (127–28)

As Schreiber writes of Song of Solomon, “The safety of community support,

which provides the sense of a true home, allows for a verbalization and com-
ing to terms with trauma.”54 Cee overcomes feelings of worthlessness and
her dependence on Frank and even comes to terms with her inability to have
children as a result of the doctor’s experiments: she is “gutted, infertile, but
not beaten. She could know the truth, accept it, and keep on quilting” (131).
Reconciling with the past in turn allows Cee to imagine and work toward a
better future. “In this world with these people,” she resolves, “she wanted
to be the person who would never again need rescue. . . . She would have to
invent a way to earn a living” (129). Further, because she cares for herself, she
is able to care for others, including Frank and the murdered man, whom the
siblings bury shrouded in one of Cee’s quilts.
The circumstances of Cee’s transformation support Visser’s argument
that “the strongest and most vital communities in the world of Morrison’s
fiction are those created by women.”55 Miss Ethel forbids Frank’s mere pres-
ence while Cee is healing, and the community in which Cee recovers from
an injury overdetermined by gendered symbolism recalls the “blessed male-
lessness” of Paradise’s Convent.56 The women’s community Morrison creates
in Home shares much with the women’s utopias described by Jean Pfaelzer,
where “the self and others . . . create political space in which the self evolves
through relationships rather than quests, in which society recognizes that
integrity and individuality create community.”57 It also partly resembles the
“domestic utopias” of the sort that Nicole Pohl claims “reinscribe the private
and domestic with political significance.”58
However, Morrison also works against conceptualizations of a utopian
home that would confine it, or her characters, to any stereotypically domestic
“women’s sphere.” For instance, she problematizes the first, far more conven-
tional domestic space readers encounter. Lenore’s house belongs to her, but
her bourgeois aspirations to money, status, and control make her incapable of
creating a true home. The siblings’ respective attempts at normative domes-
ticity also fail. Morrison provides a contrast in Miss Ethel’s “open house.”

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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

Indeed, one of the most important parts of Cee’s cure is going outside to
be “sun-smacked, which meant spending at least one hour a day with her
legs spread open to the blazing sun” (124). Her exposure to the sun implies
natural strength and growth, but Cee’s (at first embarrassed) excursions also
indicate how Morrison’s “home” disinhibits women rather than the opposite.
Equally important, this openness not only moves Cee beyond the confines
of the house; it lets the outside world in. This signifies how “home” requires
confronting rather than retiring from the world while also underscoring how,
despite Lotus’s spatial isolation, its enmeshment in the Southern cotton econ-
omy and the alienating values that Lenore embraces indicate how Lotus is
not an island unto itself but is, rather, situated in the real-historical world.
Home is a place of safety from which Cee must nonetheless engage and par-
ticipate in this world, with all its faults.
Of another kind of significance is Morrison’s location of home in the very
town that Frank, who fought in Korea, calls “the worst place in the world”
(83). The handless watch Frank finds on his return signals that Lotus remains
unchanged. What have altered instead are the characters. “Perceptions
change” (142), Frank observes as he finds himself in a garden of “marigolds,
nasturtiums, dahlias. Crimson, purple, pink, and China blue,” wondering,
“Had these trees always been this deep, deep green?” (117). For Morrison, uto-
pia thus has less to do with particularities of space than it does with a particu-
lar kind of people. Moreover, what defines—and transforms—such people
might be best understood as an ethical praxis, what Shari Evans identifies in
Paradise as Morrison’s “ethics of home.”59 In Home, home-as-utopia is thusly
defined by social actions rather than social systems.
The most conspicuous quality of this utopian praxis is the ethic of car-
ing that transforms Cee. The women of Lotus create the kind of community
that Sargisson describes as a “system of social exchange . . . marked by the
desire to give. Only by giving, living, and loving . . . can the other be regarded
differently.”60 This exchange of caring transforms Frank as well. Savoring the
“feeling of safety and goodwill” (118) and supported by Cee, Frank comes
“home” by coming to terms with his own trauma. However, Frank’s trans-
formation begins earlier through his caring for Cee. During his cross-country
journey to save her, Frank sobers up, finds purpose, and sheds his violent ten-
dencies. “Maybe his life had been preserved for Cee,” he thinks, “which was
only fair since she had been his original caring for, a selflessness without gain
or emotional profit” (35). Inasmuch as Frank’s actions exemplify Sargisson’s

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Utopian Studies 29.3

“feminine economy operating within . . . the Realm of the Gift, in  which
giving is not motivated by the desire for reciprocation and investment is not
made in anticipation of due return,”61 Morrison embraces this ethic while
complicating its gendered essentialism. Visser reads Frank as representative
of a transformed masculinity. By assuming the “role of the caretaker and
nurturer,” Frank “revise[s] his notion of manhood; it is, he realizes, compat-
ible with nonviolent, other-directed caring.”62 Morrison teaches that this is the
real meaning of empowerment, and, as it does for Cee, this ethic of caring
empowers Frank to contribute to, and to belong at, home. It is also the com-
munity’s most radical difference from the dystopian world that predominates
in the novel.
A second element in Morrison’s ethics of home is a prioritization of
what Melissa Schindler calls “nonidealized quotidian experiences.”63 A der-
omanticized attention to the practice of everyday life appears frequently
in Morrison’s work, reflecting her insistence that paradise must be “down
here.” This is evident, for example, in the unglamorized matter-of-factness
with which characters such as Mrs. MacTeer and Eva Peace engage the
world. In Home, this ethic is embodied by the women of Lotus, who “were
nothing like Lenore. . . . Although each of [Cee’s] nurses was markedly
different from the others . . . their similarities were glaring. There was no
excess in their gardens because they shared everything. There was no trash
or garbage in their homes because they had a use for everything. They
took responsibility for their lives and for whatever, whoever else needed
them” (123). In taking ethical responsibility for Cee, the women heal her,
body and soul, through what Morrison describes as a “mean” love, one
that combines unremitting care with unvarnished practical necessity: “The
women handled sickness as though it were an affront. . . . They didn’t
waste their time or the patient’s with sympathy and they met the tears of
the suffering with resigned contempt” (121). The women ultimately coun-
termand Lenore and tell Cee, “You good enough for Jesus. That’s all you
need to know” (122). However, their love and care are fundamentally not
matters of words or mere affective performance but, rather, of unques-
tioning responsibility for others and, importantly, of action. Their actions
teach Cee to care for herself, and they birth a Cee who is as resilient,
realistic, and pragmatic as they are. Morrison makes the Lotus women
heroic precisely because of the deromanticized way in which they work
the novel’s greatest miracles in the realm of ordinary life. Miss Ethel’s

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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

garden allegorizes this as well: “Her garden was not Eden; it was so much
more than that. For her the whole predatory world threatened her garden,
competing with its nourishment, its benefits, and its demands. And she
loved it” (130). Through this love, amid an antagonistic world, “pole beans
curved. . . . Strawberry tendrils wandered, their royal-scarlet berries shin-
ing in morning rain. Honeybees gathered to salute Illicium and drink the
juice” (130). The constantly threatened garden underscores both the “down
here” and the “endless work” intrinsic to Morrison’s utopian ethics and,
like Cee’s transformation, exemplifies how living this ethic in their daily
lives allows the women of Lotus to do what seems impossible. Not only
have they made a home out of “the worst place in the world”; they have
made it a place of belonging, nourishment, and even beauty.
The climactic arrival at “home” reroots the novel’s displaced siblings, but
Frank’s journey underscores how home for Morrison is primarily about car-
ing people rather than spatiality. Frank crosses a largely hostile United States
thanks to small pockets of “home” he finds along the way. Among these
are Seattle’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, where the Reverend
Locke cares for Frank after his escape from the hospital, and the “down-home
friendliness” of Chicago’s Booker’s diner, where Frank finds belonging among
“laborers and the idle, mothers and street women, [who] all ate and drank
with the ease of family in their own kitchen” (27). Such places paradoxically
show how, as Rhodes writes of Beloved, “utopia is not a place or a moment in
time” for Morrison but, rather, “succeeding in loving the self and maintaining
this sense of self while joining and loving others.”64 Throughout Morrison’s
oeuvre, the figure of “home” marks the place of this utopia. Glimpses of it
reappear in God Help the Child (2015) in Rain’s home, where the protagonist
Bride finds a place to heal. Home, however, offers Morrison’s most focused,
indeed most utopian, treatment of it. The signs of home Frank finds scattered
across the American landscape suggest the potential of the utopian world-as-
home Morrison mentions in her essay. Creating such an earthly paradise, a
world of brothers and sisters, begins, she insists, with an ethical commitment
“down here” to the endless, day-to-day work of caring for ourselves and each
other. In other words, Home begins at home.

mark a. tabone is a lecturer in English at the University of Tennessee, Knox-

ville. His published and forthcoming essays discuss utopia and dystopia in the
works of Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead.

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Utopian Studies 29.3

Notes
1. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 318.
2. Tom Moylan, “Introduction: Jameson and Utopia,” Utopian Studies 19, no. 2 (1998):
1–7, at 2.
3. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul
Knight, vol. 1 (Cambridge: MIT, 1986), 18, 9; emphasis added.
4. Ibid., 18; emphasis added.
5. For instance, Moylan claims that the critical utopia “becomes a meditation on
action rather than system. . . . Where utopia as system can only be passively wished for,
utopia as struggle can be taken on in a willed effort to transform the social system.”
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York:
Methuen, 1986), 49–50.
6. Johnny R. Griffith, “In the End Is the Beginning: Toni Morrison’s Post-modern,
Post-ethical Vision of Paradise,” Christianity and Literature 60, no. 4 (2011): 581–610, at
607–8.
7. Mark A. Tabone, “Rethinking Paradise: Toni Morrison and Utopia at the
Millennium,” African American Review 49, no. 2 (2016): 129–45.
8. Irene Visser, “Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Home,” MELUS 41, no. 1
(2016): 148–64, at 161.
9. Toni Morrison, “Home,” in The House that Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain,
ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 3–12, at 11.
10. Ibid.
11. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 145.
12. Morrison, “Home,” 4.
13. Bloch, Principle of Hope, 145.
14. Heike Raphael-Hernandez, The Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women
(Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Julie Dash): The Principle of Hope (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin
Mellen, 2008), 37.
15. Jewell Parker Rhodes, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Ironies of a ‘Sweet Home’ Utopia
in Dystopian Slave Society,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 1 (1990): 77–92, at 87.
16. Bill Ashcroft, “The Ambiguous Necessity of Utopia: Post-colonial Literatures and
the Persistence of Hope,” Social Alternatives 28, no. 3 (2009): 8–14, at 12.
17. Bill Ashcroft, “Archipelago of Dreams: Utopia in Caribbean Literature,” Textual
Practice 30, no. 1 (2016): 89–112, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2015.1059587.
18. Morrison, “Home,” 10.
19. Ibid., 5.
20. Ibid., 4–5.
21. Ibid., 8.
22. Ibid., 12.
23. Yvette Christiansë, Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics (New York: Fordham, 2013),
25–26.
24. For an influential discussion of history and exclusivism in Paradise’s depiction
of Ruby, see Katrine Dalsgård, “The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: (African)

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 mark a. tabone: Dystopia, Utopia, and “Home”

American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni

Morrison’s Paradise,” African American Review 35, no. 2 (2001): 233–48.
25. Lucy Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (London: Routledge, 1996), 98.
26. Morrison, “Home,” 5.
27. Ibid.
28. Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber, Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2010), 11, 31.
29. Melissa Schindler, for instance, reads Beloved as foremost “a confrontation between
two different cultural and ideological constructions of home: Sweet Home and 124
Bluestone Road.” See her “Home, or the Limits of the Black Atlantic,” Research in African
Literatures 45, no. 3 (2014): 72–90, at 86.
30. Melanie R. Anderson, Spectrality in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee, 2013), 29.
31. Toni Morrison, Home (New York: Knopf, 2012), 47; hereafter cited parenthetically in
the text by page number.
32. Visser, “Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Home,” 161.
33. Ibid., 149. Visser here is quoting Maria Tatar, who herself is referring to the theory
of Vladimir Propp.
34. Manuela Lopez Ramírez, for example, has compared Home’s Frank Money with
Shadrack, the “shell-shocked” World War I veteran in Sula. See her “The Shell-Shocked
Veteran in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Home,” Atlantis 38, no. 1 (2016): 129–47. Frank also has
much in common with Paradise’s Vietnam veteran, Jeff Fleetwood.
35. The healing powers of testimony and narration have been the focus of much
literary scholarship. A basic premise is summed up here in Schreiber’s work on Morrison,
in which, quoting Dennis A. Foster, she writes that “verbalization helps combat trauma,
for it is only ‘by telling stories, narratives that inevitably appropriate the past and help the
community learn to live into their future’ that people work through trauma.” Schreiber,
Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison, 10.
36. Ralph Pordzik, “Nationalism, Cross-Culturalism, and Utopian Vision in South
African Utopian and Dystopian Writing 1972–92,” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 3
(2001): 177–97, DOI:10.1353/ral.2001.0079.
37. Toni Morrison, quoted in Erin Penner, “For Those ‘Who Could Not Bear to Look
Directly at the Slaughter’: Morrison’s Home and the Novels of Faulkner and Woolf,”
African American Review 49, no. 4 (2016): 343–59, at 350.
38. Candice L. Pipes, “The Impossibility of Home,” War, Literature, and the Arts 26, no. 1
(2014): 1–15, at 3.
39. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991), 18–19.
40. Penner, “For Those ‘Who Could Not Bear to Look Directly at the Slaughter,’” 350.
41. “Make America Great Again” was the slogan for Donald Trump’s 2016
campaign for the U.S. presidency. Concerning the racial inflection of this slogan,
see, for example, Nell Irvin Painter, “What Whiteness Means in the Trump Era,”
New York Times, November 12, 2016, accessed August 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.
com/2016/11/13/opinion/what-whiteness-means-in-the-trump-era.html.

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Utopian Studies 29.3

42. Toni Morrison, quoted in Penner, “For Those ‘Who Could Not Bear to Look
Directly at the Slaughter,’” 343.
43. Wesley Lowery, “How Many Police Shootings a Year? No One Knows,” Washington
Post, September 8, 2014, accessed September 4, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-
knows/?utm_term=.9aec4f b7c724; New York Civil Liberties Union, “Stop-and-Frisk
Data,” https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data.
44. Morrison, “Home,” 9.
45. Ibid., 5.
46. George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in
America, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), xxxvii, 8.
47. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1994 [1970]), 17.
48. Ibid.
49. Pipes, “Impossibility of Home,” 2.
50. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder:
Westview, 2000), 181.
51. Raphael-Hernandez, Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women, 59.
52. Leah Hadomi, “From Technological Dystopia to Intopia: Brave New World and Homo
Faber,” Utopian Studies 3 (1991): 110–17, at 110.
53. Raphael-Hernandez, Utopian Aesthetics of Three African American Women, 17.
54. Schreiber, Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison, 106.
55. Visser, “Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Home,” 158.
56. Morrison, Paradise, 177.
57. Jean Pfaelzer, “Subjectivity as Feminist Utopia,” in Utopian and Science Fiction by
Women: Worlds of Difference, ed. Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1994), 98.
58. Nicole Pohl, Women, Space, and Utopia 1600–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 11.
59. Evans argues that Morrison makes a similar shift from space to ethics via Paradise’s
Convent. See Shari Evans, “Programmed Space, Themed Space, and the Ethics of Home
in Toni Morrison’s Paradise,” African American Review 46, nos. 2–3 (2013): 381–96.
60. Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism, 115. Sargisson draws on Hélène Cixous
here.
61. Ibid., 121.
62. Visser, “Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Home,” 154.
63. Schindler, “Home, or the Limits of the Black Atlantic,” 75.
64. Rhodes, “Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” 90–91.

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