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A light skinned West Indian man, Soaphead Church is a self-proclaimed misanthrope. After failing as a preacher, he deems himself a "Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams", and provides counsel to community members. He detests the human body, believing the human body is dirty, and only desires to touch the bodies of children, which he considers clean. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:.
Chapter 6 Quotes. Related Themes: Women and Femininity. Page Number and Citation : 97 Cite this Quote. Explanation and Analysis:. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. Chapter 9. An unnamed narrator introduces Soaphead Church, a self proclaimed "misanthrope", who hates people and find's the human body ugly and Soaphead Church is a cinnamon-eyed West Indian man with light brown skin.
His family is proud At seventeen, Soaphead Church meets a woman named Velma, and marries. If you think again back to Barth, remember that quotation of silence at the very center of Menelaiad. So, Morrison is again engaging a problem that other writers are engaging at this time, but she's setting it in a very specific historical moment with very specific historical and political connotations and implications coming out of her examination.
So, silence is at the heart, but it's hedged around so that we can see it as a silence. So, extremity does that for her. I would argue that the third reason she uses the novel instead of a tract is to generate sympathy. And this, again, I was arguing, is part of Pynchon's project. Usually, someone like Morrison is separate in people's categories of contemporary fiction from writers like Barth and Pynchon. I am going to argue that they actually occupy much of the same space.
What does sympathy look like in Morrison? Well, she sets herself a task that, I would say, is almost as hard as the task that Nabokov has set himself, and in fact maybe it's even harder. Nabokov set himself the task of making us like Humbert Humbert. Now how many of you liked Humbert in the end? He's getting less popular as the weeks go by.
More of you seemed to like him when we were in the throes of reading his seductive voice. But Nabokov set himself the task of seducing us with Humbert's voice. Morrison, as part of this novel, sets herself the task of making us sympathize with a drunk who has no verbal capacities who rapes his own daughter. Now, does she succeed? Well, let's take a look. On page , we're a little ways into the story of Cholly Breedlove, and this is in the scene where he has just left the funeral of his aunt with a girl named Darlene.
And they're playing and flirting and making out in the field. She's gotten her clothes dirty:. These little gestures that Morrison grants to Cholly in this scene--tiny gestures of tying the girl's bow, leaning over her, concerned for her looks as she goes back to her mother, telling her--reassuring her--that she's not dirty, and in a novel that is so full of demonized cleanliness his gentle assurance that her dress though stained, is not dirty in the moral sense--this is a mark of kindness, the mark of humanity.
So, Morrison begins with small details like this to build up our sympathy for Cholly. It gets more intense when he meets his father in the city. This is on page This is when he first sees him playing craps in the alleyway:. So, in this scene, we once again see that humane touching impulse. He wants to touch his father's head, touch the sign of his father's mortality, the fact that his father is growing older.
He sees in his father's body his own face, hands, voice, and we can feel that with him. And then, when he flees from that scene, finally, and soils himself, he becomes another one of those abject characters.
And he goes to hide under a pier, finally bathes in a river at night. This kind of detail gives us two things: both the beginnings or another iteration of the reason why he becomes who he becomes, the drunk, the rapist, but it gives us more than that. It gives us a sense of his complexity.
It makes us want to like him, and, in fact, by this point I would argue that probably most readers do like him at this point in the novel. Can Morrison sustain this to the very end? Well, in a way I want you to be the judge, but if we look on , I would argue that we're beginning to see that effort.
This is at the very end of the novel, speaking of Pecola:. For one thing, Morrison endows these sentences with a lyrical quality that makes us feel their power. But there's one line she uses to describe Cholly that I think trumps all the others, and that's this one about the love of a free man: "The love of a free man is never safe. If it were, the safe white household in which Mrs.
Breedlove works would look a lot more appealing than it does. There is a certain safety for Frieda and Claudia in their intact household, but there, too, it is fraught with suffering. Their mother is cruel to them. She yells at them. Safety is not really to be had there, and the safety that is had comes at great cost.
When Cholly is described as having freed himself, earlier in the novel, part of that story which we don't get explicitly is that he has learned to turn his hatred, finally, against the white men, symbolized by the white men who discover him making love to Darlene in that earlier scene.
We're told that initially he hates her instead of the white men, because hating the white men would undo him to such an extent he was not ready to see that oppression for what it was.
Later in his life, we're told, he kills three white men. We don't know the circumstances, and at that moment, we're told that he's a free man. Freedom, when applied to a black man, cannot be a wholly negative quality.
In the context that Morrison evokes, of a society still plagued by the remnants of slavery, to call Cholly free can't be to dismiss him. It gives a certain honor and weight to his anger. And to re-evoke that word, to come back to that word, in describing his love for the daughter he rapes, I think, is quite controversial. It suggests that there was some value in the thing of himself he gave to her.
Now, this is not exactly what you'd want to call a feminist position, although Morrison certainly is I would say a feminist writer in the largest sense of that word. But what she has tried to do here, in keeping with the challenge that I think she must have set for herself, is to make us see Cholly complexly enough to sympathize with him even after he commits this crime.
So she takes a certain kind of risk, but that's why she does it. She wants us to see him in a sympathetic light. This is what a novel can do. It requires that lyrical quality of voice; it requires the buildup of history, and it requires, in this scene, the return to that precise language. So, a very common literary technique--we see it all the time in the things that we read together--is to return to the terms you used in an earlier moment to ring the changes on those terms again, to use that word.
Well, that's what Morrison uses to produce this sense of value in Cholly at the end of the novel. In this sense it participates or is in conversation with a tradition of the nineteenth-century novel in America. So, one of the most prestigious novels of the nineteenth century is of course Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a hugely successful novel, abolitionist novel whose aim was to create a sense of the slave's humanity for white readers so that white readers would become inspired to the abolitionist cause.
What was repulsive about that novel to someone like Morrison is the starched white virtue and the starched white culture to which the African American characters in the novel were recruited. So, in that novel, their humanity and the sympathy that that would evoke from the reader depended on their looking as white as possible, and therefore there was this great privileging of the light-skinned black in that novel and a sense of Christian value redeeming the darker-skinned characters.
They needed it--more, it seems, than the light-skinned characters--so the darker your skin is in Uncle Tom's Cabin the more religious you are. So it's a whitewashing of the African American figure.
So, Morrison takes something of the sympathetic project of Uncle Tom's Cabin and that tradition of the nineteenth-century novel, but she transforms it by making us sympathetic to someone like Cholly who Harriet Beecher Stowe would put so far outside the pale of humanity we wouldn't- he wouldn't even be visible on her screen.
So, this is her project. Sympathy, however, relies on some darker and more ambiguous techniques that Morrison is also committed to, and one of those is what I'm going to call negativity.
Morrison is very careful--in this novel, especially--to talk about what people are not. And you see an example of this on page 55, when she's describing the prostitutes. This is after she's been telling stories--Miss Marie has been telling stories--to Pecola about her husband. It refuses all those conventional stock stories of what whores can be in the novel. So, the very first instance of it singles out the novel: "They did not belong to those generations of prostitutes created in novels with great and generous hearts," and so on.
But all those other versions are equally fictional types of prostitutes. So she rejects the stock literary cupboard of stories about prostitutes. They are opaque to literary embellishment.
They are what they are; they just are whores. But the negativity, the repeated "nors"--neither were they this, nor were they that, they were not this, they were not that--it is a kind of engine of narrative.
And it limns the place where they might come to stand in and of themselves, without embellishment. So, the effort to help us to sympathize with marginal characters--Cholly Breedlove, prostitutes--is an effort at limning a space where they can stand in and of themselves, and it creates narrative for us to sympathize through.
It creates a credibility for her voice; it creates a sense of where they can occupy a space, these characters. What's more, Marie, as we know, is the one person who really tells stories in this novel. So Morrison also gives her a special gift as a character, a gift that Morrison's own gift echoes.
She's allowed to tell stories for Pecola's delight. She's the only one who does that sort of thing for this child. Pecola herself, though, is the ultimate negativity, and this is on You can see how this works. This is in the middle of that page. Pecola is the embodiment of the negative, so she represents all that the community does not want in itself: the excess blackness, the ugliness that the white aesthetic says can't be changed or redeemed.
She represents the poverty that they all strive to escape, or at least keep a bit at bay. So, Pecola as the negativity is--through the whole novel, in the structure of the whole novel--the absence that keeps the narrative engine working. It has to keep working because she's always there as the negative pole waiting to be touched--even in the least bit--by the narrative's revelation. So she embodies that, the desire to know another person, which, in Menelaiad , if you'll remember, is Menelaus's undoing.
He diddles on and on, his voice asking, "Why? Why'd you choose me, Helen? Why do you love me? That effort to know another person is much more than a diddling on, in Morrison. That effort to know another person isn't by definition put off limits, in Morrison. The effort at trying is far more honored. The alienation from self which produces a kind of irony and a pleasure in humor in both Barth and Pynchon, that self-consciousness that you see in both novels, is not a source of humor in Morrison because the alienation is produced by an unjust society.
Because, after all, Mr. The second character under scrutiny by their community and this English major is Hester Prynne, a young woman forced to don a scarlet letter "A" to signify to herself and to her community that she is a marked sinner.
The letter, much like the veil, is an exterior symbol of appearance which is a popular device of Hawthorne; the outward appearance is an important aspect of the Puritan faith in that it reflects upon the interior climate.
Instead, he easily accepts that his father, grandfather, and the whole community were acquainted with the Devil. He then gradually begins to believe that the community of visible saints is corrupted and that they are performers of evil-doing. Mays, C. In fact, it is surprising to the reader when he entertains the mystical root said to provide protection given to him by a former slave, Sandy Douglass He accredits his own disinterest in Christianity to his own harm done by its followers.
Not to say that During his enslavement in Maryland, a white man named Mr. Wilson proposes a Sabbath school for the slaves to study the Bible.
Douglass struggles to be handed a Christianity that he sees as love-centric and the religion distorted by his abusers. The manual affirms that the Bible directly commands Christian kindness in over fifteen passages, which is irreconcilable with the practice of slavery He cannot take the guilt which is gnawing at him inside and he is desperate to seek release.
However, the shriek was only a figment of his imaginat The community sees Dimmesdale as a saint, while Hawthorne portrays him as a morally weak person who cannot confess his sin. Everyone sees Chillingworth as a betrayed husband who is betrayed by his wife.
However, Hawthorne shows him to be an evil-minded person who is so consumed with vengeance and hatred that he cannot live when his victim dies. He begins to torture his former love, Cathy. Obviously, he likes to speak to her with no respect like his father trains him to do.
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