Female Body as a Site of Male Experiment: Morrison’s Home, Communal Healing and Implications beyond Literature

Abstract

Females, as beings and bodies, have ever been the site of patriarchal oppression. Tony Morrison’s (1931-2019) era was not an exception; besides, there prevailed the suffering that racism also inflicted upon women. Morrison vividly depicts those oppressive events and behaviors in her writings so as to bring out their repercussions and warn humanity that these injustices may recur irrespective of the times and spaces we live. This article examines Morrison’s novel Home and discusses how women’s bodies were treated in her time. It explores why and how such psychologically and physically maltreated females in the novel feel disconnected from themselves as well as from the community as the central character Ycidra or “Cee” represents. Remaining within the paradigm of qualitative research, using descriptive and interpretative mode of inquiry along with feminist insights from the scholars like Simone de Bouvoir, S. L. Bartky, and Judith Butler, it concludes that women were forced by slavery and patriarchy to offer their bodies for abusive experiments. They suffered the consequences like helplessness and a break from their own self. However, eventually they get healed with the help of their own kind, community and solidarity. Venturing beyond the boundary of academia, Homeleaves an indelible lesson to humanity that injustices as such happen in the most fundamental fields of human life like medicine and its practice. Morrison advocates that basically they should not happen, if ever they do, it owes an imperative to the victim to be healed by support and solidarity before making the perpetrators get their grim share; it ought to be a part of an altruistic purpose of humanities and literature.