Morrison's Recitatif Thesis
Morrison’s Recitatif is an interesting story about an inter-racial childhood as two girls partially grow up in an institution named “St. Bonny’s” without their mothers. Roberta has a very sick mother and the Twyla’s just wanted to dance all night. The children are able to bond through their experiences and become friends. As they run into each other, time after time in adulthood, the story creates an interesting narrative of the views of society and individual racism. The way this story is set up causes the reader to not have a clear sense as to how to interpret the narrative. It helps uncover one’s stereotypes and racial views that the reader may not have been aware to possess. So, is Roberta black and Twyla white? The primary question
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The story ends with the question “What the hell happened to Maggie?” Maggie, the mute kitchen girl at the orphanage where the two girls where raised, is a reoccurring issue that continues to haunt their adult lives. The woman who foreshadowed all of the problems in Twyla’s life, the woman whose bowed body and strange hat were the long-time vessel of Twyla and Roberta’s arguments, became what Twyla was both afraid of and mourning about. The issue of what happened to Maggie seems to be both literal and figurative, and though non-conclusive, is somehow vital to the story. At certain points, it seems that both Roberta and Twyla use Maggie to defend their own views regarding race. Twyla, regardless if she is black or white, maintains that she was innocent and that the older girls where to blame. Perhaps the older girls are a metaphor for society. This might be a metaphor of how one thinks that they are not to blame, that the rest of society is the one to blame. It was Maggie’s disability that caused such a resonance in the minds of these little girls; and which caused her persecution to begin with. This woman’s life and death were the opening and closing of Twyla’s eyes to the world of disability beyond race and even beyond body, it just took three decades for her to realize
The story ends with the question “What the hell happened to Maggie?” Maggie, the mute kitchen girl at the orphanage where the two girls where raised, is a reoccurring issue that continues to haunt their adult lives. The woman who foreshadowed all of the problems in Twyla’s life, the woman whose bowed body and strange hat were the long-time vessel of Twyla and Roberta’s arguments, became what Twyla was both afraid of and mourning about. The issue of what happened to Maggie seems to be both literal and figurative, and though non-conclusive, is somehow vital to the story. At certain points, it seems that both Roberta and Twyla use Maggie to defend their own views regarding race. Twyla, regardless if she is black or white, maintains that she was innocent and that the older girls where to blame. Perhaps the older girls are a metaphor for society. This might be a metaphor of how one thinks that they are not to blame, that the rest of society is the one to blame. It was Maggie’s disability that caused such a resonance in the minds of these little girls; and which caused her persecution to begin with. This woman’s life and death were the opening and closing of Twyla’s eyes to the world of disability beyond race and even beyond body, it just took three decades for her to realize