50 pages • 1 hour read
Toni MorrisonLove: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Greater Pleasure of Platonic Love than Romantic Love
Content Warning: This section discusses racism, sexual assault, child abuse, child marriage, and violence.
As the title suggests, different kinds of love are represented throughout the text, ranging from romantic and sexual to friendship and the familial. The novel questions many common societal ideas about love, including the idea that romantic and marital love is the most important love of all. The majority of the romantic and sexual relationships in the novel are traumatic and dysfunctional, while familial love and friendship are shown to be often-neglected but important ways of relating to others.
L. remarks, “[i]f your name is the subject of First Corinthians, chapter 13, it’s natural to make it your business” (198), and she provides many of the novel’s overt thoughts on the topic of love. First Corinthians 13 is a chapter in the Biblical New Testament often known as the “love chapter” and it lists the characteristics of love, emphasizing patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice. This kind of love is notably lacking in many of the sexual or romantic relationships in the novel. Bill Cosey cheats on both of his wives with Celestial, and though he claims to love her, he never acknowledges her in society and always keeps her in the shadows of his life. May is characterized as a “slave” to the Cosey household and is more concerned with the hotel and its upkeep than her husband, Billy Boy. Christine’s many romantic relationships end in infidelity or failure, and Heed’s only conception of love is an exploitative marriage with a much-older man who grooms and abuses her. L. is dismissive of sexual chemistry, characterizing infatuation as an axe that cuts away the world but does not last. In contrast to these relationships, Vida and Bill Sandler have a happy and loving marriage, and Sandler advises his grandson that “[a] good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good good woman” (153). This relationship is significant in the novel because it is the exception rather than the rule; Morrison otherwise suggests that romantic love invites pain, manipulation, and disloyalty.
In the final chapter of the novel, L. states that one of the most powerful forms of love is childhood friendship, “a child’s first chosen love” (198). This love is ignorant of race, class, and other factors and is striking in its purity. Heed and Christine shared this love initially as children, but the adults in their lives, especially May and Bill Cosey, destroyed it. The other form of love represented positively in the novel is the familial love that Sandler and Vida feel toward Romen, their grandson. Though he frequently exasperates them and they lament the generational gap between them, they continually care for him and offer him helpful advice throughout the novel. Their concern and affection stand in marked contrast to the dysfunctional and often neglectful parents of Junior, Christine, and Heed. Ultimately, the novel questions society’s reverence for romantic love and conveys the importance and pleasure of platonic love.
Social Class and the Black American Experience
Love takes place during a turbulent 50-year period in American history, chronicling the era of Jim Crow and the civil rights movement through to the 1990s. Racism and segregation are present throughout the novel and the characters face oppression on these fronts. However, much of the novel takes place within Black society and explores the nuances of social class and colorism as well as race. Just as Cosey’s hotel offers a place for wealthy Black people to be in Black-only society and temporarily shut out the outside world, Love is less concerned with white America than with the nuances of the Black American experience.
One of the novel’s key conflicts is the clash between the wealthy, upper class Black families represented by Bill Cosey and the hotel guests and the working-class citizens of the surrounding towns. In the heyday of the hotel’s success, Cosey portrays himself as a benevolent and friendly figure to the townsfolk, but he refuses to allow them to stay there: “[E]ven when a family collected enough money to celebrate a wedding there, they were refused. Pleasantly. Regretfully. Definitely. The hotel was booked” (40). This snobbishness clearly delineates between members of different classes in Black society. Even as Cosey faces racism in the outside world and knows that he might be refused service at a restaurant or department store, he refuses service to locals because of their class and is insistent on establishing himself and his clientele above working-class locals.
Heed is initially rejected by May due to her status as an Up Beach girl. May, herself raised by an impoverished preacher, is desperate to establish a distinction between her family and families like Heed’s. This is part of why she is so horrified when Cosey marries Heed—not only the age gap, but Heed’s social class are repugnant to her. Heed is also seen as lesser for the darker color of her skin. This attests to the existence of colorism in the Black community, a topic Morrison dealt with extensively in her novel The Bluest Eye (1970).
When Junior seeks work at One Monarch Street, she is trying to leave behind her own upbringing in the Settlement, an impoverished area outside town. Heed recognizes the survival instinct in her and reflects, “[w]e’re both out here, alone. With fire ants for family” (126). However, she also sees herself as better than Junior because she married into the Cosey family and frequently thinks negatively about Junior’s manners and speech. Thus Heed perpetuates the cycle of classism by which she herself was negatively affected. Morrison hence suggests that experiences of oppression—both racial and class-based—do not prevent people from reinforcing class-based oppression.
The Corruption of Innocence
The novel deals extensively with the corruption of innocence through the damaged childhoods of Heed, Christine, and Junior. The most glaring example of this theme in the text is the exploitative marriage between Heed and Cosey. Heed is only 11 when Cosey marries her, and he pays her family $200 to do so. Heed’s innocence and naivety are illustrated by her initial ideas about marriage; she tells Christine that she imagined that it would mean she could be close to her and play with her friend every day. On her honeymoon, Heed plays with “coloring books, picture magazines, [and] paper dolls to cut out and clothe” (127). Even as an adult, she calls her husband “Papa,” which further underscores the exploitative nature of their age gap (87). On her deathbed, she finally admits to Christine that “[h]e took all my childhood away from me, girl” (193), suggesting that exploitative power dynamics make it hard for people to realize that someone is corrupting their innocence.
Christine’s innocence is also destroyed through Cosey’s exploitation of Heed and May’s interference. As a child, she sees Cosey masturbating in her bedroom through an open window and is ashamed and disgusted. She blames herself for the “inside dirtiness” and thinks that this feeling of shame is “the birth of sin” (191-92). As a child, she understands that May and the other adults are horrified by Cosey’s relationship with Heed, but she does not fully understand why. Her lack of knowledge is gradually replaced by hatred and shame. Part of the loss of innocence for both her and Heed is the isolation and self-blame: “Each one thought the rot was hers alone” (189). Christine’s story similarly shows that innocence is corrupted when it is hard for the survivor to know that it is happening; she and Heed think “back once again to a time when innocence did not exist because no one had dreamed up hell” (189). Exploitative power dynamics from both her grandfather and Cosey, combined with her childish outlook, prevent her from understanding “hell” until much later.
Junior also suffers a traumatic childhood during which she is neglected and abused from an early age. Her attempts to attend school and her innocent friendship with a boy there are viewed with suspicion by her uncles. She gives him a snake. This gift is an allusion to the book of Genesis in the Bible, in which Eve is tempted by a snake and turned away from Eden. Junior’s gift of a snake heralds her loss of innocence. Her uncles torment her for giving away the snake, and when she tries to leave home, they run her over with a car and lie about doing so. When she recovers and runs away from home, she stops at a store and steals a G.I. Joe doll. The theft of a toy emphasizes her young age and childish desires. Rather than helping her, the adults around her send her to a reform school where she is sexually abused. In adulthood, she fixates on the idea of a “Good Man” who will save her. She thinks that Cosey’s relationship with Heed was romantic and wishes that he had found her at age 11 and rescued her from her circumstances. By the end of the novel, therefore, Junior is still vulnerable and does not fully understand that, as a child, the men around her would corrupt her innocence if they sexualized her, no matter how benevolent they seem.
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