Floren's Messages In A Mercy By Toni Morrison

In A Mercy, Morrison highlights the psychological experience of slavery and the damage inflicted on the relationship between mother and daughter. Florens misreads the arrangement of her sale to slavery as abandonment by her mother. The consequence of her separation from her mother leaves her with a flawed interpretation of that betrayal, distorting her capacity to read the meanings of other’s messages. Florens’s finds refugee in her delusions, taking comfort in the illusion of a family gained on the Vaark farm and the illusion of true love with a man whom she only a physical relationship with. However, when Florens becomes separated from the farm, with another betrayal, she becomes exposed to a religious group that uses their own self-proclaimed …show more content…
Initially the treatment Florens receives on the farm provides a feeling of comfort to the child and the illusion of a family. Lina chooses Florens over Sorrow as a companion, Rebekka feels confident in Florens because “she is clever”, and the blacksmith chooses Florens advances over the other women. However, the farm only provides a false sense of security; “though Lina loves the girl as her own, Florens never gets over this early rejection” (Downie, 57). Florens finds partial comfort in the farm with her forged family, but the peacefulness of the Vaark farm is merely a façade with the owners betraying their own values. Jacob’s attempt to make a grander house than his competitor D’Ortega has him betray his own principles. Being a man against slavery, Jacob owns slaves to build this house and Florens is one of them. The ornate iron gate of the mansion is decorated with thick vines which were actual “serpents, scales and all, but ending not in fangs but flowers”(Morrison 150). Morrison incorporates the biblical allusion of the garden of Eden when including the serpents in the garden, and, like the biblical story the place of paradise eventually turns to “the world of the damned” (Morrison, 150). The fall of Jacob and Rebekka is in reference to the fall of Adam and Eve. And so, it isn’t until the death of Jacob that the illusion of this safe and peaceful …show more content…
Florens discovers her blackness under the racist religious white gaze; “blackness is me” (Morrison, 115). She understands the difference between being white and colored which reawakens the girl’s earliest trauma of isolation and abandonment; “Without [the letter] I am a weak calf abandon by the herd, a turtle without shell, a minion with no telltale signs but a darkness I am born with, outside, yes, but inside as well. . . Is that what my mother knows? (Morrison, 115). The violation by the Puritans has Florens feel less than human making connections with animals that cannot protect themselves. She interprets the darkness on her skin being a reflection of the darkness within and reasons that is why her mother abandoned her. She equates her race with shame resulting in anger and violence. With the Puritans dehumanizing her and her mother choice of the boy over her, abandonment seems the only