Tar Baby

Tar Baby explores how being a woman imprisons the female characters. The novel's male characters tend to see the women as stupid or inferior, simply because they are women. Gideon constantly criticizes Thérèse for her ignorance, while Valerian ignores Margaret's desire to leave the island. Son insults Jadine by asking her how many sexual favors she had to perform to be given expensive presents and modeling jobs. The men do not see the women as individuals.

With the exception of Jadine, the women in the novel are associated with motherhood and fertility, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. Ondine mothers Jadine, Thérèse mothers Alma Estée and Son, and Thérèse once worked as a wet nurse. Margaret longs to see her son, Michael, but it turns out that she abused him when he was a child. Thérèse believes that white women kill their babies, in part because Valerian's first wife had a series of abortions. Margaret's actions and Thérèse's beliefs show that being a mother does not always bring fulfillment to women and can sometimes imprison them as well. Margaret's unhappiness as a wife and mother led her to abuse her child. Over the course of the novel, Jadine tries on the different options available to women: a career woman in Paris, a daughter on Isle des Chevaliers, and a mother figure to Son in New York. But none of these roles leads to satisfaction, and the constraints of her gender continue to bind and frustrate her.

The conflict between nature and civilization runs throughout Tar Baby. Most characters embody either nature or civilization/culture. For example, Son, Thérèse, Gideon, the residents of Eloe, and the wild horsemen represent nature. These characters value racial and familial connection, and they demonstrate the importance of places of origin. They have a strong belief in the past and in the reality of myth, and they believe that no actions in the present can be divorced from the actions of the past. In contrast, Jadine and her urban friends believe in the importance of education and European forms of culture, and they deny the values associated with nature. For them, nature is something to be mastered or overpowered. They appreciate the idea of a kind of cosmopolitan rootlessness, where people are free to separate from their racial, familial, and geographical pasts. Nevertheless, Sydney seems to blend values from both nature and civilization: He places a lot of importance on family and believes in the importance of education. But he rejects the natural world in favor of the lively Philadelphia of his youth and young adulthood. He shrinks from anything, or anyone, that seems wild, including Son, and this makes Sydney unyielding and a little unlikable.

To some degree, the black characters align with nature, and the white characters with civilization. As she struggles to figure out what it means to be black, Jadine moves from the civilization side to the nature side. She goes to rural Florida to visit Son's hometown, and together she and Son seem to reject the material trappings of civilization. But, at the end, Jadine chooses civilization and white culture by returning to Europe. Son too must choose between nature and civilization at the end of the novel; readers do not know which he chooses. The novel itself argues that, despite the character of Sydney, nature and civilization cannot be synthesized, but it does not seem to favor one over the other either.

When a character looks young or beautiful, that character tends to have a lot of power. Son looks magnificent after he showers and goes to charm Valerian in the greenhouse. Margaret's beauty also once captivated Valerian. Likewise, aging reflects a character's loss of control or influence. As Valerian loses power, he becomes exhausted and begins to age rapidly, and he has become an invalid by the end of the novel. Jadine starts to look old as she and Son fight constantly in New York, but, having abandoned Son and the compromises she was forced to make with him, Jadine begins to look young again when she boards the plane for Paris. Conversely, some characters seem ageless or of indeterminate age. Thérèse and the wild horsemen exist in perfect harmony with nature, and they remain untamed. Ondine, a servant, has always seemed old to Margaret, and Old Man's age is reflected in his nickname. These ageless or old characters seem able to withstand the impact of other people or change on their physical beings. The faces and bodies of characters reflect their personalities and the outcome of decisions they once made.

Morrison refers to the tar baby story repeatedly, particularly in relation to Jadine and Son. According to the folktale, a farmer sets out to catch a cabbage-stealing rabbit by building a baby-shaped scarecrow out of tar. When the usually clever rabbit encounters this tar baby in the cabbage field, the rabbit tries to shake hands. Not knowing that the baby is fake, the rabbit gets angry and starts to hit it, only to get caught in the tarry surface. The rabbit continues to hit the baby until more and more of their limbs are entangled, and in this way the rabbit gets totally trapped.

Morrison has noted that she reads the tar baby story as a “love story.” In her foreword to the novel, Morrison explains that she finds the mysteries and ambiguities of the story particularly compelling. The encounter between the rabbit and the tar baby, Morrison theorizes, might represent a seductive woman and clever male who face off and then find themselves bound together. In the novel, Son sees Jadine as a tar baby figure. He imagines that she was set in his path by the hands of white people to arrest his progress, but, like the rabbit that also gets caught in the tar, Son cannot resist temptation, so he too finds himself trapped. On their way back from the picnic, Jadine falls into a swamp and literally gets stuck in tar. This experience shows that although Son too has the potential to entrap Jadine, she has the strength to resist and escape.

The wild horsemen represent people with a pure relationship to nature and to their race. These men supposedly roam Isle des Chevaliers. In the version of their history that Thérèse tells to Son, the men descend from the first slaves who landed on the island. Like these slaves, who lost their vision when the island came into sight, the wild horsemen also are blind. But their blindness does not cause them problems, because they are so familiar with the island's terrain that they can navigate it sightless. Thérèse and Son, in particular, admire the horsemen, since they descend directly from Africans and live in the wild. While Son finds them appealing on these grounds, Jadine finds the men frightening for those same reasons. When she gets stuck in the swamp, Jadine worries that the horsemen or their female companions will do her violence. At the end of the novel, Thérèse drops Son off at a foggy part of the island, somewhat encouraging him to join the horsemen, but readers do not know whether Son ultimately becomes a wild horseman or tries to find Jadine.

Morrison often uses the color black to describe nature and the elements of the natural world. At the beginning of the novel, Son swims in the black ocean, beneath the black sky. The swamp where Jadine nearly gets stuck has at its center a pit of black tar. Similarly, Jadine complains about and fears the darkness of the night in Eloe, a manifestation of how overwhelmed and out of place she feels there. Those characters like Son and Thérèse, who are most comfortable with the natural world, often seem to blend in with the black parts of it. The wild horsemen take the association between a comfort with nature and a comfort with blackness to a logical extreme: Black themselves, they competently navigate the island's wild hills in the darkness of their blindness. In contrast, Jadine's experiences show how characters who prefer civilization to nature or who reject their roots find nature's blackness disquieting.

The greenhouse symbolizes the conflict between nature and civilization. At the start of the novel, Valerian civilizes the natural world by making northern flowers grow in a southern climate. His power in the greenhouse represents the power that Valerian enjoys in his relationships with other characters in the early part of the novel. The greenhouse is also Valerian's sanctuary, a place he can go when he wants to be alone. Over time, ants invade the greenhouse, a sign of nature creeping into civilization. Then Son begins to take over, and the greenhouse comes to be less and less under Valerian's control, and more and more a place where nature dominates. After Ondine reveals that Margaret abused Michael when he was a boy, the greenhouse reflects Valerian's decline by descending into wildness. By the end of the novel, Valerian has become an invalid, and there is no longer a clear distinction between the interior and exterior of the greenhouse. Valerian's defenses and measures of control, like the special climate of the greenhouse, have broken down.

Hair helps define a person's beauty and personality. One of the first things that the residents of L'Arbe de la Croix notice about Son is the wildness of his hair. His haircut totally changes his image: He goes from being a threatening, menacing presence to an attractive, appealing man. Jadine and Margaret both have extraordinary hair that heightens their beauty. Jadine's naturally straight hair marks her as different from other black women. Margaret's red hair also sets her apart from other women. When she was young, people gossiped about Margaret's hair, as it incited speculation about her parentage. When she was a teenager, her hair, coupled with her white skin, gave her the coloring of a Valerian candy and helped make Valerian fall in love with her. Wild, ungroomed hair shows a person's connections to nature. Refined, groomed hair is a sign of a character's association with culture and civilization. Sometimes it also demonstrates a character's efforts to deny the power of nature, as when Alma Estée tries to change her appearance through a wig.

Jadine's sealskin coat represents many choices that the novel identifies as questionable, including miscegenation and civilization over nature. Jadine receives the coat from Ryk, her rich, white boyfriend. When she first accepts the gift, Jadine considers whether to marry Ryk; her acceptance of the coat seems to indicate her acceptance of the proposal as well after she boards a plane for Paris at the end of the novel. But the marriage between black Jadine and white Ryk represents an abandonment of Ondine and Sydney, as the marriage will keep Jadine in Europe. And, in marrying Ryk, Jadine eradicates the possibility of marrying a black man and having all black children, and thus the coat signifies Jadine's decision not to help continue or further the black race. The coat also represents the life of the city, a glamorous, civilized atmosphere. Similarly, the coat represents the triumph of civilization over nature, as people trapped and killed the baby seals to make the coat.