63 pages • 2 hours read
Toni MorrisonJazz
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Violence as an Act of Love
In all three books in Morrison’s trilogy, violence is explored as an act of love. Morrison’s characters believe that they must enact violence to prove or exhibit their love for others. In other instances, their love confuses their feelings and makes them dangerous. In Beloved, a mother tries to protect her child from slavery by killing her. In Jazz, Joe attempts to possess Dorcas forever by shooting her. Morrison shows that the line between love and violence is paper thin and that extreme emotions can easily waver into dangerous territory.
In Chapter 3, Violet and Alice discuss what happened at the funeral. Alice tells Violet that she does not understand women with knives, recalling her earlier thoughts on armed versus unarmed women. Violet says that she was not born with a knife but that she picked one up to fight for her marriage, and she asks Alice whether she would have fought for hers. Alice is taken aback by the question. Her life had been dominated by fear, and her husband had left her. Alice was suspicious of her own violence and anger, particularly toward the woman her husband Louis had an affair with. Violet believes that she attacked Dorcas’s body at the funeral out of love, but she later recognizes that her obsession was only harming herself.
This is a lesson that other characters learn as well. Like Joe, Golden Gray learns a shocking truth about a parent and seeks answers. When he discovers that his father is Black and alive, he travels to his father’s hometown. Golden has mixed emotions. He imagines his father greeting him as a hero for rescuing the woman from the road, but he also suggests that he intends to kill his father. Golden does not know what to do with his feelings and cannot make sense of the seeds of love that were offered by the knowledge of his father’s existence.
Joe’s association of love and violence begins at an early age. Henry teaches him how to hunt and track animals, and he uses those skills to find his mother Wild. When he believes his mother has rejected him, Joe shoots at her, not realizing the shells are in his pocket. This desperate act is an attempt to keep her from abandoning him once more. This is mirrored in Chapter 8 when Joe shoots Dorcas. He looks for her all over the city, gun at his side. Joe does not intend to hurt Dorcas, but when he sees her dancing with another man, the rejection he felt from his mother washes over him once more. When Violet chooses to love herself and her husband rather than cling to anger and violence, she provides healing for them both. Joe tells Felice that he is learning a new way to love, one that does not require him to access the dangerous part of himself. Violet explains that one must actively look for one’s authentic self and focus on love as a form of liberation.
Relationships and Trauma
Toni Morrison’s Jazz is considered one of her most complex and difficult novels. One element that makes the text so challenging is the way the narrative is offered in chunks through different perspectives. The same history is covered repeatedly by different people, each time offering new context to the events. The unreliability of the narrator and the narrowness of the characters’ perspectives casts doubt on the events, making it challenging to piece together a comprehensive story. For this reason, the major points of the plot are revealed in the first paragraph. The chapters that follow flesh out the backgrounds and personalities that inform the events. Deciphering the trauma of the characters provides rich contextualization, but this trauma is offered in short bursts within Morrison’s improvisational, stream-of-consciousness style. The reader must collect the personal facts of the characters and construct new timelines and understandings. Every character in the novel has a history of traumatic experiences and tough decisions. Joe, Violet, and Dorcas unwittingly make choices driven by their pasts, and their relationships reveal patterns inscribed from childhood.
Joe’s mother left when he was a baby, and his adopted family ensured that he knew he was different from his siblings. Joe becomes obsessed with youth and what he feels to be the unattainable love of a woman. As an adult, Joe experiences waves of racial violence, including being beaten with a pipe by a group of white men in the street. He explains that each experience changes him, making him a new person. However, Joe does not see how he continues to play out the same storyline repetitively. When he learns where his mother might be, he hunts her down, desperate for her to love him. Her rejection stays with him, informing how he relates to Violet and Dorcas. When Dorcas begins to pull away from him, he interrogates her hairdresser and looks for her for five days. He finds her dancing with another woman and replays the scene with Wild in the woods.
Violet’s childhood is not dissimilar. White people took everything away from her family, even taking the chair out from beneath her mother in their own home. Violet’s mother Rose died by suicide soon after. Violet’s early experiences cause her to avoid having a family of her own. She does not want to have children and give them pain as a dowry. However, she regrets her decision and begins sleeping with a doll at night. She takes in birds and cares for them like children. Violet’s trauma causes her to want to capture and possess others. She visits Dorcas’s aunt and obtains a picture of Dorcas. She is unwilling to let go of her pain and the girl whom her husband loved.
Dorcas, too, carries the weight of her past. Dorcas lost both her parents during the riots in East St. Louis. Her father died in a streetcar, and her mother died in their burning apartment building. Alice, Dorcas’s aunt, who has trauma of her own and transfers her fear onto her niece, tries to keep Dorcas from exploring and expressing her sexuality. However, Dorcas seeks out men who treat her badly and dominate her. Her interest in Joe is founded in his age and authority. When he treats her kindly, she loses interest.
Jazz is not content with leaving the characters with their trauma. It offers a path forward by allowing the characters to set themselves and those around them free. In Chapter 10, the narrator realizes that while Joe, Violet, and Felice have healed and lived happy lives, they have adhered to pain and anger. The narrator fantasizes about living with Wild in the woods, free from the trauma and violence of their own history.
Desire and Possession
Morrison highlights many types of desire and how those desires can become entangled with possession. Each person chooses someone to love, but the characters in the novel rarely choose to reciprocate. Violet is the first to explain this while ruminating on her first meeting with Joe. She was struck by how different he was than the other men she had met, and she chooses him to be her husband. Joe reiterates this line while speaking about Dorcas. Both Joe and Violet equate love with ownership. It is only when they liberate themselves and others that they understand the fullness of what love can do.
At first, Joe’s desire appears to be driven by intimacy. He is tired of his wife’s silence and desperate to connect with someone. He enacts this desire for intimacy upon Dorcas, offering in return the physical connection she seeks. Joe tells Dorcas things he feels he cannot share with Violet or anyone else. However, there is more to Joe’s possessiveness toward the young girl. The narrator believes Joe’s desire is driven by a desire to recapture his youth, explaining that the city traps people in a cycle of trying to find the young love that they’ve lost. Joe first spotted Dorcas in the candy store, buying peppermints, a sweet that he is known for buying and passing out. Dorcas is described as having “peppermint skin.” This association with peppermint aligns Dorcas with innocence and childhood. She has acne, but Joe does not want her to lose it. Her skin is an indication of her youth, which is part of what makes her so lovely to him.
Joe does not see Dorcas clearly for who she is, a whole person with trauma and desires of her own. Dorcas wears more mature clothes and desperately seeks the attention of other men. The city makes its way into her bones, and she feels connected to urban life and the desires it instills. Alice tries to keep Dorcas away from sex, but the girl runs toward it.
Intimacy eludes Joe his entire life. His mother leaves when he is a baby, and the woman who cares for him repeatedly reminds him that he was different from her biological son Victory. When Joe tracks down Wild, he asks her to put her hand through the branches of a hibiscus to let him know that she is his mother. When she does not, he shoots at her, a desperate attempt to hold onto her. Joe feels compelled to possess Dorcas just as he learned to possess animals while hunting: “But if the trail speaks, no matter what’s in the way, you can find yourself in a crowded room aiming a bullet at her heart, never mind it’s the heart you can’t live without” (130). Dorcas’s rejection mirrors his mother’s, and his violent act attempts to hold on to the woman he feels is slipping away from him. As she falls, Joe feels compelled to hold her and keep her.
Violet reveals another side to the theme through her obsession with maternity. When she is young, she does not want to have a baby. Once she passes the typical age for having children and experiences two miscarriages, she begins to resent her childless life. A neighbor asks her to watch her baby, and Violet immediately begins to imagine possessing it. She thinks about what it would be like to take the baby home to Joe. She transfers this same type of possession to Dorcas. After the funeral, she wants to learn everything she can about Dorcas and even puts her picture on their mantelpiece. Violet wonders whether she hates Dorcas for entrapping her husband or loves her like the child she lost.
Violet shows Joe how to let go of this attachment to possession. She learns to love herself and to offer freedom to those around her. She accepts what Joe has done and loves him despite it. Like the bird the couple adopts at the end of the novel, Joe and Violet begin to understand that true love is about liberation.
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