(Un-)Grieving Celestial in Toni Morrison's Love

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s Love (2003) is structured around a series of juxtaposed female perspectives on a central but absent male character, the late Bill Cosey. One female character, however, is markedly absent from the textual centre and emerges only marginally as a ghostly presence, vague but recurrent: Celestial, a scarred-face prostitute who is said to have been Cosey’s lifelong true love. This chapter explores Celestial as an ungrievable subject in the text, through structural and social mechanisms that bring about her exclusion. My reading of the novel establishes a correlation between the social dynamics of gender and class prejudice that the text dramatises and its narrative structure. The novel is narrated in the third person through variable focalisation combined with an enigmatic first-person narrator, L. It is quite noticeable that Celestial is the only female character whose perspective is never offered through focalisation. She is only present to the extent that she is remembered by others. Yet, the very fact that she is mentioned in the text points to the failure in obliterating her from collective memory. I argue, therefore, that Celestial thus joins the cohort of Morrison’s ungrieved ghosts.