71 pages • 2-hour read
Song of Solomon
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Symbols & Motifs
Artificial Roses
The sewing of artificial roses is an occupation that keeps the Dead sisters busy and quiet throughout their childhood and into their adulthood, as they spend hours every day carefully “tracing, cutting, and stitching the costly velvet” (5). All of their hard work scatters when Ruth Foster Dead drops a basket and the painstakingly sewn velvet rose petals fly everywhere. The image of delicate beauty and artifice captures the attention of bystanders. The image is so arresting that Guitar remembers that scene years later, juxtaposing the rose petals with the bits of girls’ dresses that went flying in the aftermath of the 1963 16th Street Church Bombing that killed four girls.
This connection between the fake roses and death is reinforced by Corinthians, who remembers the doll-like body of Robert Smith, whose suicide caused Ruth to drop the basket. Roses and death are forever connected for Corinthians, who will do anything to escape a future of rose-making.
While Lena seems content to a lifetime of making roses, she abruptly changes her mind when she sees that her father and brother have worked together to end Corinthians’s relationship with Henry Porter. She excoriates her brother for acting like their sexist father and treating women as inferior. She refuses to participate in the activity that has kept her quiet and passive her whole life, and instead uses her voice to show a fierce strength that was hidden by rose petals.
Peacock
Guitar explains to Milkman why the male peacock cannot fly: too much vanity. All the “jewels” the peacock carries on its heavy tail prevent it from flying. The peacock also symbolizes Milkman and his father. Macon Jr. has been obsessed with the pursuit of money ever since Pilate denied him the gold in the cave. He feels that his freedom in life is dependent on acquiring more and more material wealth, not realizing how this acquisitiveness also hampers his life. He lacks empathy for others because he is too focused on protecting his money.
Milkman follows in his father’s footsteps. He pursues gold once his father and Guitar push him to seize the opportunity. But his single-minded pursuit of gold makes him just like the peacock, unable to soar past the confines of materialism. Ironically, in seeking the gold, Milkman soon sheds his wealth. His shoes and watch get destroyed, and his money does nothing to satisfy his hunger once he’s in the woods. He learns to let go of his material possessions, eventually shedding the desire for gold so he can finally fly.
The Missing Navel
Others see Pilate in terms of her difference—her lack of a naval—and are unnerved by her “unnatural” birth. Indeed, her smooth stomach does sound like something from a fairy tale or myth. The naval represents where the umbilical cord was, the baby’s connection to the mother. When Pilate’s mother dies in childbirth, her tether to her mother literally and symbolically disappears; little is learned about her mother, Sing Bird.
Pilate’s lack of a mother soon becomes a lack of a father and then a brother. Then community after community also rejects her due to her difference. Pilate suffers from the estrangement inflicted on her and at first struggles to understand why people act this way. But once she understands that people reject her for such a small difference, she embraces the idea of difference, insisting on her right to look different in other ways. She begins by cutting off all her hair, so she doesn’t have to maintain it anymore. She lives in a house without electricity and running water. She doesn’t want to live with false ideas about what is essential in life. She seeks out liminal spaces where she can live according to her ideals.
But she also embraces and loves people, reaching out to those who suffer. She does not need a navel to understand the cords that bind people; she sees the other tethers connecting people, both in the present and the past.
Fairy Tales and Newspaper Tales
The book alludes to a variety of old stories from the biblical “Song of Songs,” also known as the “Song of Solomon”; to fairy tales like Rumpelstiltskin and Hansel and Gretel; to the Greek myths of Odysseus and Icarus; to African folk tales of flying. The book also alludes to famous historical events depicting racial violence that occurred just years before the publication of Song of Solomon, particularly the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the 16th Street Church Bombing in 1963. This juxtaposition of brutal racial violence with magical children’s stories creates a whiplash effect, as the monsters from children’s stories come alive in the form of slavery and lynchings, an all too real part of the story of the United States.
Morrison’s use of magical realism allows the fictional and historical monsters to overlap, showing the characters’ inability to keep them separate and contained. For example, Circe is characterized as a type of sorceress figure, her name alluding to the witch from Homer’s Odyssey. She is also connected to the witch from Hansel and Gretel. But in that same chapter, the text reminds the reader that this is no fairy tale and Circe cannot be dismissed as mere myth. She is an actual woman suffering from the all too real monster of racism, the consequences of which have deprived her and her community of her skills and abilities. If it were not for the color of her skin, Circe could be running a hospital instead of living in a dilapidated house surrounded by dogs, waiting for the house and herself to die. The reality of racism cannot be kept out of the magical tale. Instead, it forces its way into the narrative, refusing to be held at a remove.
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