Bride to Child

QR Blog Post #1

GOD HELP the CHILD by Toni Morrison conveys the heart wrenching story of Lula Ann Bridewell or, as she nicknamed herself, just Bride. Within this story, there a variety of intricacies which play important roles within this text; there are foil characters, contrasting personal beliefs, guilt, racism, hatred, and much more. Yet among all of these pieces which comprise this text, one seems to stand out to me above the others. In the first chapter, Bride discovers “every bit of my pubic hair is gone” and confides that “it scared me” (12, 13). Yet despite being scared by this new development so early in the text, Bride, perhaps like almost everything else in her life, shoves it under the rug and trudges forward. It is hardly mentioned within the text until more physical alterations begin to take place. Next Bride loses her ear piercings. “Christ. Now what?” she says as she tries to figure out the problem with her earrings, “My earrings. They won’t go in… I peer at my lobes closely and discover the tiny holes are gone” (50). Pubic hair, earrings… But wait there is more. On a road trip to look for her ex boyfriend Bride stops at a place to eat and, upon entering the ladies room, finds that the top of her dress now sags “as if instead of a size 2, she had purchased a 4” (81). Now she is trimming down… Morrison continues this development of Magical realism even further with “It was when she stood to dry herself that she discovered that her chest was flat. Completely flat, with only nipples to prove it was not her back” (92). To continue this point, when Bride asks to borrow pants from Evelyn (a person she is staying with on her journey to find her ex), she instead has to borrow pants from Rain (the daughter of Evelyn who hasn’t even begun to hit puberty) (93)... Through all of these body modifications, Bride seems to be retracing the steps of her puberty; turning younger rather than turning older.

I am struggling to define the reason behind this repeal on puberty… Why would this be? I think it has something to do with her past, however she has faced multiple problems within her past… The major problems she has faced within her life are with Sweetness (her non-affectionate mother), Sofia Huxley (the school teacher she accuses of rape), and her ex-boyfriend (who walks out on her and says “you not the woman I want” (8)); out of those, Bride believes that her ex boyfriend is the cause of the situation, and claims that “the body changes began not simply after he left but because he left” (94)... Yet I think it is something else, not her ex (Booker), or Sweetness, or Sofia Huxley… Something more than any of them. Bride says that “Booker was the one person she was able to confront - which was the same as confronting herself, standing up for herself.” (98), by going after him now, she is trying to confront herself and look for answers to a problem perhaps she doesn’t even understand. From the very beginning of the text, Morrison creates Bride as a character who is successful, yet not at home with herself; she has never stood up for herself at all through her life and that has made a lasting impression. When Booker confronts her about not being the woman he wants, her response is “Neither am I” (8), When a boy is getting raped on the stairs by her landlord (flashback from when she was a kid), her mom told her not to do anything so she kept quiet. The list goes on. Bride recognizes this when she says “Too weak, too scared to defy Sweetness, or the landlord, or Sofia Huxley, there was nothing in the world left to do but stand up for herself finally and confront the first man she had bared her soul to” (79). Just as she swept her discomfort about the arm pit hair situation under the rug and refuses to acknowledge it, even as the effects become more pronounced, Bride is beginning the journey of attacking her past through Booker and through it, it takes away more and more of her womanhood as she confronts the problems from her childhood… Her physical nature, in essence, reflects the time of her problems which she never overcame.