It was such a carryin’ on to get him born and to keep him alive. Just to keep his little heart beating and his little old lungs cleared and look like when he came back from that war he wanted to git back in. After all that carryin’ on, just gettin’ him out and keepin’ him alive, he wanted to crawl back in my womb and well… I ain’t got the room no more even if he could do it. There wasn’t space for him in my womb. And he was crawlin’ back. Being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time. I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb, not no more. I birthed him once. I couldn’t do it again. (Morrison 63)
Metaphors are tricky devices that sometimes make no sense, yet other times convey a concept better than any explanation in plain words can. Foundationally, a metaphor is a figurative device that establishes something as something that it is not, due to a shared characteristic between the two things. A metaphor functions to activate the imagination to have a fuller understanding of an abstract idea. In the metaphor I have chosen from Toni Morrison’s Sula, Eva is explaining to Hannah why she killed Plum. In this quote, Plum crawling back into his mother’s womb is a metaphor for Plum’s dependency on his mother which Eva feels is similar to that of a baby. This metaphor evokes the reader to conjure up the bizarre image of her grown son literally crawling into her womb. The sheer impossibility of this in a literal sense conveys how strongly Eva feels about her incapacity to nurture Plum as if he were still a child. This metaphor helps the reader to get an insight into Eva’s thinking process as to why she killed her son. In reading that Eva feels like her son is trying to crawl back into her womb, it can be reasoned that Eva feels like her adult son’s dependency feels like birthing another child that she did not wish to have. Interestingly, this makes me think that Eva views the murder of her son as similar to abortion. Terminating a pregnancy, or in other words, ending the life of a fetus within a mother’s womb is defined as abortion. In relating Plum’s dependency to that of a baby within her womb, Eva’s logic in killing her son seems slightly more acceptable to the reader when it is thought of under the guise of abortion. Something else I found quite interesting that we discussed in class was the possibility that Plum sexually assaulted Eva. This speaks to how the true meaning of metaphors can be obscured and left up to the interpretation of the reader.
Morrison, T. (2002). Sula. Alfred A. Knopf.
Zernitsky, L. (2014). Childbirth. photograph.