Overview
Toni Morrison’s Home (2012) follows Frank Money, a Korean War veteran who is suffering from “shell shock” (PTSD), as he escapes a psychiatric ward and travels to Georgia to rescue his younger sister Ycidra (Cee) from a white eugenicist doctor. Set in the mid-1950s, the novel takes the reader from Seattle, WA, to Portland, OR, to Chicago, IL, and finally to Georgia—initially Atlanta, where Cee is living, and then to Frank’s and Cee’s hometown of Lotus. The novel explores Frank’s and Cee’s journeys to “home,” both literally and figuratively, as the brother and sister confront buried memories and a shared past in the harsh town of Lotus that force them toward reckoning and repair. The questions that Morrison explores in the novel are: “What is home? Where is it? How do you know you’ve found it?”
Morrison stated—in an interview with “Talks at Google,”—that the inspiration for Home was her interest in “taking the skin or the scab off our view of the 1950s” as “nice comfortable American Dream stuff.” She was interested in “what was underneath” the ideal, what “was being silenced and removed” (the Korean War, McCarthyism, medical experimentation on “prisoners, army people, poor people, children”) to maintain the myth of the 1950s as ‘the good old days’. In Home, Morrison challenges the myths of this decade in American history and uncovers the ways in which this period in America resonates in the 21st century.
In creating her protagonists, Frank and Cee Money, Morrison says she was “trying to think of when a man would love a woman without the baggage. Who is the female figure that he would love selflessly? Not a mother, not a lover, not a wife—only a sister.” The novel’s main arc follows Frank’s journey to manhood through his actions to save Cee, whom he has protected throughout their childhood, from the eugenic experiments of a racist doctor. Also worthy of note is that in Home, Morrison brings together the paradigms of both the male and female hero journeys, which is an innovative narrative strategy.
The novel has seventeen numbered chapters. In the first and last chapters and in several chapters throughout the novel, Frank serves as a first-person narrator, recounting his own experiences; and he questions, confesses to, and challenges the third-person omniscient narrator, who Morrison has identified as herself. In using this innovative literary device, Morrison explains: “That was my great discovery! I didn’t want to take on the ‘I’ persona, so he and I are in this relationship. He learns about what he does. He learns about himself. And he learns with the aid of community.” Home blends elements of several literary genres—war narrative, Southern gothic, the hero’s journey, psychological realism, and social critique—to tell the story of trauma, healing, and the meaning of home for Black Americans in mid-20th century America.
Background Knowledge and Historical Contexts
The optional readings and videos below provide some historical context which may be useful when reading the novel.
- The Fifties in America: The Fifties | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
- The Korean War: Korean War – Causes, Timeline & Veterans | HISTORY
- McCarthyism: McCarthyism and the Red Scare | Miller Center
- Eugenics: Eugenics: Definition, Movement & Meaning | HISTORY and The Dark Legacy of Compulsory Sterilization – SamePassage
Questions/Topics to Consider While Reading
- Home: The novel’s title is its central question. In what ways is the novel about both leaving home and coming home? By the novel’s end, what does “home” mean for Frank, for Cee, for Lenore, and for Lily? Does Morrison suggest that home is a place, a feeling, a relationship, a choice, or all of these? Both Frank and Cee were eager to leave Lotus, Georgia, and never return. Why do they find it so comforting when they do go back? What is it about the place and people that feels to Frank “both fresh and ancient, safe and demanding” and makes Cee declare that this is where she belongs? What did Frank and Cee each need to do—internally and externally—before they could experience Lotus as home? What does Morrison’s vision of homecoming suggest about what it means to belong, not just to a place, but to yourself?
- Trauma and Healing: How has Frank’s war experience affected him? What symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder does he exhibit? In what ways does he suffer from “survival guilt”? Discuss the role of trauma in the novel and how it affects the characters’ lives.
- Womanhood/Community: In what concrete ways does Cee’s lack of education and the absence of women who might have helped her, hurt her? How much responsibility does Morrison assign to Cee for her own situation? How does your reading of Cee’s complicity (which she acknowledges in Chapter 15) change—or not change—your understanding of her as a victim of systemic violence? What methods do Miss Ethel and the other women use to nurse Cee back to health? How does Morrison frame the authority and legitimacy of the women’s healing knowledge? Why do they feel Frank’s male energy might hinder the healing process? Why do the women who heal Cee have such contempt for “the medical industry”? What larger point is Morrison making about the difference between feminine and masculine, or earth-based and industrial, ways of treating illness? What does this contrast argue about power, knowledge, and care? In what ways is Cee ultimately transformed by the treatment and the wise counsel that Miss Ethel gives her?
- Identity: Explore the intersection of race and gender in the novel and how it shapes the experiences and identities of the characters. Discuss the challenges faced by Frank as a Black man returning from war and how they relate to issues of masculinity and societal expectations. Examine the struggles faced by the female characters in the novel in relation to racial discrimination, gender expectations, and the weight of history on their identities.
- Community (and Salvation): Analyze the themes of family and community in the novel and how they contribute to the characters search for personal redemption. Why does Frank decide to give a proper burial to the man killed for sport—and whose undignified burial he and Cee witness as children—at the end of the novel? Why would this act be emotionally important for him?
- Ethics and Morality: The revelation that Frank killed the Korean girl—rather than the relief guard—is the novel’s moral climax? How does this confession change your understanding of the Frank you have followed throughout the novel? Morrison does not offer Frank easy absolution. Do you think the novel implies that healing is still possible for him after this revelation? How have Miss Ethel and the other women in her community learned not just to live with but to rise above the limitations imposed on them? What moral code do they live by?
- Race and Racism: The race of the characters is not specified in the novel. How does Morrison make clear which characters are black and which are white? Why might she have chosen not to identify characters explicitly by race? Frank, Stuff, and Mike enlisted in the army partly to escape the limitations of Black life in America, and were sent to die in a war being fought for democratic values denied them at home. How does Morrison use the Korean War to make an argument about Black citizenship, service, and sacrifice? How does Frank’s experience as a soldier connect to the novel’s broader examination of what America demands of Black Americans? Morrison presents racism as a force that operates through multiple institutions simultaneously—the military, the medical establishment, the legal system, the spatial organization of cities. Which of these manifestations of systemic racism did you find most disturbing and why? How does locating the novel in the 1950s allow Morrison to comment on both historical and contemporary forms of racism?
- Imagery and Symbolism: Discuss the following symbols in the novel: Lotus, Georgia; Reverand John Locke; the two stallions; the road and journeys; sunlight; the threshold of Miss Ethel’s house; the dead, unnamed Black man; Lily’s apartment; Cee’s quilting; the sweet bay tree.
- Morrison’s Writing Style: What is the effect of alternating between Frank’s first-person narration and the third-person narration through which much of the story is told? What is the implied relationship between Frank and the narrator? How does your sense of Frank shift between his first-person interjections and his portrayal in the third-person sections? Why might Morrison have chosen to end the formal tension between the two voices in the Epilogue? Why has Morrison structured the novel so that the end mirrors the beginning? Just as Morrison brings together the male and female slave narrative traditions in her novel Beloved, in Home she brings together the paradigms of the male and female hero’s journeys. What similarities and differences do you perceive in the male and female paradigms, and what do you think Morrison wants us to understand by juxtaposing these two paradigms in the novel?
