No System of Justice: At the Margins with Toni Morrison’s Intertextual Characters

“No System of Justice: At the Margins with Toni Morrison’s Intertextual Characters,” reads Morrison’s novel through the lens of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in which a young mother cannot love the daughter she finds “ugly.” Eaton argues that ugliness becomes a code word for, particularly the blackness of very dark-skinned African Americans.  Throughout her eleven novels, Morrison never wavers in her conviction that a formal justice system cannot heal the traumas of mothers and children torn apart by slavery, Jim Crow, endemic racism, and internalized racial self-hatred. Morrison employs intertextual characters between novels, including Pecola and Lula Ann, that emphasize her disdain for formal justice and her fascination with characters existing in extra-narrative spaces. Eaton explores Morrison’s rejection of institutional justice through the lens of lawyer/theorist Patricia J. Williams, as well as through Morrison’s essays on the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings and on the O.J. Simpson trial.