63 pages • 2 hours read
Toni MorrisonJazz
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
This chapter examines the history of Dorcas’s aunt Alice Manfred and how she copes with the death of her niece. Alice Manfred recalls an uncharacteristically cold day in July 1917. Alice held the hand of her niece as she watched the marching band pass and thought about the fear that had followed her from Illinois to the city. Alice had been afraid her entire life, and she transferred her fear to her orphaned niece whose parents were murdered during the riots in East St. Louis. Alice tried to protect her niece by concealing the girl’s feminine features from the gaze of white men and reminding her to remain chaste.
Despite Alice Manfred’s attempts to hide Dorcas away, the city had taken ahold of the young girl. Dorcas was hungry for love. For her, the drums in the parade marked the beginning of a new life. She felt alive and emboldened by the city and its music. She was sensual and drawn to sex, fully immersed in the carnal culture of the city. Dorcas and her friend Felice attended parties, but Dorcas was aware that she did not yet look grown up. She tried to make up for her youth by dressing maturely, but the men she was interested in rejected her. Their dismissal of her only increased her desire. The unnamed narrator is suspicious of Dorcas: “I always believed that girl was a pack of lies. I could tell by her walk her underclothes were beyond her years, even if her dress wasn’t” (72).
When Joe Trace visited Alice Manfred's apartment to make a cosmetics sale to a group of women, Dorcas answered the door. Joe had seen Dorcas before at the candy store but did not know who she was. The women liked Joe and felt they could tease and flirt with him without fear or risk. He was safe: married and friendly. After Dorcas’s death, Alice reflects on what happened with Joe Trace. Alice had spent her life living in fear, and then danger entered her own home and killed her niece. Now, that fear is replaced with anger. She wonders why she has always utilized fear rather than anger. Many women are armed. The women who are unarmed are those who use religion or attachments to armed men to protect themselves. Alice wonders what her life would have been like if she had been armed rather than fearful.
Violet visits Alice to find out information about Dorcas, and Alice treats her coldly. She gives Violet a photograph of Dorcas to make her leave, but Violet returns repeatedly. The two women develop an easy relationship. They do not feel like they need to be polite or formal toward one another. Alice admonishes Violet’s violence but wonders whether she should have been more violent herself.
Chapter 4 Summary
When Violet leaves Alice’s apartment, she leaves behind her sense of calm. She sees herself as split into two people: Violet and that Violet, the woman who tried to cut the face from a dead girl at a funeral. That Violet acts independently from her counterpart. When Violet lost the knife, that Violet knew right where to find it. That Violet knew which funeral parlor Dorcas’s body would be displayed at. The men at the funeral let Violet near the casket, not aware that she was holding a knife. When they realized what was happening, they pinned Violet to the ground, and she cried like a wounded animal. Violet was surprised at her strength while wrestling with the men at the funeral parlor. The city had stripped the strength she gained while working in the fields in Virginia. That Violet still had this power. Both Violets could not bear returning home to an empty house with only a parrot speaking, “Love you.”
Violet wonders what Dorcas saw in Joe, but she remembers what she saw in him when she was young. Violet picked Joe because he was unlike any of the men she had encountered before. He was outgoing, friendly, and full of dreams. Violet takes a drink from a cup in the drugstore and remembers the way her mother drank from a cup while men showed up at their home and took all their things. They pulled the kitchen table away from Violet’s mother Rose and then pulled the chair from beneath her. For days afterward, Rose did not speak. Violet’s grandmother True Belle moved in to help with the children. After four years, Rose jumped into the well and drowned. When Violet’s father showed up years later, he learned what happened to his wife, gave the children gifts, and left again.
Violet met Joe while working cotton fields in Palestine, Virginia. While sleeping under a walnut tree, Joe—who was sleeping in the branches—fell from the tree and startled her. The two stayed up all night talking. Violet stayed in Palestine, seeking farmwork to stay close to Joe.
Violet wonders what it was that overwhelmed her mother and led her to suicide. Perhaps it was the daily grind or the brutal violence of white hatred. Violet knew that she never wanted to have children because she never wanted them to endure the pain that she experienced as a child. Although she had a few miscarriages, she and Joe assured each other that they did not want children. However, when Violet was 40, she felt an overwhelming longing she could not shake. Her longing turned into silence. Violet wonders whether she hated Dorcas for taking Joe away from her or if she saw Dorcas as the child that she lost.
During her visit with Alice, Violet asks what she should do. Alice tells her that Joe will do it again, but he is all Violet has. As Alice talks to Violet, she forgets that she is ironing and burns the shirt. The two women laugh together.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Chapter 3 exemplifies Morrison’s use of different perspectives to look at the story from varying angles. In Chapter 2, Joe Trace looks back on his first meeting with Dorcas to help lull him to sleep: Morrison is careful to omit some details from this meeting, providing more later in the novel. Joe’s memory of Dorcas is told through the perspective of his own pain. Dorcas is a supplement for the silence and lack of love in his marriage; he seeks an intimacy with her that he does not share with his wife. In Chapter 3, however, this first meeting is explored through the perspectives of Dorcas and Alice. Dorcas is young and flighty, enamored with love and sex, and Joe Trace is an opportunity to engage with both. Alice sees Joe as another form of male danger. She devotes herself to protecting Alice from violent white men, never thinking to protect her from the friendly cosmetics salesperson, illustrating how each character’s motivation is informed by their histories of Relationships and Trauma.
From Dorcas’s perspective, her first introduction to the spirit of Harlem and the city is a parade in July when she is only nine years old. The drums become a part of her and propel her into a sensual life. The narration of Dorcas’s experience in the city is an excellent example of Morrison’s use of a jazz-like improvisational style and Dorcas’s characterization:
The City is smart at this: smelling and good and looking raunchy; sending secret message disguised as public signs: this way, open here, danger to let colored only single men on sale woman wanted private room stop dog on premises absolutely no money down fresh chicken free delivery fast. And good at opening locks, dimming stairways. Covering your moans with its own (64).
Dorcas is enticed by the city’s worldliness, and although Joe, Violet, and other characters in the novel make Dorcas the object of their Desire and Possession, her relationship with Joe is the manifestation of her own longing and trauma.
Although Violet opens the novel, it is difficult to determine which character, if any, is the protagonist or antagonist. Instead, Morrison relies on the characters as an ensemble to explore themes. Each character has a part to play. The repetition of the stories, each with new details or new perspectives, reflects the call-and-response technique used in jazz music. Alice Manfred retells Joe’s first encounter with Dorcas, examining him as a type of predator, a stark contrast to his own tale of love and affection for the girl he meets at Alice’s home. Joe and Violet’s early years are re-examined through Violet’s perspective. Joe cannot recall how he felt about Violet, but her feelings in those early years are still tangible. Through the polyphony of the characters’ varied experiences, Morrison provides a complex and rich musical narrative.
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