Toni Morrison's "Love" and the trickster paradigm

Abstract

The aim of this article is to propose a reading of Toni Morrison's Love (2003) as a trickster novel. The trickster paradigm, characterized by ambiguity, indeterminacy and transgression, pervades Morrison's fiction and dominates her latest novel in a clear continuation of her challenge to unquestioned univocal concepts and world views. Two of its female characters, Junior and Celestial, join the ranks of Morrisonian tricksters like Pilate or Sula. As a writer of trickster fiction, Toni Morrison turns into a figurative trickster herself, playing with language and words and welcoming paradoxes like those engendered by the multidimensional concept of love.