24 pages • 48 minutes read
Toni MorrisonSweetness
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Sweetness
Content warning: This section of the guide discusses racism, sexual abuse, and emotional abuse.
Morrison presents Sweetness as a complex and deeply flawed individual. Sweetness struggles with her own internalized colorism and self-hatred, which ultimately leads to the neglect and emotional abuse of her daughter. Sweetness is portrayed as a deeply unhappy and bitter person, whose disdain for her daughter’s dark skin color is rooted in a deep-seated fear of how society will perceive and treat her.
Sweetness’s life is portrayed as precarious because of racism, sexism, and socio-economic disparity. Morrison conveys this through the money that Sweetness receives from various people in her life with whom she has antagonistic relationships. Midway through the story, she begins to receive welfare from the state, administered by clerks who are “mean as spit” (Paragraph 7). These clerks represent the state that is constructed on white supremacist and patriarchal values and is not designed to give Sweetness real “relief”. Shortly after, she receives money from Louis, which provides a brief respite but highlights her gendered oppression in contrast with a man who can support himself and choose whether or not to support his wife and child. At the end of the story, she receives money from Lula Ann which enables her to stay in a “small, homey, cheaper” nursing home (Paragraph 12). Her small comforts that she can afford with the money, such as a “fresh deck of cards” or “special face cream” (Paragraph 12), are juxtaposed with the meagerness of her surroundings. Throughout the story, Morrison therefore makes Sweetness a sympathetic figure who is trying to survive intersecting forms of oppression, while still highlighting her failings as a mother.
Sweetness is shown to be deeply conflicted and haunted by guilt over the way she has treated Lula Ann. At first, in her internal monologue, she repeatedly tries to justify her actions and portray her fear of racism for both herself and her daughter. However, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that Sweetness is struggling with her own feelings of guilt and responsibility for her daughter’s emotional pain and suffering. This is demonstrated in her admission that “It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not” (Paragraph 7). However, she ends the story with a sense that Lula Ann will follow in her footsteps and take similar steps to “protect” her own daughter, meaning that while she undergoes life changes throughout the story, her characterization remains static and ambiguous by the end.
Lula Ann
Lula Ann is the daughter of Sweetness and the primary focus of the story. Lula Ann is described as having dark skin and thick lips, which causes her mother to feel ashamed of her appearance. At first, despite being the primary focus of the story—since the story is presented through the eyes of Sweetness and focuses mostly on the past—Lula Ann doesn’t have much agency in the story. However, she undergoes major character development once there is a shift in the story: Sweetness says, “I don’t care how many times she changes her name” (Paragraph 7), which suggests that by choosing her own name, Lula Ann is taking control of her own life and identity. She moves away, gets a high-paying job, and becomes “[b]old and confident […] using [her skin color] to her advantage in beautiful white clothes” (Paragraph 10). She therefore represents a new generation of Black women since she is not attempting to “pass” like her great-grandmother, working for a white family like her grandmother, or struggling to live like her mother. Nevertheless, Morrison hints at her trauma from colorism and racism since Sweetness senses that Lula Ann “hates” her and that she is gripped by her “conscience” to keep sending money to her, highlighting the financial burden of young Black people without intergenerational wealth.
Louis
Louis is a minor character in Toni Morrison’s short story “Sweetness,” but he is significant. As Sweetness’s husband, he is her only support system. They were happily married for three whole years. However, after the birth of Lula Ann, this support system collapses as Louis becomes convinced that Lula Ann was the result of Sweetness’s infidelity. He is so convinced that he did not even touch Lula Ann and treated her like “an enemy” (Paragraph 5). He constantly fights with Sweetness and when she blamed his family for Lula Ann’s dark skin color, he walks away from his family, leaving Sweetness and Lula Ann to fend for themselves. However, he feels guilty and so every month, he starts sending Sweetness money. While this shows that he felt remorse as he was under no obligation to do so, it also highlights his patriarchal privileges of greater (though not large) financial freedom. This money does have a positive impact in the life of Sweetness and Lula Ann as it helps them to get off welfare.
Sweetness’s Grandmother
Sweetness’s grandmother is a character whose presence is felt through her absence. Although she never appears in the story, her influence is palpable through Sweetness’s memories of her. Sweetness’s grandmother is a light-skinned woman who passed for white, and her own daughter, Sweetness’s mother, resented her for it. Sweetness’s grandmother is a symbol of internalized racism in the Black community. Her decision to pass as white is an act of self-preservation in a society that devalues Blackness.
Through Sweetness’s grandmother, Morrison explores intergenerational trauma that affects the Black community. Her passing as white is born out of the trauma of Jim Crow laws. Sweetness comments that “[a]lmost all quadroons and mulatto types did that back in the day” (Paragraph 1), and Morrison uses this vague and matter-of-fact tone to portray Sweetness’s somber understanding of her grandmother’s choices. Sweetness’s mother’s resentment toward her mother represents that trauma being passed down through the generations. Sweetness’s mother’s own internalized racism is a result of her own trauma, as is Sweetness’s. Sweetness’s grandmother’s palpable absence represents the ways in which the past shapes the present.
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