Discovering Personal Agency: The Position of Florens in A Mercy Julius Maingi Muthusi College

Toni Morrison is partly interested in the complex ways how uprootedness can ultimately confound self-understanding and self-direction. In A Mercy, Florens’ hesitation to choose is due to her inexperience of freedom, this underscores the way in which slavery and separation distorts agency.

Emancipation is pertinent to choice making. Morrison highlights how Florens’ burden of enslavement inhibits choice-making when she says “It is as though I am loose to do what I choose, the stag, the wall of flowers. I am a little scared of this looseness. Is that how free feels? I don’t like it. I don’t want to be free of you because I am live only with you. When I choose and say good morning, the stag abounds” (82). The two concepts that present a hindrance for Florens’ freedom to choose is “scared” and “loose”. The term “scared” refers to a state of fear. Florens’ fear of choice emanates from the fact of her whole life being imprisoned either under her mother (as a child) and being birthed into slavery. Being “scared” reinforces the loss of personal control, meaning that Florens submits her will to the object of her fear. On the other hand, “loose” is a state of being unattached to something. The idea of being “loose” ought to bestow...