Summary
At Saxon College, Meridian has to hide the fact that she is a divorcee who gave her child up for adoption. The institution’s rules emphasize traditional feminine behavior, but teachers are willing to lie for students who get involved in the Atlanta civil rights movement, claiming that their weeks spent in jail are “field trips.” Meridian and many other young women at Saxon experience extreme stress because of the physical and psychological toll of protesting, compounded by Saxon’s strict yet apparently meaningless rules. Meridian moves off campus and gets a job as a typist for a professor, continuing to take classes all the while.
Meridian falls in love with Truman, who attends a nearby college. One night, she and Truman plan to attend a party where three exchange students—white girls—are also present. Truman wants to skip the party and have sex with Meridian, but Meridian insists that they go. At the party, Meridian dances all night and loses track of Truman, who flirts with the exchange students. After that night, he begins dating the exchange students. Meridian is hurt, especially because, in her hometown, white women were seen as entirely undesirable.
Several months after the party, Truman runs into Meridian on her way home from work, and he walks with her back to her apartment. Truman teases Meridian about her typist job, asking if the elderly professor for whom she works ever tries to get sexual favors in exchange for the gifts, such as food and tennis rackets, that he gives Meridian. Meridian brushes off his joking question, concealing the fact that the professor frequently does sexually harass her and attempt to have sex with her. Truman pulls Meridian onto the couch, and although Meridian is still resentful that he dates the white exchange students, the two have sex. Afterwards, Meridian realizes that Truman didn’t use protection; she tries to use hot water as a postcoital contraceptive. Returning from the bathroom, she sees that Truman has left to go back to one of the exchange students, Lynne.
Meridian soon finds out that she is pregnant. She gets an abortion, and the local doctor ties her tubes so that she can never get pregnant again—while making it clear that he expects sexual favors in return. Meridian doesn’t tell Truman about the abortion. When she sees him again, he tells Meridian that she’s beautiful and that he wants to get back together. Truman flirtingly says that he wants Meridian to have his black babies, and she flies into a rage, hitting him with her school bag.
Meridian begins to have a recurring dream that she is a character in a novel who must die to solve her problems. She begins to feel physically ill, and she experiences a two-day spell of blindness. When she is taken to the local doctor, he sexually harasses her during a physical examination. Her illness advances until she is paralyzed and bedridden, progressing to the point that Meridian reaches a kind of induced ecstasy. To help Meridian, Anne-Marion recruits the help of the school’s organist, Miss Winter. Miss Winter is from Meridian’s hometown. Although she originally resented Meridian for ruining her record as the only woman from their town to go to Saxon College, she agrees to help nurse Meridian back to health. Miss Winter recalls an incident several years ago when Meridian was performing well at an oratory concert but abruptly stopped giving her speech on “The American Way of Life” because she realized that she didn’t believe what she was saying. Miss Winter had comforted Meridian after her mother chastised her on the importance of continuing along God’s given path.
Meridian thinks of her mother as a giant, whose legend she can never live up to. Her mother’s great-great-grandmother was a slave who starved to death in an effort to keep her children alive; her great-grandmother bought her family’s freedom with the money she earned painting barns; and her grandmother worked long extra hours to put Meridian’s mother through school. Meridian’s mother grew up passionately dedicated to her dream of being a schoolteacher, while constantly trying to evade her father’s physical abuse and the sexual advances of white men. Meridian feels guilty for burdening her mother’s already difficult life.
Meridian begins to recover, but Anne-Marion believes that Meridian will never truly be ready for the future. Feeling that she is unable to be friends with a person whom she can’t protect, Anne-Marion cruelly severs their friendship, telling Meridian that she is as obsolete as the idea of suffering itself. After Meridian moves back South, however, Anne-Marion finds herself compulsively writing letters to her former best friend.
Analysis
The experiences of Meridian and her fellow students at Saxon College reveal how traditional stereotypes clash with female and racial empowerment in the Atlanta civil rights movement. Saxon College is mired in the past: it is named after a plantation, which itself is named after the Germanic tribes that the term “Anglo-Saxon” derives from. The College forces its students to abide by strict rules that don’t seem to benefit its students much; girls are punished for having male visitors outdoors just ten minutes after the visiting hours have ended. These rules and the “white gloves” that symbolize them are revealed to be pointless and restrictive in the face of the harsh, gory civil-rights fight. The Saxon girls are pressed to occasionally unendurable extremes by experiencing racist brutality in the streets of Atlanta, then returning to an environment that refuses to acknowledge reality or offer support.
Meridian is by no means exempt from this struggle, and the pain of her experience at Saxon is further compounded by the sexual traps, exploitation, and misfortune that surrounds her. Even the doctor who performs her abortion not only refuses to give her anesthesia but also eventually sexually harasses her; this figure of healing and health ultimately deepens her physical and psychic suffering. When Meridian attempts to improve her situation by getting a job, her boss harasses her too; she can’t quit, because of the indispensable financial help that the job and the professor’s gifts provide. Even Truman, who at first seems promising as a dashing love interest, fails Meridian: he abandons her for the white exchange students, doesn’t bother to use protection when they have sex, and doesn’t care that the sex isn’t fulfilling for her. Meridian has one child and terminates another pregnancy, but she has never truly enjoyed sex. Everywhere she turns, men abuse their power over her to take advantage of her and use her body.
In these sections, we see Meridian’s history of emotional suffering translate into literal, physical illness. While it may be impossible to tease her harrowing life experiences apart from a biological cause of her extreme illness, the stress that Meridian has endured in her young life has undoubtedly been detrimental to her health. Ironically, it is only in the furthest reaches of her illness that Meridian begins to experience an almost spiritual state of satisfaction and bliss. The dark irony that one suffering offers respite from another has happened before in Meridian’s life: she used unenjoyable sex to protect herself from other men, and she savors the physical beatings she receives during protests because they completely occupy her mind and offer the kind of punishment that she believes she deserves. Just as Meridian has persevered against the emotional hardships in her life, however, she ultimately survives her dire illness.
Meridian’s survival is due in part to the assistance of Miss Winter, a rare positive role model in the novel. Miss Winter is independent and freethinking; she is one of the few black teachers at Saxon College, and she bravely fights with the president of the college to keep her job. She also serves as a foil to the other strong woman in Meridian’s life: her mother. Meridian’s mother has used religion to get her through the hardships of her life, but this focus on religion has ultimately narrowed her perspective. Having long been unable to choose for herself, Meridian’s mother can’t empathize with her daughter, and so she ends up focusing on her soul rather than her life. Miss Winter, in contrast, is focused on reality and physical truth. Her dedication to truth leads her to empathize with Meridian when Meridian can’t finish the speech she doesn’t actually believe in, while Meridian’s mother reproaches her for not following along the path she started on.
Female friendship offers Meridian a rare respite from the difficulties in her life and the male expectations she constantly runs up against. Anne-Marion deeply cares for Meridian, but this interest is self-destructive; Anne-Marion is unable to maintain the friendship, unable to run the emotional risk of investing herself in a person who might not be capable of being saved. Sadly and ironically, one of the few people who are genuinely interested in Meridian’s well-being turns away because she can’t bear to see her friend suffer. However, Anne-Marion’s frequent, almost compulsive letters to Meridian reveal the love of friendship seeping through the walls that Anne-Marion built between the two. Although the two grow apart, Meridian keeps her old friend’s letters, drawing comfort from the familiar handwriting.
