Building and Weaving Home in Toni Morrison's Home

Throughout her latest novel Home, Toni Morrison redefines the concept of home as a philosophical, non-physical social space of openness, engagement, and inclusion in opposition to the concept of the racist house that embeds Western hegemony with a strict division between privileged insiders and excluded strangers. Following and narrating the Korean War veteran Frank Money's cross-country journey to save his sister Cee, Morrison lays out the racist landscape of America in the first part of the twentieth century. Through the journey, Frank is able to rememory and reevaluate the past trauma and memories that bereft him of any form of "home" and of a chance to form positive subjectivity and self-ownership, thereby finding a possible course of healing on the way home. In the process Cee serves as a motivation for Frank's healing, and the healing of her broken body and mind correlates to his recuperation of his manhood and an understanding of a new concept of home. The healing process is symbolized through narrative and artistic means-the symbol of a quilt. Within the novel, the various stories are told and sewn together through various voices like a quilt: Morrison uses quilting as a symbol of healing and home, a tool to articulate their stories, assert their subjectivity, and help them redefine and find a way home. Like open and ever developing quilts, Morrison leaves the story open, so that she invites all strangers and outsiders to social space of healing, openness, and inclusion-a place of home.