Violet

Violet is a fifty-six year old woman living in Harlem with her husband Joe. Hopelessly scrawny with
very dark skin, Violet is beautiful if one looks at her long enough. She has a reputation in Harlem for
being odd and she does not quite fit in with the other ladies. She becomes sullen and taciturn with
her husband and explodes into violence at his lover's funeral, earning herself the nickname "Violent."
An orphan raised by her grandmother in rural Virginia, Violet herself has no children and, after
several miscarriages, she longs for a child.Tough and lonely, Violet is an eccentric woman whose
years of accumulated hardship finally catch up with her at the age of fifty-six. Violet was raised by
her mother, Rose Dear, in Vienna, Virginia, as one of five children. Her father would leave the family
for long stretches of time and when the family's belongings were repossessed, Violet's mother
committed suicide by throwing herself down a well. When Violet married Joe Trace, she sought to
escape the hard-knocks lifestyle of her childhood by moving to the City. Neither she nor Joe had
wanted children, but as Violet grows older, she begins to feel a deep longing for something to love.
Her relationship with Joe becomes strained when she falls into depression. When she finds out that
Joe has cheated on her with Dorcas, Violet projects all of her anger, sadness and frustration by
slashing Dorcas's face at her funeral as she lies in her open casket. In the months that follow, Violet
searches for peace and longs to heal herself and her marriage, discovering, finally, that she has to
"make it" by taking ownership of her happiness and refusing to be a victim.
Dorcas
As with Joe and Violet, Morrison recounts the pivotal events in Dorcas's life that shaped her
personality, making her more sympathetic than she would at first appear. As a young girl, Dorcas lost
both of her parents in the same day when her father was killed on a streetcar and her mother died in a
burning building during the East St. Louis riots, which left her orphaned and homeless. Like so many
of the characters in the book, Dorcas migrated to the City where her life was to be rebuilt by the
obsessive care of her aunt, Alice Manfred. However, as a teenager, Dorcas begins to rebel against her
aunt's old-fashioned tastes, and refashions herself as a sexually-desirable woman. Dorcas wants to be
looked at and admired and when Joe visits her aunt's house she successfully captures the older man's
gaze. The morality of sleeping with a married man who is old enough to be her father does not factor
into Dorcas's decision to be with Joe. Like a little girl, she is eager for the gifts that he brings her and
she becomes petulant and moody when she does not get her way. However, Dorcas also wants an
authority figure and when she realizes that Joe is completely malleable she bores with him quickly.
Her new boyfriend, Acton, promises to shape Dorcas and control her, so she allows her identity to be
created for her. When Joe shoots Dorcas, she chooses to die in order to be watched, making herself a
martyr by bleeding to death rather than going to the hospital. However, Morrison's narrator pieces
together the threads of her story to show how Dorcas as one sees her does not correspond with her
inside life.
Joe Trace
Joe is a kind-hearted and fundamentally good man who is driven by sadness and fear to shoot and
kill his young lover, Dorcas. Like his wife, Violet, Joe's suffering stems in large part from his
unstable and painful childhood. At a young age, Joe is told that he was adopted and that his mother
left him "without a trace." A feeling of abandonment and an uncertainty about his identity plagues
Joe from that moment on. Joe therefore does not know where he comes from and thinks, mistakenly,
that he cannot be complete without this information, thereby deferring his happiness and looking to
others to make him whole. He is highly regarded in the Harlem community for being a decent man
and something in his face reminds recent migrants to the City of their rural roots. He treats Violet
well but when she becomes depressed he cannot maintain a sense of completion. He still looks for a
woman to provide the love that his mother, Wild, did not, and for this reason he tries to secure
Dorcas's affection by adoring her. When Dorcas scorns him, his pain is compounded by a deeper
anguish as he watches the third woman in his life abandon him. Therefore, Joe's suffering explodes
into an act of violence in his murder of Dorcas.