“But the Greatest of These Is Love”: Desire for the Father and Agape in Toni Morrison’s Love

Love, Toni Morrison’s novel published in 2003, relates the entangled feelings of love and hostility among five African-American women related to a patriarch named Bill Cosey, aka “Big Daddy” and “Papa.” This paper aims at scrutinizing in light of Lacanian theory the various roles this Big Daddy assumes—the conceptual, symbolic father, the imaginary father and the real, anal father of jouissance. In so doing, the issue of the Father’s desire, which preoccupies almost every female character, and its intricate connection with agape, selfless love represented as a feminine act, can be explored so as to decipher the significance the title “Love” implies. The author argues that L, the ghostly narrator whose name is the subject of I Corinthians 13, “gives what she does not have” (a Lacanian definition of love) and sacrifices what is probably most precious to her—paradoxically the father not as a complete Other who knows the answer to the female subject’s question “Che Vuois?” but as another barred subject. This act of love enables Heed and Christine to retrieve their semi-pre-symbolic bonding and their code language, which simulates the pre-lapsarian plenitude in the form of the Lacanian lalangue.