“Poison may lurk at the bottom”: The ruin of Jacob Vaark and paradise already lost in Toni Morrison's <i>A Mercy</i>

Abstract The essay advances a sustained close reading of perhaps the most complete representation of a white male character in Toni Morrison's oeuvre, Jacob Vaark, the Anglo‐Dutch settler portrayed in her ninth novel, A Mercy (2008). Interpretations that comprehend Vaark's conduct as illustrating a fall from grace, whether that falling off is construed as rapid or gradual, overlook the various textual clues that Vaark's ethical standards have eroded even before he steps into the narrative and is confronted with material temptations. Vaark is a man already selfish, covetous, lascivious, hypocritical, and unexpectedly and chillingly indifferent to the misery of others. Hilary Mantel has complained of Morrison's portrait of Vaark that, “Having created him carefully, Morrison sweeps him out of the story”; rather, Morrison's novel provides the reader with a forceful, disturbing, and resonant figure who casts a long shadow over the other characters throughout the narrative. Through Vaark's corruption, Morrison unmasks an American project that is neither experimental nor instinct with promise or possibility, but tainted ab ovo and vitiated from before the beginning.