Song of Solomon: Milkman Dead - Respecting and Listening to Women
             In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Milkman Dead becomes a man by
             learning to respect and to listen to women. In the first part of the novel, he
             emulates his father, by being deaf to women's wisdom and women's needs, and
             casually disrespecting the women he should most respect. He chooses to stray
             from his father's example and leaves town to obtain his inheritance and to
             become a self-defined man. From Circe, a witch figure, he is inspired to be
             reciprocal, and through his struggle for equality with men and then with women,
             he begins to find his inheritance, which is knowing what it is to fly, not gold.
             At the end, he acts with kindness and reciprocity with Pilate, learning from her
             wisdom and accepting his responsibilities to women at last. By accepting his
             true inheritance from women, he becomes a man, who loves and respects women, who
             knows he can fly but also knows his responsibilties.
             In the first part of the novel, Milkman is his father's son, a child
             taught to ignore the wisdom of women. Even when he is 31, he still needs "both
             his father and his aunt to get him off" the scrapes he gets into. Milkman
             considers himself Macon, Jr., calling himself by that name, and believing that
             he cannot act independently (120). The first lesson his father teaches him is
             that ownership is everything, and that women's knowledge (specifically, Pilate's
             knowledge) is not useful "in this world" (55). He is blind to the Pilate's
             wisdom. When Pilate tell Reba's lover that women's love is to be respected, he
             In the same episode, he begins his incestuous affair with Hagar, leaving
             her 14 years later when his desire for her wanes. Milkman's experience with
             Hagar is analogous to his experience with his mother, and serves to "[stretch]
             his carefree boyhood out for thrifty-one years" (98). Hagar calls him into a
             room, unbuttons her blouse...