beloved

'BELOVED' AND THE PROBLEM OF MOURNING



by TERESA HEFFERNAN


How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keeper of the holocaust where all was lost?

Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

Making a space for the transgressive image, the outlaw rebel vision, is essential to any effort to create a context for transformation.

bell hooks, Black Looks

At the heart of Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Sethe, at a critical moment, is unable to tell her lover, Paul D, the story of her dead child. "Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off--she could never explain."(1) Paul D, at this point, has already seen the newspaper article featuring Sethe's picture and a story about a run-away slave who kills one of her children when the owner catches up with her. Desperate, he confronts Sethe, wanting an explanation. But she realizes that it is not a question of filling in or countering this "official version" with her own version: "Sethe could recognize only seventy-five printed words (half of which appeared in the newspaper clipping), but she knew that the words she did not understand hadn't anymore power than she had to explain" (B, p. 161). For Sethe, language cannot contain the event.

Yet, despite her insistence about the failure of language to explain her story, much of the critical literature on Beloved emphasizes the importance of the novel in terms of the "writing" or "recovering" of it. Pamela Barnett, for instance, argues that the characters in the novel are forced by Beloved (the ghost of Sethe's child) to confront traumatic memories. This confrontation in turn begins the process of healing, which she describes as "conscious meaning making about what is inherently incomprehensible."(2) And Jean Wyatt, in a tempered Lacanian reading of Beloved, argues that "the hope at the end of the novel is that Sethe, having recognized herself as subject, will be able to narrate the mother-daughter story and invent a language that can encompass the desperation of the slave mother who killed her daughter."(3)

In this paper, I want to challenge these readings of Beloved and suggest some of the reasons why the novel frustrates storytelling, bearing, what Gayatri Spivak refers to as, "the mark of untranslatability."(4)

Lost Archives

The Europeans who travelled to what they imagined to be a New World and who envisioned America as "mankind's last great hope, the Western site of the millennium," a place of freedom and possibility, were, of course, also fleeing religious persecution, social ostracism, and economic hardship in Europe.(5) This transference of libidinal energies from the Old World to the New is what Freud understands as the "normal" process of mourning, where the loss of "one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on" is overcome in the process of mourning.(6) The process involves an identification of the object that has been lost and a "reality-testing" that determines that the object no longer exists. This testing "proceeds to demand that all libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that [lost] object" and that the object be incorporated into memory.(7) The process of representing loss, translating it into symbolic language,(8) then allows the "freed" libidinal impulses to be redirected at a new object.

As several critics have pointed out, the "New World" model is inappropriate in the context of African-American history. Maxine Lavon Montgomery describes the European experience as involving "a gradual decline in social, economic, and moral conditions, a major catastrophe, then a new beginning--an unreliable model when imposed upon the Black American experience."(9) And, as Susan Bowers writes, for the African-American (unlike Europeans travelling to America) "It]he good life lay not before them, but behind them; yet, every attempt was made to crush their memories of the past."(10) For the African in America, then, the "normal" process of mourning cannot take place given that there is no new object (certainly not the New World) at which the slave can be expected to redirect his or her libidinal impulses.(11) Yet, neither can there be a conscious identification of the lost object, given that, in some cases, the memories of it have been destroyed. There are, in some instances, no testimonies or documents that preserve in memory this "lost Africa"--the people, the genealogies, the practices.(12)

Although Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes of Africans in the New World that "[n]o group of slaves anywhere, at any other period in history, has left such a large repository of testimony about the horror of becoming the legal property of another human being,"(13) there is also a pervasive silence around--as Morrison's dedication to Beloved puts it--the "Sixty Million and more" who died as slaves, many in the Middle Passage. Referring to those who died en route, Toni Morrison writes: "Nobody knows their names, and nobody thinks about them. In addition to that, they never survived in the lore; there are no songs or dances or tales of these people. The people who arrived-there is lore about them. But nothing survives about ... that."(14)

The destruction of the records of these memories happens in several ways. Morrison suggests that the classic slave narratives involved, in the "rushing out of bondage into freedom," a "veiling" of "proceedings too terrible to relate."(15) Both the psychological need to escape the horrors of slavery and the limitations around what could be put into slave narratives, given their largely white audience, contributed to this "veiling." This desperate need not to remember left the Africans in the Middle Passage "disremembered."

Furthermore, in the Master's records, there is little evidence of documentation of the histories of the Africans who were transported on slave ships. In "Names of American Negro Slaves," Newbell Niles Puckett comments on the lack of records of names of slaves and cites one collection that lists evidence of only 65 names prior to 1700.(16) Puckett attributes this lack to the general tendency of early slave traders to see slaves as undifferentiated, as mere merchandise, and points to a slave ship's journal (1675) that refers simply to a "neaggerman" that died suddenly and a New England slave notice that advertises a "negro man" for sale (p. 158). It is precisely this loss of names which plagues the "Dead" community in Morrison's Song of Solomon. As one of the characters, Macon Dead, reflects: "Surely, he thought, he and his sister had some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name. But who this lithe young man was, and where his cane-stalk legs carried him from or to, could never be known. No. Nor his name."(17)

Finally, in the interests of sustaining the Master's myth that Africans had no culture and no history, there was an intentional destruction of the archive in the separation of Africans who spoke the same languages, who were of the same families, and who practised the same traditions, making it difficult for slaves to communicate with one another, but also making it difficult for stories to be passed on and histories and names to be traced. Throughout Morrison's novel Beloved, there are questions about the nameless and the lost. Children, friends, and spouses,. "moved around like checkers," are untraceable. Sethe, an ex-slave, remembers Nan, the woman who nursed her, telling her of her mother in her mother's language, "which would never come back," of the other babies she bore in the Middle Passage, the product of rapes by the crew, whom she threw away "without names" (B, p. 62). Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law, referring to her lost children, tells Sethe: "My first born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember" (B, p. 5). When Mr. Garner asks Baby Suggs what she calls herself, although she has many names-given to her by her husband (whom she never locates), Garner, and her former owner-she answers "I don't call myself nothing" (B, p. 142). And at the end of the novel, it is Beloved, herself, the ghost/child of Sethe and the voices of those who died in the Middle Passage, who disappears so completely that "[b]y and by all trace [was] gone" (B, p. 275).

The question that remains about the exact number of those who died in the Middle Passage, which is signalled by the "and more" in Morrison's dedication to Beloved, suggests an "occurrence" which has not and cannot be recorded, documented, quantified to the satisfaction of historians. According to the laws of knowledge that have governed the writing of history, then, there can be no "unveiling"; the "veil" cannot be ripped away to disclose the records of the names of the "disremembered and unaccounted for" (B, p. 274).

How do we write or remember a history without documents, without "any songs or dances or tales"? How do we read the story of the "unaccounted for"? Morrison's novel is a testament to this untranslatable loss, a loss that is embodied in Beloved, and that explains, in part, why Sethe cannot tell her story. Beloved, the figure through which the murmurings of these millions who were dislocated, who lost their names, languages, families, traditions, and lives are transmitted, is herself an impossible figure to represent: "Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don't know her name?" (B, p. 274).

Yet, in the novel, the past, whether recorded or unrecorded, is also what cannot be kept at bay. It lives alongside the present, seeking revenge, haunting the living: Stamp Paid thinks about "the mumbling of the black and angry dead" that surround 124 (B, p. 198), and Baby Suggs realizes that "`[n]ot a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief'" (B, p. 5). These ghosts, like Beloved, are a reminder that the past can never really be past, that it cannot be escaped or ignored, because it is always already living alongside the present, dismantling the authority of the word, interfering with the linear narrative of history:

"Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm--every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again ..." Denver picked at her fingernails. "If it's still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies." Sethe looked right in Denver's face. "Nothing ever does," she said. (B, p. 36)
"Rememory" impedes the logic of symbolic language, which cannot master loss but is only a mechanism that allows for a documentation of history that leaves much of the past suppressed, repressed, buried in the name of order and outside of the order of the name. Whether the past is crushed or forgotten, the novel suggests, it never really goes away because the present does not rule it, just as the symbolic does not rule loss.(18) Beloved, who returns from the dead to disrupt Sethe's household and the community, refuses to allow the present to feel "at home"--comfortable and reconciled with the past. She refuses to participate in the museum of history, to be part of a past that is exchanged, or sacrificed, for a future ideal. This ghost/woman is a reminder of lost futures, of futures that have failed to be, and thus she counters the dreams of a future to come that reconciles itself to the past. While, at the end of the novel, Beloved disappears without a trace, she "disappears," paradoxically, pregnant, carrying a future, like her own, that will not have been.

Beloved foregrounds what Rebecca Comay refers to as "countermemory which calls all accounting memory into question." Accounting-memory seeks redemption from and reconciliation with the past. Countermemory "memorializes itself as the will-have-been of what was-not-to-be: a future whose only moment inscribes the missed moment of betrayed and relinquished hope. Its presence is thus its forgone absence, its possibility just its impossibility: its self-disclosure just the gap left by its prior failure to appear."(19) This understanding of loss, which destabilizes historical accounts, is not a rejection of history, but rather an acknowledgement that loss is a condition of history.

The Logic of the Symbolic

When Paul D goes to visit Sethe at the end of the novel, she, still tormented by the memory of Schoolteacher telling his students to list her animal characteristics, says to him, "`I made the ink, Paul D. He [School-teacher] couldn't have done it if I hadn't made the ink.'" (B, p. 271). In order to prevent her own child from undergoing this listing, she slits her baby's throat, convinced that this is a better fate than being written into the order of language, which could "[d]irty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up" (B, p. 251). The loss of identity that Sethe fears at the pen of Schoolteacher is, in her mind, worse than death.

Why is it that symbolic language proves so destructive that Sethe would choose to kill her child rather than have her named by it? We can begin to understand the problem of the symbolic if we consider it in the context of both African-American history and Helene Cixous' critique of Freud's model of mourning. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison argues that the Old World was abandoned in favor of the New World, to some extent, because it was overly "free." The state had turned its back on God's laws and the aristocrats had forsaken their sense of duty. The Old World was rife with licentiousness and lawlessness, and it tolerated the abuse of many. The desperate and persecuted, in turn, fled to the New World. Thus, Morrison writes, "[t]he desire for freedom is preceded by oppression; a yearning for God's law is born of the detestation of human license and corruption; the glamour of riches is in thrall of poverty, hunger, and debt."(20)

Arriving in America with expectations of liberty, the immigrants continued to be haunted by this dark side of freedom, a fear that was displaced onto the large African population, where anxiety about the "terror of freedom" (the unbounded, the unrestricted, the uncivilized) could play itself out on the bounded black body, leaving the concept of freedom as an escape from tyranny a cherished national dream. Morrison concludes: "[i]n other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human potential and the rights of man."(21)

If we contemplate Cixous' critique (which investigates the question about what is lost to the symbolic order) in this framework, one of the central dilemmas in the novel becomes clear. Cixous argues that the Freudian model of mourning, which encourages the translation of loss into symbolic language, originates in the fear of castration. Mourning, the incorporation of the lost object, allows the lost object to be recovered in the language of the symbolic, so that you can "refuse to admit that something of your self might be lost in the lost object."(22) In the privileging of the symbolic, the fear of loss is displaced onto what it names as other in order to avoid losing the self. Hence castration anxiety, which stems from an imagined unity of self, also virulently opposes the other within, which threatens this unity. Cixous writes:

Man cannot live without resigning himself to loss. He has to mourn. It's his way of withstanding castration. He goes through castration, that is, and by sublimation incorporates the lost object. Mourning, resigning oneself to loss, means not losing. When you've lost something and the loss is a dangerous one, you refuse to admit that something of yourself might be lost in the lost object. So you "mourn," you make haste to recover the investment made in the lost object.(23)
Reading Cixous into Morrison, the newly arrived Americans mourn the loss of their freedom in the Old World and withstand castration by refusing to admit that something of themselves has been lost to the lost object. The then-sublimated object--freedom as an ideal--is incorporated and mourned. The dream of freedom remains pure, while the anxiety about castration (the self lost to freedom) is displaced onto the black body. In Beloved, where the white masters imagine the black body as uncivilized and animal-like, the "dream" of freedom finds expression when Schoolteacher and company witness Sethe's attempt to save her children from enslavement. Schoolteacher concludes that Sethe's violent protest is "[a]ll testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred" (B, p. 151). Schoolteacher's anxieties about the dark side of power and freedom, about his own abusive behaviour in the "free" world, are displaced onto Sethe, signalling his desire to keep pure the dream of freedom in America. The more radical his attempts to separate himself from the other (the dark side of freedom--the wilderness, the cannibal, the jungle), the less able he is to recognize "the screaming baboon" that "live[s] under [his] own white skin" (B, p. 199). Motivated by the fear of castration (the loss of self), Schoolteacher understands freedom in terms of mourning (the translation of loss into the symbolic) and thus perpetuates an even greater loss in displacing the otherness of freedom onto Sethe. It is this greater loss that Sethe interrupts in killing her child and that finds expression in the figure of Beloved.

Both Sethe's violent act and Beloved's return disrupt the Freudian model of mourning, exposing the logic of the symbolic and challenging the idea of a unified self.(24) Sethe's "barbarous act of love upon her child,"(25) as one critic has described the killing, is also an act against herself-self-mutilation, which puts in crisis the boundaries between self and other and rends the master/slave hierarchy. In Morrison's other work, as Susan Willis has pointed out, self-mutilation is a common strategy and "represents the individual's direct confrontation with the oppressive social forces inherent in white domination."(26) This act stops Schoolteacher, momentarily, "in his tracks"--confronted with the transgression and confusion of identities, boundaries, and names, he is destabilized, implicated in the violence, enslaved by his own image of the slave, an image he quickly steps away from.

After watching Sethe slit the throat of her baby, Schoolteacher dismisses her as having "gone wild," but the description of Sethe looking "him dead in the eye," holding "something in her arms that stopped him in his tracks" (B, p. 164), while the nephew stands shaking and lost in a confusion that his uncle had warned him against (B, p. 150), suggests that the violent event exceeds the explanations of the witnesses. Schoolteacher's "place of knowing," the Law of the Father/Master, is momentarily usurped by the bodies of Sethe's children. Sethe's act--the killing of her child-suspends the order of the word, exposes the implicit violence of the symbolic, points to the arbitrariness of a system that names her as slave and Schoolteacher as master, and traps the messenger in his own message and the definer in his own definition. Or, as Stamp Paid finally comes to realize: "`She ain't crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out-hurt the hurter'" (B, p. 234).

Beloved, on her return, continues this confusion of identities. She cannot be translated into the symbolic and relegated to memory because she is the other that invades and constitutes the self: "You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you? / I will never leave you again / Don't ever leave me again / You will never leave me again / You went into the water / I drank your blood / I brought your milk" (B, p. 216). The milk and blood suggest the embodiment (as opposed to the symbolization) of loss, while the confusion of pronouns--the "I" that is at once Denver, Sethe, Beloved, and the slaves of the Middle Passage--renders fluid the barriers between self and other.

"The sound that broke the back of words"

In classic slave narratives, the argument is often made, the slave moves from object to subject through the act of narration. Yet, significantly, Sethe never "writes" her story and the affirmation of herself as subject at the end of the novel--"`Me? Me'?"--is qualified by the question marks. The classic slave narratives in their recounting of the movement from old to new, from privation to salvation, echo the European narratives of the New World. The slave narratives--for all sorts of practical reasons having to do with the author's concern with her/his legal status, the largely white audience, and the influence of European literary models--move from orality and slavery to literacy and freedom. Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates suggest some of the inherent problems in the slave narratives' embrace of literacy and freedom, given that these concepts, as they were developed in early American society, were marked out in opposition to the African.

Gates writes in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self that, according to the European model of the order of things, the human was distinguished from the animal on the basis of literacy.(27) Difference from the European literate tradition confirmed for the advocates of slavery the inferiority of the African. Hence the abolitionists were trying to publish slave narratives as proof of blacks' humanity, while the anti-abolitionists were busy putting laws in place that forbade the teaching of reading and writing to slaves as a way of continuing to withhold from them the title "human."(28) Further, as Toni Morrison discusses, the concept of freedom in America was also complicit with slavery: "The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom--if it did not in fact create it--like slavery" (PD, p. 38). If, as Morrison and Gates intimate, the white, literate, and free American defined himself against the enslaved, preliterate, black, how can the "freed" black slave conceive of freedom?

Although we cannot underestimate the significance of the classic slave narratives in aiding abolition, Beloved suggests the importance of examining the limits of these narratives which, in their necessary acceptance of Enlightenment notions about literacy and freedom, rejected an oral culture and an African heritage. Part of the problem with the classical slave narratives is that in fleeing the oppression of slavery, the ex-slaves moved into the free states, but unlike the Europeans, who displaced their anxieties about freedom onto another population, African Americans had no such option. Hence, freedom continued to be highlighted against an African past. For instance, Olaudah Equiano, an ex-slave, writes in the dedication of his narrative (1792):

By the horrors of that trade was I first torn away from all the tender connections that were naturally dear to my heart; but these, through the mysterious ways of Providence, I ought to regard as infinitely more than compensated by the introduction I have thence obtained to the knowledge of the Christian religion, and of a nation which, by its liberal sentiments, its humanity, the glorious freedom of its government, and its proficiency in arts and sciences, has exalted the dignity of human nature.(29)
As long as the African past (the memory of "torn connections") is "disremembered" in the name of a better future, there is no context for Sethe's violent act, and the master/slave, civilized/uncivilized dialectic continues to reign unchallenged in the "free" world, in her community. In Beloved, this past is trapped in Paul D's tobacco tin and withheld from Denver; it is something that Sethe struggles to "keep at bay" and Bulgar and Howard run away from; it lives in exile with the Cherokee in the forest, and Baby Suggs (and later Sethe) escapes from it in her contemplation of the colors of a quilt--"pure" colors without histories. With the past suppressed, the ideal of freedom continues to be played against black bodies and Sethe finds herself the victim of this logic. Following the incident with the four horsemen, twenty-eight days after the feast, Sethe, locked away in 124, on the periphery of the town, once again, is trapped, as Mae Henderson asserts, by "the dominant metaphors of the master('s) narrative-wildness, cannibalism, animality, destructiveness."(30) Ella, who has helped many runaway slaves, including Sethe, claims that she does not "know who Sethe is or none of her people" and Ella's suspicions about the "white [thing] floating around in the woods" that helped Sethe deliver her baby further marks Sethe as unnatural and alien (B, p. 187). Stamp Paid and Paul D betray Sethe by trusting the white newspaper's account of her act (B, p. 79). And, Paul D, echoing the words of Schoolteacher, reminds Sethe that she has "`two feet ... not four'" (B, p. 165). It is Beloved's return that finally releases the African-American body from the anxieties about the dark side of freedom, which have been displaced onto it, and, momentarily, offers something other than the tyranny of the symbolic. Beloved enables the community to "break" the words that continue to keep them hostage in the "free" world, words which have made them forget who they are. Instead of "beating back the past" (B, p. 73), Sethe finds Beloved allows her to talk of it, and "she found herself wanting to, liking it" (B, p. 58). For Denver, from whom the past is withheld, just looking at Beloved keeps the original hunger, "the before-Beloved hunger," away, and it is not symbolic language that Beloved provides but "[s]weet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be" (B, p. 67).

Paul D, in his escape to a "free" America and prior to his encounter with Beloved, having internalized the order of the symbolic, keeps the past buried in his tobacco tin. He grows up thinking that "of all the Blacks in Kentucky, only the five of them were men" (B, p. 125), and he displaces his own doubts about his self-worth onto Sethe when he alludes to her animal characteristics (B, p. 165). Further, when he moves in with Sethe and Denver, he tries to throw the baby ghost out of the house: "It took a man, Paul D, to shout it off, beat it off and take its place for himself" (B, p. 104). Trudier Harris writes: "He therefore enters it [ 124] like the teeth-destroying tricksters of tradition entered the vagina, in the heroic vein of conquering masculine will over feminine desire."(31) Thus, Paul D tries to mark his place at the expense of both the female (in the name of the male) and the African past (in the name of the American future).

But, after Paul D's encounter with Beloved and the release of the contents of his tobacco tin, he begins to realize that there is something beyond the tyranny of the symbolic. When the tin springs open, it releases memories of "Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, and his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper" (B, p. 113). Yet along with these painful memories is the memory of some other past: "Each time she came, pulled up her skirts, a life hunger overwhelmed him and he had no more control over it than over his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air, in the midst of repulsion and personal shame, he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged to" (B, p. 264). The "ocean-deep place" is not recoverable or translatable, but it does allow Paul D to "want to put his story next to [Sethe's]" rather than to throw hers out and to break from Garner and Schoolteacher and the idea of naming as absolute:

For years Paul D believed Schoolteacher broke into children what Garner had raised into men ... Now, plagued by the contents of his tobacco tin, he wondered how much difference there really was between before schoolteacher and after. Garner called and announced them men--but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? That was the wonder of Sixo, and even Halle; it was always clear to Paul D that those two were men whether Garner said so or not. (B, p. 220)
Finally, at the end of the novel, the community come to Sethe's aid, releasing her from the Father's/Master's metaphors by claiming what Sethe has already claimed--the lost other as their own, which breaks the symbolic(32) While Sethe feels like she must persuade Beloved "that what she had done was right," Beloved sits "uncomprehending everything except that Sethe was the woman who took her face away, leaving her crouching in a dark, dark place, forgetting to smile" (B, pp. 251-52). This slippage, from Beloved as Sethe's daughter to Beloved of the slave ships, suggests that the novel is not, finally, about Sethe having to answer for the death of her baby girl, but about the community, who need to embrace Beloved as the lost and unaccounted for. Outside of the order of the word, without fear, the women see the beauty of Beloved "thunderblack and glistening." In this confrontation with Beloved, they remember the past as something which refuses to be entombed and which offers other possible origins of the world. Breaking "the back of words," the tyranny of the symbolic, the women "stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like" (B, p. 259). It is sound that foregrounds the undifferentiated, arbitrary nature of language and that "baptizes" Sethe. But this remembering is temporary. At the end of the novel, put into narrative, into "tales" that were "shaped and decorated," Beloved once again is "deliberately forgotten," written out by the order of the symbolic (B, p. 274). When Sethe's mother displays her branding mark, the circle and cross that is burnt into her skin under her breast, so that her little girl will "know" her, Sethe, as a young girl, also wants a mark so that she too will be "known." Her mother slaps her face, a reaction that Sethe does not understand until she has a mark of her own (B, p. 61). This mark of identification, that is knowable, transferrable, translatable, exchangeable, is the mark of the owner and is already caught within a (re)productive framing. As Sethe tells the story to her daughter, Denver, the story of the slap, like the original slap, interrupts the understanding of identity as something to be uncritically reproduced, as history as something to be recovered or passed on. Comparing this scene to one in Coetzee's Foe, Gayatri Spivak writes: "This scene, of claiming the brand of the owner as `my own,' to create, in this broken chain of marks owned by separate white male agents of property, an unbroken chain of rememory in (enslaved) daughters as agents of a history not to be passed on, is of necessity different from Friday's scene of withheld writing from the white woman wanting to create history by giving her `own' language. And the lesson is the (im)possibility of translation in the general sense" (OTM,p. 195).

The process of translation of loss into the symbolic, which is motivated by castration anxiety and defers to the phallus, the Law of the Father/Master, is forcefully interrupted in the novel, but the maternal does not replace it. Although in Beloved, the maternal body is given a prominence not normally allotted to it (foregrounding, pregnancy, childbirth, and breast milk), this merely highlights how absolutely caught it is within a reproductive framing and made to service phallic production as Sethe's body and her children's bodies are harnessed in the name of future profit. Schoolteacher, trying to figure out the value of Sweet Home, calculates it in the following terms: "And maybe with the breeding one, her three pickaninnies and whatever the foal might be ... Sweet Home would be worth the trouble it was causing him" (B, p. 227). The maternal as an alternative to the symbolic is not viable in the novel. Rather it is the "uterine social order" which services the hierarchical binaries in the novel--white/black, male/female master/slave--that is finally challenged in Sethe's refusal to write her story.(33)

Beloved's ghostly return testifies to the untranslatable, that which lies outside the paternal/maternal order, "and before," as Spivak writes, "the reproductive coupling of man and woman."(34) Beloved's return disrupts the order of the symbolic, which in its insistence on the separation of self and other, white and black, male and female, past and future, orders both the racist and patriarchal paradigms in the novel. This approach to documentation has made a mockery, a hopelessly inadequate representation, of her story. Even her name, Beloved, which is inscribed on her tombstone, is borrowed from the preacher's funeral sermon, seven letters exchanged for the ten minutes of sex Sethe has with the engraver. Hence, she in turn mocks the desire to represent, to categorize, and to name. She is both adult and child, woman and ghost; at the same time that she is the unspeakable and the unknown, she is culturally and historically situated. The figure of Beloved dislodges the very site of the opposition between identity and non-identity. She cannot be named in any absolute way. In the novel she plays a multitude of parts--she is the voices of the slaves in the Middle Passage; she is the brutalized girl who escapes from the white man's cabin; she is the daughter looking for her lost mother; she is the ghost of Sethe's baby girl and the sexual female who torments Paul D; she is among the freed slaves wandering the roads. She is the boundless, transgressive, illegitimate, disruptive other who breaks up the peaceful ordering of the free and non-free, who disregards the contract of presence and absence, legitimate and non-legitimate, who disregards the laws of gender and race; who puts in crisis identity and history; she is the guest who refuses to accommodate the host. Even as she feeds on narrative, her story cannot be accommodated by narrative conventions; her words, like her body, are broken, dislocating, foreign, and she can never be integrated into the community, "no rocking can hold [her] down" (B, p. 276). Beloved can neither survive nor die. Hers is not "a story to pass on" because it cannot be "passed on," documented or effaced.

But even as Beloved remains the "unspeakable," she offers the possibility of imagining another origin to the world. Beloved is a call from elsewhere. As the sister of Beloved, the daughter of Sethe, and the granddaughter of Baby Suggs, Denver calls into question representability and permanence and accepts in language both the possibility and impossibility of meaning. Denver as the transitional figure, born in a river that separates the free from the non-free, born with the help of a white woman and bearing her name, operating in both an oral and literate culture, also encounters a schoolteacher, but one who, instead of confining names, opens up the possibilities of language, "the beauty of the letters in her name" (B, p. 102). Denver's sense of the beauty of words seems to be inspired precisely by her ingestion of Beloved (she drinks her blood along with Sethe's breast milk), who topples symbolic logic, a logic which has forced the other to bow to the self, the world to kneel to the word, and the past to submit to future dreams.

In "The Site of Memory," Morrison writes of the Mississippi River, which was straightened out to make room for homes and farms. When the River overflows, Morrison suggests, it is not flooding but "remembering where it used to be."(35) She imagines the act of writing as an effort to return, like the River, to a place of origin. The origin, the lost place, is as much a part of history as the documents and facts that testify to the "here's and now's." Even as she works within the genre of existing slave autobiographies, which she wants to "fill in and complement," Morrison wants to hold onto the memory of where she was before she "straightened out"; working with what is there, she holds onto the force that has been lost to the order of the symbolic, the futures that have not been.

NOTES

(1) Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), p. 163. All further references to this text will be abbreviated B.

(2) Pamela E. Barnett, "Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved," PMLA 112.3 (1997): 426.

(3) Jean Wyatt, "Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved," PMLA 108.3 (1993): 484. See also Linda Krumholz, "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved," African American Review 26.3 (1992): 395-408; Andrew Levy, "Telling Beloved," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 33.1 (1991): 114-23; and Margaret E. Turner, "Power, Language and Gender: Writing `History' in Beloved and Obasan," Mosaic 25.4 (1992): 81-97.

(4) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 195. All further references to this text will be abbreviated OTM.

(5) Douglas Robinson, American Apocalypse; The Image of the End of the Worm in Literature (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), p. xi.

(6) Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74), p. 243.

(7) Ibid., p. 244

(8) In Lacanian terms the symbolic is very simply "the order of language." In the following sections of this paper the significance of the symbolic as the Law of the Father/Master, as a system (the nom and the non) that positions one in society, will be discussed. See, for instance, the glossary in Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1975), p. 168.

(9) Maxine Loron Montgomery, "The Apocalypse in Toni Morrison's Sula," Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 127.

(10) Susan Bowers, "Beloved and the New Apocalypse," The Journal of Ethnic Studies 18.1 (1990): 61.

(11) The slave does redirect her/his libidinal energy to the "free" north, but, as I will argue later in this paper, this desire is complicated by the fact that freedom in America is defined against the black body.

(12) This loss is, of course, not unique to African-American history. See, for instance, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988). He writes that with Auschwitz, "something new has happened in history (which can only be a sign and not a fact), which is that the facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of the here's and now's, the documents which indicated the sense or senses of the facts, and the names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases whose conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as possible" (p. 57).

(13) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Introduction," The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Mentor, Penguin, 1987), p. ix.

(14) Marsha Darling, "In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison," The Women's Review of Books, March 1988, p. 5.

(15) Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, eds. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990), p. 301.

(16) Newbell Niles Puckett, "Names of American Negro Slaves," Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel: Readings in the Interpretation of Afro-American Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1990), p. 158.

(17) Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (New York: New American Library, 1978), p. 17.

(18) Lyotard, in The Differend, compares the mass murders at Auschwitz and the destruction of the records of those murders to an earthquake that destroys not only lives and buildings but also the instruments used to measure, directly and indirectly, the seismic force. The inability to produce accurate records of the destruction does not in any way dispel the feeling that something has happened. The rules governing knowledge do not interfere with knowing: "the silence imposed on knowledge does not impose the silence of forgetting, it imposes a feeling" (p. 56). Lyotard concludes: "the historian must break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge" (p. 57).

Sustaining the paradox of Beloved as both disremembered and known, Morrison breaks with the "rules of knowledge" in her account of slavery and searches not for what has been represented, not the "symbol," but the unrepresented, the "feelings" that accompany a "picture" ("The Site of Memory," p. 302). Morrison, in part, was inspired to write Beloved after reading a newspaper clipping about Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who killed her children rather than see them return to a life of slavery. But Morrison is also careful to point out the limitations of this documentation: "Recording her life as lived [as described in the research material] would not interest me, and would not make me available to anything that might be pertinent" ("In the Realm of Responsibility," p. 5).

(19) Rebecca Comay, "Redeeming Revenge: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, and the Politics of Memory," Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra, ed. Clayton Koelb (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1990), p. 32.

(20) Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), p. 35. All further references to the text will be abbreviated PD.

(21) Ibid., p. 38.

(22) Helene Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?," Out There, p. 355.

(23) Ibid.

(24) The maternal in Beloved is not the site of original unity, something which must be killed off in order to express an autonomous self as Jean Wyatt has argued in "Giving Body to the Word," but, the undoing of the binary of self and other. "Loss" is thus not located in some original separation from the mother. See, for instance, Domna C. Stanton, "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva," The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986): 157-82. She argues, in her critique of the maternal metaphor, "the problematic of the unrepresented is not peculiar to the maternal metaphor" (p. 164).

(25) Terry Otten, The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1989), p. 86.

(26) Susan Willis, "Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison," Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Methuen, 1984), p. 277.

(27) Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 25.

(28) Ibid., p. 17.

(29) Olaudah Equiano, "The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano," The Classic Slave Narratives, p. 3.

(30) Mae G. Henderson, "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-membering the Body as Historical Text," Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 79.

(31) Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 155.

(32) The "[y]ou are mine" that is murmured in the section of the novel which poetically renders the Middle Passage is not the claim of ownership that mimics the slave owners' claim (as Jean Wyatt suggests [p. 482]), but the claiming of the other as part of the self.

(33) Gayatri Spivak uses this term in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 152.

(34) Ibid, 153.

(35) Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory," Out There, p. 305.

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Publication Information: Article Title: 'Beloved' and the Problem of Mourning. Contributors: Teresa Heffernan - author. Journal Title: Studies in the Novel. Volume: 30. Issue: 4. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 558. COPYRIGHT 1998 University of North Texas

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Volume 2, Number 2, December 2000: 60 – 64
Reconstructing Womanhood in Tony Morrison's
Beloved
Setefanus Suprajitno
Abstract
Tony Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved (1987), explores the degradation of slavery imposed upon
slaves, even when they were owned by a "humane" slave master. The novel is set in the Reconstruction
period, the period after the American civil war. The word reconstruction may be used for the Afro-
Americans, especially for the Afro-American women who face double discrimination for being black
and women. In dealing with women's oppression, Afro-American women have to reconstruct
themselves as an act of survival, and to be aware of the horrors of the experiences which their
ancestors had to go through.
Keywords: reconstruction, womanhood, Toni Morrison, Beloved, Arfo-Amerivan.
In her works, Toni Morrison always employs and therefore preserves and perpetuates
the cultural practices of Afro-American community. In an interview she tells Nellie
McKay,
I'm not experimental, I am simply trying to recreate something out of an old art
form in my books — the something that defines what makes a book "black." And
that has nothing to do with whether the people in the book are black or not. The
open ended quality that is sometimes a problematic in the novel form reminds me
of the uses to which stories are put in the black community. The stories are
constantly being retold, constantly being imagined within a framework. And I
hook into this like a life-support system, which for me, is the thing out of which I
come. (1983, p. 427)
That is why her works are deeply rooted in the black cultural tradition. Theodore Q.
Mason even considers her as an example of a novelist as a conservator (1988). In her
works Morrison tries to depict the cultural values of her society, that is, Afro-American
society, and the way Afro-Americans preserve and maintain their identity. She admits
that black self-determination motivates her in writing. She says
If my work is to confront a reality unlike that received reality of the West, it must
centralize and animate information discredited by the West — discredited not
because it is not true or useful or even of some racial value, but because it is
information held by discredited people, information dismissed as "lore" or "gossip"
or sentiment. (1984, p. 388)
Afro-Americans are often seen as the second class citizens in the American society.
They are often discriminated and marginalized. Sydney Willhelm (1983) writes that
Afro-Americans are now moving out of their historical state of oppressive slavery into
that of uselessness. Racism and marginalization they face are the result of their
structural position of redundancy and uselessness in the economic structure. Characters
in Morrison's works often question themselves of reconstructing themselves in a
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Reconstructing Womanhood in Tony Morrison’s Beloved (Setefanus Suprajitno)
defiance of a society which is constantly denying them their subjecthood. In the society
they are often considered as ritualistic scapegoats, "exterior or marginal individuals,
incapable of establishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitant
[of the society]. Their status as foreigners or enemies, their servile condition, or simply
their age prevents these future victims from fully integrating themselves into the
community" (Girard, 1977, p. 12).
Reconstructing one's psyche is difficult, hence reconstructing that of Afro-American
women. This is so because of the devaluation of black womanhood which is "the result
of the sexual exploitation of black women during slavery that has not altered in the
course of a hundred years" (hooks, 1981, p. 53). And in Beloved (1987), Morrison shows
us the Herculean task Afro-American women do, that is, reconstructing their selfhood.
Beloved talks about the degradation of slavery imposed upon all slaves, although
they may belong to a master who is "human" and paternalistic, "[having] a special
notion of duty and responsibility towards one's own charger" (Genovesse, 1994, p. 34).
The setting of the novel is the period after the civil war in America (1861-1865), known
as the reconstruction period in which nominally slavery ended. For Morrison, the word
"reconstruct" can also be applicable to Afro-Americans, who are forced to reconstruct
themselves as an act of survival.
Beloved is also put in a critical transitional point in the Afro-American history (1987,
p. 53), which stresses the experiment of racism. Morrison herself says, "The trauma of
racism is for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has
always seemed to me a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis" (1989, p. 16). In Beloved,
racism alienates both "the racist and the victim" — the Whites who systematically
torture the slaves and conduct experiments on them to corroborate the prevailing
hypothesis that they are more animal than human (Spillers, 1987) and in the process
rendering themselves (the Whites) less human; and the Blacks who are tortured beyond
endurance and therefore are forced to shut down part of their mind, or at least their
memories in order to survive.
Beloved also reflects Morrison's desire in describing Afro-American experience in
returning to their roots to create the "interior life" (Zinsser, 1987, p. 111 ) of slaves.
Calling upon "memories and recollections" (p. 111), she explores and lays bare the stark
reality of slavery, using a collate narrative technique of poetic prose. This resembles the
process of "rememory," seeking to piece together the fragments of the past with its voices
to form a coherent account of experiences previously denied in one way or another. The
act of rememory is Sethe's main preoccupation.
Beloved also talks ancestry and relationships between the enslaved and the free,
alive and dead, mothers and daughters. Beloved, the dead child who comes back to
haunt her mother, has multiple symbolic meanings. She represents many African
women whose stories are never told, and who are uprooted from their homeland to be
enslaved, degraded, raped, and denied of identity by white men. She is also the
haunting symbol of generations of mothers and daughters hunted down and stolen from
their homeland.
Beloved is also rooted in a particular story and embodies members of Sethe's family.
As Sethe's mother, she comes from the other side of the world, Africa; and as Sethe's
daughter, she comes from the other side of life, death. Both historicize the "sixty million
and more'' (the epigraph to Beloved) slaves' experiences of sun-slit days in the hull of the
ship with thirst and crouching death through the Middle passage, the transfer of slaves
from Africa to the Caribbean across the Atlantic ocean.
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Volume 2, Number 2, December 2000: 60 – 64
Sethe's nameless mother, like Beloved and Sethe herself, has been cruelly separated
from her own mother. But in Ohio, l 873, Sethe barely remembers her mother:
Of that place where she was born . . . she remembered only songs and dance. Not
even her own mother, who was pointed out to her by the eight-year-old child who
watched over the young ones- pointed out as the one among many backs turned
away from her, stooping in a watery field. Patiently Sethe waited for this
particular back to gain the row's end and stand. What she saw was a cloth hat as
opposed to a straw one, singularity enough in that world of cooing women each of
whom was called Ma'am. (Morrison, 1987, p. 30)
Sethe, however, has one memory of her mother and that she was marked (p. 61).
She does not know why her mother was hanged. Probably Ma'am was caught when she
was trying to escape from the plantation, but the daughter born in bondage refused to
believe that her mother could have run off as that would mean that she left her
daughter, Sethe, behind, emphasizing the continuous pattern of severe mother-daughter
relationships. Conceived with a Black man in love rather than with a White master
through rape, Sethe, named after her father, was the only child her mother allowed to
survive (p. 62).
In line with the central concern with history and memory, there is a compelling
emphasis in the novel upon the survival of women within and beyond the structure of
slavery, which is the source of the dominant emotions of intense grief and outrage in the
Blacks' life, an existence "suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness the
dead" (p. 4) in which "not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some
dead Negro’s grief" (p. 50). Slaves are like pieces of checkers and merchandizes, and
they historicize the inhumanity of slavery. They recreate the "ad hoc" (Angelo, 1989, p.
49) black universe as a by-product of the "screaming baboons [living] under [the] white
skins (Morrison, 1987, p. 214). This "ad hoc nature of everyday life" arises from the fact
that "anybody might do anything at any moment" (Angelo, 1989, p. 49) to black slaves.
There is, thus, no sense of certainty in the life of the slaves. This traumatizes the
Blacks psychologically and accounts for their double-vision view of life, their radical
extreme of loving to the extent of killing their own kind and its opposite of loving "small"
(Morrison, 1987, p. 199) to preclude deep hurt when the loved ones are taken from them
or vice versa.
124 Bluestone Road houses the history of the psychological effects of slavery on Afro-
American women, being "a roaring" of black girls who [have] lost their ribbons" (p. 222).
It is a metaphor of psychic imprisonment, presided over by the ghost of the burdened
past, imaged in the spirit-character, Beloved. The psychic fence of 124 Blue Stone Road
is staked by the belief that "anybody white could take your whole self for anything that
come to mind .... Dirty you so bad you forget who you were and couldn't think it up" (p.
308), a double-edged sword curbing the inhabitants' power to imagine a future for
themselves while locking them in a self-annihilating slave past. For Sethe, the future
lies in "beating back the past" (p. 90), having been traumatized by Schoolteacher's form
of slavery which reduces human parts to merchandize, plants the white jungle of
chokecherry treed scars on her back and steals her nourishment for her children,
slamming home the brutal truth of slavery as total ownership of body and soul. She
suffers from the inability to separate "remembered" truth of slavery from reality, not
knowing "where the world [stops] and she [begins]" (p. 202). Robbed by slavery of a
center within her to anchor her self and tasting the freedom of "not [needing] permission
for desire" (p. l99) at Ohio, Sethe moors herself in her children, her "best thing" (p. 308).
Her attempt to kill them, succeeding with her "crawling-already (?) girl" (p. 187), is
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Reconstructing Womanhood in Tony Morrison’s Beloved (Setefanus Suprajitno)
driven by motherly love which has displaced her self, and despair, imaged in the
humming birds sticking their needle beaks into her hair and beating their wings (p.
200).
Sethe's drastic choice to kill Beloved rather than let her be returned to slavery shows
that the bonds of mother and daughter, and the responsibilities they entail are proven
with particular depth and complexity. What is shown is basically the relationships
between mother and children which are characterized by uneasiness. Denver, Sethe's
other daughter, fears her mother and so do her sons.
When Beloved comes back to haunt her mother, Sethe knows that what she thought
was the best thing may not have been so from Beloved's point of view, and therefore in
despair she asks Beloved to understand that she tried to kill her babies so that they
would be protected from captivity forever, as being a slave meant that it would be
impossible for her to be the kind of a mother she wanted:
Because the truth was simple and if she thought anything, it was No…. Simple.
She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that
were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through
the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. (p. 53)
Beloved's response to Sethe is not only in the language of the murdered daughter, but
also in the tortured language of the "woman from the sea." Murder and Middle Passage
evoke the same language. They are the same existence, both were experienced by the
multiple-identified Beloved, who is also the figure of both grief and outrage. She is
grieved at being uprooted from her African culture and at the loss of identity as reflected
in her desire to possess the face of the woman "[who] takes the flowers away from their
leaves and put them in a round basket" (p. 261). This woman is later projected onto
Sethe who represents the African past being the child of African parentage and carrying
a name to bear witness to this heritage. Beloved is outraged by the denial of both her
past and future on American soil by slavery. In her, the black voices of the past and
present merge, resounding the cries for the "pain of being black" (Angelo, 1989, p. 49)
and female.
Tony Morrison creates fluidity of identity among Sethe's grandmother, Sethe's
mother, Sethe herself, and the murdered two-year-old, so that Beloved is both an
individual and a collective being. She also functions as the crucial link that connects
Africa and America for the enslaved women. Survival for Sethe meant keeping the past
at bay. Remembering horrors of such enormous magnitude can cause a despair so
profound that memories cancel out the possibilities of resolution or pleasure in the
present and future. However, Morrison implies that even though memory of the past
can prevent living in the present, to pursue a future without remembering the past has
its own and even deeper despair for it denies the reality and sacrifice of those who died.
Since Beloved brings the whole traumatic experience of slavery with her, she not only
knows more than she otherwise would have known in her previous short life, but she
also contains the effects that slavery had — its profound fragmentation of the self
(Morrison, 1987, p. 133), and the connections of the self might have had with others.
Beloved is dislocated in time as well as within herself. All the incidentals and details of
memory come down to the central affirmation that Beloved is her (Sethe's) daughter, as
Sethe would have been a daughter to her own destroyed mother who left her. This
restoration is thus not only of the return of her own child, but the restoration of herself
as a child. Desperate to explain her action, memory becomes a path of explanation, and
explanation a plea for forgiveness, capturing the ambivalent innocence and guilt in
Sethe's moving narrative.
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Volume 2, Number 2, December 2000: 60 – 64
In Beloved, Morisson seems to be more interested in "reconstructing" her women to
be women, and not just mothers and daughters. In order to be women, they have to
reclaim their voices (Greene, "Feminist Fiction"), to be able to talk back, which we find
Sethe manages to do. She can tell her story, and in doing so, can claim herself. Such a
speech becomes "a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and growth
possible. It is that act of speech of 'talking back,' that is no mere gesture of empty
words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject — the liberated
voice" (hooks, 1991, p. 9).
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Genovese, Eugene D. (1994). The Southern tradition: The achievement and limitations
of an American conservatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Girard, Rene. (1977). Violence and the sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: John
Hopkins UniversityPress.
Greene, Gayle. (1991). Feminist fiction and the uses of memory. Sign 16.2., 290-321.
hooks, bell. (1981). Ain't I a woman: Black women and feminism. Boston: South End
Press.
.………., (1989). Talking back. Boston: South End Press.
Mason, Theodore O. (1988) The novelist as a conservator: Stories and comprehension in
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Contemporary Literature. 29.4., 564-581.
Morrison, Toni. (1984). Memory, creation, and criting. Thought 59.235., 385-390.
……….., (1984). Memory, creation, and Writing. Thought 59.235., 385-390
……….., (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knoff.
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Diacritics 17,65-81.
Willhelm, Sydney. (1983). Black in a White America. Cambridge: Schenkman.
Zinsser, William. (1987). The Site of memory. Inventing the truth: The art and craft of
memoir. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. 103-124.
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Beloved | Introduction
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After publishing four novels, Toni Morrison had already established herself as one of the most popular and successful black female writers of her time. With the publication of her fifth novel, Beloved, however, critics worldwide recognized that here was an author with a depth and brilliance that made her work universal. In this tale set in Reconstruction Ohio, Morrison paints a dark and powerful portrait of the dehumanizing effects of slavery. Inspired by an actual historical incident, Beloved tells the story of a woman haunted by the daughter she murdered rather than have returned to slavery. Part ghost story, part realistic narrative, the novel examines the mental and physical trauma caused by slavery as well as the lingering damage inflicted on its survivors. In prose both stark and lyrical, Morrison addresses several of her enduring themes: the importance of family and community, the quest for individual and cultural identity, and the very nature of humanity.

Although Beloved was hailed by many reviewers as a masterpiece when it first appeared in 1987, the novel inspired considerable controversy several months after its publication. After it failed to win either the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award, accusations of racism were leveled. Demonstrating their support of the author, forty-eight prominent black writers and critics signed a tribute to Morrison's career and published it in the January 24, 1988 edition of the New York Times Book Review. Beloved subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the secretary of the jury addressed the issue by stating that it "would be unfortunate if anyone diluted the value of Toni Morrison's achievement by suggesting that her prize rested on anything but merit." Despite the controversy, few have contested the excellence of the novel, and Beloved remains one of the author's most celebrated and analyzed works. As critic John Leonard concluded in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the novel "belongs on the highest shelf of American literature, even if half a dozen canonized white boys have to be elbowed off.... Without Beloved our imagination of the nation's self has a hole in it big enough to die from."

Beloved Summary
Summary of the Novel
Mr. and Mrs. Garner owned Sweet Home, a farm where they used the slave labor of Paul F, Halle, Paul A, Paul D, and Sixo—although they treated their slaves with a modicum of respect, asking for their ideas and allowing them the use of rifles for hunting. Sethe, a young female slave, was bought and allowed to choose Halle for her husband. With the Garners’ permission, the two slaves were “married.” They had a family of two sons and a daughter before Mr. Garner became ill and died.

Prior to his death, Mr. Garner had allowed Halle the privilege of hiring his labor out so that he could buy his mother, Baby Suggs, out of slavery. At 60 years of age, Halle’s mother was a free woman and moved to the next state north, Ohio, where she rented 124 Bluestone Road from the anti-slavery Bodwins and became a spiritual leader (rather than a preacher since she preferred not to preach) and a mender of shoes.

After her husband’s death, the weak-willed Mrs. Garner became very ill. She complied when she was told she must have other whites in residence and invited schoolteacher and his two nephews to live with her and manage the farm, including the slaves. Schoolteacher and his nephews were a different breed than the Garners and introduced whippings, torture, humiliation, and the dehumanizing of the slaves, but Mrs. Garner was too ill to take heed. The slaves (with the exception of Paul F, who had been sold two years prior for the money needed to keep up the farm) decided to flee via the Underground Railroad. Sethe, pregnant again, had sent her two-year-old daughter and two older sons ahead with some of the other slaves when her husband, Halle, did not arrive to meet them in the predetermined place at the predetermined time.

She stayed behind to look for him but was caught by schoolteacher’s nephews who held her down and sucked milk from her breasts. Schoolteacher discovered that she told Mrs. Garner about the incident and whipped her, flaying open the skin of her back despite her being six month’s pregnant.

Unbeknownst to Sethe, her husband was in hiding in the loft where he had a view of the attack on her. Watching without being able to come to her aid drove him insane. Paul D was watching Halle, although unable to see what was happening to Sethe. At some undetermined time soon after, he saw Halle sit down and calmly smear the butter from the churn all over his face while his eyes remained vacant. Sethe managed to escape, but had to stop because her baby was being born. An indentured servant, Amy, happened upon her and helped her. The infant was named Denver, which was Amy’s last name.

Sethe reached her mother-in-law’s home with the newborn infant and was overjoyed to be reunited with her other three children. Soon after, Baby Suggs and Sethe hosted a picnic-barbecue for all the neighbors. The abundance of food and good times, in addition to Baby Suggs’ good fortune in having been bought out of slavery, driven to freedom in a wagon by her former master, and befriended by the Bodwins who rented her their two-story house (unlike the one-story houses everyone else lived in), led the neighbors and friends, who also were Baby Suggs’ congregation, to believe she and her family were “uppity.” Thereafter, the residents of 124 Bluestone Road found themselves being shunned until they no longer had any visitors and Baby Suggs stopped being the spiritual leader at the clearing in the woods.

Schoolteacher, one of his nephews, the sheriff, and a slave catcher arrived to bring Sethe and her children back to Sweet Home. No one had warned them but Sethe recognized schoolteacher’s hat as he approached the house on his horse. She whisked her children into the shed and attempted to murder them, rather than allow them to live the kind of life in slavery she had led, as both her mother-in-law and Stamp Paid stood in the yard behind the house, frozen in terror. She succeeded in killing her two-year-old daughter by slitting her throat and would have also killed her infant daughter, Denver, if Stamp Paid had not caught the baby as Sethe swung her against the wall in an attempt to bash her brains out. The two boys had been severely beaten on their... »
The Unspoken Spoken
Toni Morrison’s Beloved analyzed in the context of the African American experience of slavery, and slave narratives.
by Marie C. E. Burns
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English Literature
Toni Morrison
Slave Narratives
Slavery
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The race of the intended readership is immaterial. One does not have to be black to realise that slavery was a holocaust, or to empathise with the suffering of the generations who were worn down, physically and mentally, but who had the forbearance to survive against such adversity. Reaction to the catalogue of injustice and abuse perpetrated upon the members of the black race, as depicted here, can be nothing but revulsion and horror. And reaction to their fortitude could be nothing but respect.
Introduction
The discrimination that continues to be the African American experience has brought forth in Toni Morrison one of the most significant voices of her race and age. She contends that the American history of slavery had been consciously “disremembered” [1] so that it is conveniently shrouded by a comfortable state of national amnesia. This is consistent with the view that the literary canon had not reflected African American scholarly achievement or artistic ability. As a consequence, her people had been part of American life, participating in, and contributing to, American culture, but, through enforced circumstances, as silent witnesses, this evidenced by her observation, “we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse, even when we were its topic”. [2]

Although the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ‘70s had initiated an interest in African American studies and was accompanied by an upsurge in black writing, black female historians and creative writers remained outside the parameters of the canon. Morrison was partly instrumental in forging a way for herself and her contemporaries into the public arena. Even there, she recognises that history does not document the individual private lives that together form the experience of a community:

Individual players are unimportant except as they contribute to the final already determined conclusion. Individual lives outside of such a grand narrative, however, are much more chaotic, contradictory and unpredictable. [3]

As a novelist who has set her fiction in key periods of black U.S. history, Morrison has dedicated her literary career to ensuring that black experience under, and as a result of, slavery would be neither left to interpretation solely at the dictates of whites, nor to an academic history that by its nature, records only the hard impersonal facts. She has succeeded in this by placing the characters of her novels in the positions American society had designed for African Americans and revealing their lives as they endured, coped with or reacted to, the effects of the racism that had its birth in the institution of slavery.

In this dissertation, I intend to show that, in her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison makes the reader become aware of the physical and psychological damage done to the African American people by the brutal inhumanity that constituted American slavery. To accomplish this, there will be three chapters. In the first, using primary sources of the period and contemporary secondary texts, I will provide a backdrop to slavery from its inception until the aftermath of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. In it, I will demonstrate how blacks were perceived, used and treated by the American population.

The second chapter will feature the slave narrative of Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [4] I will assess her account of her experience as a young woman and mother under slavery and show that it is heavily influenced by other considerations. There will also be references to how writers of the time approached the slavery question.

The third chapter will be devoted to the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Here I will show that the novel has the capacity to personalise history, and to convey an understanding of the way slavery abused the state of motherhood.

Chapter One. Background to Slavery
The African American experience began when colonists bought twenty “Negars” from a “Dutch Man of Warre” that landed its human cargo in Jamestown, Virginia, in August 1619. [5] From then on, “the planters bought slaves as rapidly as traders made them available”. [6] The diversity in occupations they filled, different geographical locations, views of individual slaveholders and other such factors provided, also, diversity in the terms of employment and conditions under which the blacks had to live. Some were bought to serve for life, others were indentured for a number of years. After some time, still others were bought by blacks who had gained their freedom and were now in a financial position to acquire slaves of their own.

Formal institutions had not been established and, as a consequence, a black population was growing wherein the status of blacks was fluid. Some of those enslaved were able to buy their freedom if they could amass the figure that the owner thought they were worth. This fluidity was eventually to see the formation of a black elite of wealthy land and property owners and educated professional classes. In the meantime, however, white prejudice saw the introduction of racial laws that would regulate terms of servitude. In 1664, officials of Maryland decreed:

that all Negroes or other Slaves already within the province and all Negroes and other Slaves to bee hereafter imported into the Province Shall serve Durante Vita And all children born of any Negro or other Slave shall be Slaves as their fathers were for the terme of their lives. [7]

Aware of having brought, and of bringing, among themselves, a body of people who had every reason to be rebellious, Virginia, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, adopted laws condemning “Negroes” to be punished more severely than others for similar offences, they “being a brutish sort of People and reckoned as goods and chattels”. [8] With the increasing slave numbers, the laws became more severe against the blacks, while they “specifically exonerated the master who accidentally beat his slave to death”. [9] Virginians could repress the black slaves by denying them any opportunities or rights and subjecting them to any punishments, without fear of the law.

Furthermore, in a land where man had the need and right to bear arms for his own protection, this the black was denied. As an explicit denotation of intent to keep the black in his place, in 1681, Virginia had prohibited all interracial liaisons, their fruits being described as “that abominable mixture and spurious issue”. [10]

Over the years, a tolerance of this “issue” seems to have been instrumental in changing the outlook, since, in the early 1700s, colonial legislators decided to redefine offspring of blacks by the status of their mothers rather than their fathers. While curtailing any licentious behaviour by white women with blacks, this allowed white men free access to black women, a liberty they availed themselves of with impunity.

An idea that blacks were “submissive and promiscuous” [11] originated with the first Englishmen who went to Africa to buy slaves. They misrepresented black practice according to tribal cultural traditions and tropical climate, as lewdness. That black women often worked bent over, with the hems of their skirts tucked into the waistband, because circumstances of their labour under slavery in America decreed, further fostered the promiscuous image assigned to them.

Their adjusted state of dress and enforced posture contrasted sharply with the modesty that the white men expected from “respectable” white women, who, according to puritanical norms, adorned themselves with layers of clothing that prevented the legs from being exposed to public view. [12] “The slave woman’s body . . . commanded no such respect.” [13] It was examined intimately on the auction block and was an ever-present target for the hypocritical master who succeeded in celebrating and emphasising white woman’s purity while sexually abusing and dehumanising his black slave girl, presenting her “with the prospect of unwanted children” [14] and nurturing the lascivious characterization that members of her race had to bear.

Survivors - and there were thousands who did not survive the brutality of capture and transportation - of the Middle Passage were sold to the highest bidder, stripped of their African names and dispatched all over the inhabited American states where, in rural and urban areas, they filled every skilled and unskilled labouring position it took to build the nation, and, in doing so, ensure the prosperity and comfort of the white colonists. Their experience of agricultural methods was of paramount importance to northern planters who knew nothing of growing the particular crops that could flourish only in this climate.

Among much else, African knowledge saw the introduction of medicines, unknown until then in the New World, and necessary for survival from tropical maladies. Skills in all branches of trades were needed and utilized, dangerous mining occupations were filled and the black’s former life experience in Africa guaranteed that navigation and boating, so crucial in the swamps and waterways of the new country, were competently handled. [15]

Ubiquitous black presence on the domestic scene allowed whites to have a life of gentility. Aaron, in his slave narrative of 1845, reports how, from childhood, whites were “reared up in complete idleness”. [16] Young men went on to spend their time at “gambling and cockfighting”. [17] He relates how three female slaves, after toiling all day “had to take night about to sit up all night and fan their master and mistress to keep them cool”. [18]

Labouring from dawn to dusk, unless there was a full moon when they were kept at it longer, [19] slaves were overworked and underfed, and were punished with severe physical brutality for even the most minor misdemeanour under the harsh regime of owners or overseers. Lashings and whippings were commonplace. “The diary of William Byrd, a cultivated Virginian gentleman, and the colony’s most learned judge, shows him lashing one or more of his servants every few weeks.” [20]

Herbert Aptheker, quotes from the same memoir, “I had a severe quarrel with little Jenny, and beat her too much, for which I was sorry”, [21] but “nine days later he was at it again”. [22] For those who ran away rather than accept whippings, “punishments…included hangings, castration and other forms of mutilation, including the poring of hot molten fat or pitch on a captive’s naked body”. [23] Running away was so widespread that, in 1793, a Fugitive Slave Law that allowed slaveholders to attempt to recover their property was introduced to minimise the practice. [24]

Blacks were dispensable, many owners believing it was cheaper to import new workers than take care of the health and safety of those they had. Resources had been in danger of drying up when importing slaves became unlawful in 1808, although William Wells Brown attests to the fact that men occupying high positions in society and holding high offices of honour in the councils of the nation, continued to make their fortunes in the trafficking of slaves. [25]

A rising cost of the “merchandise” through supply and demand, may have occasioned the slave owner to take slightly better care of his “property” because, from 1.2 million at that time, a healthier population became self-producing until, over the next fifty years, it tripled to almost 4 million and rather than being an African workforce, was now African American. [26]

The growing demand for black labour implanted a breeding mentality where blacks, particularly females, were further exploited and valued for their procreative potential, the slave owner wishing “to turn every young black woman into a brood mare”. [27] A thriving internal, domestic trade in black human stock spread widely. [28] These buying and selling enterprises did not depend on the labour of the slave, merely on their value as merchandise. Children were often sold by the pound weight. [29]

Children were to hold great significance in slavery and the slave debate. In practice, they were a powerful tool in regulating parents’, particularly mothers’, behaviour. Although some mothers ran off and suffered the trauma of leaving their children in slavery, most refused to abscond without them. Youngsters made it almost impossible for them to escape safely. William Still, the Chairman of the Vigilante Committee of the Philadelphia Underground Railway believed “females undertook three times the risk of failure that males” [30] faced. White masters used all psychological and physical means to force slaves into obedience and, in the case of black females, this had the added dimension of sexual submission. For whichever purpose, threats to the welfare of the child lessened resistance.

Deborah Gray White argues forcibly that, in the slave community, women “in their role as mothers are the focus of familial relationships”, [31] and that the most important element of this matrifocality “is the supremacy of the mother-child bond over all other relationships”. [32] While this is not in any way minimizing the pain fathers suffered on account of their families, it is stressing the particular hold that slaveholders had over mothers whose bond with her children was “more sacred than the husband-wife bond”. [33] Whipping children was common. Leslie Howard Owens quotes an instance, “Many a day my ole mama has stood by an’ watched massa beat her children ‘till dey bled an’ she couldn’t open her mouf”. [34]

The threat of having her son or daughter sold at auction or having them taken from her was ever present for a mother. The practice of such an abomination as “the tender babe” being wrenched “from the arms of its frantic mother” was widespread enough to feature in the Declaration of the National Anti-Slavery Convention of 1833. [35]

William Wells Brown chronicles his distress at witnessing such an event while working as the hireling of a slave trader. A woman and her 4 or 5-week-old baby had been bought and attached to the column of slaves walking to market in St. Louis. The baby was crying a lot and the trader warned the mother to stop its noise – or he would. The mother did her best to quieten the baby but could not. The trader took the child by one arm, “as you would a cat by the leg”, [36] and gave it away to a female acquaintance in whose house he had rested. “Madam, I will make you a present of this little nigger, it keeps such a noise that I can’t bear it.” [37] The distracted, begging, broken-hearted mother was ordered to return to the ranks where she was chained for the onward journey, without her baby. [38]

Intrinsic to the slavery debate, the image of the black child was in sharp contrast to that of the fair white Anglo-Saxon child used incessantly and planted in the American psyche by Congress, to symbolise the birth of this new nation, free from the tyranny of its parent country. It was used to emphasise the maxim that “attachment to no Nation upon Earth should supplant our Attachment to Liberty”. [39] Jedideah Morse, in 1789, defined the American people as only those “descended from the English” [40] and insisted on the racial purity of this “national character” [41] regardless of the numerous racially diverse individuals inhabiting this new nation.

Caroline Lavander contends that no matter which side of the slavery debate it was representing, the image of the child established and then reinforced “a logic of racial difference that linked slavery to black bodies and liberty to white ones”, [42] and race was “a founding, though unstable, element of the new nation”. [43]

Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia, had expressed the attitude in an indictment of the black race in general, throughout which he translated their characteristics into inadequacies:

Because African Americans are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind, slavery becomes justified and necessary in a country founded upon the concept of freedom. [44]

This common perception of inherent and unalterable inferiority to whites was deduced by physiognomists and phrenologists to be attributable to facial angle and cranial thickness. [45] Alexis de Tocqueville proclaimed of the slave of African origin, “his physiognomy is to our eyes hideous”, [46] while the first issue of the African Repository and Colonial Journal in 1825 featured an article that read, “Negroes are a distinct order of beings; the connecting link between Man and monkees”. [47] They were reiterating Jefferson’s view, expressed 45 years previously that blacks were less than human, when he had proclaimed that there was “a preference of the Oran-ootan for the black woman over those of his own species”. [48]

Unashamed racial prejudice had been part of slavery since its inception, blacks being “publicly humiliated, ridiculed and caricatured”, [49] but it was not until the outlawing of the slave trade and the gradual emancipation of slaves in the North during the years after the Revolution that racism was formalised. Slaveholders in the South would not free their slaves, refusing to give up the economic and social advantages of bondage and insisting that they were contented, jovial and better off than their freed brothers. The release had freed large numbers of Northern blacks, who were trying to exist in a society where racism and discrimination had become endemic, and who were reduced to pauperism, vice and crime, resulting in an inordinate increase in the prison population.

In 1826, the Boston Prison Discipline Society reported that a disproportionately large percentage of the prison population in the North East States are Negroes, the cause being the degraded character of the coloured population. [50]

The slave debate intensified. Diverse groups and institutions considered society to be in grave peril from increasing disorder, idleness and criminality. Apart from the disruption their release was seen to be causing, and the social and financial costs as a consequence of their behaviour, the freed blacks were held responsible for the corruption of those still enslaved, who, it was deemed, became “idle, discontented and disobedient”. [51] Contrary to the view that blacks were inferior because of their race, humanitarians, notably the Abolitionists, believed that the “Negro” condition resulted from slavery and the circumstances under which they were forced to live. [52] They regarded it as sin on behalf of white America, a blight on its Christian character.

Expressing the belief that blacks were different from whites, they averred, nevertheless, that the black people had Christian virtues that whites did not have, remaining childlike, affectionate, docile, and patient under the exceedingly degrading conditions and provocations of slavery. [53] Imbuing the movement with a virtuous, benevolent, middle-class attitude, they expected this to be the soul of the Christian society they hoped to generate. They advocated immediate emancipation.

However, the rest of the whites, even those in the South who were anti-slavery, realised that free blacks would encounter such racist inequality that they would become a very dangerous people. [54] Alexis de Tocqueville, insisting that those who had introduced slavery had bequeathed an insurmountable problem, “was forced to conclude that racial prejudice actually increased with emancipation and was worse in the ‘free’ north than in the slave south”. [55] The powers-that-were recognised the dilemma that slavery had brought. Thomas Jefferson, had summed up why he thought it impossible ever to incorporate blacks into the state:

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained; the real distinction nature has made; and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of one or the other race.” [56]

He did, however, harbour a belief at the time of writing Notes on Virginia that emancipation may be feasible if combined with colonization of blacks outside the United States. Colonizationists, from the Calvinist and Federal traditions, did not want to upset the status quo by disrupting well-established institutions, customs and prejudices that they considered were fundamental to society’s equilibrium, but they stressed that the colour line was so ingrained in white psyche that blacks would never be assimilated. [57] They formed societies to assist in having them shipped out to Liberia, a country secured for the purpose, “but many free blacks refused to be turned aside from their campaign for full rights as American citizens”. [58]

Freed blacks of the North saw themselves as Americans and very few had any wish to settle on a continent they had never seen. Southerners presented their case against accepting adoption of either abolition or colonization. They argued that the slaves were entirely unfit, morally or economically, for a state of freedom among the whites.

Thomas R Dew, purporting to speak for the whole country, said that free blacks were looked upon as the very drones and pests of society. [59] Winston Churchill recorded some southern concerns in the wake of the Nat Turner insurrection of 1831, “If the Negro were freed, it was asked, would a white man’s life be safe? or, to press the question more closely home, a white woman’s honour?”. [60] Of the economic front, in 1832, Dew warns, scathingly:

There is slave property of the value of $100,000,000 in the State of Virginia, etc., and it matters but little how you destroy it, whether by the slow process of the cautious practitioners, or with the frightful despatch of the self-confident quack; when it is gone, no matter how, the deed will be done, and Virginia will be a desert. [61]

When the creation and rights of new states, in the “frantic western expansion”, [62] wakened the “sleeping serpent” [63] that had lain “coiled up under the table from 1789”, [64] the growing political unrest between the North and the South was accompanied by an escalation of anti-slavery activity against southern doctrines. Abolitionists intensified their campaign to rid the country of slavery. This helped to endorse the perception that the North was seeking domination over all.

The South had no intention of allowing anyone to destroy their heritage. In a series of political manoeuvrings, in 1850, it wrung from the government a compromise that included a more strict form of the existing Fugitive Act. Under it, the southern slaveholders were permitted, now, to invoke the services of the law to recapture runaway slaves who had escaped into free states, and anyone who helped one to escape was liable to a fine of $2000 and six months in jail. [65]

About 7 o’clock this morning the masters and their agents arrived in pursuit of their property. They swore out a warrant before J. L. Pendery, Esq., U. S. Commissioner, which was put into the hands of Deputy U. S. Marshall Geo. S. Bennet. [66]

This newspaper article went on to read:

In the house were…young Simon and his wife, and four children…the oldest near six years and the youngest a babe of about nine months. One of these, however, was lying on the floor dying its head cut almost entirely off. There was also a gash about four inches long in the throat of the eldest, and a wound on the head of the other boy. [67]

Killing her children was the ultimate sacrifice this fugitive mother, Margaret Garner, was prepared to make, since “she was unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done”. [68]

It was in this atmosphere that slave narratives had become recognised as a distinct form of literature, and a promotion in the cause of abolition.

Chapter Two. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Slave narratives are the genre of literature that came into being through the success of some literate African Americans in escaping from slavery to freedom. Always in the first person, they are autobiographical and, as such, record experiences and stories personal to the runaway, related in the order in which they were experienced.

The narratives were written with the express purpose of demonstrating that, contrary to how he was perceived, the black was human; that he was capable of intelligent reasoning; that he had the capacity to be literate; and that spirituality was of utmost importance to him. [69] Because blacks were prevented from receiving education and were kept in ignorance, the narratives spoke for the majority who could not tell their own stories. As one former slave woman wrote:

We were no more than dogs. If they caught us with a piece of paper in our pockets, they’d whip us. They was afraid we’d learn to read and write, but I never got the chance. [70]

Some hundreds of slave narratives exist that were penned in the mid 1800s, but, commensurate with the social status of the black female of the era and the difficulties faced by many in fleeing, it is not surprising that they are predominantly male accounts, the most representative being The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, [71] Having been written to help in the struggle for the abolition of slavery, the narratives were used as propaganda by Abolitionists, who encouraged those who had escaped from bondage to record their experiences, and had them published.

As Toni Morrison notes, “slave narratives were a nineteenth century boom”. [72] Most of them had attached to the title, “Written by Himself” or “Written by Herself”, not only as an indication that the writer was literate, but that the work was his/her own. Many editors inserted disclaimers of any assistance or factual changes, aware that any fraudulent accounts would damage the abolitionist cause, although as Robert A. Gibson observes “they may have occasionally injected abolitionist rhetoric into the testimonies of the slaves”. [73]

Aaron, somewhat of an exception, was an escaped slave who gave talks in churches and public buildings throughout the North. Rather than detailing his past, the bulk of his account concentrates on the-then-prevailing religious views and those who practised them. Having had his narrative written, in 1845, by anyone who could write, whom he met on his travels, gave him an independence that allowed him to express his personal view of the Abolitionists. To him, abolitionist ministers and other professing Christians publicly supported freedom for slaves, but were hypocritical in preaching holiness while taking advantage of female slaves. He accused them of being “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, noting that they “often refused him when he asked for food or shelter while travelling”. [74]

Aaron would seem to be giving proof of the racist feelings prevalent in the North, even among Abolitionists, which gave rise to George M. Frederick’s findings, that the South could be described as, “having manifested a desire for both slavery and Negroes, while a Northern majority provided indications that it wanted neither”. [75] Abolitionists were open to the charge from the pro–slavery sympathisers that the narratives were written by, “the most talented and gifted and are, therefore, not representative of the thought and experiences of the “average” slaves”. [76] This view was sustained well into the late twentieth century by historians who refused to accept their authenticity or reliability.

Although male narratives included references to black women, the most intimate feminine details are to be found in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, which she wrote under the pseudonym of Linda Brent. Jacobs’s narrative is usually taken as the most representative of her sex.

Slavery is terrible for men but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own. [77]

Admitting that it would have been more pleasant not to broadcast them, she is, however, forthright in revealing her experiences for the sole purpose of arousing “the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered and most of them far worse”. [78]

She ably fulfils the criteria of a slave narrative, documenting the dehumanising aspect of slavery and providing evidence of black humanity. These are simply, but succinctly, encapsulated in the exchange between Dr. Flint and Jacobs when he learned of her love for a young black man:

If you must have a husband, you may take up with one of my slaves Don’t you suppose, sir, that a slave can have some preference about marrying?

Do you suppose that all men are alike to her? (Ch 7)

That she was reasonably literate and able to demonstrate an ability to apply reason would make a mockery of the “buffoon, a degenerate beast or a subservient lackey” [79] image, and abundant references and invocations to the spiritual deities would indicate that she possessed and was aware of her immortal soul. Harriet Jacobs, throughout her testimony, demonstrates that she was representative neither of the black race nor her sex, in some aspects. There is a distinct air of personal superiority emanating from her text. Hers being a mulatto family would elevate it over the full African American not least in that its members had economic advantages and social opportunities denied to those of darker skin. [80] Her grandmother, freed very late in life, was depicted as being very comfortably off and associating with the white female elite of the community. Reported speech of the other slaves was in dialect, as opposed to Jacobs’s or her family’s. Her brother had, on occasion, passed as white.

Although slavery had made Jacobs “prematurely knowing” (Ch 10) concerning the evil ways of the world, as it had on other young girls, she professed, “I had not degraded myself like most of the slaves”. (Ch 10) She held a privileged position in her owner Flint’s regard. By her own admission, her “life in slavery was comparatively devoid of hardships”. (Ch 10) This slight degree of bestowed and embraced superiority, not experienced by the pure black, may have afforded her the ability to stand up to Flint’s advances and resist the racism she encountered in the North when she became a fugitive. But it would detract from the subjectivity of the narrative, suggesting that this was a plea on behalf of a lower class to which she felt she did not belong.

With very few exceptions, Jacobs’s testimony abounds with invocations for God’s blessings on most of the white people with whom she came in contact - she only appeared to meet humane people; even the slave-trader who said the next trip would be his last because, “this trading in niggers is a bad business for a fellow that’s got any heart”. (Ch 19) It is as if she is looking to absolve them, and blaming the institution of slavery itself for their inhumanity. Noting that “no pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery”, (Ch 9) she peppers her testimony with admonitions on those whites of the North who are perpetuating the system, emphasizing that it is a system that causes denigration to their own race.

Slavery is a curse to the whites as much as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensuous, the sons violent and licentious, it contaminates the daughters and makes the wives wretched. (Ch 9)

Nevertheless, in chronicling a female life under slavery, she is representative of her sex when testifying to the sexual harassment one may experience at the hands of a white master. She describes how a young black girl, reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear, where “the lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers”, (Ch 9) is enticed, whipped or starved into submission, and insists that resistance was hopeless.

Very early in life, also, by the hatred directed at a master’s favourite, the young girl recognises that jealousy on the mistress’s behalf causes resentment that rebounds, with malevolence and actual violence, on the girl. When this became Jacobs’s fate, she resisted Flint’s approaches, spending months treating him with contempt, but reluctant and ashamed to tell her grandmother, who had promised, “to be a mother to her grandchildren, so far as she might be permitted to do so.” (Ch 2)

In this capacity, the grandmother “knows there is no security for her children” (Ch 10) and “would live in daily expectation of trouble” (Ch 10) once a girl reaches her teens, although Deborah Gray White observes, “In the long run, however, a mother could do little but hope that her daughter made it through adolescence and young womanhood unscathed by sexual abuse”. [81] Obviously, Jacobs is appealing to the white women readers that they might sympathise with the slave mother, whose natural role of mothering has been removed, deliberately, from her and she has no power to protect her children.

Jacobs’s response to Flint’s attentions, in having a baby to a white unmarried lawyer, might appear extreme to the modern reader. She makes much of the scandalous nature of her action, but, according to form, it would be no more than the whites would have expected from one of her race, as far as they cared. Her self–depreciation has a feigned ring to it. It could almost evoke a feeling of “the lady doth protest too much, methinks”. [82] However, her reasoning clearly demonstrates that while being owned reduces the slaves to a common state of subservience, the basic instinct for self determination prevails and efforts to suppress it forces the individual to resort to subterfuge.

It could require a stretching of credulity to accept the outrage with which the grandmother received the news of Jacobs’ pregnancy, “You are a disgrace to your dead mother”, (Ch 10) when she was speaking from a life time experience of enslavement herself. Jacobs’s lament that there was no chance of now being respectable appears at variance with Gray White’s findings, “prenuptial intercourse was not considered evil”. [83] She further reported that, “slaves did not condemn motherhood out of wedlock”. [84] Herman Gutman, in his book The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, argues that there were well-defined sexual mores under which “a girl typically had intercourse fairly early and bore a child, but then settled down with one man and had the rest of her children by him”. [85]

While purity was an expected element of white female society of the era, Jacobs does not seem to have transgressed according to the norms of her own community. There might appear here a sense of exaggerated outrage and mortification that not only emphasises her aloofness, but could suggest abolitionist influence, denoting that she, and by association, all black women, conduct their sexual lives according to the same principles as whites. The inference would be that black sexual practice, if allowed to be natural, would conform to the morals of the white race. This could indicate that she had succumbed to abolitionist propaganda.

The assumption could be endorsed further by the significant absence of any details regarding her relationship with Mr. Sands, the man chosen by Jacobs to be the father of her child. That she was a slave girl of fifteen and he was white, could suggest some exploitation on his part; that he was white, educated and eloquent, might suggest some on hers. Having had two children to him would indicate that she engaged in some form of connection with him over the period of a few years, even after she had achieved what she set out to do, and found that it did not lessen Flint’s persistence and so had not produced the desired result. This is not documented.

The nature of their relationship has been glossed over, apparently to concentrate on the one that disturbed her, and was of more significance to the abolitionist cause. It does point to her being selective in her narrative. Her interior life wherein, Toni Morrison contends, lie the innermost thoughts, is not brought fully to the fore. She has not said why she put herself in the position of having another child when she was fully aware of its fate. “I knew the doom that awaited my fair baby in slavery”. (Ch 16) She gave numerous examples of how children were hired out to work for unscrupulous masters and of them being sold at a master’s whim.

I saw a mother lead seven children to the auction-block. She knew that some of them would be taken from her; but they took all. The children were sold to a slave-trader, and their mother was bought by a man in her own town. Before night her children were all far away…I met that woman in the street, and her wild, haggard face lives today in my mind. (Ch 3)

The removal of children from their mothers, between whom there is a special bond, was one of the most devastating but effective implements of slavery. On an immediate level, it caused enduring heartbreak, with its emotional impact, on the mothers who were left bereft. T. Parsons contends that “the human personality is not “born” but must be “made” through the socializing process”. [86] He notes that for the child, “The central focus of the process of socialization lies in the internalisation of the culture of the society into which the child is born”. [87] Those children separated from their mothers were thus denied, not only their nurturing, but their true culture and were inculcated with that of enslavement. They were sold off, dispatched, one knew not where, and knowing nothing of their fore bearers, culture or history, to a life of uncertainty and suffering.

There are disclosures that might make one question the commitment Harriet Jacobs had to her children, one example being when she had everything prepared to flee and leave them, indefinitely, with the aged grandmother, who pleaded with Jacobs not to do so, on the grounds that no one respects a mother who leaves her children. There could be an element of moralizing here. It would have been more believable had the grandmother put her from going on the grounds that she did not want the obligation. It would seem to be unreasonable, nay outrageous, for anybody to expect an elderly woman to take sole responsibility for two very young children.

What can be said in Jacobs’s defence is that it was the institution of slavery that put her in the position. In the event, grandmother got them anyway, since Jacobs concealed herself in the garret of a shed connected to her house. Here she was forced to endure severe discomfort, pain and illness, for almost seven years. Discovery would have had disastrous consequences, not only on her and the children, but on all those who were complicit in her deception. While awaiting an opportunity to get herself and the children to freedom, she was forced, in effect, to leave them motherless, although safely in the care of her grandmother. She watched them grow without ever being able to make herself known to them, for fear of them leading her into Flint’s clutches again, since he continued to make every attempt to trace her, even going to the North in his search.

Her eventual escape to freedom was to a North that enacted the updated Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. A life of insecurity had become the lot of thousands of fugitives, on what they considered free soil.

The slave Hamlin, the first fugitive that came under the new law, was given up by the bloodhounds of the north to the bloodhounds of the south. It was the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population. (Ch 40)

Slaves who had made it to freedom were hunted down by their owners and were dragged back to their previous lives, an event that is central in Toni Morrison’s portrayal of slavery.

Fortunately, Jacobs’s employer in the north bought her release and gave her the papers, meaning that she was free to begin life with her two children. Her experience of slavery as a woman and mother had been menacing and traumatic, but the more harrowing tales of others overshadowed her experience. It could seem that Jacobs was defining herself through the white culture, and that her own image was of importance in her account. Her superior attitude and a tendency to pander to the whites augmented an overabundance of abolitionist rhetoric that lessened the sincerity of the narration.

Jacobs’s testimony was published in 1861. The white writers of the day preferred to steer clear of the contentious issues, an example being Nathaniel Hawthorne, who placed his The Scarlet Letter in a period two hundred years before. It is significant though, that of the little girl, Pearl, he retains the image of the white Saxon child that his forefathers used to represent the freedom of the new nation:

But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us. [88]

Mark Twain, at least, introduced his black slave character, Jim, into his most recognised works, but in doing so, he put words into the children’s mouths that epitomised white perceptions of the black, “but I never see a nigger that wouldn’t lie”, [89] and their prejudices:

He likes me, becuz I don’t ever act as if I was above him. Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat with him. But you needn’t tell that. A boy’s got to do things when he’s awful hungry he wouldn’t want to do as a steady thing. [90]

Ann Douglas contends that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [91] is “a Bildungsroman, a novel of education, in which Twain sees to it that nobody gets educated”. [92] Toni Morrison goes further. She believes that to give themselves the feeling of freedom, whites needed slavery. For her, Twain’s view was expressed in the novel:

freedom has no meaning to Huck or to the text without the spectre of enslavement, the anodyne to individualism; the yardstick of absolute power over the life of another; the signed, marked, informing and mutating presence of a black slave. [93]

Some novelists writing in the early eighteenth century felt that the purpose of the novel was its moral utility. Penelope Aubin’s aim was “to encourage virtue and expose vice”. [94] Uncle Tom’s Cabin [95] did just that. It was unashamedly anti-slavery, abolitionist propaganda, where Harriet Beecher Stowe displays “her laudable determination to flinch from nothing”, [96] except asking why they thought they had the right to assume that the black race was there for their comfort.

While she left no aspect of the descriptions of slavery untold, her denouement saw Uncle Tom, having served loyally in slavery, and dying as a result of a bad whipping, content to leave this world as a good Christian and looking forward to attaining happiness in the Kingdom of Heaven. Her gifted George and wife Eliza, mulattos, opted to leave the country altogether and settle in Africa. That was the solution to the slavery problem arrived at by an avowed Abolitionist!

She did not let the persecutors know what slavery did to the African Americans. That is what Toni Morrison undertook in her novel Beloved.

Chapter Three. Toni Morrison's Beloved
Beloved, written in 1987, could be considered a slave narrative of the twentieth century, since, from the unfolding of the story, we follow Sethe’s journey from enslavement to freedom. Unlike Jacobs’s work, however, it is set exclusively in the black world. A cultural heritage, that includes improvisation, allows Toni Morrison, “writing a part of herself into the narrative”, [97] to envisage for Sethe an experience of motherhood, and intertwining subplots for the other characters.

Through these, she unveils the interior life of the slave. This Morrison deems necessary to give a true representation of African American life, in and after bondage. Her novel “exposes the unsaid of the narratives, the psychic subtexts that lie within and beneath historical facts”. [98] Like Ella, one of her characters, Morrison “listens for the holes – the things the fugitives did not say: the questions they did not ask”. (92) She finds them, and in true African American tradition, has Paul D admit to his heartache, “sang it sometimes but never told a soul”. (71)

The medium of the novel lends itself to the process, one of its chief functions apart from moralizing, according to E. M. Forster, being “to express man’s pure passions, that is to say the dreams, joys, sorrows and self-communings [which circumstances] prevent him from mentioning”. [99] In this way, the “unspeakable things, unspoken”, namely, the horrors endured by the black people who inhabit the world of Beloved, can be unearthed and shared. Characters in a novel do not hold any secrets. Their inner as well as their outer lives can be exposed so that they are understood completely by the reader. [100] Ian Watt contended that “the defining feature of the novel is its realism, its ability to show ourselves to ourselves”. [101]

In the light of Sethe’s preoccupation with “beating back the past” (73) so that she may have a “liveable life”, James Baldwin agrees with Morrison that it is by acknowledging and confronting the darkness and complexity of humanity that “we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves”. [102] This power is “the power of revelation, which is the business of the novelist. [103]

As a vehicle to address “the necessity of historical memory, the desire to forget the terrors of slavery and the impossibility of forgetting”, [104] Morrison uses this novel to show, also, that “there is a necessity for remembering the horror…in a manner in which…the memory is not destructive”. [105] She extends the power of revelation to her characters who reveal the hidden degradation and humiliation they suffered, by telling what they want to tell, of their own volition, and at a time they are ready to tell it. When they finally come to putting their memories into words, Morrison demonstrates that, “the collective sharing of that information heals the individual – and the collective”. [106]

Morrison’s style of writing is both artistic and artful. One paragraph reads:

She might be hurrying across a field to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs (6)

(a hypothetical occasion)

The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard (6)

(She was not thinking of the atrocity the men committed on her, or the reason for her scared back, but by this negation, the reader has been made aware of the horrible sexual act and that she has been physically abused.)

Then…Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling…out before her eyes...it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. (6)

(The most innocent occurrence or image has connotations that bring back the horror of what happened at the picturesque Sweet Home.)

Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world (6)

(This demonstrates that the trees are what she prefers to remember rather than the boys, while evoking in the reader a picture of a lynching.) [107]

When the last of the chamomile was gone, she went round to the front of the house. (6)

(A present situation.)

Apart from filling one paragraph with copious information, every word or phrase significant, and intimating some of the unspeakable things Sethe is trying to forget, Morrison has taken us from a hypothetical into a present situation seamlessly. In such ways, she moves between past and present, memory and fact, memory and memory etc. while “shifting from third person narration to omniscient narration to interior monologue”. [108] Weaving backwards and forwards through the lives of her characters, she gathers their thoughts, memories and deeds as they cope with their individual traumas.

Although the joins are seamless, they are bringing together and introducing fragments of unconnected stories, or, at times, the same one from a different perspective, so that they are told or retold in a piecemeal fashion, the event therefore never relayed in linear or chronological order. The structure of the novel creates an element of confusion, since changes in perspective are not always marked.

It has been suggested that this is the response desired by the authoress to instil in her readers the experience of confusion had they been “snatched just as the slaves were from one place to another, without preparation and without defence”. [109] The activity of the child ghost in the house at the beginning evokes in Sethe, memories of her baby girl, which in turn conjures up images of a degrading sexual union with a stonemason as payment for a headstone. All we are told at this juncture is that the baby, whose ghost is haunting the house, had had its throat cut and that the blood “had soaked her fingers like oil”. (5)

It is not until halfway through the book that a third person narrator describes, from the hunter’s viewpoint, the arrival, into a yard, of a slave-catcher, a sheriff, schoolteacher and his nephew, who have come to reclaim unidentified fugitive slaves, a black woman and her children, under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

The use of this narrator, in this passage, allows Morrison to imbue the event with the inhumane feeling with which the white owner and representatives of the law viewed their prey. While they sneaked up on the unsuspecting Sethe, as a hunter would on an animal, their thoughts are revealed, “Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin.” (148)

On discovering that the woman had had time to kill one of her children and was in the process of killing the rest, Morrison makes the white owner admit that he considers his slaves as less than human. He remonstrated with his nephew, “See what happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you the responsibility of – the trouble it was, and the loss.” (150) The reader knows that Sethe is the mother who has committed this terrible deed. But Sethe is not ready to confront or voice it yet; it was locked away with the rest of the horrors she endured under slavery.

Present events begin in the novel in 1873, after the Civil War and a decade after slavery had been abolished. They see Sethe and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Denver, living alone in nominal freedom, in a detached house on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Sethe’s two sons had run off at thirteen, ten years previously, spooked by continuing poltergeist activities of the baby ghost, whose actions Sethe considered “no more powerful than the way I loved her”. (4) Her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, whose home it had been, had died of despair eight years before.

Paul D, one of the slaves, who had been owned by the Garners of Sweet Home with Sethe, enters the story, meeting her for the first time in the eighteen years since they had arranged their escape to freedom, which was the last time Sethe had seen her husband, Halle. Paul D clears the house of the haunting ghost.

In the first chapter, through their conversations, their individual thoughts and memories, the reader, gets a sketchy, rudimentary idea of some of the events connected to their escape from slavery and their state of mind at present. Sethe and Denver are living a solitary life were no one calls. It is a life that is not that other life, but one that entails continually “beating back the past”. (73) The daughter, Denver, is seen to be lonely, now resenting the dismissal of the only company she had besides her mother, that of the ghost of her sister.

She is envious of her mother and Paul D having shared a past life. Little is communicated openly between them except an element of Sethe’s experience at the point of the escape. She tells Paul D, that although she had been pregnant with Denver, she was still feeding her “crawling already” daughter, whom she had sent ahead, with her two boys, to freedom with other fugitives. It was when the white nephews on the plantation “came in there and took my milk” (16) that she had decided to flee. For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue. It was “And they took my milk”. (17) Even in using cowhide on her, beating her while pregnant, it was still, again, “And they took my milk”. (17) The symbolism contained in the numerous references to having her milk taken from her is essential for the premise of Beloved. The importance she attaches to preserving black culture and connecting with one’s ancestry, so crucial to giving the blacks identity and history, is synonymous with the nurturing of one’s children. Sethe was denied her mother’s milk, only having seen her in the fields and remembered speaking to her once:

Nan had to nurse whitebabies and me too because ma’am was in the rice. The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. (200)

This, added to the fact that Sethe had had hers taken from her, accentuates this elemental destructive aspect of slavery which not only cuts the bonds that unite, and degrades womanhood, but removes the natural biological function of motherhood.

The nephews and their uncle, schoolteacher, had taken over the running of the plantation on the death of its owner Mr. Garner, who had exercised slavery without physical brutality, although Halle realised that “what they say is the same. Loud or soft”. (195) The new regime brought changes, a significant aspect of slave life, since theirs were totally dependent on either the change in circumstances of their masters, or a change in masters. Now, brutality reigned and subdued. Displaying his polygenetic view, schoolteacher took measurements and made notes of the slaves. Sethe, not understanding the significance of this, became traumatised when she heard him and the nephews discussing her human and animal characteristics.

Afterwards, when the younger men defiled her, in her own words, “they handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses”, (200) it was the final straw that precipitated her plan to escape in an “emphatic rejection of slavery’s power to circumscribe her motherhood”. [110] She sent her three children ahead, intending to follow with her husband Halle, but the escape went wrong and Sethe found herself running alone. It is significant that, in her exhausted physical state, nearing her time of another confinement and badly beaten, she thought that “her baby’s ma’am” (31) was going to die. She saw herself only as a mother, having no identity outside of her children; they were an extension of herself; they were her best part, never been sullied by slavery. It is noteworthy that Morrison had a white girl, Amy Denver, administer to Sethe’s wounds and deliver her baby, the baby to be called Denver in acknowledgement. Morrison demonstrates the strong connection she herself feels to the generations of her people who had been brought to America in the slave ships by dedicating the book to them - “the “Sixty Million and more” who have never been known or recognised, and who were part of the beginning of black American history. The horrors they endured on the middle passage are an underlying feature of the account. Now, she takes the opportunity to use the movement of the coming baby in Sethe’s body, during labour and at the moment of birth, to give them a presence when she introduces echoes of them speaking in their African tongues and visions of them performing their African dances. The implication is that, although these are of the past, their memory still has power to influence.

These evocations were seen to bring forth from Sethe, affirmation and appreciation of the black culture which permeated her consciousness. As a mother, Sethe saw herself as the natural link by which her children would know their true heritage and was determined to convey it to them with pride. To do this, and to instil in them the same pride, she had to deliver them from slavery and the attitudes which classified them as animals.

It was only when Sethe, with her new baby, was reunited with her other three children in freedom that she felt what freedom meant. Her elation in self-determination is palpable. She had done something of her own free will, as an individual; she had got them “all out” (162) by herself. Her euphoria in being free is palpable. In one of the most affecting passages in the book, she radiates with her new-found liberty, and is able to bestow on her children the love that she now recognised had been curtailed by slavery:

I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon – there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to. (162)

Paul D understood the freedom. “Not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.” (162) But he was more circumspect about allowing himself to love like that. He knew that such a love, for the slave who could have it snatched from him at any moment, was “too thick” (164) To him “a woman, a child, a brother – a big love like that would split you wide open” (162). It was such love that sent Sethe running to the woodshed when she spotted her owners and the law coming to bring her and her children back to a life of slavery. Rather than let them be taken into bondage and suffer as she had done, it was such love that allowed her to have one of them killed by the time the posse reached her.

And who is going to judge her? The black community did. They had adopted a way to hide their pain, even from themselves, locking it in their memory. They even inured themselves against it when they could. Baby Suggs had barely glanced at her eighth baby when it was born because she did not expect to see him into adulthood:

Seven times she had done that; held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own – fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognise anywhere…All seven were gone or dead. What would be the point of looking too hard at the youngest one? (139)

Slavery broke the mothers’ spirit and, not only rendered their nurturing function superfluous to the system, but left them dispassionate, with the result that the Beloved community did not appreciate Sethe’s reaction to the recapture of her children. (256) Being victims of an institution that was designed to remove personal regard, they saw her as being “prideful” (265) especially when, after she came from gaol, they perceived her remoteness as being aloofness. They disassociated themselves from her. Sethe spent the following years “loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day”. (70)

Toni Morrison brought into the novel the only one she thought had any right to judge Sethe [111] – the eponymous Beloved. Ambiguity surrounds her personhood but there are indications to suggest that this young woman could be perceived as the reincarnated “crawling already” baby, appearing at an age she would have been had she lived. When Sethe reaches the conclusion that this is her daughter, she envelops her with love. She is not seeking forgiveness, because:

Nobody on this earth would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper…Maybe Baby Suggs could…live with the likelihood of it; Sethe had refused – and refused still.” (251)

But she wanted Beloved to understand why she had done what she did. Beloved proved an unsettling presence. She caused disruption but it was through this that Sethe was able to unburden herself from all her bad memories, while retaining the ability and will to love. It was through her presence that Denver was able to overcome her fears and go out into the world as an independent young woman. And it was through her presence that Paul D was able to commit himself to Sethe for the future. Beloved was the catalyst for such interaction between characters that the community, who had scorned Sethe for eighteen years, but whose own individual humiliations and atrocities against them had been unveiled, came to her aid when Beloved was seen to be draining the life from her mother.

They were in the yard when the former Abolitionist, Mr. Bodwin, rode towards the house. In her confused state, Sethe imagined he was schoolteacher coming to take her children, sending her into a rage. She made to attack him with an ice pick, but the women of the community, there to save her from Beloved, restrained Sethe and prevented her from committing damage. On the intervention of the neighbours, and evidence of their support, Beloved disappeared from their midst. Maybe her presence was no longer needed in the novel.

The ambiguity that surrounds the Beloved character is intriguing because she has been written into the work in such a way that, besides being the daughter, killed out of love, she could be the personification of slavery itself, in the manner in which she took all that her mother had. Another perspective could be that, from the experience she depicted of capture in Africa and conditions aboard the slave ships, she was representative of the millions of blacks lost without trace. Whatever her role, and it would appear that it was multipurpose, she is a central character in a novel that has portrayed an immediate, personal and comprehensive history of black American experience of slavery. It is also such a human response to the inhumanity of slavery that its message has to be universally received and acknowledged.

The race of the intended readership is immaterial. One does not have to be black to realise that slavery was a holocaust, or to empathise with the suffering of the generations who were worn down, physically and mentally, but who had the forbearance to survive against such adversity. Reaction to the catalogue of injustice and abuse perpetrated upon the members of the black race, as depicted here, can be nothing but revulsion and horror. And reaction to their fortitude could be nothing but respect.

But one could feel that Morrison’s urge to produce a truthful slave narrative free from any influences was many faceted. Details of horrible truths were kept out of the public domain for many years by policies and laws, and not least by the aforementioned practice of national amnesia. It was necessary for improvement in the future that the past be truthfully documented. It was also necessary that the elements of the black population, who still cite the yoke of slavery as the reason for all their ills and who allow themselves to be beaten by negativity and the system, should amend their way of life, and regain and display some pride in themselves and their families.

Morrison has used history to point the way. She has resurrected and exposed the buried ghosts and her characters have dealt with them. She has shown in Sethe, a character whose commitment to her children will not be compromised. She has enabled her individuals and community to come to terms with their past. She has brought them together. She has shown that blacks and whites have co-operated and were pleased at working well together. She has brought to life a history that many would prefer to forget. She has given her black community hope for the future. Toni Morrison has exorcised the ghost of Beloved and in doing so, has shown her black brothers and sisters how to exorcise the ghosts of slavery that still haunt many of her race. She has given them reasons to be proud.

Conclusion
As it is hoped can be seen from this work, the contribution of African Americans who were enslaved, was the foundation upon which the United States was built. While doing so, they endured severe indignities, degradation, dehumanisation and suffering under the law, and were consistently victims of prejudice from American society. White writers of the day were not inclined to broach the subject of slavery. Those who did introduce black characters in their works, or made a protest through their writing, had their own agenda which did not include incorporating the black community into the population as equal American citizens.

The impact of Harriet Jacobs’s experience was diminished by her personal attitudes and the influence of the Abolitionists. Particular trials and tribulations of motherhood were seen to be a result of designated policy to ensure the elimination of African culture and the perpetuation of slavery. Toni Morrison’s skill in writing has been responsible for depicting the horror of slavery, its effect on mothers and the devastation it leaves in its wake with such intensity, that, calling Wordsworth to mind, hard would he be of soul who could pass by a tale so touching in its majesty. It should send white American society to its knees, begging for forgiveness.

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Wyższa Szkoła Języków Obcych w PoznaniuKatedra Języka AngielskiegoJagoda PiotrowskaThe Formation of Personal and Communal Identity in Toni Morrison's BelovedPraca licencjackanapisana pod kierunkiemdr Moniki HagartyPoznań 2005
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Table of ContentsIntroduction 4 Chapter One 8The Formation of Individual IdentityChapter Two 21The Development of Communal IdentityConclusions 35Bibliography 38
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IntroductionSelf-love and love of others are both modes toward increasing self valuationand encouraging political resistance in one's community. These modes ofvaluation and resistance are rooted in a subversive memory – the best ofone's past without romantic nostalgia – and guided by a universal loveethic... Beloved can be construed as bringing together the loving yet criticalaffirmation of black humanity.1What Toni Morrison had strived to achieve when writing her 1987 novel,Beloved, was to show the rebirth of black identity through revived agency amongdowntrodden people. By portraying the struggle for self-affirmation, she most vividlydisplayed what Cornel West perceives as the especially degraded and oppressedpeople’s hunger “for identity, meaning, and self-worth.” 2 The author herself is anexample of a person who lives according to her own truths and is not afraid to admit it. As one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century, Toni Morrison has exerted atremendous influence on whole generations of writers by bringing a totally innovativeoutlook on the role of today's novel – especially a slave narrative. Contradicting aconventional milieu and refusing to be accounted for as a sentimental novel writer, shestands in firm opposition to “dropping a veil over these proceedings too terrible torelate.” Instead, undertaking the role of a writer, she identifies herself with the one1Cornel West about Beloved in his study Race Matters, New York: Vintage Books, 2001, pp. 29, 30;hereafter cited in the text as West.2Op. cit., p. 20.
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whose “job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over [the above] proceedings.”3In 1993, upon receiving the Nobel Prize, Toni Morrison exclaims: So I've just insisted – insisted! – upon being called a black womannovelist, and I decided what that meant, because I have claimed it. Ihave claimed what I know. As a black and a woman, I have had accessto a range of emotions and perceptions that were unavailable to peoplewho were neither. 4With these words she reveals that her prevailing wish to acknowledge something that sofar has been inaccessible to art can finally become articulated within the space of hernovel, Beloved. The idea to base this novel on a dramatic, yet factual story of MargaretGarner is derived from a will to deliver truths that even history fails to convey. Discovering a documentation on Margaret Garner's murdering three of her childrenback in 1850s, Morrison made an attempt to reconstruct the complex psychologicalbackground that forced the woman to kill her own offspring. Andre Levy concedes thattrying to recount this story “in writing” is Morrison's greatest challenge “because theinstitutionalized parameters of guilt and responsibility do not provide the vocabulary to'tell,' legally or narratively, the anomalies of a slave mother's infanticide” (Grewal 1998:97). Thus, the last sentence in the book reads, “it was not a story to pass on.” 5 Themeaning behind this ultimate utterance can be deciphered as either an assumption of theinability to sustain the story by “writing it down,” or an indication that it will never“pass away” – be forgotten, or dis-remembered. It should, in other words, remain in theblacks' consciousness as an evidence of the traumatic burden of slavery. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is hardly an attempt to strengthen and fossilize thedistress of past experience, rather, it strives to bring consolation to “the brokenheartstrings.” In accordance with Cornel West's earlier observation, the novel devotesits pages to a portrayal of the process of individual and collective battle against thedevastating effects of institutionalized slavery – the struggle for self-affirmation whichalso implies the striving to become “the definer” instead of just being “the defined.” InBeloved, the recurring pattern of “self-love and love of others” constitutes the bestremedy for the “whitefolk's jungle.” Elizabeth Kella argues that in “loving anythingthey choose” the novel’s characters such as Baby Suggs, Paul D and Sethe find3Gurleen Grewal, Circles of Pain, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison, Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1998, p. 99; hereafter cited in the text as Grewal.4Quoted from the archives of “The Boston Globe,” Gail Caldwell, “Morrison Awarded Nobel Writer's'Visionary Force',” http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=list&p_topdoc=31(08/10/93).5Toni Morrison, Beloved, London: Vintage, 1997, p. 275; hereafter cited in the test as Beloved.
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definition of freedom, which becomes a practical tool to eliminate the suffering causedby repression. 6 Hence, learning to love one another is a basic step to self-valuation, beit individual or communal. Following Martin Luther King's legendary “dream,” Toni Morrison puts the veryidea of equality of human race in question. Still, what can be read between the lines of Beloved, is an unswerving hope that the battle for subjectivity, just like the struggle ofSethe and her black community to re-affirm their status of human beings, will one dayturn fruitful. The following analysis is an attempt to portray the various paths thatBeloved’s protagonists take while searching for their true identity. In the first chapter the focus is on the individual aspect of the spiritual quest forself-valuation. Examining Sethe's and Denver's struggle for self-affirmation, the studyelaborates firstly on the effects that institutionalized slavery had on its victims' psyche. As for Sethe, the discussion concerns not only the problem of dehumanization triggeredby the white oppressors, but also the harm done to Sethe by the black community. Sethe's retreat to 124 Bluestone Road is seen as a consequence of the rejection by thatsociety after the barbarous act of killing her own child. Denver's psychologicaldevelopment towards self-recognition begins with the mother-daughter relationship andDenver's fear for Sethe as well as her fear of the community “outside.” Undoubtedly, Beloved's role in the formulation of Sethe's and Denver’s identityis absolutely central to the novel. The ghost's arrival marks a turning point in theprotagonists' lives: Sethe is given a chance to revise her past and reenact it, whereasDenver is challenged to responsibility for her family, which results in her subsequenttransformation from being a girl to becoming a woman. The appearance of Beloved,however, is both therapeutic and destructive. The damaging results of her agency thusleave space for the community to present its – unquestionably – crucial role in theempowering of its tormented members.The second chapter of this study takes a closer look at the communal struggle forself-redefinition. Much attention is given to the rationale behind an individual beingconditioned by the community, and to the function of “the ancestor” and the African-American heritage in the discovery of collective originality. Also analyzed here arefactors that unite members of a social group, such as the religious ritual conducted by“Baby Suggs, holy.” To contrast the common sources of mutual empowerment, this6Elizabeth Kella, Beloved Communities: Solidarity and Difference in Fiction by Michael Ondaatje, ToniMorrison, and Joy Kogawa, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2000, p. 142; hereafter cited inthe text as Kella.
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study further emphasizes the threat of losing contact with a spiritual leader and fallinginto the trap of the whites' degrading definition. Another aspect under scrutiny is the motif of community agency after it hasfailed to perform its role in shaping its members self-dignity. The communityundergoes a “social change” when dialogue with Denver is resumed. This becomes thedecisive moment for the community's final recognition of its function. The blacks as acommunity are thus given a second chance to support and not to reject. Such changecould only be obtained through the revision of the community’s actions and re-discovery of its true communal identity.
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Chapter OneThe Formation of IndividualIdentityWorse than that ─ far worse ─ was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ellaknew, what Stamp saw, what made Paul D tremble. That anybody whitecould take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work,kill, or maim but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourselfanymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think itup.~Toni Morrison, BelovedToni Morrison's Beloved can figure as an investigation of the paths that theindividual takes to reach self-affirmation. The personal need to re-articulate one'sselfhood has its roots in the institution of slavery responsible for the removal of thisselfhood in the first place. Therefore, the individual searches for “new” self-recognition, an impulse traced back to the trauma of past experience. Even though theeffects of slavery were experienced primarily within the communal boundaries, thewhite oppression has also affected the individual. Only by affirming personalindividuality, is one able to be reborn in the community. It seems that in ToniMorrison's Beloved, it is the two female protagonists, Sethe and her daughter, Denver,
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that best represent successfully regained self-value, and recognition in the eyes of thecommunity. 7Though apparently white racial oppression aimed at devaluating and abusing allblack people without exception, it tended to exercise its cruelty primarily on blackwomen. According to Cornel West, the cause of black women's trauma in the novels ofToni Morrison is strongly bound with “the effect of the suppression of Black race,which reinforces the black obsession with the psychic scars, ontological wounds, andexistential bruises.” These obsessions are of vital significance for the agency of 'self-making' and 'self-inventing,' which are essential to the “human struggle for mature blackselfhood.” Nevertheless, as he puts it, “the search for black space (home), black place(roots), and black face (name)” was hindered despite the abolition of slavery. Thus,quoting James Berger's words, “even in a free state and after slavery, the former owners,under the auspices of law and science, can still regard the African American as object,property, and specimen” (qtd. in Kella 2000: 145, 223). In the reality where theabolition of slavery existed apparently only in theory, it was still viable for the whites tocontinue the practice of slave-holding. In Race Matters, Cornel West argues that white supremacy originates primarilyin the degradation of black bodies in order to have control over them, which is best donethrough persuasion that their black bodies are ugly (West 2001: 122). Therefore, usingthe device of dehumanizing the body, slavery aimed first and foremost at women. Audre Lorde affirms that, when considering institutionalized slavery, it is essential tounderstand that more central than liberation alone was African American women'smaltreatment (Kella 2000: 70). It was easier to enact cruelty upon women for, apartfrom being black, they were also most vulnerable in the black society because they werefemales. This fact encouraged white oppressors to abuse them sexually. In her bookCircles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle, Gurleen Grewal theorizes that Toni Morrison'sBeloved clearly portrays that there is more to the “equality of oppression” since underslavery women were routinely the “subjects of rape, enforced childbirth, and natalalienation from their children” (Grewal 1998: 100). The fact that they were “mothers,”also enabled, even encouraged, white masters to dehumanize and deprive women on a7We are led to assume that in Beloved the female characters do achieve the state of self- and communalaffirmation at the end of the story. This fact is affirmative though Beloved's female protagonists seemto be in minority among the portraits of women in other works by Toni Morrison. According to MariaMardberg, in novels such as Tar Baby and Sula the community does not really provide a sense ofwholeness due to historically shared experience. By contrast, these novels present females' self-insufficiency and negative individualism. Even though Sethe isolates herself from the society, shedoes not reject it. Therefore, Beloved differs from Toni Morrison's other works in that it shows innergrowth and affirmation of communal identity (Mardberg 1998: 216, 224).
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higher level of degradation than it could be done to slave-men.Apparently, Toni Morrison found the experience of black mothers who developa sense of self after slavery worth writing about. Hence, Beloved appears to be a properillustration of it. Based on a true story of Margaret Garner the action of the novel takesplace in 1873 Cincinnati, Ohio. After escaping from Kentucky plantation the maincharacter, Sethe, attempts to kill her children to prevent them from being re-enslaved. She succeeds in killing only one of her four children, “the crawling-already girl.” Thisevent, in all its brutality, condemns Sethe to being rejected by the society. She thenseeks refuge within the walls of her house at 124 Bluestone Road, where she separatesherself as well as her daughter, Denver, from the black community. 8 Hence, the cruelty of dehumanization that indirectly forced Sethe to commitinfanticide can be best illustrated with examples from the novel. There are two crucial moments in Sethe's life when she is submitted to the dehumanizing forces of the whiteoppressors. The first clearly distinguishable incident in Sethe's story that marks a turning point in her life and drastically changes her perception of the future, takes placeearly in her life, when she is put on the animal side of the list of features according toschoolteacher's education. Sethe overhears the man's lesson, during which he teacheshis nephews about the natural features of a human, drawing a thick line between ahuman being and an animal. To supply his students with a more precise exemplificationof the difference between the human and animal world, he classifies Sethe as arepresentative of the animal realm. Not until she actually acknowledges that “thefeature means something naturally assigned to a thing,” can she understand thehumiliating classification. She begins to trust in the words of Baby Suggs that “there isno bad luck in the world but whitefolks” (Beloved 1997: 89) seeing no other possibilitythan to draw a general conclusion about the racism of every single white person9(Kella2000: 118). The aspect of dehumanization gains even more meaning when, much laterin her life, Sethe is pregnant with Denver. Sethe's milk is then taken from her to feedthe schoolteacher's nephews. As it is indicated, feeding white boys with Sethe's ownmilk, is superimposed over feeding her own children. Such bestial endeavor deprives8The concept of exclusion recurring in the novels of black women writers is taken into account by RitaFelski, who names all women “outsiders,” since in her opinion, women's priority is to first search for asymbolic identity – the recovery of a completely new sense of self that will, in consequence, enablethem to participate in the social world (Mardberg 1998: 114, 115). 9This, however, is arguable for Sethe may not be fair in her estimation of the white people. After all, inher own life she did receive help from them: Amy helped Sethe to give birth to Denver when sheescaped from the plantation; Ella, unlike the whole female community, instead of feeling offended bySethe's isolation, is willing to help when Denver seeks her support; the Bodwins – the abolitionists – allow Baby Suggs to live in their own house.
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Sethe of the role of being a mother, and degrades her to the position of a “breeder,” asshe is made use of like an animal in service of feeding a human. The humiliationreaches its peak when Sethe learns that her husband, Halle, is a witness to the situation. Since he cannot protect her, he feels emasculated, and therefore abandons her. Much asHalle's behavior is then rationalized by Sethe, she will nevertheless feel disgust for men. This, in consequence, can be a logical explanation of her inability to form a closerrelationship with Paul D. As “the last from the sweet-home men” and the only one whosurvived, Paul D appears in Sethe's life eighteen years after the event of killing her childand shows readiness to form a relationship with Sethe. In fact, this could give the basisfor the substitute of a traditional family, if not for them both, then at least for Denver. Yet, to Sethe's disappointment, Paul D cannot reconcile with the knowledge of Sethe'scommitting so barbarous an act as murder, and following the white masters' examplecompares her to an animal when he says: “you have two legs, not four.” Thisdeclaration is all the more hurtful and humiliating for Sethe because here Paul D sideswith the white oppressors, simply unable to understand the complexity of her actions. Sethe, who has hoped for Paul D's support in her suffering, receives it neither from theblack society, nor from Paul D.10Hence, to talk about “Sethe's journey” to self-reliance and her re-affirmation in the black society it should be emphasized that it were not only“whitefolks who broke her heartstrings.” As a direct result of enslavement, every slavecreated his/her identity based on the definition provided by the white people. Inconsequence, the members of the black community begin to perceive each otheraccording to the whites' definition of the Black race. Therefore, a significant hindranceto Sethe's self-valuation can be attributed to the actions of the black community which,rather than using their own definition, interpreted Sethe's actions through the definition“borrowed” from their oppressors. 11 This is why Sethe's killing of her own child can10According to Katherine B. Payant, through the disability of mutual understanding between Sethe andPaul D, Toni Morrison points to the divisions between black men and women, yet only as a product ofwhite society (Payant 1993: 200). In the study on 'double-consciousness' W.E.B. Du Bois claims,similarly to Morrison, that depriving the black men of true Self, the world lets him see himself onlythrough the revelation of this other world. It is then applicable to Paul D's perception of Sethe throughthe eyes of the whites, for whom she was an animal. Compare (Du Bois 1989: 5) with Cornel West'scommentaries on 'double-consciousness' (West 2001: 138). 11Another reason for the black community to reject Sethe is attributed to “being proud.” In accordancewith Katherine B. Payant, apart from Baby Suggs, the black protagonists in Beloved are all capable ofhurting each other. Such tendency is then attributed by Morrison to “being proud” (Payant 1993:200). The critic further assigns “the capacity to hurt each other” to people as a natural feature. Yet, inthe end, the novel Beloved brings consolation, as it is the positive side of the community that winsover. Thus, the peril of losing a member of the black community gives reason to swallow one’s prideand unite forces against common evil. So does the community, rescuing Sethe from the devastating
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be analyzed at least in two ways, depending on whether the “black” or “white”definition is applied. Some critics consider the act barbaric, while others see it asheroic. Perceiving the murder as an act of barbarism suggests agreeing to be defined bythe slaver, whereas calling it heroism, even if controversial, signifies black self-definition. Gurleen Grewal, for example, suggests taking Sethe's deed as a heroic act ofresistance that revealed in itself the whole idea of slavery. The critic justifies herposition through the statement: “If the master could subject the slave children inbondage to a slow ‘social death,’ the mother could release them through physicaldeath.” The reader is encouraged by Toni Morrison to see Sethe's killing of the child asnot an anomaly, but rather as a revision of the stereotype of “the mammy figure”(Grewal 1998: 97, 101). Kristina K. Groover is not afraid to call Sethe's act “adesperate act of love.” 12 All the more unreasonable then, seems Sethe's exclusionfrom the black community. The society that has previously heartily welcomed her as itsrightful member, now ostracizes her from its range. They invite her to join their freecommunity once she has escaped from slavery, and seeks shelter in the embrace ofBaby Suggs, her mother-in-law. Now she is among “her people.” Still, it is only for amonth that she enjoys the status of a “black sister.” After the unforgivable infanticide,the people who could best understand her motives because of their common experience,reject her: “Those twenty-eight happy days were followed by eighteen years ofdisapproval and a solitary life” (Beloved 1997: 173). Sethe's exclusion from society isjustified by other critics who, unlike Grewal and Groover, find Sethe's murderunpardonable.13After being rejected, Sethe finds a place of desolation within the walls of 124Bluestone house and succeeds in isolating herself, and Denver, from the community. Marilyn R. Chandler relates the idea of the house, through which women could “workout their salvation and define their identities.” Accordingly, Maria Holmgren Troydetermines another interpretation of Sethe's seclusion pointing to the importance of “thedivision between inside and outside, private and public” of the house. In the critic'sestimation, Sethe spatially circumscribes life to the house, and as such, is able to see away to find her true identity. In addition, Sethe's having locked herself in the house canforce of Beloved. 12Kristina K. Groover, The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and the Spiritual Quest,Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999, p. 70.13For example, Katherine B. Payant argues that “the murder out of maternal possessiveness means anunwillingness of mothers to allow their children autonomy to the extremes – mother as a terrifyingpower ” (Payant 1993: 196).
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be perceived as an attempt to revise the past in order to free herself from the burden ofher murder. The will to re-enact the traumatic experience can be then taken for astruggle for freedom. 14 This being so, the house stands as a device to recollect andrecreate memories as a compulsory step to self-redemption. Hence, asserting freedomfor oneself called for the revision of the disgraceful past.Sethe's subconscious longing for clarification of the past, and simultaneously forforgiveness, brings into being the ghost of her murdered child. According to West African belief, the dead are not finished with the livingbecause the past (the dead), present (the living), and future (the unborn) arecoexistent. Deceased ancestors can and do communicate with theirdescendants, especially if certain rites of the dead have not been performed. Such a world view posits a fluidity and continuity between the past andpresent (Grewal 1998: 106).It takes eighteen years for the ghost of Sethe’s murdered daughter, Beloved, to comeback in flesh and claim the love she has been denied. Beloved appears as a youngwoman, but behaves like a child. Being slaughtered by her mother she has never beengiven a chance to mature, thus, her development was arrested at the point when she wasa “crawling-already baby.” Consequently, her mentality is comparable to that of achild, and she is selfishly demanding. Her infantile egocentricity reveals itself in thenature of her return, namely, she comes back to claim what was taken from her. Toborrow a Freudian term, Beloved's “return of the repressed” denotes the comeback ofthe suffering soul to “possess” (Grewal, 1998: 105). Initially, Beloved’s appearance suggests to the main protagonists that she came to “love and be-loved.” As time goesby, Sethe and Denver make every effort to provide the regained family member with allthe love they previously reserved for each other. Hard as they try, it becomes visiblethat the feeling of love is not at all altruistic. On the contrary, the notion of “love” isequalized with the notion of “possession.” Beloved’s behavior is often approachedthrough the lens of Oedipal complex that develops into some demonic force, andsubsequently leads to Sethe’s mental and physical destruction. She resigns from her jobto be constantly at Beloved’s disposal. In doing so, she gradually loses control over herown life, and progressively ceases to perform the role of a mother. While attempting to14Marilyn R. Chandler quoted in Maria Holmgren Troy, In the First Person and in the House: The HouseChronotope in Four Works by American Women Writers, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis,1999, pp. 165, 197; hereafter cited in the text as Troy. Troy's further claim is to associate the address124 Bluestone Road with the American history. 124 stands for the number of years between theEmancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the publication of Beloved in 1987, and becomes anillustration of bridging the gap between past and present (Troy 1999: 39).
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make up for the murder, Sethe does not fulfill Beloved's expectations. For in reality,what Beloved seeks is a compensation for being abandoned in the past. Incapable ofperceiving the true intentions behind Beloved’s actions, Sethe exists only as if theghost’s possession. At this point in the novel, the ghost appears to be a main threat toher mother’s existence. Moreover, the asylum of the haunted house enhances Beloved'sdrift to “suck the life out of Sethe.” Katherine B. Payant explains that the maternal bond contains a hidden threatendangering both the child and the mother. Through this bond the child remainsinfantile and dependent, and it has destructive effects upon the mother, especially whenshe is viable to lose her children.15In Beloved, motherhood is strongly associated withthe desire to “possess the children.” This relation is reflected in the extensive use ofpossessive pronouns that underline the creation of an intimate fusion between females at124 Bluestone Road. These are three sections in the novel that are Sethe's, Denver's andBeloved's stream-of-consciousness, centered around the possessive pronoun mine. Sethe’s repeated assertion: “Beloved, she mine daughter, She mine,” is followed byDenver’s conviction “Beloved is my sister. Waiting for me. Ready for me to protecther,” and Beloved’s final declaration: “I am Beloved and she is mine. I am not separatefrom her her face is my own [emphasis mine]” (Beloved 1997: 200, 205, 206, 210). These statements testify that the mother-daughter relationship is not nurturing, and thatthere is a need to decipher the nature of “love” as “demanding and wanting” from eitherof the sides. For instance, taking into account Sethe's words: “Unless carefree,motherlove was a killer” (Beloved 1997: 132), one can argue that at this very point inthe novel the feeling of “love” lost its original meaning. That is why “women need tosee themselves as more than mothers” in order to prevent themselves from killing theirchildren “in the name of love.” Paul D seems to share this opinion when he states that“the best thing was to love everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back orshoved it in the croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love left over for the nextone” (Beloved 1997: 45). Blaming Sethe for her “too thick love,” he emphasizes thefact that her major crime lay not so much in the murder itself as in usurping herself theright to posses her children. According to Carol Boyce Davis, Sethe asserts the “basiclaw of mother-right over the bodies of her children in the society which denies her thatright” (Payant 1993: 196). Yet, within Sethe's words: ”Love is or it ain't. Thin loveain't love at all,” Toni Morrison defends Sethe's maternal love. She strongly believes15Katherine B. Payant, Becoming and Bonding: Contemporary Feminism and Popular Fiction byAmerican Women Writers, Westpoint, Connecticut — London: Greenwood Press, 1993, p. 195;hereafter cited in the text as Payant.
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that this kind of “love” is a sign of the mother's infinite devotion. Undoubtedly, Toni Morrison's theme of “motherhood” is difficult to decipher. On the one hand, a woman is the creator and caretaker of home. On the other,Morrison's “maternal love” far from being romantic is rather “dark, medicinal andmysterious,” to quote Kristina K. Groover (Groover 1999: 34). Thus, the cause ofDenver's reservation to the world outside also has its roots in the rapport between herand her mother. The major aspect of Denver's disability to achieve self-confidence isthe lack of established family. To cite Elizabeth Kella, Sethe's family was “neithernormative, nor 'pathological' (because) fatherless.” The blame for its deformedstructure is on the “traumatizing forces of white racism” (Kella 2000: 116). Hence, thefamily as a unit stands on guard of racial solidarity, and arises in opposition to racism. In this manner, it threatens the institution of slavery and is, therefore, the main target fordestruction. Although Sethe is willing to create a substitute of a traditional home forDenver, especially when her two brothers escape, the source of “domestic nurturanceand familial love” does not have its source in her biological mother.16Undoubtedly, it is Beloved's influence upon Sethe that allows her to re-articulateher value and self-definition. Beloved is not only a ghost of Sethe's killed daughter, butalso a symbol of the link between the present and the past. It is therefore not onlythrough the recreation of the maternal bond that Sethe searches for her self-affirmation. The formulation of Sethe's identity is also accomplished through the connection withthe past obtained thanks to the ghost. Even though Beloved belongs neither to thepresent nor to the past, she becomes a link between temporaneity and the times passed. Thus, the factual events from Sethe's and Denver's lives are inseparably connected withtheir history embodied in Beloved. Yet, re-memorizing the past can work both ways. In one critic's opinion, Sethe'spast could either enslave or free her.17It seems that in order to free herself of theburden of the traumatic “yesterday,” Sethe needs to experience it anew. It is not untilBeloved's physical arrival that Sethe is finally allowed to “reexamine her story withregard to sacrifice, resistance, and mother love” (Kella 2000: 129). Being a realizationof the past trauma, Beloved also becomes “the literal return of the event against the will16Kristina K. Groover also describes Toni Morrison's other protagonists in search for traditional homewhen conventional definitions fail to be relevant. Not unlike Denver, they all find it “outside” thehouse, in the arms of their community (Groover 1999: 48, 49).17In Beloved Communities, Elizabeth Kella quotes Morrison's opinion on her latest 1998 novel Paradisethat is applicable to Beloved as well.: Morrison refers to the creation of a place “to inhabit,“ clear ofracism, “a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent” (Kella, 2000: 210). Suchdeclaration requires respect for the past with all its cruelty; still, to render it powerless one should tryto dis-remember it.
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of the one it inhabits” (Grewal 1998: 98). As such, Beloved may act in opposition tothe people she settles to live with. A real “memorandum” to the scarcely dis-remembered history, Beloved re-opens the “wounds” caused by slavery. This confirmsthe ghost's limiting influence over Sethe and Denver. Carolyn Denard postulates thatToni Morrison's female protagonists understood that their historical backgroundhinders the creation of “their own positive images” (Mardberg 1998: 182). In order toheal the “wounds” of slavery, black people have to learn to forget and leave the harmfulexperience behind. If Beloved serves as a revival of painful memories that for blackpeople interchangeably meant the times of slavery, then Sethe's and Denver's journey toself-recognition could be impeded by their unwillingness to undergo the torment anew. Beloved should therefore be understood as a symbol of obscure history, the pain ofslavery which is constantly being suppressed.The ghost's negative influence upon the main protagonists of the novel is furthervisible in the competition between Sethe and Denver over Beloved. When the ghost-girl appears in flesh, Denver becomes jealous, because, like her mother, she also forms apossessive relationship to her sister. While Sethe and Denver render rivals in the battleover Beloved's attention, the atmosphere grows tense. This competitive atmosphere is aresult of the mother's and the daughter's nostalgia for lost companionship: it indicatesSethe's desire to revive the broken tie with her daughter and Denver's hunger for asisterhood. Denver first acknowledges the nature of the relation between Sethe andBeloved: “Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her payfor it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminishedshamed and infuriated her” (Beloved 1997: 251). Witnessing her mother's gradualcollapse, Denver decides to prevent her from the destructive influence of Beloved. Even if it is arguable whether Sethe's restoration to the community was thiscommunity's or Denver's accomplishment, it is quite clear that without Denver's maturedecision, whether rational or intuitive, Sethe's recovery, even her existence, would behighly dubious. The moment of her mother's spiritual death marks the beginning ofDenver's quest for maturity. At this particular moment Denver takes on responsibilityfor her mother and “goes out” to seek help within the community once lost. In fact,Denver's abandoning the house in search for the dialogue with the black community canbe read as a positive effect of Beloved's agency. Although Beloved’s power is devastating, it is also therapeutic. Toni Morrisonadmits that “the presence or the absence of an ancestor determined the success or thehappiness of the character” (Mardberg 1998: 183). It is clear from this explanation that
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Beloved stands not only as a symbol of suppression, but also as a key element in theconstruction of Sethe’s self-recognition. Beloved’s appearance is indispensable forSethe and Denver, and the process of finding their identity.In two places in the novel Beloved's restorative power becomes especiallyevident. The first episode takes place when Sethe, Denver and Beloved go skating onice together. “ Holding hands, bracing each other, they swirled over the ice,...screamingwith laughter... Each seemed to be helping the other to stay upright, yet every tumbledoubled their delight... Nobody saw them falling” (Beloved 1997: 174). The scene hassymbolic reverberations: Beloved brings Sethe and Denver closer to each other, and the mother-daughter tie becomes close-knit. Katherine B. Payant sees the moment in thewomen's lives as reunion between the mother and the sisters, thus emphasizing thepositive aspect of the ghost’s appearance (Payant 1993: 199). Before Beloved'smaterialization, any attempt of dialogue between Sethe and Denver was hindered, andtherefore abandoned. It was a result of Denver's fear for her mother's “murderous love.” But for Beloved, the two women will never have insight into the core of a mother-daughter relation. It is Beloved's remedial force too that reconstructs the mother- andthe daughterhood in the novel. 18 Beloved’s healing power is further demonstrated when Denver is forced to “goout the yard.” It is the ghost's agency that provokes Denver's decision to seek help“outside” the secure “four walls.” Denver's mother simply prevents her fromcommunicating with the black society. Maria Mardberg's study strongly supports theview that “communal identities are crucial to the well-being of Morrison's women,”where daughterhood preserves an African-American heritage in the sense of culturalcontinuity.19Through alienation in the house at 124 Bluestone Road, Denver is butbereft of the possibility to aspire to the expectancies imposed on her as a daughter andas a member of the community. Instead, “she grows up self-centered and lonely, afraidof her mother and the world outside the yard” (Payant 1993: 196). 18This reunion is partly due to “the locking of the door at 124 Bluestone Road”, as “the women insidewere free at last to be what they liked, see whatever they saw and say whatever was on their minds”(Beloved 1997: 199). Another controversial interpretation of the retreat into the house and thesubsequent formation of the female alliance is investigated by Gurleen Grewal. She argues that thisfact is a manifestation of the women’s superiority over men, because emphasis is put on maternaltrauma caused by slavery (Grewal 1998: 111-113). This can be compared with Morrison’s view onthe unique female sensitivity to the house (Troy 1999: 18), and a more detailed illustration on thehierarchy of gender roles in Elizabeth Kella under the title “Reconstructing the Family” (Kella 2000:128-137).19Maria Mardberg, Envisioning American Women: The Roads to Communal Identity in Novels by Womenof Color, Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1998, p. 212; hereafter cited in the text asMardberg.
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As it can be deducted from Denver's endeavor, she learned Baby Suggs' lesson,for she is the one who claimed that, despite the inability to defend oneself against thewhite folks, one must claim freedom through action.But you said there was no defense.“There ain't.”Then what do I do?“Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on” (Beloved 1997: 244).Taking this advice, Denver leaves the four walls of 124 Bluestone Road, thus breakingthe domestic confinement, and transcending the biological bind that disabled hersearching for integrity within the whole community.20The first person Denver asks for help is Ella. She once turned her back ontoSethe not because of the murder, but because of her deliberate retreat into 124Bluestone house. Much as she disapproves of Sethe's actions, Denver's first steptowards reconciliation with the society deserves a positive consideration. By showingfull readiness to earn her living, she has demonstrated signs of mental development. The repentance for which Ella and the society waited so long comes unexpectedly, notfrom Sethe, however, but from Denver. For the black community of women it is arevelation of Denver's care and sympathy for her mother. After that, not only is Denvergiven the admittance into the community, but she is also accepted into it as a woman,and not a girl. Much as it may be ascribed to the ghost’s damaging influence, the challengingdecision to leave the secure domestic space is a monumental progress in Denver’smental growth. The girl’s “stepping off the edge of the world” under the pressure of theevil ghost, puts an end to the infantile stage in Denver’s life. The moment she startsfunctioning as a member of the society, an adolescent girl transforms herself into agrown-up woman taking whole responsibility for her family’s future. One criticsuccinctly summarizes this very act as Denver's “rite of passage into womanhood”(Groover 1999: 74). Though it surely constitutes a “journey into community,” it canalso be viewed as a voyage into adulthood and self-recognition in the eyes of thisparticular community. In other words, Denver provides a developmental model of aperson who escaped the threat of total alienation and became aware of her place in thesocial structure.20On the example of Beloved, Elizabeth Kella distinguishes between the separateness of the family rolesand the need for solidarity and revision of those roles by means of transcending the biological in orderto form unity (Kella 2000: 140).
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In consequence of Denver's responsible agency, Sethe’s recovery is at hand, andit is triggered by the black community. Not only is it achieved by the black womendriving Beloved out of 124 Bluestone house, but also by Paul D’s reassurance: “Go asfar inside as you need to, I’ll hold your ankles” (Beloved 1997: 46). Without doubt, it isBeloved who prompts Sethe’s inward journey. The ghost functions as a purifying“rememory,” and her disappearance signifies the past finally confronted. Now Sethe is“released into the present” (Grewal 1998: 116). The prophetic character of Beloved’sarrival that gives hope to a promising future is reflected at the carnival. Without a vowor promise, to “see how it goes,” Paul D decides to take Sethe and Denver to thecarnival. During that very night “they were not holding hands, but their shadows were...she [Sethe] decided that it was a good sign. A life. Could be” (Beloved 1997: 47). Sethe's projection of a new “life” to emerge has a double significance. Firstly, itanticipates the ghost's arrival the following day. Secondly, it envisions the emergenceof a family from unconventional sources. As it happens the night before Beloved’smaterialization into the human body, her appearance can be read as a prophecy of abetter tomorrow. For these were the shadows, not people who joined hands: itsymbolizes a potential for a family bound to emerge. Yet, to gain mature self-valuation Sethe needs to claim it individually. Beloved'ssignificance is undeniable, but in order to recognize herself as an independent person,Sethe has to believe in it by admitting her “Self” aloud. Yet, before spelling out theactual “Me” in the name of self-recognition, she is in danger of losing it forever. Although in the beginning Sethe plays the role of a mother, due to the reversal of roles,she becomes an innocent child as “Beloved ate up her life, grew taller on it” (Groover1999: 73). It is not until Paul D stimulates her awareness of a true “Self,” and a needfor “some kind of tomorrow,” is Sethe finally able to assure her own identity. Duringone conversation Paul D affirms: “You your best thing, Sethe. You are” (Beloved 1997:273). Through these words he attempts to awaken Sethe's self-perception, and the needfor her detachment from her children. Whereas Sethe continues to regard herselfthrough her children, Paul D strives to build her self-conviction of separateness fromthem, of her as an independent whole. Sethe’s subsequent reply: “Me? Me?,” thoughhesitant, is nevertheless a crucial stage of affirming her individual separateness. 21Thedevelopment of Sethe's self-value is comparable to Baby Suggs' maturing from thephase of “not knowing what she looked like and not being curious” to the moment of21By contrast, Carol Boyce Davies finds Sethe’s “Me?” mocking “because no woman receives self at thehands of another, especially a man” (Payant 1993: 199).
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“suddenly seeing her [Baby Suggs'] hands and thinking with clarity: 'These handsbelong to me. These my hands' ” (Beloved 1997: 141). Sethe grows to the finalproclamation of “herself” not in the sense that “her children were her best thing,” but asa reflection of “herself as her best thing.” 22Toni Morrison's Beloved demonstrates that the dramatic historical background ofslavery may acquire an empowering role. The novel portrays successful developmentof the “black identity” in times when a black person was denied it. During the strugglefor self-definition, Sethe and Denver learn to self-possess their own selves, andovercome the conviction of being someone else's possession. Toni Morrison constructsa story of the personal aspiration of a black individual to be recognized as a humanbeing, which subsequently marks the beginning of the communal crusade to self-acceptance. Only when the individual succeeds in finding his/her own identity does thepossibility of gaining the collective self-recognition emerge. 22In addition, Mahdu Dubey, the author of Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic(Bloomington — Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 161; hereafter cited in the text asDubey), traces the naming of Sethe a “mother,” not only to its literal meaning, but figuratively, to “amother of black political and cultural resistance.”
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Chapter TwoThe Development of CommunalIdentityThe community, the black community ... it had seemed to me that it wasalways there, only we called it the 'neighborhood.' And there was this life-giving very, very strong sustenance that people got from the neighborhood. One lives really, not so much in your house as you do outside of it, within the'compounds,' within the village, or whatever it is. 23Toni Morrison has always placed an individual within the context of the society. Or rather, the society performed a crucial part in the formation of an individual. Morrison insists that the place inhabited by the community was not that essential for itssingle members as it were for the people that formed it. One has always beensurrounded by other members of the community, therefore, the development of the “I”could only be achieved among others. Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, stands as anexample of how isolation from one's community can threaten the well-being ofparticular individuals. When the novel’s two central protagonists, Sethe and Denver,23From the interview between Toni Morrison and Robert Stepto in 1976 (qtd. in Kella 2000: 113, 114).
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lock themselves at 124 Bluestone Road thus starting to live only “inside,” they shedevery contact with the “outside.” But for infrequent negotiations with the community,the two women would successfully cease to exist within the four walls. The novel thenmarks the significance of revising and re-articulating the relationship between anindividual and the community. What exactly constitutes a “community”? According to Raymond Williams, thenotion is equivocal. On the one hand, it denotes “actual social group,” on the other, itindicates “a particular quality of a relationship” between the members of a particularsocial unit. Assigning the latter interpretation a greater salience, he explains that it isthe intra-communal relation, rather than the spacial aspect, that decides about thecommunity’s condition and status. As he puts it, “community provides the individualwith meaning and purpose, with a sense of belonging to something larger and morepowerful than the self.” This constitutes the very essence of what a “community”means. Samira Kawash is even more precise when she says: “a community provides itsmembers with a strong foundation for resisting the oppressions of systemic andinstitutional prejudice” (Kella 2000: 31, 32). This is very true in the case ofinstitutionalized slavery as it is presented in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. When it comes to slave narratives the aspect of “collective trauma,” andconsequently, racial solidarity against common oppression seem vital. Gurleen Grewalasserts that in Beloved, an individual is somewhat removed from the center of the novelso as to give priority to the multiplicity of voices. 24 Personal trauma is less importantthan the interaction and interdependence of various consciousnesses – this way thenarrative becomes collective. “Collective” in the meaning of creating mutualremembrance by generating several individuals' dealing with their past. Ashraf H. A.Rushdy makes a genuine observation that in Beloved “memory exists as a communalproperty of friends, of family, of a people. The magic of memory is that it isimpersonal, that it is the basis for constructing relationships with the other who alsoremembers” (Grewal 1998: 103, 104). The writer finds a panacea for the dramaticexperience by means of “working it through,” as Elizabeth Kella suggests, anddeveloping a sense of unity within the community. Similarly, another critic, DavidCarr, estimates that the community is in a constant process of composing andrecomposing its own history (Kella, 2000: 77). This becomes a call for the revision of24Kristina K. Groover agrees with Gurleen Grewal and several other critics. The word “spiritual” implies,as she notices, not only the change in the novel from the way the individual in the center is replacedby the community. In such a portrayal of a narrative, she sees the shift of the spiritual quest towardsfemale journey into her community (Groover 1999: 54).
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the past, and especially, in the case of a slave narrative. When in her narration ToniMorrison speaks “we,” she uses the technique of speaking about, with and for thecommunity. Such “implied 'we' ” is also found in Mahdu Dubey's work on BlackAesthetic. Interestingly, Toni Morrison herself presents clues to decipher her writing. About Beloved she says: “the novel should be beautiful and powerful, but it should alsowork. It should have something that enlightens; something in it that opens the door andpoints the way... If anything I do... isn't about the village or the community ... it is notabout anything” (qtd. in Dubey 1994: 34). This potent declaration proves Morrison'sstrong will to maintain a dialogue within the black society. 25 She insists on perceivingher novel not only in terms of aesthetic (the so called “art for art's sake”), but, what iscertainly of a greater value for the author, in terms of Black Aesthetic. Morrison invitesthe contemporary black society to go back to its roots because the black identity isformed in close connection to the historical experience of their predecessors. CathyCaruth and Dominick LaCapra are convinced that extreme events derived from history,such as persecution or oppression, may provoke collective trauma. Since individualsare always deeply embedded in the social context, this trauma may manifest not only asingle experience of one person, but history itself. This is certainly true in Morrison’sBeloved where personal suffering originates in communal repression. It is then workedout, or re-enacted through the intervention of the community (Kella 2000: 26, 27). A number of critics agree that, in order to build identity, be it individual orcommunal, there is a need to return to particular moments in the history. Diverse roadsto affirming one's selfhood all converge. The experience of being a slave, the ancestralcontribution toward collective identity formation, is the element that Toni Morrisonwishes to keep alive in today’s black consciousness.Maria Mardberg eruditely argues that in Beloved ancestors play a crucial role inthe shaping of communal identity:The figure of the ancestor constitutes a forceful catalyst in the change ofconsciousness of the granddaughters. Bearing vital cultural memory, theancestor embodies the spiritual links to the community and providesnourishment for the emotionally starving heroine in that she [the ancestor]communicates transformative knowledge. Her mythic wisdom shapesgenerational continuity and establishes order in a seemingly chaotic world;she preserves ancestral ties and provides stability (Mardberg 1998: 123). In the African-American society, especially the creation of communal identity was25Toni Morrison also points at the political aspect of her writing; “political” in more than the literal sense:in her view, apart from addressing the black society it should emphasize gender roles. She focuses onsexual politics.
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seriously impeded by slavery. A direct result of being tormented by white oppressorswas for a black person to feel an urge to unite with others. This union made it easier tomanage the pain and disgrace of being subservient to white masters, when understoodand compassioned with by those who shared the same experience. Much as all formerslaves did try to erase the brutal past from their memories, they were aware of thenecessity to conserve those memories for the next generations. This preservation servednot as much as a warning, but rather as the basis of cultural legacy. Ancestors are animportant connector to the heritage of the servile African-American history. To MariaMardberg, the forefathers’ role is essential when it comes to the formulation of theirgrandsons’ consciousness, which thus ensures “generational continuity.” This way theAfrican-American existence is rendered meaningful and suffused with the significanceit deservedly claims. The expression “community-building” seems appropriate whenthe reference to slaves’ history as “saving history” is made. Satya P. Mohanty confirmsthat the African-American “experience” provides genuine knowledge (Kella 2000: 225). However, this purely cognitive aspect depends on the subjectivity of an individual, andas such, requires social revision. In view of the above, it seems clear that Sethe's“journey inside” in search of her own identity could not have taken place without thecommunity’s reassessment.In her study on the notion of community, Elizabeth Kella declares that whetheror not community is associated with notions of inclusion or separation its representationlies in “antiquity.” 26 For Morrison ancestry stands for “timeless people whoserelationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive and protective, and theyprovide a certain kind of wisdom.” She further elucidates: “If we don't keep in touchwith the ancestor,... we are, in fact, lost... When you kill the ancestor you killyourself.”27 Consequently, return to ancestral ties and values seems fundamental to theprotagonists' psychological well-being because they are capable of healing emotions. They also have a potential to transform. Such ties allow an individual to grow in self-confidence in the reality where a black person is constantly reminded of his/hersubservience to the white race. Morrison is especially susceptible to the danger of thelack of “conscious historical connection.” A sense of communal identity becomes ananchor in history; the lack thereof signifies disconnection from the nourishing cultural26Further in her study, Elizabeth Kella illustrates other writers’ portrayals of the past, which is thenlicensed to give inspiration in building collective identity. Whereas for Toni Morrison the past isreflected through the notion of an “ancestor,” for other novelists, such as Alice Walker or Alex Haley,the past connotes “roots,” “myths,” or “a grandmother” (Kella 2000: 49). 27Quoted in Maria Mardberg (Mardberg 1998: 121, 188). Compare with Mahdu Dubey's suggestions onthe same quotation (Dubey 1994: 60).
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heritage. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, it is the grandmother, Baby Suggs, who providesthis linkage between the present black society and its historical origins. She becomes anembodiment of ancestry, the catalyst of the cultural and the spiritual for the wholecommunity, and a leading voice that brings the community to its recovery.Maria Mardberg sees one of the roads to communal identity in the symbolicepitome of “a grandmother.” According to Gretchen Bataille, the grandmotherfunctions as “the storyteller, the preserver of the past and the strength for the future”(Mardberg 1998: 122). In Beloved, Baby Suggs, “the ancestor,” serves as a spiritualnourishment for the emotionally starved community in that she introduces thetransformative aspect into each individual's life. Mardberg argues that the grandmother's agency manifests itself chiefly in ritualsand religion, which at times, brings lost individuals back to the community. In aninterview on “Rootedness,” Toni Morrison portrays the African American church as asource of consolation and personal affirmation within the community:There were spaces and places in which a single person could enter andbehave as an individual within the context of the community... You can see[it] sometimes in Black churches were people shout. It is a very personalgrief and a statement done among people you trust. Done within the contextof the community, therefore safe (Kella 2000: 226). Baby Suggs' preaching certainly transcends conventional forms of religion. TheClearing was organized at 124 Bluestone Road, and although Baby Suggs was its head,she would never claim authority or a title of honor, being known modestly as “BabySuggs, holy.” During her sermons “she told them that the only grace they could havewas the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it”(Beloved 1997: 88). Her religion is “a spiritual resistance were people ask not for God'sforgiveness but for God's recognition.” 28 God, then, has to accept black people beforeHe forgives. But if the acceptance meant naming one “a human being,” for Baby Suggseven God perceives people with regard to the color of the skin. For her, the fact ofbeing submitted to whitefolks' definition of the black race remained invariable. 29 Shefeels she only has power to convince “her people” that the premise of submission “theblack” to “the white” is unfair. Her strong objective is to awake the feeling of freedomin every black person. Baby Suggs' endlessly repeated lesson can be summarized byMorrison who asserts that “the recognition validating black personhood can never come28Kimberly Rae Connor Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women (qtd. inGroover 1999: 72).29 Vide Chapter One, p. 2, 5.
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from 'above' – ...from the white men... – but must be sought and must be forthcomingfrom the black community” (Kella 2000: 127). The remedy for racial oppression can betraced exclusively to collective affirmation.Not until Baby Suggs affirms her own freedom, can the very ritual take place. Only when she discovers “her heart knocking in her chest and that it was her ownheartbeat,” does she become an authority to talk about freedom. This, in consequence,empowers her to present the model for reconstructing the community and point at theshared roles within its boundaries, where “women stopped crying and danced; men satdown and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried” (Beloved 1997: 88).Kristina K. Groover claims that Baby Suggs is nevertheless vulnerable in theface of the destructive effects of slavery. In a single moment, in response to the lack ofempathy concerning Sethe, she turns back from her society (Groover 1999: 72). Thismarks the moment of her defeat and surrender. Never again will she address hercommunity, nor revive their belief in a sovereign future.In Beloved, Morrison depicts a community that can embrace its member and bean empowerment in the struggle against white masters. The same community, blindedby jealousy and rage, declare Baby Suggs and Sethe their convicts. Kristina K. Groovertheorizes that here “the community fails to perform its role” (Groover 1999: 71). Instead of protecting its members against the devastating forces of slavery, it not onlyloses faith in its own inner power, but actually imitates the white oppressors in putting asentence on a black person. The potential to reconstruct Baby Suggs’ and Sethe’seroded black morale gives way to its destruction. Although it is the black society that rejected Sethe in response to her infanticide,the actions of this community must be attributed to the devastating agency ofwhitefolks. The whites' judgment of the black race, undoubtedly, greatly influenced theblack people's self-perception. Analyzing Sethe’s story it seems that the blackcommunity learns meanness from their masters. Thus, the black society deliberatelyremains deaf when the white oppressors come to re-enslave Sethe’s family. Accordingto Stamp Paid, one of the members of the black community and a close friend to BabySuggs, “Nobody warned them, and he'd always believed it wasn't the exhaustion fromlong day's gorging that dulled them, but some other thing – like, well, like meanness”(Beloved 1997: 157). Enraged about Baby Suggs' giving a welcoming party to herdaughter-in-law, Sethe, they cannot stand such wealth and heartiness with which BabySuggs wants to show her joy.
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Too much, they thought. Where does she get it all, Baby Suggs, holy? Whyis she and hers always center of things? ... Giving advice; passing massages;healing the sick, hiding fugitives, loving, cooking, preaching, singing,dancing and loving everybody like it was her job and hers alone... it madethem mad... It made them furious (Beloved 1997: 137).The thought of Sethe's “full benefit of Baby Suggs bounty and her big old heart” isunbearable. Baby Suggs’ “own people” cannot stand the perspective of a promisingfuture for Sethe under Baby Suggs' roof, possibly because they do not want to beorphaned. It seems then, that the society's greatest sin is in the wrong understanding ofBaby Suggs' actions. They accuse her of material privilege while the only thing shewants is to express joy of the reunited family member. Elizabeth Kella suggests that the community perceives Baby Suggs' celebrationas a threat to communal identity and a violation of exchange economy in makingreciprocity impossible. She simply gave too much and therefore “offended them byexcess” (Kella 2000: 138). Still, Morrison is quite critical about the community'sagency. The sole factor responsible for maintaining unity and wholeness – mutualrecognition of one another – when uncompromising, can have the opposite effect. Thecommunity's turning back on Sethe and Baby Suggs proves this to be right.Sethe is expelled from her “black family” because of the murder of her ownchild. In the eyes of the society this act is unforgivable. The female communityespecially, rejects Sethe in her motherhood the moment she takes the handsaw into herhands (Payant 1993: 200). Women who share the role of mothers within thecommunity, consider the act of killing one's child an inevitable exclusion from themothers’ range. Yet, in Becoming and Bonding, Katherine B. Payant accounts forMorrison's judgmental standpoint regarding “the dark side of the community.” In heropinion “the community members refuse to recognize their complicity in the death ofthe baby.” Payant assumes that the same pride that allowed Sethe commit the crimewas a reason for the community's passive conduct and prevented them from warningSethe of the slavers' approaching. 30 Though Sethe physically cuts the throat of herbaby-daughter, the responsibility for this murder lies in the community's deliberatewithholding of any action, any sign announcing the arrival of the white oppressors. Some critics blame Sethe rather than the community. They disapprove of herneedless pride upon deciding to isolate herself from the society. Kristina K. Groover30Katherine B. Payant further elaborates on the human capacity to hurt each other as the very motif ofcommunity's disgraceful behavior. Controversially, the critic admits that sometimes “this hurt comesfrom love,” quoting Morrison’s statement on acts committed in the name of love that “violence can bea distortion of what, perhaps, we want to do.”
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estimates “Sethe's self-isolation unforgivable” (Groover 1999: 70). While all this seemsrelevant, it is worth mentioning that only by means of ritual can the protagonists inBeloved be spiritually connected to the community. If this community’s function is toprevent an individual from alienation, Baby Suggs' death and the termination of thespiritual Clearings broke the tie between Sethe and her social group, at the same timeprovoking Sethe's retreat to 124 Bluestone Road. Therefore, in order to recover and redefine identity, the revision of one's actionshas to work both ways. Such decision allows Sethe to preserve her community, andconversely, gives a second chance to the community to protect its member by“performing” its empowering force once more. In Beloved Communities Joseph Roachdefines the term performance: “[it] is nevertheless useful to a reading of Belovedbecause it calls attention to the agency involved in building community as well as to theritual and transitory character of the community. Performance as 'restored behavior' or'twice-behaved behavior'... requires repetition, but repetition with a difference” (qtd. inKella 2000: 148). Although “repetition” indicates a monotonous movement, thestressed “with a difference” marks a new era for the community as a whole. Due to itsrevision of the once assigned communal role, the recognition of its uniqueness and,therefore, revival of the collective identity is at hand. Already on the first pages of the novel we encounter Sethe’s daughter, Denver. Much too infantile at the beginning of the story, she appears to be childish and self-centered, partly due to being left on her own within the house at 124 Bluestone Road. She is afraid of the surrounding world – the people outside her house, and of her motherwho had already murdered her sister to prevent her from being re-enslaved. Under suchcircumstances, Denver is particularly eager to seek connection with others. And it is her who eventually reunites her family with the black community. A strong wish to create a traditional relationship similar to that based onmaternal love can eventually come true when the ghost-girl, Beloved appears. Havingrecognized the girl as her dead sister, Denver seizes the chance for a relationship, whichevolves into a sisterhood. Typically for a child, Denver thinks egoistically and isjealous of her sister. While Beloved becomes the embodiment of all her wants, Denverattempts to accumulate the materialized ghost's all attention. Denver, who thought she knew all about silence, was surprised to learnhunger could do that: quiet you down and wear you out. Neither Sethe notBeloved knew or cared about it one way or another. They were too busyrationing their strength to fight each other. So it was she who had to step offthe edge of the world and die because if she didn’t, they all would. The flesh
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between her mother’s forefinger and thumb was thin as china silk and therewasn’t a piece of clothing in the house that didn’t sag on her. Beloved heldher head up with the palms of her hands, slept wherever she happened to be,and whined for sweets although she was getting bigger, plumper by the day(Beloved 1997: 239).Denver’s attitude alters when she becomes aware of the authoritative personality ofBeloved. Thus, the ghost’s excessive demands put Sethe's life under threat. In thissituation Denver makes a desperate step towards the black community, who in hermentality personifies the unknown “outside-the-house.” Through this act, the rolesreverse: a mother becomes a fragile and dependent child, whereas the daughter is alteredinto the independent decisive woman ready to take risk in the name of love. 31 Notuntil Denver's mature decision to abandon her family home for the sake of her mother,does the possibility of a dialogue between the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone house andtheir society emerge. In effect, apart from becoming her mother's mother, Denverundertakes the crucial role of a mediator. Katherine B. Payant identifies this point inthe novel as “Denver's growth in strength [while] neighbors turn from their cruelty”(Payant 1993: 197). What is worth mentioning, is the actual revision of attitudes. Under certaincircumstances, particular groups or individuals are constrained to leave secure space ofconvenience, and re-define their roles. It leads to a “social change,” which in ElizabethKella's opinion “signals the interdependence and interpenetration of the individual andsociety, of the psychological and the political, the private and the public, existence andagency.” Similarly, Amy Binder sees the road to social change in “subjectivenegotiations of a sense of individual self and identification with a group that aimtogether at forming collective identity” (Kella 2000: 37). Thus, the affirmation ofcommunal identity necessitates not only communal self re-examination, but morevitally, it requires that each member reconsiders its history through re-memorizing. This in turn, reveals the cyclical character of Beloved, where community is building andre-building itself endlessly in its search for identity. As Elizabeth Kella puts it, this re-organization is triggered by constant reassertion, reiteration and infinite performance. Moreover, without the individual’s participation in this learning process claiming one'sfreed self would not be possible, which Sethe's example undeniably proves. Morrison posits 'school' of emancipation to counter the 'school of slavery.' 31Curiously, in Beloved various acts are committed in the name of love. Katherine B. Payant, forexample, sees Sethe's barbarous murder as committed “in the name of love,” whereas Denver'sdecision is made purely “out of love” (Payant 1993: 200).
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The lessons of liberation are the lessons of and in a racially homogeneouscommunity characterized by an apparently unconditional inclusiveness. Morrison thus revises the notion of an autonomous self, emphasizing thatfreedom and selfhood are dependent upon social relations of equality – uponcommunity (Kella 2000: 141).Inclusion in a larger unit then, is an imperative condition for an individual to becomeautonomous and self-evident. Beloved’s story assumes a circular structure. This narrative technique enhancesthe protagonists' continuous returns to life episodes, their re-membering and repeatingthem “with change.” However, Sandra Zagarell perceives this circularity as a classicelement of communal narratives. She claims that “they ignore linear development orchronological sequence... Rather than being constructed around conflict and progress[they] are rooted in the process” (Groover 1999: 52). Morrison's story is not embeddedin “the linear flight from slavery,” but in “the circular journey to recreate a communitydestroyed by slavery.” This need for communal re-definition and the negation oftraditional sequential character of the novel only accentuates the periodicity of thisprocess. 32 Denver is the one to whom the stimulation of social change should be attributedto, since she is the one responsible for resuming the dialogue with the black community. Still, this already “changed” social group is primarily represented by women. They arefirst asked for help, and they are the first ones to respond to this plea. Withdrawn fromsocial participation Sethe resigns from the role of utmost importance – being abiological mother. Denver's “going out” and initiating the dialogue is an indirect searchfor her mother's substitute. Taking over the role of “community mothers,” black womenbecome the ultimate lifeline, the last chance for salvation. Kristina K. Groover assertsthat “whereas the male spiritual quest is traditionally a solitary one, the femalecharacters [here Sethe and Denver] experience spirituality not in solitary flight, but insupportive communities” (Groover 1999: 13, 14). Toni Morrison's choice to placewomen's community at the center of events highlights the females' indisputable role inthe formation of communal unity, and the individual self-realization within its boarders. In Beloved, the group of women obtains an undeniably crucial function in theprocess of the individuals' identity formation recovery. Although it is often generalizedthat the black community brings rescue to Denver and her mother, the colossal role offemale union in transforming the future of the main protagonists should not be32More information on the subject of cyclicality of time and narrative in Beloved is available in SalmanRushdie and Paula Gunn Allen (Grewal 1998: 104, 105).
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underestimated. Not unlike Alice Walker in The Color Purple, Toni Morrison attributesthe whole formation and sustenance of community to women as protectors of domesticspace, which is essential to the lives of both women and men (Groover 1999: 13, 75).In Maria Mardberg’s estimation, women are prompted “to go beyondconventional roles and construct new communities on the basis of shared experience”(Mardberg, 1998: 226). Truly enough, Beloved tackles racial identification, andinterrogates matters within the race. By and large, the “common experience” in Belovedis studied with regard to slavery. Gurleen Grewal, however, casts light on the “womenservile experience.” Harriet A. Jacobs claims that “slavery is terrible for men; but it isfar more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they havewrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own” (Grewal 1998: 100). The uniqueness of women's anguish derives from the fact of their being mothers. Because of the greater quality of loss in the sense of losing their children, thischaracteristic adds physical to emotional suffering. Therefore, as Kristina K. Grooverputs it, women form an alliance due to their “giving birth and caring for children”(Groover 1999: 54). Maria Mardberg theorizes that through mothering, women are ableto take on the function of spiritual leadership in the society (Mardberg 1998: 178). Shediscusses “community mothers” to emphasize the significance of women's associationsbringing comfort to spiritual existence of the younger group members. This aspect isexemplified by the women’s attitude toward Denver. Much as they disapprove ofSethe's behavior, they do not refuse Denver's plea. Moreover, they treat it as their“mother-duty” to stand on guard and provide security for Denver, if not for Sethe, whois now regarded more vulnerable than her daughter.Interestingly, “being a mother” that unites women to act, is the very aspect thatallows them to reject Sethe in the first place. In their mentality, Sethe's infanticide is anaction against the law of nature. Killing her own child ostracizes her not only from theblack community, but most of all, from the range of mothers. This way Morrisonchallenges the traditional definition of motherhood. In Barbara Christian's view,Morrison suggests that “motherhood itself is constructed, affected by specificsocietal/political constructs, even as it is basic to all human societies as we know it”(Kella 2000: 132). All the more understandable seems Sethe's refusal to be defined as“a breeder.” This fact condemned her in the eyes of the female part of the community. Unable to put aside their pride, they refrain from warning Sethe of the masters'approach. At the same time, they withhold the communal embrace, which marks aturning point for both, Sethe and the community. Consequently, Sethe's revision of her
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actions is not sufficient to heal the past. To gain the feeling of wholeness there is a needfor compassion on the part of the society. Yet, it is not until the community re-examines its actions, that a recognition of collective identity is viable. Elizabeth Kellainterprets the women's uprising as “a performance” that figures as a reflection ofcollective re-membering, and in so doing, allows Sethe's reintegration with thecommunity (Kella 2000: 149). Another strong factor of female agency is illustrated in the way they improvise.For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat andsimmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the rightcombination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was awave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods offchestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in itswash (Beloved 1997: 261).Kristina K. Groover claims that these were women united by “the power of community”rather than “shared belief or a firm understanding of what they are about to do.” Theywere the ones accountable for “driving off Beloved at 124 Bluestone Road and restoringSethe’s family to a place in the community” (Groover 1999: 74, 75). Rejecting therational approach, they were led by their intuition as they “had no idea what they woulddo once they got there” (Beloved 1997: 257). One thing that determines choosingwomen over men is rooted in the female perceptiveness superior to men’s logicalthinking. When the women reach 124 Bluestone Road “they [stop] praying and [take] astep back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginningthere was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” 33 (Beloved 1997:259). Therefore, one can draw the conclusion that collective as well as individualhealing is rooted in the female community. Through re-memory women can eventuallycome to understand “the historical circumstances that have limited their own potential”as mothers, which is exemplified by Sethe's dramatic choice to kill her child. “This hereSethe talked about safety with a handsaw... more important than what Sethe had donewas what she claimed” (Beloved 1997: 164). Despite the community's instability, thatwas hopefully temporal, women found in their uniting a source of force to keep thecommunity together as one whole. Through restored behavior the possibility to re-gain33Here, Toni Morrison goes back to the origins of “the word.” According to the Bible, “the sound” isprior to “the word” – a symbol of logic and mental comprehension. As such, it stands in opposition tothe supernatural “sound.” Contrasting human abilities to those escaping conventional cognition,Morrison reveals her unwavering belief in women’s paranormal power in the act of Sethe's salvation.
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an empowered identity appears achievable. Elizabeth Kella makes a substantialobservation that not until Sethe is freed by and into the community of women, can shefinally claim freedom to herself (Kella 2000: 150). Sethe's rebirth into the communalbounds is accepted thanks to the community's regeneration. Through re-building aunion with Sethe’s family, the black community affirms its true function. Therefore,apart from Sethe's individual recognition and self-assertion as a free person, hersalvation should also be regarded as a cornerstone in the process of the affirmation ofcollective identity. Beloved is a fine illustration of the journey to self-reliance on a communal aswell as individual level. Here, the black society is given a chance to play a crucial rolein formulating individual identity of the main female protagonists, Sethe and Denver. In fact, the process of self-valuation and affirmation of one's identity is reciprocal. Therefore, much as the communal identity depends on the individual, the self-valuationof a single person owes predominantly to the community's agency. Nevertheless, thereconstruction of self-definition, be it collective or personal, should be defined as aquest for subjectivity. It is a rejection of being the defined, and a claim to be given theright to define. Such transformation constitutes a crucial aspect for the development ofthe future African-American generations. Thus, the role of an individual, as well ascollective struggle for self-affirmation contributes greatly to historical legacy. Whatforms the very basis of an African-American heritage is the historical burden of slaveryand the struggle of black people to gain self-respect.
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ConclusionsWhen Sandra Zagarell writes that “[Narratives of community] take as theirsubject the life of a community ... and portray the minute and quite ordinary processesthrough which the community maintains itself as entity. The self exists here as part ofthe interdependent network of the community rather than as an individualistic unit”(Groover 1999: 52), she proves that an individual's existence within a greater unit – acommunity, is vital for the development of collective identity. The critic challenges theconventional novel form where an individual's self-recognition is dependent upon theabandonment of communal life. Zagarell coins the term “a community novel,” in whichan individual is conditioned by the society. This idea is thus reflected in Sethe's history,in which the black community becomes a stimulus for her future. In Toni Morrison'sBeloved the community succeeds in embracing its members, offering acceptance andsafety. In so doing, the black society shapes the personal identity of the two main
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female protagonists in the novel. Only through re-vision of the communal actions is theregaining of self-recognition achievable to both Sethe and Denver.Sethe's and Denver's road to personal identity is grounded in mutual reliancebetween them and the community. Thus, personal psychological growth is closelyrelated to a group of people. Beloved indisputably proves that the development of asingle member's self-confidence is always accompanied, and therefore spirituallysupported by others. Although at times the social group turns passive andunsympathetic towards its members (such is the case of Morrison's Sethe), there arecommon paths that sooner or later lead to unity and mutual understanding.The present study has portrayed the roads to collective as well as personalrecognition. The journey to self-reliance takes the novel's protagonists in manydirections. Sethe strives to reconcile with her history through self-examination. Theprocess of her “going as far inside as she needed” to self-identify is gradual. It requiresgoing back to her roots and re-memorizing the horrific past of slavery with itsdehumanization and deprivation. Consequently, not only does she have to resistwhitefolks' oppression, but she is also subjected to black malice. Not unlike her mother, Denver also goes through various stages in herdevelopment to affirm her personal identity. Devoid a traditional home she sets out on ajourney to seek its substitute. Before she is able to change her attitude towards Sethe,she has to overcome the fear of her mother and be willing to rescue her. Yet, it is notuntil Beloved's appearance when self-recognition for both of them is finally at hand. The ghost of the murdered daughter symbolizes Sethe's past that is ready to be re-visioned, and re-experienced “with change,” which restores her back into thecommunity. Besides, it makes Denver gain mature responsibility for her family andleads indirectly towards her recognition of a place in the society. As for communal identity formation, in Beloved the common awareness of thetragic experience of slavery is a burden that the black community needs to relieve itselfof. Just as on the individual level, gaining collective freedom called for re-memorizingancestral heritage and uniting through a spiritual quest. The importance of religiousrituals presents itself the moment the community ostracizes Sethe. Should Baby Suggsas their spiritual leader still conduct the Clearing, the black society would not have beenput to trial to prove solidarity and sympathy towards one of its members. Theregeneration of blacks presents the opportunity to repeat actions but “with change.” Beloved is the binding figure, who, apart from being the cause of Sethe's family andcommunity's distress, is simultaneously their salvation.
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In Morrison's Beloved, a distinguishable predominance is given to thereciprocal support between individuals and their society. This mutual understanding,and compassion that stems from common history, contributes to the feeling ofwholeness without which the formation of personal identity within the collective framewould not be achievable. This aspect is the main theme of all neoslave narratives, whoseprimary function is to re-affirm the distressed black identity. In so doing, they partake inthe process of “being heard” in the world, and give evidence of African-Americanindisputable contribution towards global cultural legacy.
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BibliographyDubey, Madhu1994 Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic. Bloomington —Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.DuBois, W.E.B. 1989 The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books Ltd.Grewal, Gurleen1998 Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Groover, Kristina K. 1999 The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and the SpiritualQuest. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.Holmgren Troy, Maria1999 In the First Person and in the House: The House Chronotope in FourWorks by American Women Writers. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Kella, Elizabeth2000 Beloved Communities: Solidarity and Difference in Fiction by MichaelOndaatje, Toni Morrison, and Joy Kogawa. Uppsala: Acta UniversitatisUpsaliensis.Mardberg, Maria1998 Envisioning American Women: The Roads to Communal Identity inNovels by Women of Color. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.Morrison, Toni1997 Beloved. London: Vintage.Morrison, Toni1998 Recitatif in Nina Baym (eds.), in: The Norton Anthology of AmericanLiterature. Vol.2. New York — London: W.W. Norton & CompanyLtd.
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Payant, Katherine B.1993 Becoming and Bonding: Contemporary Feminism and Popular Fictionby American Women Writers. Westpoint, Connecticut — London:Greenwood Press.Schmidli, Karin1995 Models and Modifications: Early African American Women Writers fromthe Slave Narrative to the Novel. Tubingen — Basel: Franckle.West, Cornel2001 Race Matters. New York: Vintage Books.Internet Sources:Angelo, Bonnie, Interview: “The Pain of Being Black” (22/03/89).http://www.time.com/time/community/pulitzerinterview.htmlCaldwell, Gail, “Morrison Awarded Nobel Writer’s ‘Visionary Force’ ” (08/10/93).http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=list&p_topdoc=31Farnsworth, Elizabeth, Interview: “Conversation: Toni Morrison” (09/03/98).http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june98/morrison_3-9.htmlHarrison, Nicola, “Sethe, a Slave to Her Past” (23/02/01).http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/beloved/essays/essay1.htmlOsagie, Iyunolu, “Is Morrison Also Among the Prophets?: ‘Psychoanalytic’ Strategiesin Beloved.”http://www.geocities.com/tarbaby2007/beloved1.html
Source: http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:VtE9Krgm67gJ:www.serwis.wsjo.pl/files/katalog/J.Piotrowska.pdf+cultural+trauma+in+morrison%27s+beloved&cd=53&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

Music

Book Summary
Presenting a comprehensive A-Z glossary of the main terms and concepts used in the study of popular music, this fully updated second edition covers key new developments in the area, such as the impact of the Internet and Reality TV.

Key definitions include:

* important musical genres, from bhangra to punk rock

* musical subcultures, from hippies to Goths

* methodologies, from Marxism to postmodernism

* musicological terms, from sound to harmony

* musical phenomena, from girl groups to concept albums.

All entries are fully cross-referenced and include suggestions for further reading and listening - making this an invaluable resource for anyone studying or interested in popular music.