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Models of Memory and
Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison's Beloved.
by MARY PANICCIA CARDEN
One of the great moments of ideological negotiation in any work occurs
in the choice of a resolution for the various services it provides.
Narrative outcome is one place where transindividual assumptions and
values are most clearly visible, and where the word "convention" is
found resonating between its literary and social meanings. Any artistic
resolution . . . can, with greater or lesser success, attempt an
ideological solution to the fundamental contradictions that animate the
work. Any resolution can have traces of the conflicting materials that
have been processed within it. It is where subtexts and repressed
discourses can throw up one last flare of meaning; it is where the
author may side-step and displace attention from the materials that a
work has made available.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis (3)
There is always something more interesting at stake than a clear
resolution in a novel. I'm interested in survival--who survives and who
does not, and why--and I would like to chart a course that suggests
where the dangers are and where the safety might be. I do not want to
bow out with easy answers to complex questions.
Toni Morrison (qtd. in McKay 402)
Women writers, Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues in Writing Beyond the
Ending, search out and project possibilities "beyond" restrictive plots
centered in romance and directed toward domesticity. She defines
"writing beyond the ending" as "the transgressive invention of
narrative strategies... that express critical dissent from dominant
narrative" and fashion a text that "denies or reconstructs seductive
patterns of feeling that are culturally mandated, internally policed,
hegemonically poised" (5). For Toni Morrison, an African American woman
addressing a "dominant narrative" in which black women have been
secondary or invisible, "writing beyond the ending" means interrogating
the historical implications that romance assumes when infused with
ideologies of race. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved,
intersecting narratives of romance and slavery lead to dual endings,
which, in their refusal of resolution, represent the double dilemmas of
divergent narrative perspectives and goals.
Most of the voluminous commentary produced on Beloved since its
publication in 1987 approaches the novel as a meditation on the
enduring repercussions of slavery as personified in the character
Beloved, with a substantial portion of the criticism focused on the
text's negotiations of female identity, subjectivity and embodiment and
on its treatment of mother/ daughter bonds. [1] Although these readings
have shed light on key aspects of Morrison's project in Beloved, they
often overlook her placement of this thematic side-by-side with the
emergence of a romantic heterosexual couple. Morrison devotes
significant textual space and energy to the relationship between Sethe
and Paul D, but many critics relegate the romance strand of the novel
to the status of subplot. While much of the criticism on Beloved
approaches it primarily as a story of the consequences of slavery and
only secondarily as a romance story, I will argue that the novel
demands to be read with both narrative lines in the foreground, and
that thi s double sidedness produces contradictions and oppositions
that are never more powerfully problematic than in Morrison's choices
for narrative outcome. The novel's action concludes with the projection
of a happily-ever-after romance scenario for Sethe and Paul D, a
scenario loaded with possibilities for both resistance and
reinscription of the gender role expectations that have consistently
failed them. Morrison then writes "beyond" this tenuously romantic
ending by writing another. Beloved ends twice: first with the
construction of new domestic arrangements at 124 Bluestone Road, then
with the deconstruction of Beloved. That these two endings with their
contradictory movements--coming together and flying apart--sit so
separately together indicates the novel's ambivalent investment in the
heterosexual couple as the site where history assumes its shape and
meaning.
Romance plot is central
to this and many other novels because it functions as a "trope for the
sex-gender system as a whole" (DuPlessis 5), for the normalized
expectations and rules that mold male and female subjectivities. In the
heterosexual couple, DuPlessis suggests, "the organization of family,
kinship, and marriage, of sexuality, and of the division of all sorts
of labor by gender" (1) come together, establishing the basic unit of
"natural" human inclinations and interactions. Traditional romance
plots ground gender roles in the domestic spaces of the home, spaces
that serve as both the training ground and the desired destination of
the heterosexual couple. When Elspeth Probyn suggests that we
understand "locale" as a "place that is the setting for a particular
event"--where "place" signifies "both a discursive and nondiscursive
arrangement which holds a gendered event"--she offers "the home" as
"the most obvious example" (178). Place and event, however, do not
always or completely mesh; the material a nd discursive surrounds of
differently configured houses, for instance, may provoke or prevent
particular expressions of sexuality, may energize or disguise specific
applications of gender roles. These "lived contradictions of place and
event" demonstrate that "discourses are negotiated. Individuals live in
complex places and differentiate the pull of events" (182). Uneven or
unsteady intersections of place and event produce competing structures
for interpreting experience. In this context, Morrison asks us to think
about the meanings of romance in fractured, endangered, and illusory
spaces of domesticity.
Hortense Spillers observes that
domesticity appears to gain its power by way of a common origin of
cultural fictions that are grounded in the specificity of proper names,
more exactly, a patronymic, which, in turn, situates those persons it
"covers" in a particular place. (72)
Within this American economy of gender-production, enslaved Africans'
"loss of the indigenous name/land provides a metaphor of displacement
for other human and cultural features and relations, including the
displacement of the genitalia, the female's and the male's desire that
engenders future" (73). Within the slave system, as Angela Davis points
out, slaveholders
cast aside their
orthodox sexist attitudes except for purposes of repression. If Black
women were hardly "women" in the accepted sense, the slave system also
discouraged male supremacy in Black men...since Black women as workers
could not be treated as the "weaker sex" or the "housewife," Black men
could not be candidates for the figure of "family head" and certainly
not for "family provider." (7-8)
The captive body is rendered genderless; Africans'
New-World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body--a willful and
violent...severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active
desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in
the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory
of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related,
gender-specific. (Spillers 67)
Within the parameters of slavery, romantic and generative outcomes of
love and desire are thwarted, redirected, stolen; therefore, for many
former slaves, to experience freedom means to recouple domestic places
and events. Such a goal, Morrison makes clear, serves a number of
interests, not all of them desirable.
"THE LAST OF THE SWEET HOME MEN": ROMANCE AND REMEMORY
Because Paul D acts as spokesperson for and conveyor of the novel's
movement toward romance, I will trace out the ways his character is
both embedded in and shut out of dominant gender/power arrangements.
[2] Having lived as a wanderer in America, displaced and out of place
everywhere he goes, Paul D is acutely aware of slavery's success in
severing of men from family. After the Civil War,
odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the black roads and
cowpaths from Schenectady to Jackson.... Some of them were running from
family that could not support them, some to family; some were running
from dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land...
configurations and blends of families of women and children, while
elsewhere, solitary, hunted and hunting for, were men, men, men.
Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy "talking
sheets," they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs
and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social
courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked
about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. (Morrison
52-53)
In American culture, "man"
signifies head of household, protector of wife and children, giver of
the law, guardian of culture. But black men, as travelers driven to
"secondary routes," had no such foundation on which to base identity.
Pursued and punished as a trespasser in culture, Paul D perceives the
trajectory of his life not as a progression toward settlement,
ownership, and stability but rather as a set of botched escapes, a
series of failures to stay "uncaught" (268). A "dark ragged figure"
(113) against a blossoming land he cannot "love" or claim as his own
(268), he figures the shadowy (non)position of the black man in
America. [3]
Paul D grew up on a
farm called "Sweet Home" as "the youngest of three ha1f-brothers...
sold to [John] Garner and kept there... for twenty years" (219). For
"family" he had his brothers Paul A and Paul F, his friends Halle and
Sixo, "Baby Suggs in the kitchen, a boss who showed them how to shoot
and listened to what they had to say. A mistress who made their soap
and never raised her voice" (219). In this "cradle" (219), he lived as
the precocious child of benevolent white parents, embedded in
hierarchies that modeled those of patriarchal family. Paul D Garner,
however, is not a son but rather one in a group of "Pauls" belonging to
a man named Garner. Sons inherit manhood with patrilineage; Paul D
borrows a provisional second-order manhood from a master who allows his
slaves to
correct [him], even defy
him. To invent ways of doing things; to see what was needed and attack
it without permission. To buy a mother, choose a mother, choose a horse
or a wife, handle guns, even learn reading. (125)
Granted the privileges that signify manhood, Paul D performs a
carefully mediated script of male behavior.
Although Paul D wants and needs to believe that "in [his] relationship
with Garner was true metal" (125), the text makes clear that the
benefits of Sweet Home manhood accrue to Garner, who "brag[s]" while
"other farmers [shake] their heads in warning":
"Y'all got boys," he told them...." Now at Sweet Home, my niggers is
men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every
one.
"Beg to differ, Garner. Ain't no nigger men."
"Not if you scared, they ain't." Garner's smile was wide. "But if you a
man yourself, you'll want your niggers to be men too."
"I wouldn't have no nigger men round my wife."
It was the reaction Garner loved and waited for. "Neither would I," he
said. "Neither would I," and there was always a pause before the
neighbor, or stranger, or peddler, or brother-in-law or whoever it was
got the meaning. Then a fierce argument, sometimes a fight, and Garner
came home bruised and pleased, having demonstrated one more time what a
real Kentuckian was: one tough enough and smart enough to make and call
his own niggers men. (10-11)
Garner creates his superior manhood through superior ownership. That
the "definitions belonged to the definers--not the defined" (190) and
that the slaves' manhood is refracted from the authority of white
ownership becomes apparent after Garner's death. Paul D discovers the
arbitrary nature of white making and calling when "schoolteacher"
arrives to "put the place aright" (226). After a horrifically failed
escape attempt, chained and tethered to the wagon that will lead him
away from the only "Home" he knows, it is borne in on Paul D that a
rooster named Mister is endowed with the individuality, autonomy, and
even manhood denied to him:
Mister
was allowed to be and stay what he was.... Even if you cooked him you'd
be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D
again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else
and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a
tub. (72)
In the work prison at
Alfred, Georgia, Paul D lives not in a "Sweet Home" that mimics
normative family but in a "grave," a ditch "into which wooden boxes had
been fitted" (106), in a condition of living death designed to erase
manhood and humanity. There, "everything belonged to the men who had
the guns ... each one of whom he could snap like a twig if he wanted
to. Men who knew their manhood lay in their guns" (162). Completely
subject to the physically weaker white guards, the prisoners occupy the
abjected position of powerless women. Their feminization is graphically
illustrated in the abuse they suffer each morning:
Kneeling in the mist they waited for the whim of a guard, or two, or
three. Or maybe all of them wanted it. Wanted it from one prisoner in
particular or none--or all.
"Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?"
"Yes, sir."
"Hungry, nigger?"
"Yes, sir."
"Here you go.
Witnessing this ritual for the first time, Paul D vomits, and "an
observing guard smashed his shoulder with the rifle and the engaged one
decided to skip the new man for the time being" (108). Although the
novel does not record events of subsequent mornings, it is clear that
Paul D must have endured this violation. And because in America he is
always subject to the law of white men--with or without guns--he always
occupies this position of powerlessness and coercion.
The lessons he learns from schoolteacher and in Alfred teach him to
"love just a little bit" (45), to guard against loss through
disengagement. By the time he arrives at Sethe's house, he does not
"believe he could live with a woman--any woman--for over two out of
three months ... walking off when he got ready was the only way he
could convince himself that he would no longer have to sleep, pee, eat
or swing a sledge hammer in chains" (40). While it is not difficult to
understand Paul D's evasion of any kind of "ties," proving his freedom
by "walking off' from the houses of black women seems to position them
as keepers of the "chains" that bind him. To Paul D, women represent
potential for inscription within the gendered positions defined by
romance--husband and father, protector and provider--and acted out in
the domestic hierarchies of the home. But his tendency to "house
fits"--the "glassy anger men sometimes feel when a woman's house begins
to bind them, when they want to yell and break something or at l east
run off" (115)--reflects the domestic perils that romantic scripts hold
for black men. Because women remain stationary--in houses--they
represent not only the privileges but also the dangers attendant upon
being attached to place, fixed and defined in the bounds of locale.
Denied jobs, votes, voice, and justice, it is hard to be the hero of a
romance plot. "House fits" are symptomatic of this gap between place
and event, of the discomfort of dominant models of romance.
Travel affords Paul D an alternative power over place, exempting him
from the gender arrangements embedded in domestic spaces and policed by
white culture. Morrison has said that she envisions the traveling black
man as "truly masculine," "a man who's stretching ... he's going all
the way within his own mind and within whatever his outline might be"
(qtd. in hooks 96). Addressing this model of black manhood, bell hooks
remarks that "though the travelling man repudiates being a patriarchal
provider, he does not necessarily repudiate male domination" (96). In
an attempt, perhaps, to mediate these competing aspects of Paul D's
character--his need for freedom and for "male domination"--Morrison
endows him with an almost preternaturally sensitive and understanding
disposition. While this character-content makes him an attractive and
sympathetic figure, it poses difficulties for readers attempting to
reconcile his dehumanizing experiences and feelings of nonidentity with
the capacity for empathy that he has develo ped when he arrives at 124
Bluestone Road. [4] We know that as a result of his unspeakable past,
he has "shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part
that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he could do those
things--with a little work and a little sex thrown in--he asked for no
more" (41). He keeps "the rest" in a "tobacco tin buried in his chest
where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut" (72-73).
Even without a "red heart" and
not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a
house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they
could. There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and
wanted to weep--to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did
too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told
each other. (17)
Paul D's
blessedness on the one hand facilitates relationships outside the
power-inflected barriers raised between men and women, but on the other
hand gives him a certain advantage because the telling is not
reciprocal-- he keeps his secrets. His blessedness does, however,
balance his walking off-- walking into houses, he gives women relief
and outlet. Creating Paul D as "embodied kindness" (Fields 161), a man
women are drawn to on an instinctual level, Morrison will not allow the
reader to simply dismiss him when that understanding fails. As we will
see, this move indicates the depth of the novel's investment in Paul D,
the extent of its need for what he offers.
Paul D's blessedness also helps to justify his intervention into the
dynamics of Sethe's household. Moments after his arrival, he drives the
"baby ghost"--the presence of Sethe's dead daughter--out of her house.
Breaking up with violence and "a loud male voice" (37) the family
composed of Sethe, the baby ghost, and Sethe's living daughter Denver,
Paul D assumes the male role of protector before he understands the
nature of the haunting or whether Sethe wants or needs protection from
it. He forces the baby ghost out and, "standing in the place he had
made" (39), lays claim to Sethe and attempts to establish a more
normative family structure.
As
"the last of the Sweet Home men" (9), Paul D offers Sethe "a life" (46)
through a romance that builds on and reshapes their shared past; with
him to support her, he promises, she can "go as far inside as you need
to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out" (46). For Sethe,
who takes as her "day's serious work" the task of "beating back the
past" (73), the prospect of remembering directed at the future is new.
"Her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and
hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for,
the next day" (70). Sethe's agonized history takes up all her psychic
space: she is "full" of terrible memories, of "two boys with mossy
teeth, one sucking on [her] breast the other holding [her] down" while
schoolteacher "watch[es] and writ[es] it up" (70), of schoolteacher's
voice instructing his nephews to "line up" her "human characteristics"
beside her "animal ones" (193) in their daily lessons. All memory,
however, circulates around the moment she cut the throat of her infant
daughter and attempted to kill her other children when schoolteacher
appeared at 124 to reclaim them after their escape from Sweet Home. The
unbearable weight of these memories is the measure of
what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to
feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her
head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the
death spasms that shot through that adored body. (251)
Although Sethe "work[s] hard to remember as close to nothing as was
safe" (6), she lives these profoundly visceral memories with all the
immediacy of the moment; they fill and shape her life. Paul D's offer
of supported memory extends the possibility of another kind of shape.
Swayed by the "temptation to trust and remember" (38), Sethe begins to
believe that history can be brought under control and made "bearable
because it was his as well--to tell, to refine and tell again" (99).
She posits this collaborative retelling as an order-inducing narrative
act aimed toward control of the past and resolution of historical
trauma. But, while each shares with the other haunting details of
unspeakably painful pasts, both leave conspicuous gaps in their
stories, gaps containing experiences that fall outside the gendered
expectations of romance. Sethe does not reveal that she chose
infanticide of her "crawling already?" baby over allowing her to be
lost in slavery. Paul D does not speak of his "tobacco tin" or of
Alfred, Georgia. Sethe recognizes that there are "things neither knew
about the other--the things neither had word-shapes for" but believes
that these things will "come in time" (99).
Against this hope stands her experience of the past as a locale that
continues to structure identity, which "comes back whether we want it
to or not" (14), in the form of "rememory." "Rememory" differs from
"memory" in its active force independent of the rememberer. Sethe
explains:
what I remember is a
picture floating around out there outside my head ... even if I don't
think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is
still out there. Right in the place where it happened. (36)
Therefore, she dedicates herself to "the job ... of keeping [Denver]
from the past that was still waiting for her" (42). She tells her
daughter that
where I was before I
came here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole
farm--every tree and grass blade of it dies ... if you go there--you
who never was there ... and stand in the place where it was, it will
happen again. ... Because even though it's all over--all over and done
with--it's going to always be there waiting for you. (36)
Although the borders and defining characteristics of the place of
dehumanization may have vanished from sight, its affects and
effects--its event--remain. Slavery is remembered but is more than a
memory; its immediacy and material consequences resist resolution.
The present poses its own impediments to Paul D's desire to put
together a nuclear family. Denver "prefer[s] the venomous baby to him
any day" (104), resenting his usurpation of the ghost's space, his
appropriation of her mother, and his ownership of a past that excludes
her. Sethe wrestles with the conflicting demands of daughter and lover,
but insists that her first responsibility is to Denver. Paul D,
however, argues that
it's not
about choosing somebody over her--it's making space for somebody along
with her. You got to say it. And if you say it and mean it, then you
also got to know you can't gag me. There's no way I'm going to hurt her
or not take care of what she need if I can, but I can't be told to keep
my mouth shut if she's acting ugly. (45)
If he is to assume the respect and authority afforded the man of the
house, Sethe and Denver must perform their roles accordingly. But,
because they have grown accustomed to a family composed of women not
subject to the authority of fathers or husbands, Paul D's imposition of
romantic space over a space of alternative domesticity remains
difficult and uneasy. [5]
BELOVED: REMEMORY AND DISREMEMBERED HISTORY
Just as a new family structure begins to tentatively coalesce, Beloved
arrives to do what the ghost could not. Her narrative strand confronts
the romance strand with the interference that "rememory" poses to
"memory" the crucial problem underlying romantic remembering. Textual
evidence supports her existence on three interconnected planes. She is
the "true-to-life presence of the baby" (119) that Paul D drove out,
returned in the flesh to reclaim her place in the family and possibly
to mete out punishment for her death. She is also an African girl, a
child who survived the Middle Passage only to be "locked up by some
whiteman for his own purposes, and never let out the door" (119). After
his death, she finds her way to the house on Bluestone Road where she
mistakes Sethe for the mother who either died and was thrown overboard
or committed suicide by jumping off the ship during the passage from
Africa. Although she appears approximately 18 or 19 years old, the
violent interruption of her family by the slave economy has left her
stunted, fixed to the moment her mother went into the sea without
acknowledging her. Finally, Beloved is the material manifesta tion of
the "sixty million and more" Africans lost on the Middle Passage as
well as the uncounted numbers "disremembered and unaccounted for" (274)
in American slavery, whose stories and names will never be known. [6]
As the embodiment of these unspeakable losses, she interrupts what
Caroline Rody terms Sethe and Paul D's "mutual talking cure" (99),
their amelioration of history through romance.
Until Beloved's arrival at 124, the novel had been structured around
the reunion of Sethe and Paul D and their negotiations for a new
domestic order. Her plot gradually loosens and finally dismantles this
narrative frame, shifting relations between characters, their views of
domestic locales, and their expressions of memory Beloved's presence
exacerbates Paul D's sense of unmanly powerlessness while
simultaneously calling on him to act as a father figure to another
resistant daughter.
He wanted her
Out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn't put her out of a house
that wasn't his. It was one thing to beat up a ghost, quite another to
throw a helpless coloredgirl out in territory infected by the Klan.
(66)
Sethe, perhaps mindful of her
own torturous journey to a fragile kind of freedom, insists on
defending Beloved from the dangers of being "a coloredwoman roaming the
roads with anything God made liable to jump on you" (67-68). She sees
Beloved as "nice girl company for Denver" (67) and is "flattered by
[her] open, quiet devotion" (57); the "company of this sweet, if
peculiar, guest pleased [Sethe] the way a zealot pleases his teacher"
(57). While Sethe wants Paul D "in her life" and works to "launch her
newer, stronger life with a tender man" (99), she refuses to sacrifice
Beloved to his need to be the man of the family. Disregarding his
reservations and accepting Beloved into her home, Sethe diverts the
priorities of the household away from maintenance of the romantic
couple, sure she has "milk enough for all" (100).
Immediately prior to Beloved's appearance, Denver had shown signs of
relenting in her animosity for Paul D. But as she cares for Beloved and
protects her from Sethe's dangerous love and from the thing that "can
come right on in the yard" (205) and prompt her to kill her children,
Denver constructs her own alternative domesticity Accomplishing a
measure of authority as Beloved's caretaker, she attempts to disconnect
from the new familial hierarchies at 124. Because "nothing was out
there that this sister-girl did not provide in abundance: a racing
heart, dreaminess, society, danger, beauty" (76), Denver "plot[s]"
(121) to arrange the household to provide for the moments that she is
"pulled into view" by Beloved's "interested, uncritical eye." Under
that gaze, she feels her "skin dissolv[e] ... and [become] soft and
bright....She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and
intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was" (118).
These moments provide escape from the molds of identit y that have been
forced on her throughout her life: slow and silent daughter of an
abjected mother, outsider cut off from the love and approval of others.
"To go back to the original hunger [is] impossible" (118), so Denver
clings to Beloved and waits for the return of her missing father, the
"angel man" who "could look at you and tell where you hurt and ... fix
it too" (208). When Halle finally makes his way home, he will "help
[her] watch out for Ma'am and anything come in the yard" (207).
Restoring Halle's paternal authority, Denver imagines a properly
ordered family safe from the unpredictable force of rememory, a home
protected from violent eruptions of the past.
For her part, Beloved recognizes none of the male-centered domestic
ideals that the other characters take, to one degree or another, for
granted. Her overwhelming need for her mother's love exceeds the
boundaries of nuclear family: "Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by
Beloved's eyes. Like a familiar, she hovered, never leaving the room
Sethe was in unless required and told to" (57). Her touch, "no heavier
than a feather," is "loaded, nevertheless, with desire," and her gaze
contains a "bottomless longing. Some plea barely in control" (58).
Ignoring the other family members' attempts to enforce their domestic
norms, Beloved pursues a kind of symbiosis with Sethe, a relationship
that will ultimately eliminate all other contact. Sethe "is the one I
need," she tells Denver, "you can go but she is the one I have to have"
(76). 124, she says, is "the place I am" (123). In Beloved's infantile
"romance," the figure of her mother reflects her vision of selfhood.
Because her desire for Sethe is for an impossible revers al of loss and
because her fragile sense of identity depends on the equation of
Sethe-mother-self holding, she lives in constant danger of falling Out
of existence. She has "two dreams: exploding, and being swallowed" and
has "difficult[y] keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to
her hips when she is by herself" (133). Sethe gradually directs more of
her attention to the urgency of Beloved's needs, and the severed bond
of the past takes precedence over the romantic bond that provides for
the future. As Sethe "feed[s]" (58) Beloved with stories of her past,
the context and purpose of remembering shift to accommodate the demands
of a voracious history; it becomes apparent that "they were a family
somehow and [Paul D] was not the head of it" (132).
This disruption and redirection is reflected in Paul D's steadily
increasing sense of restless discomfort. Made uneasy by Beloved's
"shining"--in his experience a sure sign of "arous[al]" (64)--he finds
the stability of heterosexual romance increasingly compromised by her
presence. Even though he knows that she is "moving" him (114) Out of
the domestic spaces of 124, he remains strangely helpless to stop her
as she "force[s]" (116) him into the cold house and unable to resist
her when she comes in the night and says:
"You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my
name."... If he trembled like Lot's wife and felt some womanish need to
see the nature of the sin behind him; feel a sympathy, perhaps, for the
cursing cursed, or want to hold it in his arms out of respect for the
connection between them, he too would be lost.
"Gall me my name."
"No."
"Please call it. I'll go if you call it."
"Beloved." He said it, but she did not go. She moved closer with a
footfall he didn't hear and he didn't hear the whisper that the flakes
of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco
tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when
he reached the inside part he was saying, "Red heart. Red heart," over
and over again. (117)
Although the
nature of the "connection" between Paul D and Beloved, who actively
dislike each other, is not specified, it emerges when Beloved's
emptiness--caused by the dismemberment of her family in slavery--meets
Paul D's emptiness--caused by a similar lacuna in identity. As this
connection results from historical trauma, the sexual act seems to
signify possibilities for reencountering the past. It pries open his
tobacco tin to expose the red heart secreted within, performing a
"bodily cure" (Smith 348) for the disease of history.
Later, Paul D remarks that Beloved "'reminds [him] of something... look
like, [he is] supposed to remember'" (234), and equates his "coupling"
with her with
a brainless urge to
stay alive. 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. (264)
The repeated implications of a perilous but essential encounter with
memory suggest that sex with Beloved stages Paul D's necessary
engagement with his avoided history and therefore leads to the
reanimation of his red heart. As the novel sets the task of confronting
history for all its characters, the fact of his sexual relations with
"a girl young enough to be his daughter" (126), a girl who in fact
occupies the position of his daughter in Sethe's household, tends to
become secondary, as a scan of critical responses will demonstrate.
However, because Beloved is more than embodied memory, this scene calls
up possibilities for and losses of other encounters, as well. Beloved
approaches Paul D out of her "hunger" to be "recognized," her need to
be "known," as Barbara Schapiro suggests, "in [her] inner being or
essential self" (201). But as she articulates this need in connection
with hearing her name, it is clearly a need that cannot be met--Paul D
cannot speak her name because he does not know it. "Beloved" was not
the "crawling already?" baby's name, but the name Sethe had inscribed
on her tombstone, the first words of the preacher's "Dearly Beloved"
sermon at her grave. "Beloved" is not the African girl's name, but one
of the names she was called by her white captors, "ghosts without
skin," who "stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and
bitch in the light" (241). When she lost her mother, she lost her name,
along with her developing sense of self.
The text does not record what impression, if any, sex with Paul D has
on "Beloved." Following the "bodily cure," there is no noticeable
change in her; because no part of her past is closed down or hidden,
there can be no opening of repressed memory. Locked in an endless
past--"there will never be a time when [she is] not crouching" in the
hold of the ship watching others die and waiting for her mother's smile
(210)--Beloved is unable to contextualize her losses. She cannot save
herself by confronting history because she lacks the distance that
would afford the new perspectives that project possibilities for a new
life. And, just as the text provides no sign of Beloved's response to
her initial encounter with Paul D, it gives no reason for her returns
to him. She is obviously not motivated by concern for the condition of
his red heart, nor, as we have seen, can she use him as a medium
through which to confront her history. Continually reliving profoundly
agonizing events that cannot be contained as memories, Beloved has no
history. For her, "all of it is now, it is always now" (210).
The novel's central romance plot is aimed at pulling history into a
manageable framework through the "mutual talking cure" that reorganizes
the past that pulled men and women apart by denying them "the female's
and the male's desire that engenders future" (Spillers 73). Paul D's
relationship with Sethe promises a joining of memory within functional
structures, a route to normality and to the family that "engenders
future." But his "cold house" sex with Beloved projects memory outside
the structures of the home, violating the gender role compacts of
romance and family, scrambling positions of domestic authority. That
this sexual act releases his red heart further compromises the
viability of romance plot by confounding any expectation that his
relationship with Sethe, whom he loves and who endured Sweet Home
slavery with him, would open his tobacco tin. His vulnerability to
Beloved indicates that the "talking cure" could not reach his red
heart, perhaps because locked away there are the demasculinizing experi
ences that hamper romantic remembering. In other words, Sethe and Paul
D's memories do not draw them into a domesticity intelligible in
American culture because these memories are of being refused
traditional male and female roles.
The description of the sex between Beloved and Paul D turns the power
dynamics embedded in the heterosexual scene upside down by assigning
"womanish" feeling to Paul D and by reversing the gendered gestures of
seduction: Beloved forces herself on Paul D, he resists, she prevails.
This confusion of male-dominant and female-submissive positions leads
him back to the illusory manhood of Sweet Home:
One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human
race. Watchdogs without teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded
workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not be translated into a
language responsible humans spoke. His strength had lain in knowing
that schoolteacher was wrong. Now he wondered.... If schoolteacher was
right it explained how he had come to be a rag doll--picked up and put
back down anywhere any time by a girl young enough to be his daughter.
Fucking her when he was convinced he didn't want to.... But it was more
than appetite that humiliated him and made him wonder if schoolteacher
was right. It was being moved, placed where she wanted him, and there
was nothing he was able to do about it. (125-26)
These instabilities and contradictions in his identity as a man fuel
his desire to secure a place where manhood will be tangibly visible by
making Sethe pregnant. Inscribing her body with his ownership, he would
"hold on to her, document his manhood and break out of the girl's
spell--all in one" (128). Her pregnancy would prove his ownership in a
culture that demands that men own women while producing a child subject
to his authority, thus creating normative family within intelligible
domestic space.
However, the
revelation of Sethe's infanticide interrupts the story of family
redemption Paul D has been telling himself. To Sethe, her act is
"simple" (163)--she prevents schoolteacher from dirtying her child,
from killing her by making her less than human. Paul D, however, is
sure that there must have been "some other way," and, drawing on
schoolteacher's language, points out "You got two feet, Sethe, not
four" (165). Her continued insistence on infanticide as the only
possible course of action in the context of slavery, schoolteacher, and
Sweet Home forces Paul D to adjust his perception of her. He had
thought that, until he rescued her, she had lived with the ghost
in helpless, apologetic resignation because she had no choice; that
minus husband, sons, mother-in-law, she and her slow-witted daughter
had to live there all alone making do. The prickly, mean-eyed Sweet
Home girl he knew as Halle's girl was obedient (like Halle), shy (like
Halle), and work-crazy (like Halle). He was wrong. This here Sethe was
new.... This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked
about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could
cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw.
This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began .
. . more important than what Sethe had done was what she claimed. It
scared him. (164)
His view of
Sethe as "Halle's girl" displays his assumptions about wives as
extensions of their husbands; he presumes that she is obedient, shy,
and work-crazy because he saw those characteristics in Halle. But her
claim to responsibility for her children without the mediation of
fatherly or cultural authority rends scripts of romance and their
outcomes in domesticity Her "outrageous claims, her self-sufficiency"
(171) upend Paul D's notions of romance as effectively as did sex with
Beloved. Moving quickly from his own "shame to hers. From his
cold-house secret straight to her too-thick love" (165), Paul D leaves
Sethe, removing himself from a locale in which traditional definitions
of "man" and "woman" cannot be fuffilled.
In Paul D's absence and without the "distrac[tion]" (202) of his
domestic demands, Sethe recognizes Beloved as her daughter returned
from "the other side" (203), and a new family structure emerges based
in a new view of memory. While Sethe's relationship with Paul D brought
her "another kind of haunting" (96) in the form of new information
about the past, she interprets the return of her daughter as the end of
such hauntings, as deliverance from the burden of memory. "Excited to
giddiness by the things she no longer had to remember," Sethe believes
that she does not "even have to explain. [Beloved] understands it all"
(183). Paul D had "convinced [Sethe] there was a world out there and
that [she] could live in it" (182), but Beloved's presence persuades
her that "whatever is going on outside [her] door ain't for [her]. The
world is in" 124 and the mother-daughter romance contained there is
"all there is and all there needs to be" (183). As Sethe rejects memory
as the means to a new life, she eliminates her limited contact with the
community. Entirely devoted to Beloved, she goes "to work later and
later" until she is told "not to come back. And instead of looking for
another job, [she] played all the harder with Beloved, who never got
enough of anything" (239-40).
The
household focuses intensely inward as boundaries between individual
members dissolve. Beloved yearns to "join" with Sethe in what she terms
"a hot thing" (213), a merging state in which she is "not separate from
her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be
there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too"
(210). Within this new family, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved engage in an
alternate romance:
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 in the water
I drank your blood
I brought your milk
You forgot to smile
I loved you
You hurt me
You came back to me
You left me
I waited for you
You are mine
You are mine
You are mine (216-17)
As their voices mesh, the women put together their histories in an
erotics of relational identity outside of heterosexual structures and
organizations of desire.
Gradually, however, Beloved's desire for possession grows punishing and
consuming. Despite Sethe's assurances that "Beloved was more important,
meant more to her than her own life" (242), that her children are "her
best thing" (251), Beloved accuses her "of leaving her behind...not
smiling at her...they were the same, had the same face, how could she
have left her" (241). Sethe addresses Beloved as her infant daughter,
but Beloved answers as the African girl whose mother went into the
water, talking her name and her face away. No matter how sincere her
assurances of love, Sethe cannot repair the losses Beloved suffered on
the Middle Passage; like Paul D, she cannot say her name. As their play
turns to violent recriminations and fruitless explanations, 124 becomes
"loud" (169) with "a conflagration of hasty voices," women's voices
mumbling and jumbled so that the only word decipherable is "mine"
(172). And, together with "the thoughts of the women of 124,
unspeakable thoughts, unspoken" (199), are the voices of "the black and
angry dead" (198). 124 becomes a place where the past possesses the
present, a household without domesticity or familial hierarchies. Now
Sethe sits "licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate
up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it" (250).
As the past consumes Sethe, Denver breaks free of the paralysis of
knowing that there exist "places in which things so bad had happened
that when you went near them it would happen again" by drawing on her
memory of Baby Suggs, who advises her to simply "know it, and go on out
the yard" (244). Taking on the "job" of "protecting her mother from
Beloved" (243), Denver faces her fears, adapts her views, and acts.
Reestablishing contact with the community and developing relationships
of her own, she comes to the "new" realization that she "[has] a self
to look out for and preserve" (252). This new sense of selfhood,
however, "might not have occurred to her" without a young man named
Nelson Lord, whose childhood enquiries about her time in prison with
her mother "blocked up her ears." When he tells her to "Take care of
yourself," he "open [s] her mind" (252).
This vision emboldens her to venture further into Cincinnati, where, in
order to get help, she tells the whole story of 124. A group of African
American women then sets out to restore proper order between worlds, to
prevent "past errors" from "taking possession of the present" (256).
Acting in community, they produce the song, the music they withheld
from Sethe after the murder in order to exorcise Beloved. But this
communal ceremony is interrupted by Mr. Bodwin, white abolitionist and
owner of 124, who turns out to be the primary, if unsuspecting, player
in Beloved's exorcism. As he arrives to take Denver to work, Sethe
believes he is schoolteacher and attacks him, prompting Denver and the
singing women to restrain her. As they fall on her, they form what
Beloved sees as "a hill of black people, falling." This "rememory" of
the pile of bodies thrown off the slave ship recapitulates the sequence
of events that led to her loss of her mother. "Standing alone on the
porch," Beloved "feels the emptiness in the h and Sethe has been
holding" and sees above the falling bodies, "rising from his place with
a whip in his hand, the man without skin, looking. He is looking at
her" (262). Having again lost the gaze of the beloved for the gaze that
dirties and destroys, Beloved vanishes.
BELOVED'S TWO ENDINGS
The first ending of the novel tracks Paul D's return progress through
the spaces of 124, where "his coming is the reverse route of his going"
(263). His encounter with Denver in the streets of Cincinnati serves
two purposes for this ending: it establishes Sethe's need for rescue
and redemption while displaying Denver's new maturity and confidence.
After Denver conveys her fear that she has "lost [her] mother" (266),
Paul D watches her greet Nelson Lord, "her face looking like someone
had turned up the gas jet" (267). This last image of Denver's "shining"
balances Beloved's transgressive "shining" and begins the novel's
movement to restore order to its heterosexual economy. As the first
unenslaved generation, Denver represents possibilities for the future.
And as she takes on adult responsibilities in familial, social, and
economic spheres, her potential is represented through her
incorporation into the normative safety of heterosexual romance. Her
felicitous transformation prepares us for the novel's return t o the
central romance plot, and for Paul D's return to Sethe.
His motives for returning, however, are not clear. It is possible that
he comes back because he has reached some kind of peace not only with
Sethe's infanticide but also with her "outrageous claims." These claims
"scare" him, but after her attack on Mr. Bodwin becomes common
knowledge, he jokes with Stamp Paid: "every time a whiteman come to the
door she got to kill somebody?" (265). Perhaps, as Mae G. Henderson
suggests, Sethe's attempt to kill Bodwin indicates that she has
reconsidered her dangerous claims; "Sethe, in effect, re-enacts the
original event" but "directs her response to the threatening Other
rather than to 'her best thing"' (81). Or perhaps Paul D returns simply
because the presence that displaced him is gone. He comes back to a
house that "does not look back at him. Unloaded, 124 is just another
weathered house needing repair" (264). He feels that
something is missing.... Something larger than the people who lived
there. Something more than Beloved.... He can't put his finger on it,
but it seems, for a moment, that just beyond his knowing is the glare
of an outside thing that embraces while it accuses. (270-71)
Unloaded of the living presence of an unassimilable history of loss,
pain, anger, and betrayal, 124 appears as "just another" house, ready
to house just another family. Finally, Paul D
doesn't care how It went or even why. He cares about how he left and
why. When he looks at himself through Garner's eyes, he sees one thing.
Through Sixo's, another. One makes him feel righteous. One makes him
feel ashamed. (267)
During his
time away from 124, he comes to question the meanings of manhood he has
accepted as normal and desirable, reconsidering his long-held belief
that
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. It troubled him that, concerning his
own manhood, he could not satisfy himself on that point. Oh, he did
manly things, but was that Garner's gift or his own will? What would he
have been anyway--before Sweet Home--without Garner? In Sixo's country,
or his mother's? Or, God help him, on the boat? (220)
Here, manhood appears as the slipperiest of cultural constructions,
measured in relation to others, prone to assume different forms and
expressions in different locales. When he can posit, however
tentatively, alternative forms of manhood in other cultural spaces, he
can admit and carry out his desire to put his story of troubled manhood
next to Sethe's story of troubled womanhood.
However, the move to reunite the romantic couple without explanation of
Paul D's motives or investigation of Sethe's response complicates this
movement toward alternatives. Having found her in the bed that Baby
Suggs died in, without "plans," volition, or desire, he struggles to
identify all the "things to feel about this woman" (272). Remembering
Sixo's description of the Thirty-Mile Woman as "a friend of my mind....
The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the
right order" (272-73), he recalls his last encounter with Sethe at
Sweet Home. Then, as now, he is moved by
her tenderness about his neck jewelry--its three wands... curling two
feet into the air. How she never mentioned or looked at it, so he did
not have to feel the shame of being collared like a beast. Only this
woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that.
(273)
His defining image of Sethe rests in her ability to gather and order
his identity as a man, even as it was stripped from him by the slave
system. Because he is a man in her eyes, she appears to him, as to
Beloved, as "the place I am"-the locale where selfhood resides.
This memory of Sethe's preservation of his manhood stands as Paul D's
final thought before he expresses his desire to "put his story next to
hers" (273):
"Sethe," he says, "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We
need some kind of tomorrow."
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face.
"You your best thing, Sethe. You are." His holding fingers are holding
hers.
"Me? Me?" (273)
Even though Sethe is broken spiritually and physically at the
conclusion of the novel, many readers assume a happy ending for her
through Paul D's return.8 But the uncertainty and ambiguity of the "Me?
Me?" that ends Sethe's story undercut confidence in a
happily-ever-after scenario for their future; it is not at all clear
that Sethe will find a way to claim and value herself as her "best
thing." Further, this (non)resolution is composed almost entirely of
Paul D's perspective, with the exception of one paragraph in which
Sethe's point of view emerges to reaffirm that he is "the kind of man
who can walk in a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in
his presence, they could" (273). Echoing almost exactly the earlier
description of his blessedness, Sethe's view of Paul D reinvokes the
problematic assertion of an understanding that overrides complexity and
contradiction. It is this blessedness, the narrative suggests, that
will allow her to lay her story beside his in the new "talking cure"
capable of producing a promising "tomorrow."
While Morrison is sympathetic to Paul D's dilemmas in the novel and has
identified him as "a healer" (Darling 250), the first ending leaves
open competing interpretations of his character and of the romance plot
he conveys. We could congratulate Paul D for finding the courage to
love big instead of small, or see in his proposal to "take care" (272)
of Sethe an attempt to reestablish control. Their ending scene, with
its implication that Sethe will reclaim herself by deploying her
"story" as romantic device, parallels the emergence of Denver's "self"
through Nelson Lord's recognition and invests Sethe's renewal tenuously
in Paul D's naming. In some ways, Paul D's rescue bespeaks a return to
patriarchal scripts: we are left with a strong man bending over the bed
of a supine, weakened woman, promising redemption in a space safe for
domesticity. In other ways, however, we can see in this ending the
potential for unconventional romance: Paul D's expression of openness
to alternative models of manhood gains creden ce when Sethe connects
his proposal to "take care" of her to Baby Suggs's care for her. His
offer to bathe her reminds Sethe of her arrival at 124 Bluestone Road
after her escape from Sweet Home, when Baby Suggs bathed her carefully
and with love, putting her bruised and bloody pieces back together.
Now, Sethe wonders "if he bathes her in sections, will the parts hold"
(272)? Her fear that her parts will not remain intact echoes Beloved's
fear of flying apart, but leaves space open for the healing touch of "a
tender man."
This ambivalent
coming together is countered by the novel's second ending, which
addresses the disappearance and dissolution of Beloved. Exorcised when
her losses of the Middle Passage are replayed in the yard of 124, she
is last seen naked, "cutting through the woods" behind the house (267).
If we consider Beloved at least in part a bodily, material being--which
the novel insists we do--we must consider the fate of a naked black
woman alone and confused in the southern Ohio of the 1870s. Her state
of advanced pregnancy [9] recalls Sethe's lone trek to freedom and
delivery of Denver on the banks of the Ohio River, but, unlike Sethe,
Beloved has no help and no family to meet, no beloved others to
recognize and value her. While Denver conveys the promise that history
may be transcended, the baby conceived out of Beloved's unmet need to
be known and loved promises to perpetuate an unredeemable immersion in
an unescapable past. Recapitulating and reversing Paul D's plan to make
Sethe pregnant, Beloved's pregnanc y signals not new domestic
beginnings but rather a continuation of past-ness; the loss of another
mother and child represents the excess of recovery in unremitting
namelessness and homelessness. History is pregnant, but will deliver a
futurity without a sense of hope.
Pushed "quickly and deliberately" (274) out of the other characters'
memories and out of recorded history, Beloved dissolves:
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? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. In the
place where long grass opens, the girl who waited to be loved and cry
shame erupts into her separate parts, to make it easy for the chewing
laughter to swallow her all away. (274)
The admonition that "This is not a story to pass on" (275) bespeaks the
absence of a historical framework to account for the living and
continuing consequences of a system that dehumanized and ungendered its
victims. These consequences are not easily repaired, and cannot be
called into order in such a way as to propose redemption, normality,
futurity. Because she is and is not simply a ghost, is and is not
simply an abused girl seeking her mother, is and is not simply an
embodiment of a history of loss, Beloved reaches beyond linear
historical narratives with beginning, middle, end. Her diffuse,
multilayered, and unresolvable "story" cannot be deployed to
demonstrate national progress or to display African American recovery.
Instead, she continues to haunt all locales of normalcy.
Occasionally ... the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the
knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper.
Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative... shifts, and
something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can
touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never
be the same if they do. (275)
Behind the house on Bluestone Road "her footprints come and go. . .
Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take
them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there"
(275). Beloved's simultaneous presence and absence figures the ache of
the concealed wound of the past throbbing at the edge of awareness and
articulation, a wound that, if "touched," would overwhelm the present
and dismantle possibilities for the future.
Beloved's two endings encapsulate two incompatible models for memory.
The history conveyed in the dynamics of romance--coming together,
taking a talking cure, establishing a happily-ever-after
family--carries the potential for repair and rejuvenation. Addressing
history through romance, the Sethe/Paul D plot represents the
possibility of making the unspeakable into the male/female bond that
produces normative families, communities, cultures. The unknown story
of Beloved and her unborn child, however, reinscribes all that is
written out of an intelligible romance, all that haunts models of
history based in closure and control. No talking can cure Beloved's
losses, and, because these losses are shared in varying degrees and
intensities by all of the characters, her ending reaches back into the
Sethe/Paul D ending, dissecting and undermining the claims of romance
and domesticity. Beloved's ending also reaches into all accounts of
American history that assume that slavery simply ended in 1863, that
when it was c alled off it was over. [10] It haunts us as "the glare of
an outside thing that embraces while it accuses" (271), reminding us
that nothing just stops.
Like
Sethe, the novel is torn between Paul D and Beloved. Morrison makes no
attempt to "sidestep" or to resolve these "fundamental contradictions
that animate [her] work" (DuPlessis 3). Leaving the two endings side by
side, she forces us to hold competing notions of history together,
drawing our attention to the dilemmas of American history and identity
caused by the notion of historical transcendence. Like Sweet Home,
which "wasn't sweet and . . . wasn't home" (14), Beloved, who "was not
beloved" (epigraph), is a rememory that is "out there, in the world."
Even if all the characters in the novel and its author and all its many
readers "don't think it, even if [we] die, the picture of what [we]
did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it
happened" (36). As she supplements discourses of recovery with the
wordless desolation of a wordless history, Morrison's Beloved
challenges America's faith in the past-ness of the past by undercutting
assurance in the resolution of historical trauma. Morrison "writes
beyond" the "seductive patterns of feeling" associated with romance
plot and its not-so-inevitable happy ending by "writing beyond" the
"seductive patterns of feeling" informing dominant versions of American
history.
MARY PANICCIA GARDEN is
assistant professor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State
University. Her article "Creative Fertility and the National Romance in
Willa Gather's O Pioneers! and My Antonia" recently appeared in Modern
Fiction Studies. She has also published articles in Frontiers: A
Journal of Women Studies, Prose Studies, and a/b: Auto/Biography
Studies. She is currently at work on a book entitled Sons and Daughters
of Self-Made Men, which addresses intersecting narratives of nation
building and gender construction as they are represented in modern and
contemporary American novels.
NOTES
(1.) For explorations of bonds between women and Morrison's critique of
American ideologies of race and gender as they meet in the
"unspeakable" experience of slave mothers and daughters, see Ferguson,
Horvitz, Goldman, Liscio, Rody, and Rushdy.
(2.) bell books notes that
transplanted African men, even those who were coming from cultures
where sex roles shaped the division of labor, where the status of men
was different and most often higher than that of females, had imposed
on them the white colonizer's notions of manhood. Black men did not
respond to this imposition passively. Yet it is evident in black male
slave narratives that black men engaged in racial uplift were often
most likely to accept the norms of masculinity set by white culture.
Although the gendered politics of slavery denied black men the freedom
to act as "men" within the definition set by white norms, this notion
of manhood did become a standard used to measure black male progress.
(89-90)
These attempts to "assume
full patriarchal responsibilities for families and kin" (90) inevitably
conflicted with ideologies of gender and race that denied black men and
women recourse to the rewards of the "sex-gender system" granted by
American culture.
Also, Herbert
Gutman has pointed out that slaves found creative ways to make and
nurture family bonds, nuclear and otherwise. See his The Black Family
in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 and Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan,
Roll: The World the Slaves Made.
(3.) All the black men in Morrison's novel share this (non)position but
address it in different ways. Paul compares himself to Sixo, an African
man who defiantly rejects white definitions, asserts his rationality
and individuality, and preserves his ties to African culture. His
insistence on himself as a man results in his destruction, but not
before he has impregnated the "Thirty Mile Woman" with "seveno." Paul D
also compares himself to Halle, Sethe's husband, who attempts to
operate within the white man's system. He works extra hours to buy his
mother's freedom, and marries Sethe with the consent of his master and
mistress. His crisis results from the problem of claiming a black woman
as his own; the question of ownership comes graphically before his eyes
as he witnesses schoolteacher's nephews taking Sethe's milk--robbing
his children of their sustenance and appropriating the body of his
wife. Unable to intervene, Halle goes insane. In Cincinnati, Stamp Paid
represents a kind of compromise between the p ositions of Halle and
Sixo. Having "paid" for his freedom with his wife's body, he ferries
escaped slaves (including Sethe and her children) across the Ohio River
and settles them among the black community on the free side. Because he
has been instrumental in establishing black community, he views himself
as its patriarch and is dismayed when his community fails to act in the
ways he deems appropriate. These performances of masculinity as the
factor of control and ownership carry over to generations with no real
memory of slavery. Sethe and Halle's sons Howard and Buglar are
uncomfortable in the improperly configured family at 124 Bluestone
Road. They "grew furious at the company of women in the house, and
spent in sullen reproach any time they had away from their odd work in
town" (104). They are finally driven off by the "personal spite" (104)
of the house inhabited by Sethe's murdered daughter.
(4.) Few critics address this issue, seeming to take his gentle,
compassionate, and giving nature for granted. Margaret Atwood, however,
remarks that "considering what he's been through, it's a wonder he
isn't a mass murderer. If anything, he's a little too huggable, under
the circumstances" (50).
(5.) See
Askeland's essay for an exploration of the "power of ordering" (785)
represented with/in houses through Victorian housing reform movements
and ideologies of "the model home." She argues that "Beloved sets
itself up as a remodeling of Uncle Tom's Cabin that examines this
ideology and revises it in a way that avoids reification of a
patriarchal power structure" (787). Both texts, she suggests, "use and
remodel traces of slave history to create narratives that will also
remodel the ideologies that dominate the country's power structure. Yet
both novels remain haunted by the figures that represent that power"
(787- 88).
(6.) For readings of
Beloved as ghost, escaped African woman, and embodiment of the
collective history of slavery, see Bowers, Ferguson, Henderson, Hirsch,
Horvitz, Levy, Liscio, Mathieson, Rody, and Rushdy.
(7.) Characters' conflicting responses to Sethe's infanticide reflect
its complexity. Baby Suggs, in many ways the moral center of the novel,
can neither blame nor absolve Sethe. Henderson argues that Morrison
"neither condemns nor condones, but rather 'delivers'" (82) Sethe over
the course of the novel. Goldman suggests that Sethe's act asserts her
right to "desire her own daughter, despite the measure of the
slaveholder to deny this authority" by preventing black women "not only
from expressing a desire which would reinforce autonomous identity as
women but from also freely and fully exercising that desire which is
rooted in the subject-subject bond between mother and child" (319).
(8.) See, for example, Bowers, Rody, and Rushdy, along with Fields,
House, Rhodes, and Schapiro.
(9.) Some readers may feel that Beloved only appears pregnant and that
her appearance is meant only to illustrate her ability to diminish
Sethe, to eat "up her life, [take] it, [swell] up with it, [grow]
taller on it" (250). But given the text's insistence on her repeated
sex with Paul D and on the lost links between mothers and children
(more on this later), I believe that she is indeed pregnant. Note that
Beloved eats more than Sethe and Denver, developing a "basket-fat
stomach" (243), but even though she is "getting bigger," she "seem[s]
nevertheless as exhausted as they were" (242). The singing women who
come to exorcise Beloved see "a pregnant woman, naked and glistening in
the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunderblack and glistening, she stood
on long straight legs, her belly big and tight" (261).
(10.) Berger sees Beloved as an intervention into discourses around the
black family. He argues that the novel
opposes neoconservative and Reganist denials of race as a continuing,
traumatic, and structural problem in contemporary America but also
questions positions on the left that tend to deny the traumatic effect
of violence within African American communities. In emphasizing the
African American family as a site of violence--emanating both from a
racist society and from within the family--Beloved takes up debates
that emerged and then were stifled in the wake of the Moynihan report
of 1965. (408)
My thanks to Susan
Strehle for her helpful comments on an earlier draft. The ideas
informing my argument began to take shape in conversation with the late
Constance Coiner. I dedicate the essay that grew out of them to her
memory.
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