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"To be Loved and Cry
Shame": a psychological reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved
by Lynda Koolish
The struggle for psychic wholeness is a continuous one in Toni
Morrison's Beloved, a novel situated in slavery and its aftermath. It
is a process which requires access to painful memories; the characters
in the novel reintegrate, achieve "the join" so desperately wished for
in Beloved's soliloquy chapter, re-fuse, when they no longer refuse the
deepest knowledge of the meanings of their individual and historical
pasts. But much of the novel explores the extraordinarily anguishing
interlude of time during which virtually all the protagonists, not just
Sethe, exist almost as dreamwalkers in a state of dissociation and
denial as they remain determined to expend their psychic resources
keeping the past at bay. No longer able to endure the endless
succession of losses, faced with the death or disappearance of all
eight of her children (including Sethe's husband Halle), retaining as
her sole and astonishingly poignant memory of her first-born child,
Ardelia, the solitary knowledge of how much she loved the burned bottom
of bread, Sethe's mother-in-law, the great unchurched preacher, Baby
Suggs has a "sadness ... at her center, the desolated center where the
self that was no self made its home" (140). Eventually, she gives up
preaching and dies of grief, while Sethe's daughter Denver lives
psychically paralyzed inside her own mind. After Sethe acknowledges to
Denver the veracity of Nelson Lord's grisly re-telling of the story of
Sethe's murder of Denver's sister, Beloved, to keep her from being
returned to slavery, Denver takes on a synesthesiac version of
hysterical blindness: she becomes deaf, musing in her soliloquy
chapter: "Made me have to read faces and learn how to figure out what
people were thinking, so I didn't need to hear what they said" (206).
While maternal love is certainly one focus of the novel, the male
protagonists in this novel also struggle towards a definition of
appropriate loving within which they can survive. In the absence of
that stipulation, namely, survivability, Halle loves too much, and ends
up with his face in the butter; Sethe's companion and lover Paul D,
haunted by the consequences of what he sees as Halle's, and later,
Sethe's, "too thick love," is determined to love small and suffers
enormously for the consequences of his decision.
Sethe's consciousness, and the consciousness of Denver, Paul D, and the
twenty-year-old Beloved (the spectral and apparently embodied adult
presence of her murdered two-year-old daughter) are suffused with a
truncated, relentless, disrupted chronology common to persons so
severely abused that they suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder
(MPD) or disassociative states. Despite the fact that she was not
captured in Africa but rather born in America and therefore could have
no rational explanation for remembering in vivid detail her own ordeal
on a slave ship during Middle Passage, Beloved repeatedly returns to
memories of Middle Passage, the primal scene for sixty million
Africans, the slave ships on which captives suffered and died. (1)
Throughout the novel, Denver and Paul D frequently do not know if they
are dreaming or awake. Sleep and the comfort of Baby Suggs' nearness
protects Denver at night in 124, but during her waking hours, during
consciousness, she is almost unsure if she is alive, breathing, in her
own body. In Denver's soliloquy chapter, she muses, "I was safe at
night in there with [Baby Suggs]. All I could hear was me breathing but
sometimes in the day I couldn't tell whether it was me breathing or
somebody next to me" (207). And in an understated echo of the normal
response to profound deprivation, Paul D doesn't know if it is mud or
his own tears that are the moisture on his face: "Paul D thought he was
screaming; his mouth was open and there was this loud throat-splitting
sound--but it may have been somebody else" (110).
All four of these characters, and, to some extent, every black
character in the novel who believes he or she has seen Beloved (as well
as Bodwin, the one white character who also sees Beloved), experiences
Beloved either as a fractured aspect of Sethe's psyche or as a kind of
doppleganger for his or her own feelings of loss, grief, confusion, and
rage, and, in the case of Bodwin, feelings of accountability,
culpability, and guilt. The story not to be passed on, the story not
told in traditional slave narratives, is that of psychosis,
dissociation, of climbing out of one's body to forget "that anybody
white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not
just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you
couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you
were and couldn't think it up" (251).
This reading is not meant to exclude or even necessarily to contradict
other readings of who Beloved is. The question of the identity of the
mysterious young woman who appears on a stump not far from the house on
Bluestone Road is crucial to almost any reading of the novel. Yet Toni
Morrison herself has been explicit in encouraging her readers to arrive
at readings which may or may not coincide with those intended by the
author; in her essay "Unspeakable Things, Unspoken: The Afro-American
Presence in American Literature," Morrison makes the case for a reading
of Beloved consistent with what Holloway has called a "plurisignant"
(Holloway 618) text, one with "the concurrent presence of multiple as
well as ambiguous meanings" (Holloway 629):
These spaces, which I am filling in, and can fill in because they were
planned, can conceivably be filled in with other significances. That is
planned as well. The point is that into these spaces should fall the
ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or
misunderstood knowingness. The reader as narrator asks the questions the
community asks. (Morrison, "Unspeakable" 29)
The characters believe that Beloved is the ghost of the "crawling
already? baby," but Morrison makes the question of who Beloved is so
ambiguous that the characters as well as the readers are frequently
confused as to Beloved's identity. Most readers and critics of the
novel assume that Beloved is who Morrison herself has claimed she is.
When asked who summons the spirit, Morrison replies that Beloved "is a
spirit on one hand, literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her
child returned to her from the dead ... [S]he is also ... a survivor
from a true, actual slave ship," further explaining that Beloved could
be both one who returned from Middle Passage and the ghost of "the
crawling already? Baby" because "the language of both
experiences--death and Middle Passage--is the same" ("In the Realm"
5-6). Who Beloved is, fittingly, is not merely ambiguous but multiply
inscribed. Simultaneously, she represents many things, many people,
each of which is true. For Sethe, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Ella, and the
thirty women of the community who come to exorcise her, the adult
Beloved is a catalyst for healing who functions as a version of the
beautiful African woman wearing a canary yellow dress who spits on
Jadine in Tar Baby; she is a doppleganger, an alter ego, a shadow, a
darker and more authentic version of the self. Morrison describes the
African woman as the "original self--the self we betray when we lie,
the one that is always there. And whatever that self looks like ... one
measures one's self against it" ("An Interview" 422).
While none of the residents of 124 and the surrounding community appear
to welcome the precursor to the adult Beloved, the poltergeist-like
spirit of the murdered "crawling already? Baby" (except for Denver who
thinks of the ghost as a kind of playmate, a mischief-making ally who
among other things will assist her in preventing Paul D from displacing
her as the entire focus of her mother's attentions), the description
each character supplies about the spiteful two-year-old provides the
first major clue in the novel that the residents of 124 unconsciously
summon the disembodied spirit, and, later, the apparently incarnated
Beloved, in order to displace onto a shadow self the knowledge of
feelings too painful to otherwise allow to surface to consciousness.
Paul D's response to the ghost, which, as for the other characters,
reflects his own repressed emotions about the past, about his personal
history, is to inquire, "Good God ... what kind of evil you got in
here?" (8). His memories are so suffused with terror, humiliation, and
physical, sexual, and emotional violation that it is not surprising
that his response to something associated with his feelings about the
past, and his own capacity to remember as well as to feel, is simply to
condemn it as evil. Denver contradicts this description of the ghost
with a definition of her own, explaining that the ghost is, as she
experiences herself, "rebuked. Lonely and rebuked"(13). (2) And despite
the fact that Paul D tells Denver that Sethe has described the ghost as
"sad ... not evil," Sethe offers the final pronouncement on the ghost's
character by denying the ghost's loneliness, as she denies her own,
acknowledging instead only the anger that acts as an armor for the
sadness that lies beneath it: "I don't know about lonely.... Mad,
maybe" (13).
R.D. Laing and other
psychologists, particularly those who have written about Multiple
Personality Disorder (MPD), have described schizophrenia and other
mental illnesses as coping strategies, as the only "sane" response to a
world gone mad, as "a special strategy that a person invents in order
to live in an unlivable situation" (79). Morrison's world view in this
regard is not unlike Laing's: madness is not only not a sign of
weakness or failure, but it is an act of sanity, resistance, and
survival. (3) The meaning of characters in Beloved, whose lives have
been so devastated by the unspeakable abuse of slavery that they
exhibit clinical signs of MPD, is therefore not simply an indictment of
pain, but an acknowledgement of power, of African Americans leaping
generations and continents to claim self as other and other as self, a
black female vision of reciprocity and reincarnation. The characters in
Beloved not only take on ancestral pain, but their struggle for
individual wholeness becomes a struggle for ancestral healing. At the
moments during which characters bump up against one another's painful
rememories and experience one another's suffering, Morrison evokes not
only shared sorrow, but the possibility of tribal and ancestral healing
through the transformational healing of individual characters.
For healing to take place, dissociation must give way to the full
reclaiming of that wounded self, the reintegration of that denied self
as part of the core of one's being. Each character in Beloved goes
through a process by which he or she gains not only an awareness of
that shadow, but an introspective awareness of the psychological
origins of the split-off self. The shattering and reclaiming of memory
proceeds in similar ways for most of the central protagonists of the
novel. The memory of what has happened to them is pushed aside,
externalized, repressed, placed in a box, given over to someone else.
But where psychic disintegration has taken place, each character splits
into a "core self" and "alters," none of whom possess the others'
memories. Within each individual, there is no memory/knowledge that a
split has taken place.
Eventually,
in each of these characters, memory returns unbidden. Without choosing
consciously to be aware, Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Ella, and even Bodwin,
as dissociative persons, become gradually aware of at least one
alternate self in the person of Beloved. As evidence of the existence
of an alternate self or selves begins piling up, it becomes so
compelling that the characters have to acknowlege the existence of
these selves. In the process of rememorying, which in Beloved is
equivalent to the process of healing, each character begins to realize
who is doing what, which psyche is in effect "up at bat." To achieve
psychic wholeness, each character must come to accept his or her
memories. When each begins to remember and acknowledge their alter
selves as part of their core self, they reintegrate.
The theme of the splitting self is a familiar one in Morrison, all of
whose novels to some extent explore the split within the individual
caused by the juxtaposition of a self-definition and that grotesque
parody of human status by which perpetrators of slavery, racism, and
sexual violence have attempted to define African Americans. As Morrison
herself insists, "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" ("Unspeakable" 16). Morrison
observes that Pecola, the protagonist of her first novel, The Bluest
Eye, "is not seen by herself until she hallucinates a self"
("Unspeakable" 22). In this regard, she serves as a prototype for Sethe
and other characters in Beloved, who also remain invisible to
themselves until each of them hallucinates a kind of alter self in the
form of the young woman who, calling herself Beloved, appears on
Sethe's doorstep. Pecola's hallucinated self appears only after
Cholly's second rape of his daughter and offers to Pecola an explicit
explanation for her sudden emergence in Pecola's life and thus in the
novel; she tells Pecola that she didn't come before because "you didn't
need me before" (152), an explanation that also sets the stage for the
reader to understand Beloved's appearance as a self or alter initially
willed by Sethe and then gradually taken on by many members of the
community within and beyond the confines of 124. (4)
The willing of necessary spirits in Beloved is prefigured in Sethe's
description of Denver as "a charmed child" (41) who, while in the womb,
sensing that Sethe would die without help, wills the appearance of Amy
Denver, literally "pull[s] a whitegirl out of the hill" to act as
midwife and healer for her mother (42). Beloved, the willed self, is
needed not only by Denver to conquer her fear of being abandoned (or
murdered) by Sethe and her fear of stepping off the edge of 124, but
needed by Sethe to resolve her guilt over the murder of her daughter,
and by Paul D to unlock his heart. Beloved is all the characters'
unspeakable thoughts, unspoken.
That Beloved exists as the repository of unresolved feelings is
suggested by the fact that Stamp Paid confirms that initially Beloved
is seen only by Sethe, Denver, Paul D, and himself, each of whom has an
enormous burden of guilt, shame, sadness, and fear. When Paul D tells
Stamp that he doesn't know where Beloved comes from, Stamp tellingly
reveals Beloved's mercurial visibility: "Huh. Look like you and me the
only ones outside 124 lay eyes on her" (234). When Paul D asks Denver
about the identity of Beloved, "you think she sure `nough your sister?"
Denver responds, "at times. At times I think she was--more" (266).
Finally, Paul D. asks the crucial question at the center of my
contention about the novel: "but what if the girl was not a girl, but
something in disguise?" (127).
Beloved
The character Beloved provides the most complicated challenge to an
attempt to theorize her as a dissociative double for characters in the
novel who have suffered greatly under slavery, for she also appears in
the novel as a character in her own right, a character who wrestles
with her own demons. The novel's four soliloquy chapters (200-204,
205-209, 210-213, and 214-217), spoken sequentially in the dissociative
voices of Sethe, Denver, Beloved, and a merged chapter containing both
Beloved and Denver's voices, summon the most agonized memories of each
of the characters as they journey through their actual and ancestral
pasts, as each attempts to claim Beloved as a part of themselves, as
each names her "mine."
Both
Beloved and Sethe are on the slave ship, dying of thirst, so hungry
that paradoxically they cannot eat the bits of rotting sea-green bread
that are proffered them. Some of the captive Africans die and are
pushed into the sea; others jump. Under unspeakable conditions, a
disassociative split takes place, and each person splits off into all
those whom they have loved and splits off pieces of themselves as well:
the heart Baby Suggs commands them to love may disappear into a tobacco
tin; one's face becomes not one's face. Willing oneself to
forgetfulness, to amnesia, to numbness, one's self feels lost forever.
Beloved's soliloquy includes a nightmare exploration of the sexual
assault of children, a subject almost entirely silenced during the
original narratives, yet allusively present in the work of writers like
Harriet Jacobs, whose Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl provides
many clues that the interstices in such texts are as important as that
which is written explicitly. (5) The speaker in this chapter of Beloved
who cannot differentiate her face from another's, who repeatedly
murmurs "I am not dead ... I see her face which is mine ... she is my
face smiling at me," breaks into pieces, splits off, dissociates,
becomes a nineteenth-century African American Sybil, a multiple
personality whose childhood is maimed by the man who sexually enters
her, who "puts his finger there," who "hurts where [she] sleep[s]"
(212). The place where Beloved sleeps is both a geographic and a
psychic location: literally the physical place in which she lies down,
but also the site of her body itself, her vagina, her vulva, her
clitoris, the place in which her innocence sleeps, the place in which
she is still unawakened sexually. This reading is confirmed by the
reappearance of this image in an even more explicit passage: "[Beloved]
said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her.
That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in
her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light" (241). Beloved
rememories, merges with and becomes, all the unnamed African women and
girls during Middle Passage who, raped by their captors, are called
"beloved" at night and "bitch" in the morning.
The dead man who sleeps on Beloved's face is an emblem of those who
literally have died in the holds of the ships during Middle Passage,
ships packed so tightly that the bodies of the dead frequently
obstructed the breath and movement of the living. In addition, each
captive also has a "dead man" sleeping on his or her face: the ghost of
one's self, a self which has been strip-mined of vitality, dignity,
humanity, of life itself. Denied the right to keep her own body
inviolate, Beloved breaks into pieces, shatters into a core self and
alters:
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 ... the girl who
waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts. (274-75)
Beloved is repeatedly described as fragmented, split off, shattered;
unlike Sethe, Beloved has knowledge of the splitting self, which
Morrison indicates when the narrator in the novel observes that "among
the things [Beloved] could not remember was when she first knew that
she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces" (133). In fact,
all the African American girls and women in the novel are versions of
Beloved, and finally, so too are the men. Beloved serves as a
wrenched-open version of himself for Paul D and as the exposer of his
less virtuous impulses to Stamp Paid. Despite the richly ambiguous
suggestions about who Beloved is, Morrison is explicit in describing
Beloved as a projection of the thoughts and feelings of every character
who actually sees her:
After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw
her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her. It took
longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with
her, to forget, until they realized they couldn't remember or repeat a
single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they
themselves were thinking, she hadn't said anything at all. So, in the end,
they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. (274)
It is for this reason that Beloved's given name, although referred to
explicitly by Denver, is never revealed in the novel: Beloved is
everyone's Beloved. (6) Beloved's lack of name signifies that she is
everybody, the powerfully loved baby, while it simultaneously suggests
a figure of absence, loss, and powerlessness. Sethe
Morrison has borrowed from a traditional African religious belief to
suggest that one person can appear in another's guise: thus the
murdered "crawling already? Baby" is in the body of the twenty-year-old
woman who appears at the stump. Yet if it is not a conflict for Beloved
to appear in the body of a stranger, it would seem even less of a
conflict to imagine Beloved as reappearing in the body of the one
person who mourns her loss most: Sethe. (7)
Beloved is the part of Sethe whose job it is to be a witness to her own
pain, to ancestral pain, to Middle Passage. Beloved as Sethe, whose
name alludes to the Biblical Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, the
"appointed" or "granted" or "subsituted" son who replaces the murdered
Abel, replaces the lost, the dispossessed, the murdered others who died
during slavery, Middle Passage, and beyond. (8) She is also the
subsituted self, the one who, in order for the child to survive, as a
double or alter replaces the wounded child and takes on all of the
child's vulnerability, pain, and traumatic experiences, especially the
experiences of sexual and physical abuse.
Sethe's fanatical preservation of her children, a love so possessive
that Baby Suggs "beg[s] God's pardon" for it, is also Sethe's attempt
to keep a part of herself unsullied (203). Beloved as a double thus
becomes not only the child who takes on the abuse, but the child who
was never abused, who never witnessed the "headless, feetless torso"
(250) of the remains of a lynching, who never worked the slaughterhouse
yard as a prostitute: "The best thing [Sethe] was, was her children.
Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her
beautiful, magical best thing--the part of her that was clean" (250).
Earlier, Sethe hints at a connection between her own experience of
sexual abuse and her fear that she would end up a prostitute, not
entirely surprising given that childhood sexual abuse (especially
incest) is the most frequently cited causal factor in studies of both
MPD and prostitution: "I got close. I got close. To being a Saturday
girl. I had already worked a stone mason's shop. A step to the
slaughterhouse would have been a short one" (203-204).
It is not only the ten minutes that "were longer than life" which Sethe
spends with her "knees wide open as any grave," enduring the cemetery
engraver's violation of her body in order to provide her daughter with
that among the most precious of all African American possessions: a
name and therefore an identity, (9) which causes Sethe to fear becoming
so numb that prostitution becomes a possible livelihood (5). If we
accept Beloved as Sethe's double, then Beloved's explicit accusations
of childhood sexual abuse suggest that this devastation is one that
Sethe, too, endured under slavery. The ten-minute exchange with the
engraver may well be one which triggers a much earlier memory of sexual
violation. In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken," Morrison provides a clue
to this possibility; she echoes in the essay lines from the novel
Beloved to reveal that in her first novel, The Bluest Eye, sexual
violence, the rape of Pecola by her father, is the secret, the silence,
which is "an unspeakable thing, spoken at last" (220).
In Sethe, Morrison has created a character who reproduces in
extraordinary fidelity a clinical pattern of someone experiencing MPD.
Like survivors of the Holocaust, veterans of the war in Vietnam, and
political refugees from countries like Chile, El Salvador, Uruguay, or
Uganda, which have practiced systematic torture on civilian and
military populations alike, Sethe's emotional state also echoes in
almost textbook fashion the syndrome known as Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD), not surprising given that Sethe's creator once
described slavery as akin to "two hundred years of World War II"
(Bragg). In PTSD, symptoms include "recurrent and intrusive
recollections about the traumatic events, dissociative episodes,
intense distress when exposed to events that resemble or symbolize the
traumatic event, inability to recall important aspects of the trauma,
restricted range of affect, hypervigilance [and] feelings of detachment
or estrangement from others," all symptoms also frequently present in
persons with MPD. (10)
It is Paul
D who most clearly observes the nature of Sethe's splitting self. In
contemporary critical terminology, Paul D is a good reader of facial
texts; his repeated refrain, "THAT AIN'T her mouth" when confronted
with Stamp Paid's newspaper clipping of a drawing of Sethe after the
murder of her "crawling already?" baby reveals a stunning truth, not a
willful denial. (11) For Sethe to initiate the act of murdering her
child, she must summon someone else to do it, and that someone is
another self, an alter, someone whom Paul D has never seen.
Paul D's earlier arrival at 124 sets the stage for the reader's
discovery of Sethe's splitting self. While Sethe's controlling
consciousness appears to welcome the arrival of Paul D, the fractured
aspect of Sethe, which manifests itself initially as the ghost and
later as Beloved, opposes Paul D's arrival because his presence will
enable Sethe to imagine a future without experiencing the necessity of
exploring the anguish of the past. That is why the spirit intrudes on
Sethe and Paul D's lovemaking, and then reappears in the guise of a
"helpless coloredgirl" whom Paul D would not be heartless enough to
cast out into the dangerous Klan-infected Ohio countryside (66). Paul D
could and did chase the dematerialized "crawling already.9" baby's
spirit out of the house, but he is too compassionate to similarly chase
out what appears to be a flesh-and-blood woman whom the residents of
124 believe to be an adult incarnation of that spirit. It is the
presence of that spirit in the guise of Sethe's returned adult daughter
which is necessary in order for Sethe to confront her past. In
Beloved's soliloquy when she insists "I am not dead," Morrison suggests
not only that the part of Sethe whom Sethe keeps trying to murder, the
past, is not dead, must not die, must not be forgotten or sealed off,
but she also indicates that the passage also obliquely functions as a
way for Beloved to reveal to Sethe that she is in fact a part of Sethe
and is not the returned dead daughter (213).
There are numerous clues that Morrison scatters throughout the text
that yield this alternative reading, that rather than the incarnated
adult version of the dead baby's ghost, Beloved is literally an aspect
of Sethe. For instance, in the opening lines of the novel, the reader
is told of a house that is haunted, a house that is "full of a baby's
venom," yet it is Sethe, not Beloved, who is later described as a
poisonous snake: "down in the grass, like the snake she believed she
was, Sethe opened her mouth, and instead of fangs and a split tongue,
out shot the truth" (17). While fleeing Sweet Home, poised to strike an
intruder who turns out to be Amy Denver, Sethe also specifically refers
to herself as "like a snake. All jaws and hungry" (31). The symbolism
here is not accidental. Beloved's arrival heralds Sethe's rebirth; the
snake in classical mythology is an agent of rebirth (See Henderson and
Oakes). (12) Beloved is that serpent aspect of Sethe who is magical,
dangerous but necessary, and potentially healing; she is taboo:
"forbidden but unconsciously willed" (Otten 158). (13)
In Sethe's soliloquy chapter, Morrison hints of the absence of
boundaries, of an absolute psychic merger between Beloved and Sethe,
when Sethe muses about why Baby Suggs "pondered color" during her last
years:
Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had
time to see, let alone enjoy it before. Took her a long time to finish with
blue, then yellow, then green. She was well into pink when she died. I
don't believe she wanted to get to red and I understand why because me and
Beloved outdid ourselves with it. Matter of fact, that and her pinkish
headstone was the last color I recall. (201)
Sethe's anguished, desperate wish for Beloved to understand and forgive
the one act for which she herself cannot imagine granting absolution,
leads Sethe to imply Beloved's complicity in the blood-soaked scene in
which Sethe, and Sethe only, outdoes herself with red. Sethe attaches
onto the two-year-old Beloved active participation in Sethe's singular
act, the act which ends Beloved's life, for the red that Sethe and
Beloved allegedly outdo themselves with is the baby blood that "soaked
[Sethe's] fingers like oil" (5) as Sethe's handsaw slashes Beloved's
throat. Other clues to Beloved as a double for Sethe include Beloved's
incredible thirst and her alleged pregnancy, both of which are
prefigured by Sethe. When Sethe is found by Stamp Paid within hours of
Denver's birth, Stamp gives her some smoking hot eel, but thirst
overtakes her, she refuses the food, and instead "She begged him for
water and he gave her some of the Ohio in a jar. Sethe drank it all and
begged more" (90), an act mirrored by Beloved, who, on arriving at 124,
"gulped water from a speckled tin cup and held it out for more" (51).
Similarly, when Toni Morrison responds to interviewer Marsha Jean
Darling's question, "How is Beloved pregnant?", with the answer, "Paul
D," and suggests that this is possible because "ghosts or spirits are
real" ("In the Realm" 6), we as readers should remember that it is
Sethe whom Paul D asks to have a child with him, not Beloved. Beloved's
pregnancy is actual or literal (if it isn't in fact metaphorical, like
the false pregnancy of Alice Walker's character Harpo in The Color
Purple who eats because he is trying to get as big as Sofia) because as
an aspect of Sethe, and perhaps only as an aspect of Sethe, Beloved has
been lovers with Paul D.
Pregnancy
serves as an almost perfect metaphor for the psychic metaphor of
multiple personality, for a pregnant woman carries not self and other,
but self and an other which is in fact experienced as an aspect of self
within her own body. As Kristeva suggests:
Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of
the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the
self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and
speech. This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a
fantasy of totality.... The arrival of the child ... leads the mother into
the labyrinths of an experience that, without the child, she would rarely
encounter: love for an other ... the slow, difficult, and delightful
apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. (31) (14)
While pregnancy thus creates for many women the illusion of an
undifferentiated and relatively unconflicted fusion between mother and
child, slavery makes impossible both in pregnancy and in its aftermath,
the ideal experience of mothering, the "slow, difficult, and delightful
apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself." The
fugitive Sethe, pregnant with Denver, and carrying Beloved on her
already brutally latticed back, defines her experience of maternity as
one of a splitting self: "Beloved asleep on my back. Denver sleep in my
stomach. Felt like I was split in two" (202). Sethe's split psyche is a
function not just of her ruptured motherbond with her daughter Beloved,
but with her own ma'am. Sethe's imagined dialogue with the adult
Beloved fuses Beloved's childhood memories and fears with her own:
Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her
reasons [for fleeing Sweet Home without Beloved at her side]: that Beloved
was more important, meant more to her than her own life. That she would
trade places any day. Give up her life, every minute and hour of it, to
take back just one of Beloved's tears. Did she know it hurt her when
mosquitoes bit her baby? That to leave her on the ground to run into the
big house drove her crazy? That before leaving Sweet Home Beloved slept
every night on her chest or curled on her back? Beloved denied it. Sethe
never came to her, never said a word to her, never smiled and worst of all
never waved goodbye or even looked her way before running away from her.
(241-42)
Surely, if Sethe were accurately responding to Beloved's emotions,
Beloved's censure, fear, anger, and sense of betrayal over Sethe's
killing her would have more cathexis for Beloved than her feelings of
abandonment; it is Sethe's own overwhelming memories of abandonment
which she projects as Beloved's. Sethe's mother labored in the fields
and had no choice but to allow her daughter to be wet-nursed by Nan,
the one-armed slave who functions as a surrogate mother for Sethe.
Denied her mother's succor when she was alive, Sethe lives with an even
greater deprivation when her mother is hanged: not only the absolute
loss of her mother's continuing concern and love, but the terrible
knowledge of her mother's apparently deliberate choice to leave Sethe
behind. Sethe's determination to beat back the past is not simply an
attempt to deny her knowledge of Beloved's murder but also her
knowledge of maternal abandonment and the loss of maternal love.
[Sethe] had to do something with her hands because she was remembering
something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had
seeped into a slit in her mind right behind the slap on her face and the
circled cross. "Why they hang your ma'am?" Denver asked. (61)
Sethe is haunted by the knowledge that her mother was hanged. Since the
usual reason in the plantation owner's mind for destroying such a
valuable piece of property was to serve as a warning and a deterrent
for others tempted to run away, Sethe may safely assume that her ma'am
was hanged for running away. But if her ma'am ran, then at least on
some level, she chose to leave Sethe behind, to abandon her, a
possibility the adult Sethe only allows herself to ponder when Beloved
returns: "Because she was my ma'am and nobody's ma'am would run off and
leave her daughter, would she? Would she, now?" (203). Sethe wills or
hallucinates Beloved's return because she associates the chance to be a
mother with the longed for opportunity to be ma'am's child. Sethe's
wish is not merely to gain absolution from Beloved but to re-experience
herself as a cared-for child, to be mothered herself. Until Sethe can
confront the neediness of her maternal love, the degree to which it
borders on the pathological, Beloved's love as a projection of her own
need will remain rapacious, not reciprocal; Beloved's ravenousness is a
parody of Sethe's own possessive love.
Sethe's splitting self emerges not just in her own soliloquy chapter
but in the first of Beloved's two soliloquy or stream-of-consciousness
chapters; the speaker's voice seems to be Beloved's but it also echoes
many of Sethe's thoughts. In this chapter, differentiated characters
merge historically, spiritually, and psychologically. There is a
constant alchemy, an exchange in which Sethe and Beloved collide with
one another's memories. The chapter is suffused with images of maternal
abandonment and its corollary consequence, dissociation. Beloved
re-experiences ancestral/Middle Passage abandonment when Sethe kills
her to keep her from being destroyed by slavery, just as an important
source of Sethe's dissociation is her experience of abandonment by her
own ma'am who is hanged for running away.
The she who "is going to" (212) do something so unspeakable that it is
not named, the one who is not pushed but who, in one last defiant
gesture of autonomy, goes in, the mother who abandons her child by
leaping into the ocean on the slave ship, is a mirrored image of Sethe
who, believing that she is not her own best self and that she does not
possess a self worth saving, takes a handsaw to her beloved child
instead of herself. That the suicidal "she" of this passage is a
doppleganger of Sethe is confirmed by the references to Sethe's
"diamonds," her earrings, the totem jewels which are all that is left
of Sethe's marriage to Halle. The "hot thing" which brands Sethe,
Sethe's ma'am, and Beloved disrupts chronology and consciousness here,
threatening not to cauterize but to sear. (15)
For much of the novel, Sethe is in high denial about the meaning of
Beloved's identity. At one point, apparently denying any personal
relationship to Beloved, she refers to her simply as "Denver's friend"
(173). Yet Sethe tacitly acknowledges in her soliloquy chapter that
Beloved does function for her as a kind of alter or other who witnesses
her tragedies, who takes on her pain, announcing, "my girl come home.
Now I can look at things again because she's here to see them too"
(201). Whether Beloved is a projection of Sethe's imagination or an
embodied twenty-year-old, her appearance as Sethe's daughter enables
Sethe to minister to the lost daughter within herself as she reassures
and comforts Beloved: "You came right on back like a good girl, like a
daughter which is what I wanted to be and would have been if my ma'am
had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her
and let me be one" (203).
Beloved's reappearance in the novel as a double or alter for Sethe
enables her to break through the icy numbness within her, expressed in
the novel through images of snow, cold, thaw, and melting, images
associated with Denver, Beloved, and Paul D, as well as with Sethe.
(16) As she returns repeatedly to the most terrible moments of her
entire existence, to incidents of overwhelming pain, Sethe is able
finally to come to terms with them, to experience them as having
happened to her, and thus finally to begin to be free of the hold they
have had on her while she remained in denial.
Ironically, the clearest indication Morrison provides about Sethe's
healing and reintegration comes in the form of her seemingly irrational
attack on Bodwin. The first time Schoolteacher, a white man, comes into
her yard, Sethe commits self-murder; she kills a part of herself by
killing her child. But some eighteen years later, when Bodwin appears
in her yard on his horse-drawn cart--a dead ringer, in Sethe's eyes,
for Schoolteacher--she attacks him, claiming for herself a kind of
wholeness by attacking, instead of a part of her self, a white man,
emblem of the original threat. And Edward Bodwin is revealed to be an
appropriate candidate for Sethe's rage for more than skin color alone:
even the kindly Bodwins, the antislavery Bodwins, who procured 124 for
Baby Suggs and Sethe, of whom their servant Janey says "I wouldn't
trade them for another pair" [of white people], surely a backhanded
compliment, are revealed to be racists, the possessors of a grinning
icon straight out of the film Ethnic Notions: "Denver left [Bodwin's
house] but not before she had seen, sitting on a shelf by the back
door, a blackboy's mouth full of money.... And he was on his knees....
Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words `At Yo Service'"
(255).
The scene in which Sethe
attacks Bodwin is especially significant because so much of African
American literature explores how legitimate rage is choked off and
displaced. Consider, for example, Bigger Thomas's murder of his lover,
Bessie Mears, in Richard Wright's Native Son or the ten young black
antagonists swathed in white blindfolds in the "Battle Royal" scene in
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, bloodying one another instead of the
sadistic white men who have arranged the afternoon's "entertainment."
In Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, Cholly is unable to protect
Darlene from the white men who transform the young couple's lovemaking
into a violation, and so he turns his anger on her; similarly, in Alice
Walker' s The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Brownfield spews out a
spigot of hatred onto the one woman who truly loved him and whom he
once truly loved, his wife Mem.
But in Beloved, Morrison uses repetition to offer the possibility of
healing. Sethe's compulsive cinematic rememorying of the theft of her
breast milk is coupled with a second compulsive return to a primal
scene, her failure to attack schoolteacher and the murder of her
"crawling already? baby." In this case, she has a chance to play out
the scene with a completely different outcome. When she attacks Bodwin,
the present and the past fuse, as Sethe floats psychically,
geographically, and temporally between these two events. Sethe
figuratively returns to the murder of Beloved and erases from her life
some of the overwhelming impact of that action, giving herself a chance
to reintegrate her profoundly fractured psyche. It is almost as if
there is no longer a fleshmemory of her murder of her child.
Intellectually Sethe knows it happened, but the memory of it functions
like a demagnetized tape recording; traces of the recording remain
perhaps, but they can no longer play themselves out at anything like
original volume. (17)
Denver
Denver's psychological disintegration originates not just in her willed
deafness to the news of Sethe's murder of Beloved nor in the isolating
shunning of 124 by the townspeople, but in Denver's fear that Beloved
will not be the only sacrifice to Sethe's handsaw. Denver's waking life
as well as her dream life is punctuated with a recurring nightmare,
experienced by Denver as fact, and therefore reported to the reader as
fact:
She cut my head off every night. Buglar and Howard told me she would and
she did.... She looks over at Buglar and Howard--see if they all right.
Then she comes over to my side. I know she'll be good at it, careful. That
when she cuts it off it'll be done right; it won't hurt. After she does it
I lie there for a minute with just my head. Then she carries it downstairs
to braid my hair. I try not to cry but it hurts so much to comb it.... The
scary part is waiting for her to come in and do it. Not when she does it,
but when I wait for her to. (206)
Denver attempts to displace her loneliness and her fear of her mother
with silenced rage and thus finds herself "long[ing] for a sign of
spite from the baby ghost" (12). After two years of hearing nothing at
all, Denver's hearing returns when she hears "close thunder crawling up
the stairs" (103), the imagined sound of the baby ghost's footsteps.
Denver is returned to hearing when she acknowledges the self she has
silenced, the shadow self who has knowledge of her mother's violent
act. With Beloved's arrival as a potentially even more spiteful
presence than the ghost, Denver is released to acknowledge her rage at
spending her infancy in a dank jail cell, at spending her childhood
afraid that Sethe would take a handsaw to her too, and at the
community's rejection of the family. Denver inhales Beloved, breathes
her in, loves her in a way that she has never allowed herself to love
her mother; Beloved's return is the antidote to Denver's "original
hunger," the period in her life in which she is cut off from Lady
Jones' schoolroom and the world outside 124 after Nelson Lord tells her
what her mother has done:
For anything is better than the original hunger--the time when, after a
year of the wonderful little i sentences rolling out like pie dough and the
company of other children, there was no sound coming through. Anything is
better than the silence when she answered to hands gesturing and was
indifferent to the movement of lips. When she saw every little thing and
colors leaped smoldering into view. She will forgo the most violent of
sunsets, stars as fat as dinner plates and all the blood of autumn and
settle for the palest yellow if it comes from her Beloved. (121)
Denver's terror in the cold house at the idea of losing Beloved again
strongly suggests that Beloved functions as a double for Denver, that
for Denver to lose Beloved is literally not just to lose a much loved
sister but to lose her own physical, actual self:
Beloved is not there. There is no point in looking further, for everything
in the place can be seen at first sight. Denver looks [for Beloved] anyway
because the loss is ungovernable.... If she stumbles, she is not aware of
it because she does not know where her body stops, which part of her is an
arm, a foot or a knee. She feels like an ice cake torn away from the solid
surface of the stream, floating on darkness, thick and crashing against the
edges of things around it. Breakable, meltable and cold.... This is worse
than when Paul D came to 124 and she cried helplessly into the stove. This
is worse. Then it was for herself. Now she is crying because she has no
self. Death is a skipped meal compared to this. (122-23)
Despite the chaos Beloved brings, Beloved's arrival finally frees
Denver to have compassion for Sethe. In telling the story of her
harrowing birth to Beloved, Denver tells it to herself and experiences
her first real feelings of empathy. She begins to imagine what Sethe
must have felt, feared, experienced. She imagines Sethe not as an
all-powerful figure who has claimed the right of Jehovah in choosing
who shall live and who shall die, but as a terrified pregnant young
woman who attempted, against all odds, to protect her family:
Now, watching Beloved's alert and hungry face, how she took in every word,
asking questions about the color of things and their size, her downright
craving to know, Denver began to see what she was saying and not just to
hear it: there is this nineteen-year-old slave girl--a year older than
herself--walking through the dark woods to get to her children who are far
away. She is tired, scared maybe, and maybe even lost. Most of all she is
by herself and inside her is another baby she has to think about too.
Behind her dogs, perhaps; guns probably; and certainly mossy teeth. She is
not so afraid at night because she is the color of it, but in the day every
sound is a shot or a tracker's quiet step.
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it--through Beloved. Feeling how it
must have felt to her mother. (77-78)
Beloved, initially willed by Denver as a potential agent of revenge,
becomes an agent instead of forgiveness and healing. Paul D
Beloved is associated throughout the novel with water and other
liquids: urine, sweat, amniotic fluid, the salt water both of Middle
Passage and of tears, the salt water that rusts iron and creates the
flakes of rust that fall away from Paul D's tobacco tin heart when he
makes love to Beloved and his tinned heart opens up. She is the drowned
self, the wounded child of the men in this novel, as well as the women.
(18)
Tense and distanced, complex
and difficult, passionate and deeply tender, sexuality between Paul D
and Sethe ignites in each of them an awareness both of the splitting
self and of the possibility of healing. It is the function of Beloved,
as an aspect of Sethe, to provide healing in this novel, which explains
the seeming betrayal of Paul D when he has sex with Beloved as well as
Sethe. Although there are many points in the novel which seem to
clearly suggest that Paul D literally has sex with the twenty-year-old
Beloved, it is my belief that the compulsive and confused lovemaking
between these two characters is really a veiled suggestion of Paul D's
disorienting experience of making love with Sethe as she floats in and
out of more than one personality. Only the wild, tormented, profoundly
feeling aspect of Sethe that is Beloved can provide Paul D access to
his own past: "She reminds me of something. Something, look like, I'm
supposed to remember" (234). Knowledge of the past and of his separate
selves shatters not only Paul D's consciousness, but opens up the
rusted-shut seams of his tobacco tin, allowing his red red heart to
emerge (14). The something Paul D is reminded of is the self whom he
has suppressed, the self who is unafraid to love big. (10)
This reading is at least partially confirmed by the fact that in the
most sexually explicit passage about Paul D and Beloved, it is clear
that rather than making love to Beloved, Paul D is dreaming that he is
having sex with Beloved.
"Call 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. Softly and then so loud it woke Denver, then Paul D
himself. "Red heart. Red heart. Red heart." (117)
As Paul D dreams he is making love to Beloved, his heart is opened up;
he is awakened not only from a literal dream but from a waking
nightmare, a prolonged period of dreamwalking, of dissociation.
Mirroring Sethe's revulsion at schoolteacher's attempts to describe her
"animal" characteristics, sex with Beloved arouses Paul D's most
terrifying fear: being made into an animal, into something smaller and
more unmanned than a rooster. Initially, Beloved is Paul D's nightmare,
a projected other who serves as a confirmation of his worst sense of
himself; believing Beloved to be the adult incarnation of Sethe's
murdered daughter, he nevertheless seems unable to control his sexual
desire for her, and thus sees himself as bestial, deformed, "beached
and gobbling" (264).
Paul D may be
shamed, but he is "thankful too for having been escorted to some
ocean-deep place he once belonged to" (264). The dream reveals a
healing which has taken place within Paul D's consciousness. The
"inside part" that he enters in this dream is not Beloved's body, and
possibly not Sethe's either, but the feeling part of himself. For
Beloved is not only an aspect of Sethe but a fractured aspect of Paul D
as well. He touches himself, his own inside part, when he touches her.
When Beloved apparently breaks her promise to go if Paul D will call
her name, perhaps she does not go because the name Paul D calls her,
"Beloved," is not her only name; her name is also Sethe--and Paul D, an
identity suggested by the passage in which Morrison observes of Beloved
that "SHE MOVED HIM ... and Paul D didn't know how to stop it because
it looked like he was moving himself" (114).
One final piece of evidence that suggests that Beloved does indeed
function as an alter in the novel is that as Sethe and other characters
begin to reintegrate through the healing process of "rememorying,"
Beloved transforms from someone loving to someone destructive. An
explanation exists for this in the current theoretical perspectives
about MPD. If Sethe reintegrates, and absorbs Beloved into her core
self, Beloved will cease to exist as a separate entity. As Beloved
ceases to exist as a projection of other characters' interior lives, as
she becomes an integrated part of each character's life, she is in
effect metaphorically at risk to be killed again and, fighting for her
life as a separate being, she unconsciously wishes to destroy those who
would "destroy" her. Since the integrated self is by definition the end
of the alter self or selves, Beloved loved disappears at the novel's
end, evidence of the profound healing achieved by each of the
protagonists and also of the promise of the healing that Baby Suggs
calls on all African Americans to claim as their own: "More than lungs
that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and
your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this
is the prize" (89).
Notes
This essay is for Tex, who helped facilitate my apprehension of the
meanings of Multiple Personality Disorder.
(1.) See Clemons, who defines the allusion to sixty million as "the
best educated guess at the number of black Africans who never made it
into slavery--those who died either as captives in Africa or on the
slave ships" (75).
(2.) Mobley
notes that "the obsolete meaning of the word rebuked--repressed-not
only suggests that the ghost represents repressed memory, but that, as
with anything that is repressed, it eventually resurfaces or returns in
one form or another" (195).
(3.)
In Sula, Morrison's second novel, the townspeople of the Bottom accept,
and in their own way, respect, the peculiar behavior of the
shell-shocked World War II veteran Shadrack; they "knew Shadrack was
crazy but that did not mean that he didn't have any sense or, even more
important, that he had no power" (15).
(4.) In The Bluest Eye, Pecola prays to God to make her disappear when
her parents are fighting (39), a wish that prefigures Beloved's
transtemporal memory of the agonized withdrawal and dissociation of the
captives during Middle Passage who "are all trying to leave [their]
bodies" (210).
(5.) "I was
subjected to such insults as no pen can describe. I would not describe
them if I could; they were too low, too revolting" (Jacobs 77). In
"Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," Morrison suggests that in her
own work "what is left out is as important as what is there" (341).
(6.) See Denver's revealing acknowledgement of Beloved's given name:
"Look like I was the only one who knew right away who it was. Just like
when she came back I knew who she was too. Not right away, but soon as
she spelled her name--not her given name, but the one Ma'am paid the
stonecutter for--I knew" (208).
(7.) Berry and Blassingame have explored the prominent role that ghosts
play in African cosmology and religious beliefs, and their discussion
offers valuable insight on the spiritual and psychological function of
Beloved as a ghost:
Viewed as the indwelling spirit or soul of a man which departs his body on
his death, the ghosts retain an interest in the affairs of the living and
punish or frighten them for misdeeds, aid descendants, remain in the
vicinity of their graves, and sometimes inhabit the body of newly born
infants. The African's belief in ghosts is part of the process of honoring
ancestors and functions to preserve social order. Many features of African
cosmology regarding ghosts were retained in the Americas.... The main
function of the ghost in the quarters was, as in Africa, to engender
respect for the dead. The slaves universally believed, according to many
nineteenth-century observers, that if the living neglect in any way their
duty to the dead, they may be haunted by them. (247-48)
Christian (whose main source in her essay is John Mbiti) has also
suggested the usefulness of approaching Beloved "from an African
perspective" (11). (8.) See Genesis 4:25: "God has appointed me another
offspring in place of Abel for Cain killed him."
I would like to acknowledge with a great deal of pleasure the work of
one of my undergraduate students, Kathyrn Martin, whose interest in
Biblical images and allusions in Beloved provoked me to think about the
ways in which Biblical allusions might be relevant to an exploration of
the psychological themes I am exploring in the novel. Her essay
provides a wonderful alternate reading to the meaning of Sethe's name:
"Replacement is ... suggested in that Seth replaced Abel, who was
murdered by Cain. In her rebellion against Schoolteacher and the
Fugitive Slave Law, Sethe refuses to allow her children to bear the
`mark of Cain,' the scriptural misinterpretation which allowed the
whiteman to rationalize slavery. Instead, she subsitutes herself,
defiant and strong, for the women who were forced to submit to the
masters, and who watched their children being led away, sold, or
destroyed. Morrison's use of the name, and the image, of Seth
emphasizes Sethe's power and strength; she has been created for
freedom, humanity, and motherhood, and will allow nothing to destroy
that appointment."
(9.) "If you
come from Africa, your name is gone. It is particularly problematic
because it is not just your name but your family, your tribe. When you
die, how can you connect with your ancestors if you have lost your
name? That's a huge psychological scar" (Morrison, "Language" 28).
(10.) Chilean political activist and theorist Pat Cofre, board member
of Amnesty International, personal communication, San Diego, April
1992.
(11.) My thanks to Professor
Frances Smith Foster, who, in response to a considerably earlier draft
of this paper, made the observation that Paul D was a good reader of
facial texts. Personal communication, March, 1991, San Diego,
California.
(12.) Note also that
snakes are important to voodoo. A snake and a person may be bound
together as if they have only one soul. See Hyatt.
(13.) The image of Sethe as a snake, and the multiple metaphors of
shadow selves are also interesting in terms of thinking of the novel
Beloved as a kind of progression from Tar Baby. Otten's description of
Son as "a shadow figure of each character's undiscovered self' (156)
serves as well as an apt depiction of the function of Beloved,
especially so in his further description of Son as a "serpent figure"
who is "forbidden but unconsciously willed, possessing healing powers
but potentially destructive "(158).
(14.) Kristeva's remarks about pregnancy being a merger of self and
other lend further insight into Toni Morrison's observation that her
original intention for the novel that became Beloved was to write a
novel about self-murder. See Bragg. My thanks to Chalapith Wasuwat for
bringing the Kristeva article to my attention.
(15.) If the "hot thing" is a branding iron, a thing which sears the
flesh, it is also a doppleganger for a physically less destructive but
spiritually equally destructive implement, schoolteacher's pen, which
inscribes black people as subhuman. Surely Morrison intended a textual
allusion to Williams' character Nehemiah in Dessa Rose. Among others,
Mae Henderson has suggested an intertextual relationship between Dessa
Rose and Beloved (73).
(16.) See
for example, the following passages: "[Beloved] hoped Denver's arm
around her shoulders would keep them from falling apart. The couple
upstairs, [Sethe and Paul D] united, didn't hear a sound, but below
them, outside, all around 124 the snow went on and on and on. Piling
itself, burying itself. Higher. Deeper" (134). Paul D's blood is
described as "frozen like an ice pond for twenty years" (106). And of
course, the scene in which Sethe lunges at Bodwin with an ice pick is
one in which she is "breaking a lump of ice into chunks" (261).
(17.) Snead offers a description of repetition compulsion that lends a
great deal of insight into Sethe's psychology:
[I]n repetition compulsion, as Freud describes it, repetition--an
idiosyncratic and immediate action--has replaced memory, the `normal'
access to the past. Instead of a dialogue about a history already past, one
has a restaging of the past. Instead of relating what happened in his or
her history ... the patient re-enacts it with all the precision of ritual.
This obsessive acting-out of the repressed past conflict brings the patient
back to the original scene of drama (67).
(18.) Rust (the rusted shut tobacco tin of Paul D's heart) as a mixture
of iron and salt water evokes not only salt tears, and the salt water
of Middle Passage, but the iron of Paul D's neck jewelry, the iron
circle that Beloved hallucinates as surrounding the collective neck of
herself and Sethe. See also the explicit reference to drowning: "I
couldn't lay down nowhere in peace, back then. Now I can. I can sleep
like the drowned, have mercy. She come back to me, my daughter, and she
is mine" (204). (19.) Paul D, whose Biblical name means "little" or
"small," sees his own capacity to love profoundly as something
profoundly dangerous to an African American man in captivity:
Listening to the doves in Alfred, Georgia, and having neither the right nor
the permission to enjoy it because in that place mist, doves, sunlight,
copper dirt, moon-everything belonged to the men who had the guns ... so
you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the
sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over
the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between
the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers,
beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child,
a brother--a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred,
Georgia (162).
Paul D's sees loving big as equally dangerous for African American
women, and muses to himself that Sethe's large love for her daughter
Denver was a danger to her own survival:
Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love
anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had
settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit;
everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in
a croaker sack, well, maybe you'd have a little love leg over for the next
one. (45)
The metaphor of black people being forced to love small, never more
savagely painful in Morrison's oeuvre than in this novel, has
nevertheless been prefigured by Milkman's mother, Ruth, in Song of
Solomon, Morrison's third novel; Morrison describes Ruth as a "frail
woman content to do tiny things; to grow and cultivate small life that
would not hurt her if it died: rhododendron, goldfish, dahlias,
geraniums, imperial tulips. Because these little lives did die. The
goldfish floated to the top of the water ... the rhododendron leaves
... lapsed into limp yellow hearts" (64). Works Cited
Berry, Mary F., and John W. Blassingame. "Africa, Slavery, and the
Roots of Contemporary Black Culture." Chant of Saints. Ed. Michael S.
Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1979.241-56.
Bragg, Melvin. Host of "The South Bank Show: Toni Morrison." Bravo
Television 1987.
Christian, Barbara. "Fixing Methodologies: Beloved." Cultural Critique
24.1 (1993): 5-15.
Clemons, Walter. "The Ghosts of `Sixty Million More.'" Newsweek 28
November 1987: 75.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
Henderson, Joseph L. and Maud Oakes. The Wisdom of the Serpent: The
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Lynda Koolish is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at San Diego State University. Her collection of photographs
and accompanying literary biographies, African American Writers:
Portraits and Visions, has just been published, and a New York exhibit
of sixty-two of her photographs is currently at the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.
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