|
"To take the sin out
of slicing trees ...": the law of the tree in 'Beloved.'
by Michele Bonnet
When Baby Suggs, Beloved's ancestor figure and moral beacon, expresses
her view of what seems to be the novel's central transgression, the
murder of a child at the hands of her own mother, she sums up what the
whole work tends to demonstrate regarding the tragic deed: "... she
could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice" (180). Endeavoring
to understand rather than judge, she acknowledges the legitimacy of
some of Sethe's arguments while being aware of more questionable
elements in her decision, such as her daughter, in-law's dangerously
possessive conception of mother love, or the psychological damage her
act has inflicted on each of her four children. Like Baby Suggs,
Morrison clearly refrains, at least explicitly or in conventional
terms, from either condemning or condoning Sethe's desperate deed. When
the murder is overtly branded as a crime or a sin, it is by people--the
community and Paul D--whose moral choices are not reliable. As a matter
of fact, it is repeatedly suggested that the ultimate culprit is not
the individual who committed infanticide, but the system that created
the conditions for it, the "peculiar institution." As the novel
unfolds, the whites increasingly come under attack, even if, adding to
the moral complexity and ambiguity of the book, they are also presented
as the victims of a system they have themselves set up, while the
blacks in turn prove to have been contaminated by the cancer of
slavery, as shown in Stamp Paid's metaphor of the jungle (198-99).(1)
Curiously enough, however, Morrison reserves the word sin for another
context. It first crops up in Baby's address to her people in the
Clearing when she urges them to love their abused bodies and heal the
wounds inflicted by slavery:
She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no
more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its
inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace
they could imagine. (88)
This statement is interesting in that it shows Baby distancing herself
from established religion, overtly discarding the Christian notion of
sin as an acceptable moral standard. This perception is actually
confirmed by the use of the word in its second occurrence. When Paul D,
shortly after his arrival at 124, takes Sethe and Denver out to the
carnival, they walk past a big patch of rotting roses stretching along
the lumberyard fence. The narrator then makes the following remark:
"The sawyer who had planted them twelve years ago to give his workplace
a friendly feel--something to take the sin out of slicing trees for a
living--was amazed by their abundance ..." (47).
What this statement brings out is that the tree is a natural element
that serves as a law--and a sacred one at that--unto man. In other
terms, the religious referent that transgression is measured against is
not Western religion or even some secular yet holy human law, but man's
natural environment. This might seem to be a somewhat extravagant or
incidental remark were it not for the fact that trees play such a
prominent part in the novel, either in the form of the highly symbolic
tree stamped upon Sethe's back by schoolteacher's whip, or as the real
trees that the protagonists repeatedly turn to for spiritual support.
Furthermore, one should bear in mind that trees, and in particular
sacred groves, play a crucial role in African religion, where they are
considered as intermediaries between God and man--they are even
worshiped by some tribes as God himself in his immanent aspect (Mbiti
112-64). The pervasive presence in the book of trees, and the moral
significance they are imparted with, as the above quotation suggests,
seems therefore to be in keeping with Morrison's claim that she is not
an American, but an Afro-American writer, intent on preserving and
transmitting her community's cultural heritage, which she insists is an
essential dimension of her fiction.(2) Indeed the print of Africa is to
be felt everywhere in the novel, much more so than in Morrison's
previous fiction: It manifests itself through the characters, several
of whom were born in Africa, still speak a native language, or have
gone through the ordeal of the Middle Passage. It is also present in
the religious, moral, or philosophical values conveyed by the text: the
vital importance of the community (and in a more general way the
necessary complementarity between self and other); the prominence given
to the body, with the particular role attributed to the heart and
blood(3); or the presence of the dead among the living. In Morrison's
own words, the form of the book is also indebted to African
traditions.(4) It is therefore interesting to explore the field opened
up by the narrator's comment on the sin of cutting trees, and to
examine how a number of the transgressions perpetrated in the novel can
be construed as violations of the natural law trees embody.
The Tree and the Law of Life
The most salient feature of the tree is that it is identified with
Life--a sign of the influence of African religion, which holds that
trees concentrate within themselves the vital force that flows through
and animates the universe (Thomas 110). Sixo, the only truly flawless
character in the novel, the African hero and role model, provides the
first example of their beneficent, life-giving virtue. He "went among
trees at night. For dancing, he said, to keep his bloodlines open ..."
(25). The trees whip up the flow of the blood that animates his body;
they infuse him with some vital energy that feeds and multiplies his
own; they are revivifying. Denver's bower is similarly endowed with a
nurturing, healing, rejuvenating power. It is made of "five boxwood
bushes, planted in a ring" (28), where she regularly seeks refuge to
relieve her aching solitude. It provides Denver with the company she so
painfully craves; it soothes and revitalizes her: "Veiled and protected
by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as
easy as a wish" (29). The juxtaposition of the two adjectives green and
live suggests a semantic equivalence between the two terms, which is
made quite explicit in a later reference to the bower when the narrator
speaks of "the before-Beloved hunger that drove her into boxwood and
cologne for just a taste of life" (120). The vibrant depth of the green
leaves, which irradiate "an emerald light," also connotes vitality.
Denver imbibes and feeds on it. "In that bower ... Denver's imagination
produced its own hunger and its own food ..." (29). The womb-like shape
of the trees, a secret place that you have to "crawl into" and which
forms a ring, further enhances their life-giving virtue.
The spiritual character and nurturing role of the tree are given
particular relief by Sixo and Paul D's Brother. Paul D evokes the tree
under which they elect to sit for their midday breaks at Sweet Home in
the following terms: "... trees were inviting; things you could trust
and be near; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did since way
back when he took the midday meal in the fields of Sweet Home. Always
in the same place if he could .... His choice he called Brother, and
sat under it ..."(21). Morrison exploits the tree's symbolic value by
specifying that the men sit under it, thus drawing attention to the
fact that they seek safety and refreshment from its protective,
cooling, rejuvenating shadow. It is even more significant that they
should have chosen it as the place where they partake of their meals,
as if the tree itself supplies them with the sustenance they need to
replenish themselves. Morrison goes beyond this symbolism, however: The
tree's very name, Brother, emphasizes not only its animate but its
human-like nature, which is unambiguously underlined by such terms as
trust and talk to. The tree is a caring parent or friend who gives
advice and moral support.
The
blossoming trees that help Paul D find his way north to freedom after
he has escaped from Alfred, Georgia, perform a similar role. Taking the
advice of the Cherokees who have greeted the runaway convicts, Paul D
follows their trail:
"That way.... Follow the tree flowers
.... Only the tree flowers. As they
go, you go, You will be where you
want to be when they are gone."
So he raced from dogwood to
blossoming peach. When they thinned
out he headed for the cherry blossoms,
then magnolia, chinaberry, pecan, walnut
and prickly pear.... He merely
followed in their wake, a dark ragged
figure guided by the blossoming
plums. (112-13)
The trees lead him to freedom, which in accordance with a trope
familiar to slave literature the novel equates with life, as we will
see below. This is the reason that, in presiding over Paul's passage
from South to North, they do not merely signal his passage from
symbolic death to symbolic life; being active catalysts of his
spiritual rebirth, they are shown to have a creative force of their
own, the faculty of generating the life that goes with freedom.
A similar power is ascribed to the Clearing, the name for the cluster
of trees where Baby speaks the Word, and which is quite obviously one
of those sacred groves so central to African worship (Mbiti 109-240).
It is to the Clearing that Sethe turns for comfort after the shock she
has suffered on learning about her husband's madness. Dazed and
overwhelmed as she is upon entering the grove, she reemerges from it
with a clear mind and a stronger love for Paul D, having drawn fresh
moral vigor from the surrounding greenery: "... she wanted Paul D. No
matter what he told and knew, she wanted him in her life. More than
commemorating Halle, that is what she had come to the Clearing to
figure out, and now it was figured. Trust and rememory, yes ..."(99).
The significance of the Clearing, whose name obviously carries a
metaphorical connotation of spiritual cleansing, is nevertheless best
illustrated by Sethe's recollection of the meetings held there by her
mother-in-law. It is no coincidence that it should be the setting for
Baby's message of love and self-healing:
After situating herself on a huge
flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her
head and prayed silently. The company
watched her from the trees. They
knew she was ready when she put her
stick down. Then she shouted, "Let the
children come!" and they ran from the
trees toward her.
"Let your mothers hear you
laugh," she told them, and the woods
rang. The adults looked on and could
not help smiling.
Then "Let the grown men come,"
she shouted. They stepped out one by
one from among the ringing trees.
"Let your wives and your children
see you dance," she told them,
and groundlife shuddered under their
feet. (87)
The people first sit among the trees, intimately connected with them
("the company watched her from the trees"), and it is from them that
they leap in response to her call ("they ran from the trees toward
her"). Indeed each of her shouts is followed by a close-up on the trees
which underlines their supportive role:
"Let the children come!"
and they ran from the trees
toward her. "Let your
mothers hear you laugh,"
she told them, and the
woods rang.... "Let the
grown men come," she
shouted. They stepped out
one by one from among the
ringing trees.
The people are at one with the trees, which take part in the action,
both by sympathizing with them (they "ring") and breathing into them an
energy made palpable by the powerfully rhythmic tempo of the whole
passage. They are not merely a setting; they are truly active
participants whose salutary role is to be measured by the miracle
worked among them. At Baby's bidding, the children, the men, and the
women, after beginning in their usual roles--the children laughing, the
women crying, the men dancing--swap roles and are thus led to commune
with each other, stepping out of the confining limits of their selves,
and growing richer from the communal experience intitiated by the
trees.
It is also no coincidence
that the Clearing should be the place where Baby delivers the fervent
address urging her people to love and piece together the bodies that
have been broken up by slavery, to re-member what has been
dis-membered. The surrounding trees nourish Baby's inspiration while
helping the people reconstruct their fragmented selves, as the
"harmony" (89) achieved at the end of the scene suggests. No wonder
then that the community's priestess should be pictured as smelling
"like bark in the day and leaves at night" (19) or that after the
murder has killed her faith in life she should be seen tramping along
among dead leaves (177)--thus providing further evidence of the
deliberateness and consistency of Morrison's treatment of the theme.
The Clearing's regenerating energy is perhaps even plainer in one of
the last scenes of the novel when the women of the community gather in
front of 124 to exorcize the spirit that has driven Sethe to the verge
of death: "For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with
all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched
for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the
back of words.... It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the
baptized in its wash" (261). As is so often the case with Morrison's
writing, the reader's mental categories are here subverted. Contrary to
one's expectations, the main protagonist is not the group of women
acting with the Clearing as a backdrop: The protagonist is the
Clearing, while the women recede into the background. It is the sacred
grove that is the agent of the spiritual rebirth connoted by the image
of baptism.
The "Peculiar Institution" and the Transgression of the Tree's Sacred
Law
We can now better grasp the meaning of the narrator's comment upon the
sawyer's misdeed: It is what the tree encloses, Life itself, that is
sacred. It follows that even if no explicit judgment is passed on
Sethe's deed, even if we are given a number of unquestionably good
reasons that partly legitimate her decision, she is nevertheless shown
to commit a major transgression in deciding to cut her daughter's
throat since she infringes upon a principle whose sacredness is
postulated by the narrator's remark on the sawyer's sin and
demonstrated by the nourishing quality of the tree. Besides, Morrison
introduces two details which leave no doubt as to her intention to use
the tree as evidence of her protagonist's crime. The man who commits
the sin of cutting trees is no anonymous person. He is a sawyer, which
cannot but call to mind the very saw that Sethe uses to cut Beloved's
throat, thus drawing attention to the similarity between the two
actions. The parallel is further enhanced by the fact that the victim
of the murder is constantly associated with a felled tree: Sethe first
spots Beloved sitting on a stump, and later on both Paul D and Denver
repeatedly and pointedly refer to this circumstance when talking about
her.
Yet Sethe is not the only one
who commits a sin against Life. The whites perpetuate the same type of
transgression. Slavery first inflicts bodily death: The novel is
dedicated to the "Sixty Million and more" who perished in the Middle
Passage, and one of its most dramatic scenes is the description of the
prisoners' dreadful agony in the hold of a slave ship. Beloved
witnesses the passing of the man whose heavy body has long been
crushing hers; piles of dead people are thrown into the sea; Beloved's
mother chooses to hurl herself into the ocean rather than keep enduring
her excruciating ordeal. The novel also alludes to or describes other
deaths: Sethe's mother's, Sixo's burning (tied to the trunk of a tree),
Paul A's hanging, the lynchings after the Civil War. As for the
numerous maimings the slaves suffer as punishments or as a result of
excessive toil, they are but a seemingly milder form of death,
especially in Morrison's world, where the body is at least as precious
as the mind.
Death is also
symbolic and is conveyed by a spatial metaphor, that of the dividing
line between the slave and the free territories whose crossing is
pictured as the passage from death to life. This is first the case with
Sethe, who is nearly dead when she meets Amy near the Ohio River. Blood
trickles from her festering back; her feet are monstrously swollen; her
exhaustion is such that she can hardly crawl. Indeed her state is so
critical that the white girl bets she will not last the night. Yet,
against all odds, she comes back to life on leaving Kentucky. She makes
it across the river and is restored to health in her mother-in-law's
home; even more significantly, she gives birth to a daughter in those
very waters which separate the two worlds, a highly emblematic event
pointing to the exact equivalence of life and freedom.
The symbolic rebirth represented by the crossing of the Ohio River is
also suggested by its biblical association with the River Jordan: The
slaves are ferried across by Stamp Paid, formerly Joshua, who was named
after the man who led the Hebrews from captivity into the Promised
Land. A similar point is made when Baby's body is seen to become
literally alive the very moment shesets foot on free soil:
... suddenly she saw her hands and
thought with a clarity as simple as it
was dazzling, "These hands belong to
me. These my hands." Next she felt a
knocking in her chest and discovered
something else new: her own heartbeat.
Had it been there all along? This
pounding thing? (141)
In recovering her freedom, she recovers the life that had been stamped
out of her, so that, as with Sethe, the passage from South to North is
experienced as a spiritual resurrection.
The mental death inflicted by slavery is also symbolized by Sethe's
unresponsive back, whose lifelessness mirrors both the repression of
unbearable memories and, in a more general way, the suppression of all
emotion, more particularly those dangerous feelings of love which are
bound to be frustrated by an institution that systematically separates
mothers and children, husbands and wives, families and friends. If they
want to survive, the slaves have to silence--that is, kill--their
hearts, as Paul D's tin box neatly exemplifies. He first describes it
while telling Sethe of one of his worst ordeals, his encounter with
Mister, the plantation's rooster: "Saying more might push them both to
a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it
belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart
used to be. Its lid rusted shut" (72-73). Both as metaphor (it holds
the traumatic experiences of the past) and metonymy (it is buried in
his chest) the tin box materializes the death of his heart, the death
of what the novel shows to be the highest expression of life, love.
The Alfred, Georgia, episode, which marks the lowest point in Paul D's
descent into hell, is another illustration of the identification of
slavery with death which pervades the
whole chapter. It is thematized by the prisoners' songs to "Mr Death"
and symbolized by a number of details: the pall-like mist that shrouds
the scenery, the latter's uniform colorlessness,(5) the underground
cages that are reminiscent of the netherworld, the image of "the
unshriven dead, zombies on the loose" (110), the symbolic rebirth of
the prisoners when they reemerge from the mud (Samuels 125).
This scene is of additional interest insofar as it features a tree
which seems to embody slavery's deadliness, emphasizing its utter
incompatibility with life. It is interesting that the death camp, the
product of the "peculiar institution," should have wiped out all manner
of vegetation, allowing only the tiniest tree to grow, Paul D's little
aspen: "In Alfred, Georgia, there was an aspen too young to call
sapling. Just a shoot no taller than his waist." It holds him
enthralled, being the only sign of life left in the wasteland of the
prison camp, and thus testifies to his invincible passion for life
("His little love was a tree ..." [221]). But it has an ambivalent
function, for its tiny size also provides a comment on slavery's
devastating force, confirming what the death imagery of the whole
chapter points to. It is impossible for saplings to grow into real
trees, for life to develop and flourish, in a world ruled by
slaveholders.
Life however is not
the only value attached to the tree, at least in the form I have been
considering--that of the vital energy that animates the human and
natural worlds and allows individuals to be regenerated. The
descriptions of the tree of flesh stamped onto Sethe's back and the
light it throws both on her and the slaveholders' actions show that
this tree embodies yet another law, what I will call the law of growth,
the constant violation of which is again used as evidence of the
perversity inherent in slavery.
The Tree and the Law of Growth
The first allusion to Sethe's tree comes in the form of a question by
Paul D after Sethe has laconically announced," `I got a tree on my back
and a haint in my house ...'" (15). This startling revelation prompts
the question," `What tree on your back? Is something growing on your
back? I don't see nothing growing on your back'" (15). Paul D's wording
focuses attention on the fact that Sethe's tree is not only inscribed
in her flesh, as his choice of the verb to grow and his insistence on
it emphasize; it also takes root in her body. It is not merely an image
or a mark bearing a resemblance to a tree; it is an active, living tree
with an irrefutable power and reality of its own. The tree possesses a
kind of awesome materiality which seems to invest it with some
transcendent meaning, thus echoing and reinforcing all the details
pointing to the tree's holiness. In addition, the intimate connection,
indeed the continuity, between Sethe's body and the tree suggest that
they are made of the same fabric, and that what concerns the tree
necessarily concerns human creatures. The choice and repetition of the
verb to grow also draws attention to what the tree represents, which
brings us back to what Mircea Eliade, among others's considers as its
most universal symbolic value: growth and regeneration.
It is Amy, Sethe's white savior, whose creative vision transforms the
slave woman's lacerated back into the trunk, branches, and blossoms of
a chokecherry tree. Her description is first briefly reported by Sethe
to Paul D:" `That's what she called it.... that's what she said it
looked like. A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny
chokecherry leaves'" (16). This description is subsequently expanded in
the narrative Denver makes of her mother's escape:
"It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry
tree. See, here's the trunk--it's red and
split wide open, full of sap, and this
here's the parting for the branches.
You got a mighty lot of branches.
Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these
ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms,
just as white. Your back got a
whole tree on it. In bloom." (79)
Amy's description does not stress the tree's greenery, as was the case
with Sixo's trees, or the trees in the Clearing or the Bower. It does
not draw attention to the vital energy spontaneously associated with
the leaves and the color green, but to the principle of division and
extension, growth and transformation represented by the passage from
trunk to big bough to smaller branch and finally to blossoms. It thus
conjures up the image of the genealogical tree, be it in its lay
version or in the biblical one of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4), or, as
Paquet remarks (117), Jesse's tree (Isaiah 11). Indeed, the emphasis
laid on its growing from Sethe's back may well be designed to underline
the similarity between the fictional and biblical figures. Furthermore,
Morrison uses two metaphors which explicitly conjoin the family and the
tree: Commenting on Beloved's destructive preying on her mother, the
narrator warns, "Ax the trunk, the limb will die" (242). As for Sixo's
son-to-be, he is alluded to as "his blossoming seed" (229).
Yet the most convincing evidence that Sethe's tree is of the
genealogical type is the strategic importance of the family theme in
the novel, one of whose major, if not essential, messages is that the
individual is not self-sufficient. It has permeable frontiers and
extends beyond the individual proper, drawing substance and sustenance
from the family and the community, for the genealogical tree does not
represent the family in the narrow sense of the term, that generally
accepted in Western culture. It should be given the much broader
extension it is given in the African culture Morrison claims as her own
and which is understood as the clan, the community, what the author
calls "the village." Her novel once again demonstrates how vital the
tree is to the individual. This is best illustrated by a scene which
has already been discussed, that of the Clearing which shows the people
swapping selves and in so doing regenerating themselves. It is also
evidenced by the fact that it is the community which achieves the final
regeneration, both by helping Denver break the enchanted circle of 124
and grow into a real person, and by exorcising Beloved and saving Sethe
from death. Indeed, the latter scene shows the people officiating as a
communal priest in what is described as Sethe's baptism; that is to
say, her symbolic rebirth into life.
One of the novel's most salient themes is that slavery and community
are strictly antagonistic. The "peculiar institution" is grounded on
the principle that the slaves are not human beings, but chattel--or, at
best, animals. Slaves are "checkers" (23) that the owners feel free to
use as best furthers their economic interests. Family ties are
therefore of no consequence. Indeed, one of the leitmotifs of the novel
is the systematic breaking up of families: We hear Baby Suggs
complaining in the very first pages of the narrative that she was left
with only one out of her eight children. Paul D has never had any
family except for his half-brother Paul F, who is finally sold away to
another plantation. During his wanderings after the Civil War he comes
across men, women, and children drifting all by themselves on the
roads. They have permanently lost touch with their relatives or
friends. He is awestruck and incredulous when he meets a real Negro
family, complete with parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. We are also
reminded that black infants were routinely removed from their mothers
after a week or two and nursed by a slave woman whose work it was to
tend all the children, while the mothers were sent back to the fields
to avoid jeopardizing productivity. Sethe thus tells us that she has
seen her mother only two or three times in her life (60).
It is, as a matter of fact, the disruption of the bond between mother
and child that is the most striking, actually paradigmatic,
manifestation of the very common practice of separating slave families.
Because the mother-child link is the primal human bond without which,
as the text amply suggests, the self cannot come into being, it can be
considered as the condensed form, the epitome of all family ties. Since
the thematic core of the novel is the separation of mother and
daughter--be it that of Beloved as the mythical child from her African
mother or that of Beloved as the historical daughter of the main
protagonist--with the disastrous consequences it entails, one may
assert that the central motif of the narrative is the role played by
family in the development of the self. Sethe's being prevented from
being a real mother (which is in the end the reason that she decides to
escape) is but the most dramatic evidence that the system of slavery
tramples upon the principle materialized by her tree.
Milk and the Tree
Whites however are not the only ones who transgress the law inscribed
in Sethe's back. Though we are led to sympathize with her and
recognize, at least partially, the legitimacy of her arguments, we also
gradually discover that her own attitude--her conception of motherhood
and her behavior toward her children--is at odds with the principle of
the tree. Close scrutiny of the text confirms what is actually
signified from the very beginning by the tree's particular place on her
body: It is rooted in her back, that part of her body which she cannot
see, a detail which might be dismissed as merely coincidental were it
not emphasized by the remark she adds when first describing it:" `I've
never seen it and never will' "(16). There could be no clearer hint
that she is going to disregard the lesson imprinted on her back.
Its being placed there conveys however yet another meaning, which is
essential to the understanding of the subject. It is directly opposite
her breasts, those breasts that are made so much of through her
obsession with the milk they carry, and which epitomize her conception
of motherhood--she explains her decision to run by claiming that she
had to bring her milk to her daughter (16-19). It is indeed highly
revealing that when she first speaks of the tree she should immediately
associate it with her milk; in answer to Paul D's request for an
explanation after she has announced, "`I have a tree on my back and a
haint on my house,'" she first briefly reports Amy's description, but
immediately proceeds to add, without any transition: "`I had milk ...'"
(16). She then explains that she was whipped and got the scars that
became a tree under Amy's transforming vision. The striking
characteristic of the ensuing conversation is however that, while Paul
D insists on being informed about the tree, she keeps brushing his
questions away and doggedly reverting to the stealing of her milk by
schoolteacher's nephews:
"We was talking `bout a tree,
Sethe."
"After I left you, those boys came
in there and took my milk...."
"They used cowhide on you?"
"And they took my milk."
"They beat you and you was
pregnant?"
"And they took my milk!" (16-17)
Her obsession with her milk and disregard for the tree, which form the
structural and thematic backbone of this scene, tell us a lot about the
way she envisions her relationship with her children, although one
should not forget the milk's ambivalent function, its positive as well
as negative connotations: Sethe's being made unable to nurse her
daughter is a powerful signifier of slaves' inability to feed and
therefore nurture their children and bring them up into full-fledged
human beings. A dominant theme of the book is that, because the
children have been deprived of proper nurturing, they have been unable
to develop into real persons--it accounts not only for Beloved's
crippled and ultimately evil character but also for Denver's unnatural
childishness and inner emptiness. Even Baby claims that she has no
self, which the text suggests is the result of her early separation
from her mother. The robbing of Sethe's milk, which is so often evoked
in the narrative and referred to as what she owns and as her children's
very life, is thus the materialization of the fundamental perversity of
the institution which kills the slaves' selves by severing the bonds
between mother and child.
Yet
Sethe's milk also has negative connotations. Her obsessive concern with
nursing her child signifies a view of motherhood which turns out to be
a very unhealthy, destructive one. The nursing stage is essential in a
person's development, yet it is only a stage, and Morrison demonstrates
a universal truth: Mother and child must outgrow their initial
relationship, namely the symbiosis that typifies that period of life in
which they are engrossed in each other, locked up in the exclusive dual
relationship characteristic of the pre-Oedipal stage. One immediately
recognizes a major theme of Beloved, which has been expansively
commented upon(7) and whose analysis I will therefore take for granted.
A fact that seems to have been overlooked, however, although it is
relevant to the study of Sethe's conception of motherhood, is that she
has the same kind of attitude toward Denver as toward Beloved, even if
it takes a much milder form, since Denver is now eighteen. One cannot
speak of a dual relationship in the full sense of the term, as is the
case with Beloved, yet the mother's over-protectiveness--her order not
to step out of the home (i.e., her desire to keep her daughter confined
to the closed circle of the maternal space)--together with her explicit
insistence that Denver is a" child"(8) instead of the adult she should
see in her at eighteen, testifies to her reluctance, indeed her
failure, to renounce her initial fusion with her children and recognize
their separateness and independence. Besides, Sethe's remarks on
motherhood,(9) while displaying her passionate love for her children,
also betray a potentially dangerous sense of possession deriving from
the notion that her children are mere extensions of herself.
Morrison dramatizes the disastrous consequences of this exclusive,
paralyzing, withering kind of love. Denver has no self of her own: She
has to go into the woods in search of the life of which she has been
deprived; she desperately clings to Beloved's company because she has
no other; and when her sister vanishes into the air of the cold room,
she is left with an unbearable void within her--" ... she has no self"
(123). Beloved, whose murder has forever frozen her in the dual
relationship she was in at the moment of her death, finally comes close
to devouring her mother.
Yet even
more direct, unmistakable allusions are made to the deadliness of a
relationship that remains modeled on the pre-Oedipal mother-child bond:
Disorder and chaos invade the house in part III after Paul D has left,
leaving the women free to indulge unreservedly in their fantasy. They
plant flowers in the dead of winter; the loud jarring colors and
chaotic arrangement of the garden, dimly reminiscent of Ophelia's
madness, conjure up the image of a dangerously anarchic jungle. Indeed,
the women's attitude is explicitly described as that of lunatics.(10)
The message is also conveyed through other rich metaphors: As Beloved's
grasp on her mother tightens, the snow falls thicker and thicker,
paralyzing all movement, bringing life to a halt. The process comes
full circle when the creek turns into a huge ice patch, an unmistakable
sign--especially in view of Morrison's emphasis on the symbolic
significance of water--that death has struck 124. Indeed the whole
thrust of the episode showing the three women taking advantage of the
cold to go ice-skating on the river is to reveal the deadliness of the
dual relationship Beloved and her mother--and more marginally
Denver--have to this point regressed to: Paul D's departure has made it
possible for them to turn in upon themselves and cut themselves off
from any contact with the outside world, as shown by the circularity of
the ring they form on the frozen creek. 11 The regression to the
pre-Oedipal stage, which is markedly referred to in the next scene in
which Sethe is shown heating up milk for the girls, is accompanied by a
number of details which all connote death: the ice the women skate on;
the paralyzing cold of winter; the grey, death-like color of the
women's skin, which has "turned pewter in the cold and dying light"
(174); and the final adjective, which is a direct comment on the
significance of the scene. The leitmotif which punctuates the
episode--"nobody. saw them falling"--is but a variation on that central
theme.
We can now better
understand the mutually illuminating and, to a large extent, mutually
exclusive relationship between Sethe's--milk and her tree. The tree
shows the way out of the deadlock into which the misguided maternal
love materialized by the milk leads. The principle of division which
presides over its structure stands as a cogent reminder that
separation, differentiation--in human terms, individuation--is part of
the law of nature or, more profoundly, of that vital, primal force
which we have seen is the other major feature of the tree.
In the same way that the text dramatizes, both thematically and
symbolically, the deadly danger involved in prolonging the pre-Oedipal
bond beyond its proper time, it develops into narrative form the
message inscribed in the tree's ramified structure, overtly enhancing
its exemplary character.
The Maternal versus the Paternal World
Denver's story offers the most conspicuous and consistent demonstration
of the passage from the stifling maternal world to self-fulfilling
separation and emancipation. Until she realizes that her mother is
about to die as a result of Beloved's destructive demands on her,
Denver behaves like a very dependent child, clumsy and diffident,
terrified at the thought of leaving the maternal space of the home. She
has not yet evolved a self of her own. In that respect, as I have
already mentioned, she is fundamentally very much like her elder
sister. Yet alarm at her mother's plight finally forces her to take a
decisive step and break away from her tightly closed, crippling
universe. When she becomes aware that all three women are certain to
starve to death unless she does something, she overcomes her terror and
makes the very momentous and symbolic gesture of stepping out of the
circle of 124 into the outside world: "She would have to leave the
yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask
somebody for help" (243). In so doing she initiates her own spiritual
rebirth, as signified both by Lady Jones's calling her "baby" and by
her own reaction to that name: "She did not know it then, but it was
the word `baby' ... that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman"
(248). She then becomes the one who provides sustenance for the family;
even more significantly, she calmly accepts separation from her mother
("`I think I've lost my mother, Paul D'" [266]) and starts a romance
with Nelson Lord.
Denver thus
becomes the full-fledged person Paul D has all along wanted her to
become: From the very beginning he has disapproved of Sethe's
reluctance to acknowledge her daughter's independence. When Denver
aggressively asks him how long he plans to stay and Sethe wants to
apologize for her, Paul D rebukes Sethe for not letting the girl assume
responsibility for her act:
"Look here. I apologize for her.
I'm real--"
"You can't do that. You can't
apologize for nobody. She got to do
that." (44)
The final scene between the two lovers is similarly indicative of Paul
D's desire to respect and foster personal integrity; he urges Sethe to
stop defining herself as a mother and to think of herself as a woman:
"`You your best thing, Sethe. You are.'" His desire to "put his story
next to hers" (273) instead of taking possession of it also reveals his
deep sense of otherness, in contrast to the mother's spontaneous
tendency to annex her children's self.
It is clear that in this sense Paul D accomplishes the Law of the Tree,
offering an alternative to the kind of relationship represented by
Sethe's milk. His role is undeniably a beneficent one: From the very
beginning, he brings Sethe back to life; he makes the long dead nerves
of her back ("... her back skin had been dead for years") responsive to
his touch ("Maybe this one time she could ... feel the hurt her back
ought to" [18]); he makes her see the colors she bad stopped being
aware of after her fateful deed ("Every dawn she saw the dawn, but
never acknowledged or remarked its color.... after Paul D came, she was
distracted by the two orange squares that signaled how barren 124
really was. He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface
in his company" [39]). In the final scene, he wakes her up from the
dazed slumber she has sunk into, and starts massaging her half-dead
body, repeating the healing ritual of Amy and Baby Suggs (272). It is
also his love that enables Sethe to bring back to consciousness--and,
in the process, accept--the repressed traumatic experiences of her
past.
The lesson of the narrative
is unambiguous: There is no harmony in the human world without a
harmonious relationship between man and woman. The nucleus of the real
family is not mother and children, but mother, father, and children.
Withdrawing into a woman-to-woman relationship only leads to disaster.
A man must come and unlock the mother-child dyad, open up the circle of
the pre-Oedipal bond, as is best illustrated by the merciless, deadly
fight that pits Paul D against Beloved, whose narcissistic
possessiveness is radically antagonistic to his own attitude. It is
significant that their struggle for power should make up the plot
underlying that part of the narrative set in 1873. Paul D's first
gesture is to drive the ghost out of 124, thus making room for a real
family, with mother, father, and child, as the carnival scene suggests.
But immediately upon their return from the fair Beloved bursts upon the
scene and gradually forces Paul D out of 124. He finally leaves the
house when Sethe reveals to him the real circumstances of her
daughter's death, but Beloved's conspicuous presence at the top of the
stairs hints that it may not be so much his revulsion at Sethe's
gesture that is driving him away as Beloved's evil power (165). She is
then free to unleash her desires and draw her mother back into the
narcissistic world of her infancy. The community's intervention brings
her invasion to an end, however, expelling her from the world of the
living and symbolically destroying the maternal world she has embodied.
Paul D can now come back, offering a different pattern of relationship.
The necessity of a male presence is
also signified in the symbolic mode by a detail inserted in the
description of Sethe's preparations for the outing on the frozen creek:
Rummaging for shoes to put on, she can only find one of the man's
blades (174). As a consequence, mother and daughters are unable to
stand upright on the ice, a transparent sign that women should not
think they can dispense with men, oust them from their rightful place.
The only sound relationship is a triangular one, not the deceptive one
of the ice-skating scene where the women are in reality but two, mother
and daughter(s), but rather the relationship in the scene it pointedly
parallels, the one showing Paul D taking Sethe and Denver to the local
fair. Whereas the characteristic feature of the former episode is the
ring formed by the women--and their constant falls--the carnival scene
shows Paul D taking the women out of the circle of the home and making
them renew their ties with the community: It was Sethe's "first social
outing in eighteen years.... [Paul D] said howdy to everybody within
twenty feet.... There was something about him ... that made the stares
of other Negroes kind, gentle, something Denver did not remember seeing
in their faces. Several even nodded and smiled at her mother
..."(46-48).
What Sethe's tree
finally represents in contrast to the fake family of the maternal world
and its basically tautological relationship is the real family--both
the paradigmatic nuclear family of mother, father, and child and the
wider family of "the village," figured by the tree's characteristically
ramifying structure, which reconciles separateness and connectedness,
self-reliance and solidarity. What seems however to signal a shift in
Morrison's fiction is that, considering the role Paul D plays in
Sethe's emancipation and his attitude toward Beloved, the tree stands
as a reminder not only of the vital importance of community, an already
familiar theme in her fiction, but also of the complementarity between
man and woman and the necessity to give men their proper place in a
world which, if it remains exclusively female, is doomed to mental
suffocation (Sixo's heroic stature is also significant of this
shift).(12)
Conclusion
The novel, which starts and develops as a tragedy, finally winds up
with an optimistic conclusion: Denver releases herself from the prison
of the maternal world and becomes an adult, a full-fledged person;
Sethe and Paul D are reunited, and the mother accepts to grow into a
woman; the community and the people of 124 are finally reconciled. Both
individually and collectively, they thus become the tree whose law they
had previously violated. It is therefore the tree's regenerative power
that prevails and helps erase the transgressions that have been
committed against it. Indeed, Sethe's very name has been encapsulating
the message from the start, functioning as a central, even a master,
emblem structuring the text, irradiating it with its powerful symbolic
meaning--a meaning which is both concealed and conspicuous: concealed
because it is symbolic and therefore calls for deciphering, yet
conspicuous when one breaks the surface of words. For Sethe's name
cannot but call to mind the legend of Seth, the biblical character
whose story undoubtedly presided over Morrison's choice of her
protagonist's name, considering its relevance to the text: As Seth's
father Adam lay dying, the archangel Michael offered Seth a bough
which, coming from the forbidden tree of Eden, was endowed with
marvelous healing virtues. The bough was no help to Adam, who was
already dead when his son came to him, but when Seth planted the branch
on his grave, it grew into the tree which eventually provided wood for
the cross on which Jesus was crucified.(13)
The tree that is stamped on Sethe's name--stamped on her soul as it is
on her flesh--thus duplicates and concentrates upon itself the meaning
that unfolds in the diachrony of the narrative. It brings into play the
forces of life and death and, because of the part the tree plays in
Christ's Resurrection, foretells what the narrative gradually
reveals--the victory of Life over Death. Sethe's name thus epitomizes
the drama that builds around the numerous trees that people the
narrative, beckoning to the bewildered readers in their search for
meaning. Slavery has transgressed the Law of Life and Growth, the Law
of the Tree. Yet what the trees enfolded in Sethe's name and the
narrative also demonstrate is that beyond transgression lies
regeneration.
Notes
(1.) Concerning the moral ambiguity of good and evil in the novel, see
Otten and the author's own comments in "Intimate Things in Place" ("One
can never define good and evil. Sometimes good looks like evil;
sometimes evil looks like good.... evil is as useful as good is" [476])
and "A Conversation" ("The best thing that is in us is also the thing
that makes us sabotage ourselves" [584]).
(2.) See in particular "Rootedness," in which Morrison, after
explaining that the oral quality of her fiction is a direct heritage of
her Afro-American background, complains that critics often fail to
judge her books in terms of "their accomplishment within the culture
out of which" she writes (342).
(3.) On the conception of the body and the definition of selfhood in
African culture, see Thomas and Luneau 27-29, 33, 35; see also Zahan
19-20.
(4.) "If my work is
faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture,
it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and
translate them into print: antiphony, the group relationship to
audience performance, the critical voice which upholds tradition and
communal values and which also provides occasion for an individual to
transcend and/or defy group restrictions" ("Memory" 388-89). Sale
analyzes this aspect of the book.
(5.) Throughout the book, the ability to perceive colors is presented
as a symptom of sensitivity to life: The blindness to colors that has
been paralyzing Sethe since the murder of her child (89) is suddenly
dispelled when Paul D's love reawakens her to a sense of life (38-39).
After the murder, Baby Suggs gradually loses all interest in life
except for colors, which are the only surviving sign of her former
passionate attachment to it. Beloved, who hungers for life, is
fascinated by the orange squares on Baby's quilt (54, 77-78).
(6.) In his chapter on "Regenerative Trees," Eliade describes the tree
as "a source of Life," giving various examples showing that the mere
fact of touching a tree is "beneficial, fortifying, fertilizing"
(261-62).
(7.) The reader may refer to my article in Americana and the papers
quoted there.
(8.) "`Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They
get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart
it don't mean a thing'" (45).
(9.)
"The best thing she was was her children" (251); "`She was my best
thing' "(272); "all the parts of her that were precious and fine and
beautiful" (163).
(10.) "It was as though her mother had lost her mind ..." (240). Denver
later speaks of "their lunatic asylum" (250).
(11.) It is also signified by Sethe's pointed unawareness of the
footprints that Stamp has left around the house (181-82) and her
decision to remain tightly locked up in 124: "`Paul D convinced me
there was a world out there and that I could live in it. Should have
known better. Did know better. Whatever is going on outside my door
ain't for me. The world is in this room' "(182-83). "... there is no
world outside my door" (184).
(12.) See the comments Morrison makes in "Rootedness" about Song of
Solomon, a novel which starts dramatizing the "nourishing" role played
by men (in my opinion, in a much more muted way an in Beloved): "Pilate
had a dozen years of close, nurturing relationships with two males, her
father and her brother. And that intimacy and support was in her and
made her fierce and loving because she had that experience. Her
daughter Reba had less of that and related to men in a very shallow
way. Her daughter had even less of an association with men as a child,
so that the progression is really a diminishing of their abilities
because of the absence of men in a nourishing way in their lives....
That is the disability we must be on guard against for the future--the
female who reproduces the female who reproduces the female" (344).
(13.) As Eliade remarks (250-51), several versions of the legend
developed in the Middle Ages; they all focus however on the
regenerative power of the tree, which consistently metamorphoses into
the symbol of Redemption.
Works Cited
Bonnet, Michele. "Histoire Singuliere, Histoire Collective: la Double
Identite de Beloved." Americana 11. Paris: Presses de I'Universite de
Paris-Sorbonne, 1994. 33-37.
Eliade, Mircea. Traite d'Histoire des Religions. Rev. ed. Paris: Payot,
1968.
Mbiti, John S. Concepts of God in Africa. New York: Praeger, 1970.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
--. "Memory, Creation and Writing." Thoughht 59 (1984): 385-90.
--. "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundatioon." Black Women Writers. Ed.
Mad Evans. Garden City: Anchor, 1984. 339-45.
--.
"The Site of Memory." Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.
Ed. William Ziesser. Boston: Houghton, 1987. 103-24.
Naylor, Gioda, and Toni Morrison. "A Conversation." Southern Review
21.3 (1988): 567-93.
Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison.
Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.
Paquet, Anne-Made. "Beloved: Tree of Flesh, Tree of Life." "Beloved,
She's Mine." Ed. Genevieve Fabre and Claudine Raynaud. Paris: Cetanla.
1993. 115-25.
Sale, Maggie. "Call
and Response as Critical Method: African Oral Tradition and Beloved."
African American Review 26 (1992): 41-50.
Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston:
Twayne, 1990.
Thomas, Louis Vincent, and Rene Luneau. La Terre Africaine et ses
Religions. Paris: Larousse Universite, 1975.
Zahan, Dominique. Religion, Spirituatite et Pensee Africaines. Paris:
Payot, 1970.
Michele Bonnet is an associate professor at the Universite de
Paris-Sorbonne, where she teaches American literature. An earlier
version of this essay was presented as a talk at the University of
Provence (France) at a G.R.E.N.A. colloquium in March 1994.
-1-
|
|