Beloved by Toni Morrison - Literature review Example

Toni Morrison’s Beloved In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison concludes “It was not a story to pass on” (Morrison, 1988, p. 274). This simple-seeming, straightforward sentence actually turns very complicated once one truly considers its meaning in the context of the story just read. First we must determine what story is being discussed, or what part of the story. The immediate answer is that this is the story of a woman who killed her child and must now live with the guilt of that. It could also be classified as a ghost story, as the manifestations of the baby become more and more pronounced and more and more obvious to all. But before we can relegate the statement to this easy explanation, we must consider the answers to what is ‘it’ referring to; an answer that can change depending upon the way in which it is read. By understanding the general plot line of the story and the reasons why Morrison might have built this deliberately ambiguous statement into the novel, it becomes possible to understand how the various approaches might interpret the story differently in such a way that most of them reach the same final conclusion – that here is a story that absolutely must be told. The story follows the fictional character Sethe, who lives in a small “gray and white house on Bluestone Road” (Morrison, 1988, p. 1) with her daughter Denver. Throughout the story, we learn these two women have not always lived alone, nor will they remain alone as the story progresses. As the story opens, we learn that Sethe and Denver once lived with Sethe’s two sons, Howard and Bugler, who have both run away as a result of strange, ghostly activities happening at the house. They also once lived with Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law and the woman who taught Sethe how to live again after escaping slavery. Very quickly, we are also introduced to Paul D, who was one of the men Sethe had worked with on Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation where she, her husband and several others had been cruelly treated as slaves. Upon her escape from slavery, an event that happened many years prior to the opening of the story, Sethe murdered her youngest child, a girl, as part of a desperate attempt to keep her precious daughter from experiencing the type of degradation and abuse Sethe experienced at the hands of Schoolteacher. It is this child who returns to haunt her mother and family in later years, manifesting itself in the bodily form of Beloved, who feeds off of this desperation to eventually bring about a final resolution. It is through Morrison’s deliberate use of the ambiguous in her statement of the story that “was not a story to pass on” as well as the ambiguous nature of her narrative style that allows her to say so much with so little. This concept of how authors express the incomprehensible is the subject of Catherine Belsey’s theory of a ‘crisis in subjectivity’ or ‘split subject.’ “Entry into language inevitably creates a division between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enonce, the ‘I’ who speaks and the ‘I’ who is the subject of discourse. The Subject is held in place in the discourse by the use of ‘I,’ but the ‘I’ of this discourse is always a stand in, a substitute, for the ‘I’ who speaks” (Belsey, 1980). Another theory, brought forward by Julia Kristeva, introduces the concept of a “divided subject, even a pluralized subject, that occupies not a place of enunciation, but permutable, multiple, and mobile places” (Kristeva, 1980). Morrison’s approach in Beloved expresses an experimental narrative approach that affords a variety of reading levels while still telling this difficult story. In this sense, narrative figures as both a primary technical resource and as part of a theme that helps to illustrate that adjustment to a life free of slavery was just as difficult as adjusting to life as a slave. Regardless of how the story is approached, for Sethe, although she had escaped to freedom with her children and her life, her husband was missing and her fear remained permanently ingrained in her heart. The suggestion that she and her children might be taken back into slavery was so horrifying that she attempted to kill the children rather than allow them to live the same sort of abusive, empty, fearful life she had experienced as a slave. Despite the fact that she is now free, Sethe cannot escape the haunting memories of her past. Her impending recapture comes on the heels of her first understanding of what it meant to be free, when Baby Suggs would lead the community out to the clearing in the woods and give the children permission to run and the mothers permission to hear them laugh and the men permission to dance and the women permission to cry for their losses (Morrison, 1988, pp. 87-88). However, following the murder of her beloved daughter to keep her out of the hands of the schoolteacher, Sethe is not able to escape the shackles of her past again. She remains tied to the house, tied to the memory of her lost daughter and incapable of moving forward with her living children. This creates a situation similar to slavery in which the children one by one work to ‘escape’ the house itself and the community quickly pulls away and out of her life, leaving her to her solitary prison cell of a house with no one but Denver for company. In determining the answer to the identity of ‘it’, a variety of approaches to the text can yield a variety of answers thanks to the narrative approach that Morrison takes in revealing the tale. Reading this from a psychological approach might indicate that this is a story Sethe is trying to avoid telling while a familial approach indicates a family history shared rarely and only in the dark. A social history perspective would see this as a story told by the slave community to those who have a need to know as a means of overcoming their own heartbreak while a national history perspective would demonstrate the story of slavery itself and the effects it has as it is told to the public. Because of its placement in the text, the ‘it’ in this famous statement can also be referring directly to the child with no name, whom everyone knows simply as ‘Beloved’ and whom no one remembers or recalls. In a final twist, a reader’s knowledge of vernacular indicates a dual literary translation of the statement. Instead of indicating a story that should not be retold, this passage could indicate a story that should not be unheard, as in passed up or skipped. The psychological perspective immediately sees this statement, then, as an attempt to avoid the topic, an act of failed repression. Repression is defined in psychoanalytic terms as the rejection from consciousness of painful or disagreeable ideas, memories, feelings, or impulses (“Repression”, 2006). This was a common response among ex-slaves as they worked to adjust to their new lives of relative freedom that is identified within Morrison’s tale. The idea that the slaves at Sweet Home were cruelly treated is made obvious in the first few pages of Morrison’s description: “suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves” (Morrison, 1988, p. 6). Perhaps more telling even than this passage is the inclusion of the boys hanging from the sycamore trees that Morrison goes on to describe, indicating Sethe’s guilt at being able to remember the beauty of the trees more than the boys who were hung from them. “Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that” (Morrison, 1988, p. 6). Despite this demonstrated tendency to skip over the more unpleasant details of her life, Sethe finds it impossible to escape from the memory of her one desperate act, so much so that she calls on it to manifest itself, which it does almost to Sethe’s ruin. Another aspect of slavery that becomes apparent in the story deals with the inability of the slave to enjoy a traditional family structure. In Beloved, Sethe is provided much more leniency than most slaves in that she is permitted to ‘marry’ the man she’s chosen from among the five available on the farm. This becomes clear through the narrative of Paul D, who remembers the five of them making the conscious decision to leave her alone in order to allow her to make her own decision. “It took her a year to choose – a long, tough year of thrashing on pallets eaten up with dreams of her. A year of yearning, when rape seemed the solitary gift of life” (Morrison, 1988, p. 10). Through this statement, it appears rape was a solution that was apparently all too common on other plantations. However, when she did get married, it was signified only by a new dress Sethe had managed to sew for herself ‘on the sly’ and Halle’s hitching rope hanging on a nail on the wall of her cabin, indicating the lack of importance such a coupling had within the greater community. This is only one way in which the traditional ‘family’ is shown to be denied to the slaves. “Through the different voice and memories of the book, including that of Sethe’s mother, a survivor of the infamous slave-ship crossing, we experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange […] Above all, it is seen as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised” (Atwood, 1987). Like Sethe, Baby Suggs was also familiar with the ‘checkerboard piece’ way in which families were pieced together under the slave system. Having had eight children, Morrison tells us these children were fathered by six different men and most taken away before their mother even had a chance to say good-bye. “Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. […] What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children” (Morrison, 1988, p. 23). The story also serves as a record to the world, both on the local community level and at the national level, of what was done to these people and why such treatment of other human beings should never be allowed to take place. Like the actions of Baby Suggs in leading the community out into the open field to give them permission to take part in those activities most often denied them, a societal viewpoint can interpret this book as being Morrison’s tacit permission to the members of the black community to feel the joys of life by remembering the things that were denied them. The story stands up as an analogy to the effects of slavery as Sethe can be seen as a fractured woman, just as the black community was a fractured community during the time of the Reformation. “It sings out hope for a new community, in which all the stories of its people unite in song to raise them out of an infernal, fractured world” (Cowan-Barbetti, 1998). In the process of telling the story, Morrison is able to highlight for those who did not experience it what slavery was like for those who lived through it, educating the nation to the deplorable conditions and the never-ending effects such treatment had on the body, mind and spirit of everyone involved. The final aspect to consider is whether the ‘it’ of Morrison’s undefined statement refers to the child who was murdered as she struggles to achieve some semblance of recognition. Having been murdered at such a young age, no one now remembers what her name was, making it impossible for anyone to call her back in keeping with popular folklore, yet she remains a focus of Sethe’s life simply because of the passion with which Sethe remembers her. However, her reappearance among the living, while attempting to establish a more normal family life for the women of the house, is not able to fulfill this goal because of the hurts that have been experienced in the past. “There’s a lot more to Beloved than any one character can see, and she manages to be many things to several people. She is a catalyst for revelations as well as self-revelations; through her we come to know not only how, but why, the original child Beloved was killed” (Atwood, 1987). Although it takes the intervention of the community to eventually drive her away and save Sethe from the draining effects of trying to make up for the life lost, it remains Beloved that provides Sethe with the necessary avenue to find a form of self-accepting peace. Through this aspect of the story, it can be seen that Morrison does not intend the story to be one of unending grief and constant imprisonment. Throughout the story, Morrison makes it clear that the only path to true freedom exists not in remaining enslaved to the actions and events of the past, but in their acknowledgement and acceptance. This is first set forth in the actions that Baby Suggs takes in leading her community to laugh, dance and cry depending upon the age and the gender of her listeners. She understands that the women have suffered heartache greater than any human can bear and that the men have had to hold themselves under rigid control at every waking moment just to survive. She knows, too, that the children have learned how to be silent dark ghosts in the shadows, staying out of the way and asking no questions for fear of punishment or separation from those they love. The appearance of Beloved marks a turning point in the novel as the characters are again forced to remember, forced to face the actions of the past and forced to accept what has happened to them. “Pamela Barnett, for instance, argues that the characters in the novel are forced by Beloved to confront traumatic memories. This confrontation in turn begins the process of healing, which she describes as ‘conscious meaning making about what is inherently incomprehensible.’” (Heffernan, 1998). The idea that healing could take place is further illustrated when “Sethe is broken at the end of the story, waiting to die, when Paul D. comes to her and caresses her, putting back together again the parts of her body” (Cowan-Barbetti, 1998). Therefore, regardless of how it is approached, the true message of Beloved is that ‘it’ must be acknowledged, whether for the personal mental health of the individual, for the healing it can bring to the family, for the benefit of the community to understand their shared experience or for the nation who is still struggling to overcome the problems that were started during this period of history. The child who wishes to remain remembered must be so in order for others to let go and forget and the story must be told. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. “Jaunted by their Nightmares.” The New York Times. (September 13, 1987). November 28, 2006 Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Cowan-Barbetti, Claire. “Transforming the Chain into Story: The Making of Communal Meaning in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Janus Head. (Summer 1998). November 28, 2006 < http://www.janushead.org/JHSummer98/ClaireNBarbetti.cfm> Heffernan, Teresa. “’Beloved’ and the Problem of Mourning.” Studies in the Novel. Vol. 30, I. 4, (1998), p. 558. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Leon S. Roudiez (Ed.). Thomas Zora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin Books, 1988. “Repression.” Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1). Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Random House, Inc., 2006. November 28, 2006. Read More