A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

In Laugh of the Medusa (1981), Helne Cixous states that new history is coming (253), and with Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) it begins to arrive. The novel is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her daughter in a desperate bid to save her from the misery and indignity of slavery when threatened with recapture-a story very few people knew before the publication of Morrison's book. Yet, while Beloved is a woman-centered narrative that challenges the phallusy of history (the lack of representation or misrepresentation of women in male-dominated versions of history), it is not so much a herstory as a hystery in the sense that the central protagonists can be read as hysterics: subjects haunted by the past, characters who unconsciously express repressed memories of psychic trauma through physical symptoms and use a corporeal discourse to articulate what is otherwise unspeakable. Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis and employing French feminist ideas about hysteria, I will argue that Beloved explores the means by which the disempowered and dispossessed express personal dissatisfaction and enact political dissent. By examining the relationship between the repression of pain and the repossession of the past, I propose that, like hysteria, Morrison's novel highlights the importance of confronting, reclaiming, and transforming history, and that