Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

In Beloved, Toni Morrison expresses the dislocations and violence of slavery through disruptions in language. The novel tells the “unspeakable” story of Sethe, a slave mother whose act of infanticide leaves a gap in family narrative; bars her surviving daughter, Denver, from language use; and hinders her own ability to speak. Morrison's inclusion of voices previously left out of historical and literary narratives disturbs the language of the novel itself. The Africans piled on the slave ships, the preverbal child who comes back in the shape of the ghost Beloved, and a nursing mother who insists on the primacy of bodily connection: the expression of these subjects' heretofore unspoken experiences and desires distorts discursive structures, especially the demarcations that support normative language. Morrison's textual practice challenges Lacan's assumptions about language and language users, and her depiction of a social order that performs some of the functions of mothering challenges his vision of a paternal symbolic order based on a repudiation of maternal connection.