Looking into the Self that is no Self: An Examination of Subjectivity in Beloved

Abstract

In a 1989 interview with Bonnie Angelo of Time magazine, Toni Morrison discussed the desire of our nation to repress the memory of slavery. According to Morrison, the enslavement of Africans and African Americans in the United States is "something that the characters [in Beloved] don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember" (120). Yet her novel forces its reader to recognize the existence and conditions of slavery in a nation that would prefer to forget that such a crime was ever committed. While Morrison, like Sethe and Paul D., would prefer to repress the memory of slavery, she feels compelled to create a space in which the "enslaved" may finally speak. As Elizabeth Abel has pointed out, "Beloved deliberately represents captive persons as subjects rather than objects of oppression, and does so primarily in a discourse on the hunger, passion, and violence generated in the 'too thick' mother-daughter bond produced by the conditions of slavery" (199). While the end of slavery sought to transform objects (slaves) into subjects (free men and women), the characters in Beloved find the passage into subjectivity somewhat elusive. In this essay, I explore the question of Beloved's identity and how her identity affects her own subjectivity, as well as that of Denver and Sethe. First, I explain how Beloved's perpetual references to a slave ship experience function as her primal scene: a traumatic event in one's childhood which may be considered the cause of one's adult neurosis (Freud 213-34). After interpreting the primal scene, I discuss the complexity of Beloved's identity. As Margaret Atwood asserts, "There's a lot more to Beloved than any one character can see, and she manages to be many things to several people" (3). Like the novel itself, the character of Beloved resists a singular interpretation. However, if for a moment one were to disregard the multiplicity of Beloved's voice and focus instead on the voice as a single consciousness, one would find a powerful way into the novel. This schema allows the reader to consider another possible interpretation of Beloved's identity. Finally, I examine the characters' desire for subjectivity and the extent to which their desires are fulfilled. Identifying the Primal Scene In her article "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved," Elizabeth B. House informs us that "unraveling the mystery of . . . [Beloved's] identity depends to a great extent upon first deciphering chapters four and five of Part II" in Beloved. House provides a detailed explanation of the obscure references in the narrative, pointing out "how white slave traders . . . captured the girl and her mother" and "put them aboard an abysmally crowded slave ship" (18). Her observation lies in contrast to that of Carol Rubens, who views this narrative sequence as Beloved's "escape from the grave," explaining that "the hold of a slave ship seems [only] fleetingly invoked" (1135). To readers unfamiliar with slave ship descriptions and the events that transpired on board these vessels, Morrison's eight-page account might seem "fleetingly invoked" and much "too vague." Jean Wyatt argues that the unannounced appearance of the slave ship monologue is intended to throw readers off balance: "Since Morrison does not identify these scattered perceptions as observations of life on a slave ship or tell how Beloved came to be there or give any coordinates of time and place, readers are baffled: they have no idea where they are." Wyatt goes on to explain how the confusion that the reader experiences in this section of the text "imitates the disorientation of the Africans who were thrown into slave ships without explanation" (480). While I agree with Wyatt that some readers may stumble on the initial appearance of the sequence, I believe that the reader who is educated about the Middle Passage will quickly recognize the details of the narrative, finding it extremely vivid and tangible. …