Narrative Possibilities at Play in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

The historical heritage of African Americans and its mythical echoes are the dominant themes of Toni Morrison's poetics. Song of Solomon (1977) is based on the retrieval of the myth of the Flying Africans; Tar Baby (1981) subtly re-enacts Brer Rabbit's homonymous adventure with the sticky doll. Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved (1987)(1), may at first seem somewhat different from her previous novels in that it is set in post Civil War years whereas the others focus on contemporary times. However, it is the relationship between present and past that constitutes the cohesion of the author's fictional world, no matter when the stories take place.(2) In The Bluest Eye (1970), the narrator is the grown-up witness of a story that took place when she was a child. Sula (1975) questions the crucial influence of both the personal and the collective past on people's understanding of their present life by highlighting the ambiguities caused by the potentially endless changes of interpretation of any past event. The hero of Song of Solomon finds his identity only when he learns his ancestor's story. The protagonists of Tar Baby, on the other hand, are caught in the trap symbolized by the sticky tar: they never take their destiny in their own hands but enact the old folk tales as shadows of its original characters. Morrison is well-versed on statistical and historical events, and she always scatters bits and pieces of documentary realism in the elaborate fabric of her tales. As a matter of fact, her novels are rich with statistical figures on Black migration, on employment, on lynchings or cases of violence against Black Americans that shocked public opinion worldwide, like Emmett Till's murder or the bomb in the Birmingham church. The narrative pretext of Beloved is also an instance of documentary realism, as it draws inspiration from the many cases of infanticide that occurred in order to prevent children born in captivity from suffering like their parents.(3) Central is the story of a runaway slave, Garner, who tried to kill her four children when she was about to be caught by slave catchers who had tracked her down at her mother-in-law's house in Cincinnati. Various versions of this event have been recorded. For instance, one of the illustrations in Vincent Harding's There is a River reproduces an engraving of Margaret Garner, who killed two of her children rather than have them returned to slavery. When the remaining children were taken away, she committed suicide.(4) Walter Clemons shows a different version in his review of Morrison's novel when he says that afterwards, [Margaret Garner] was quite serene about what she had done (74). Various reviews and interviews relate that a newspaper article reporting this case had been on Morrison's mind for years. When reading this I remembered seeing it in The Black Book, the scrapbook of African American history she helped to put together in 1974 when she was working as an editor at Random House. In fact, A Visit to the Slave Mother Who Killed her Child from The American Baptist is among the articles in that book. Morrison says that she was not at all interested in recording [Garner's] life as lived, but rather she wanted to invent it (Darling 5). Albeit she has used some of the details of Garner's experience from the 1856 article, with Beloved Morrison has certainly succeeded in reinventing the extreme act of love of a slave mother and has transformed it into a powerful metaphor. In these pages I want to explore the meaning of this metaphor. The story takes place in Cincinnati between 1873 and 1874, eight years after Emancipation, and eighteen years after the protagonist, Sethe, has cut her baby girl's throat in the wood shed where she meant to slaughter all her little ones to protect them from their owner who had come to claim them. After the death of Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law, Sethe stays in the woman's house with her only remaining daughter, Denver. …