"Nobody Could Make It Alone": Fathers and Boundaries in Toni Morrison's <i>Beloved</i>

Abstract

Everybody remembers first time they were taught that part of human race was Other. That's trauma. It's as though I told you that your left hand is not part of your body. --Toni Morrison, Pain of Being Black (258) Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) explores psychologically shattering effects of slavery by exposing societally sanctioned terror tactics used by white slave owners to rob black women and men of subjectivity and agency. As novel begins, ex-slave Sethe and her daughter, Denver, continue to experience psychological trauma inflicted by slavery years after slavery has been abolished. Sethe and Denver live isolated from community at 124 Bluestone Road, house that is haunted by what appears to be ghost of baby daughter Sethe killed eighteen years earlier. Mother and daughter seem to be on edge of madness. In words of Barbara Schapiro, they are experiencing 'psychic death, denial of one's being as human (156). The novel charts process by which Sethe, Denver, and other African Americans recover from effects of slavery and claim ownership of [a] freed (95). To become autonomous, Sethe, Denver, and others experience aftereffects of slavery must make their way back into community and become part of prevailing social order. As Teresa de Lauretis explains, identity is socially constructed through a process whereby social is accepted and absorbed by an individual as her (or his) own representation (12). The need for relationships with others for development of social self is dilemma ex-slaves face. How do they risk engagement in white-dominant social order that systemically works to appropriate them? Morrison's fiction points that problem of domination cannot be avoided even by excluding whites and forming an allblack community. Within African American in Song of Solomon, Paradise, Love, and other Morrison novels, blacks often reproduce marginalizing power structures of white culture. Morrison's novels engage with contemporary debate about need for and risks of identification within community. The notion that identification with others promotes separate identity is paradoxical. On surface, collective identity seems at odds with individuation. Accordingly, central premise of identification theory is that bonding with others is both constitutive of self and dangerous to self, because joining with others involves risk of being co-opted by other. This happens at conclusion of Beloved, when Sethe and Beloved become locked in love that wore everybody out (286) and was difficult for Denver to tell was who (283). The novel thus poses paradox: How can an individual maintain intact gender, ethnic, and other boundaries while at same time eliding these boundaries to ally with others? How, for example, can person of color both protect black identity and have solidarity with whites? The large body of scholarship on community in Morrison's texts reflects precisely these questions. For example, while some Morrison scholars agree that assuming identity ... is community gesture (Smith 283) and that her novels reimagin[e] community and coalition building within context of an increasingly multicultural and multiracial America (Michael 2), Roberta Rubenstein and Barbara Christian counter that we must not overlook sometimes destructive effects of community on individual. To resolve this seeming double bind, number of scholars have sought theory of identity that allows for relationships without colonizing another. Magali Cornier Michael argues that the notion of constructing 'we'... does not negate individual subject ... rather, it depends on conception of subject as involving continuous interchange and interdependency between individual and various communities (12). …