"To be Loved and Cry Shame": A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

The struggle for psychic wholeness is a continuous one in Toni Morrison's Beloved, a novel situated in slavery and its aftermath. It is a process which requires access to painful memories; characters in novel reintegrate, achieve the join so desperately wished for in Beloved's soliloquy chapter, re-fuse, when they no longer refuse deepest knowledge of meanings of their individual and historical pasts. But much of novel explores extraordinarily anguishing interlude of time during which virtually all protagonists, not just Sethe, exist almost as dreamwalkers in a state of dissociation and denial as they remain determined to expend their psychic resources keeping past at bay. No longer able to endure endless succession of losses, faced with death or disappearance of all eight of her children (including Sethe's husband Halle), retaining as her sole and astonishingly poignant memory of her first-born child, Ardelia, solitary knowledge of how much she loved burned bottom of bread, Sethe's mother-in-law, great unchurched preacher, Baby Suggs has a sadness ... at her center, desolated center where self that was no self made its home (140). Eventually, she gives up preaching and dies of grief, while Sethe's daughter Denver lives psychically paralyzed inside her own mind. After Sethe acknowledges to Denver veracity of Nelson Lord's grisly re-telling of story of Sethe's murder of Denver's sister, Beloved, to keep her from being returned to slavery, Denver takes on a synesthesiac version of hysterical blindness: she becomes deaf, musing in her soliloquy chapter: Made have to read faces and learn how to figure out what people were thinking, so didn't need to hear what they said (206). While maternal love is certainly one focus of novel, male protagonists in this novel also struggle towards a definition of appropriate loving within which they can survive. In absence of that stipulation, namely, survivability, Halle loves much, and ends up with his face in butter; Sethe's companion and lover D, haunted by consequences of what he sees as Halle's, and later, Sethe's, too thick love, is determined to love small and suffers enormously for consequences of his decision. Sethe's consciousness, and consciousness of Denver, D, and twenty-year-old Beloved (the spectral and apparently embodied adult presence of her murdered two-year-old daughter) are suffused with a truncated, relentless, disrupted chronology common to persons so severely abused that they suffer from Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or disassociative states. Despite fact that she was not captured in Africa but rather born in America and therefore could have no rational explanation for remembering in vivid detail her own ordeal on a slave ship during Middle Passage, Beloved repeatedly returns to memories of Middle Passage, primal scene for sixty million Africans, slave ships on which captives suffered and died. (1) Throughout novel, Denver and D frequently do not know if they are dreaming or awake. Sleep and comfort of Baby Suggs' nearness protects Denver at night in 124, but during her waking hours, during consciousness, she is almost unsure if she is alive, breathing, in her own body. In Denver's soliloquy chapter, she muses, I was safe at night in there with [Baby Suggs]. All could hear was breathing but sometimes in day couldn't tell whether it was breathing or somebody next to me (207). And in an understated echo of normal response to profound deprivation, D doesn't know if it is mud or his own tears that are moisture on his face: Paul D thought he was screaming; his mouth was open and there was this loud throat-splitting sound--but it may have been somebody else (110). All four of these characters, and, to some extent, every black character in novel who believes he or she has seen Beloved (as well as Bodwin, one white character who also sees Beloved), experiences Beloved either as a fractured aspect of Sethe's psyche or as a kind of doppleganger for his or her own feelings of loss, grief, confusion, and rage, and, in case of Bodwin, feelings of accountability, culpability, and guilt. …