“To Get to a Place”: lntercorporeality’ in Beloved

Abstract

Abstract From The Bluest Eye through Beloved, Toni Morrison surfaces and reconstructs Ellison’s submerged story of black motherhood. In The Bluest Eye, as Michael Awkward has noted, Morrison removes the father’s rape of the daughter from its status as a framed, disowned story within a story instead positioning it as the central event in her novel.1 At the same time, in all of her novels she reconfigures the violation and abuse of black motherhood in part by transforming the storytelling techniques that speak it. In The Bluest Eye this means that she echoes Ellison’s imagery yet changes it from a veiled symbology of the motherly past to a body-embedded phenomenology of that past. Furthermore, in all of her fiction, but especially in Beloved, Morrison c eates an intercorporeal narrative that conforms to neither the Romantic subsumption of objects and nature typical of Mr. Norton’s master narrative in Invisible Man nor the deconstructive purging of objects and “meaning” typical of Ellison’s interruptive narrative. Her narrators, like Virginia Woolfs, make bodies and objects the favored level of the real, a narrative medium and a narrative locale.