Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

The terms and community are frequently uttered with reverence by feminists, non-feminists, and anti-feminists alike. These terms and spaces they conjure up are invoked as cure to no end of social ills, from stress and malaise to crack addiction and corporate downsizing. Calls for return to and to community are both nostalgic and utopian. In Coming Home, Carol Pearson discusses a feminist utopian narrative through which, . . upon discovering a sexually egalitarian society, narrators have a sense of coming to a nurturing, liberating environment (63). Other feminist theorists of utopia, such as Lucy Sargisson, worry that such blueprints represent an inappropriate closure to feminist utopian imaginings. Because domestic spaces have worked out for many women as places to be domesticated and/or to be a domestic, it is not surprising that most have mixed feelings about a structure that contains often unfulfilled dream of possession and lived experience of servitude. Beloved, a novel published during domestic retrenchments and anti-feminist backlash of 1980s, shows both dystopian and utopian properties of space named home and people named community. Morrison, through a complex interweaving of peopled spaces, shows how homes and communities serve as places to gather strength, formulate strategy, and rest, even as they are insufficient to task of solving institutional and social ills. In a process of personal and social transformation, Beloved's spaces and times change through geographical and structural movement and through storytelling. Narrative processes are linked to spatial formations and communal configurations. Morrison's simultaneous working through of history and memory by describing bodies and social structures makes novel useful not only for projects of remembrance and revision, but also for building new social configurations of family and kin. The role ghost-daughter's body plays as a site for memory, desire, and history has been discussed in depth by many critics, but she/it is not only embodied site in novel at which memory and desire meet. The dwellings and places characters move through and escape to become at times fixed containers of memory and desire, and at times spaces where boundaries between selves are softened, making possible gatherings and joinings necessary for emancipatory struggles. When softer, they provide emotional and physical sustenance and can be built onto, accommodating gatherings. Because novel is a meditation on transformations of body and soul, it is necessary to mark process of how spaces become hardened as well as how they may be softened again. Places in Beloved are made hard discursively and architecturally, marked off by law, by walls, or by armed guards. They can also be or be made open: fluid, dynamic, and partially or temporarily invisible to law. What is important, however, is not recognizing or describing a space, or categorizing it, but charting interactions between spaces and charting processes of their hardening or softening. The demands of self-protection and make it impossible to rely entirely on open spaces, for they carry their own vulnerabilities. The rented house 124 Bluestone plays a crucial role in marking possibilities and limits of transformations of spaces Morrison's characters inhabit. Possibilities, and shutting down of possibilities, develop through interactions and processes. For example, pre-apocalyptic 124 Bluestone (before Sethe takes handsaw to her children) is a softened space in which African-American community of Cincinnati meets and exchanges information and food. The post-apocalyptic 124 (after the Misery) has become hardened, albeit ironically more alive in its resentment of intrusion and change. Through Denver's going out into community and exchange of food, she and become to change and community intervention. …