Beloved analysis (final paper in feminist writings)

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Name: Jesullyna C. Manuel Date: May 18, 2009
Subject: Feminist Writings Prof. Jennie V. Jocson
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LOVE, MURDER AND INSANITY: THE PORTRAIT OF A BLACK MOTHER IN TONI
MORRISON’S BELOVED
A black woman in Ohio, in the mid- nineteenth century, slashes the throat of her
infant daughter and lets her bleed to death. This is basically the tragic story of the mother
in the novel Beloved written by Toni Morrison. We are going to ask ourselves, what kind
of mother can commit such act of violence against her own children? Killing one’s child is
considered as the most callous and unnatural act of which a woman could be thought
capable. In the conventional wisdom, motherhood is the most sacred vocation for all
women. It is the shrine at which every woman must dedicate their lives. In the familiar
discourse of the governing patriarchy, maternity is projected as woman’s biological
destiny, as well as her assigned role in the society. At different historical moments, across
different cultures, this idealization of motherhood has been variously deployed, to reaffirm
the patriarchal framework.

Published in 1987, and set in the post civil War Ohio of the 1870’s, Beloved is the
story of Sethe, a black woman haunted by the ghost of the baby daughter she have killed,
to save the child from enslavement. In a narrative that moves back and forth between the
past and the present, we piece together the main events of Sethe’s life. We learn that, as
the only child of the black father, Sethe is spared the fate of all her other siblings,
drowned by their mother on board a slave ship. We are told of the apparently idyllic
conditions at Sweet Home, the plantation owned by the Garner family, before the arrival
of Schoolteacher, whose brutality drives the slaves to attempt escape. Sethe’s story
includes the death of her mother on the slave plantation; her marriage to Hale; a whipping
which leaves the scar on her back with the shape of the chokecherry tree; the act akin to
rape in which the white slave owner take her milk; her subsequent escape; and the birth
of her daughter while she is on the run. Assisted in childbirth by a white girl named Amy
Denver, Sethe later takes refuge in the house of her mother-in-law Baby Suggs whose

Beloved – Toni Morrison Final Paper in Feminist Writings Jhess Manuel (MAed Lit)

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son bought her freedom by working “Five years of Sundays”. Facing recapture, Sethe
desperately tries to kill all her children to save them from being slaves. She succeeds in
killing only the infant who is later then referred to as Beloved, after the tombstone erected
in her memory. After a period of imprisonment, Sethe returns to live at the house called
124, haunted now by Beloved’s ghost. Her sons, Howard and Buglar, are frightened away
by this ghost, who becomes a member of what is now an all-female household.

Into this household comes Paul D., once Sethe’s fellow slave, whose presence
compels Sethe to remember or rather to “rememory”- the past that she has tried to
repress. Paul D. finds it equally hard to confront the story of his own sufferings as a slave.
His heart is compared to a sealed tobacco tin. Jealous and possessive, the ghost of
beloved reappears as a young woman, bent on seducing Paul D as a double act of
revenge on and the control over her mother. Trapped in his mutually destructive
relationship with her daughter, Sethe is rescued by the community of black women. Her
other daughter Denver, succeeds in exorcising the ghost after Sethe attacks Mr. Bodwin
in the mistaken belief that he is the schoolteacher, come to enslave the daughter she
once killed.

Other characters- mothers and daughters- complicate the double narrative of
Sethe and Paul D. Baby Suggs, the black ancestor figure with prophetic overtones
exercises a great influence as a preacher. Referred to as “Baby Suggs, holy” she
combines the sacred with the secular in her role as a preacher with special magical
powers. She belongs to the long line of strong powerful matriarchal figure created by Toni
Morrison. At one point, she antagonizes the community by her act of presumption when
she lays out a lavish feast in celebration of Sethe’s return. She then withdraws from active
life, retiring into a world of silence, only two colored patches on her quilt signaling her
desire for life more imaginatively fulfilling. Baby Suggs decline has been to represent the
silencing of the African Great Mother by the discourse of slavery, or the subjugation of the
blacks in America. However, she continues to exert a powerful influence after her death.
Sethe and Denver sense her ghostly presence when they revisit the spot where she used
to preach. Later, Denver hears her grandmother’s voice urging her to break out of her
sense of bondage, Baby Sugg’s posthumous agency thus triggers Denver’s awakening,


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indicating a need to confront and interpret the past in ways that enhance the survival in
an altered present. Baby Suggs is also portraying a powerful feminist role in the story. In
the clearing where she was heading the cathartic ritual of crying, dancing and talking, she
urged the women to start loving themselves. She urged them to kiss every part of their
body to show their acceptance. Loving oneself according to baby Suggs is the only way to
be free from the ghost of the past. By accepting who you really are will mean that others
will also accept you. No one can love yourself first but you. This for me is a powerful call
for women to start realizing their value.

In Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics she said that in terms of activity, sex role assigns
domestic service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human
achievement, interest, and ambition to the male. The limited role allotted the female tends
to arrest her at the level of biological experience. Therefore, nearly all that can be
described as distinctly human rather than animal activity (in their own way animals also
give birth and care for their young) is largely reserved for the male. Of course, status
again follows from such an assignment. (P. 26). Inherently, women are nurturing, caring
and capable of giving life like the allusion of a woman to Mother Nature. Based on the
context of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, she repudiates the role of maternal ideal as
limiting and false. Women must not be boxed in the stereotyped that women are only
there to give birth and care for their children. In this contention, we can clearly see it the
way Toni Morrison created the main character in the novel Sethe.

The idea of the maternal is clearly one of Morrison’s preoccupations, but
representations of motherhood in her novels defy easy analysis on account of their range
and complexity. Traversing the fractured space of the maternal, Morrison’s mother comes
up against a range of contradictions central to the crisis of feminism: Identity of the
otherness, freedom and responsibility, nature and culture individualism and collectivity,
love and anger, silence and speech, creation and destruction. These contradictions are
really quite apparent in the novel Beloved which is the subject of my analysis in this
paper. The concept of motherhood within Beloved is as an overarching and overwhelming
love that can conquer all, strongly typified within the novel by the character Sethe, whose
very name is the feminine of "Seth"- the Biblical 'father of the world'. Sethe's escape from


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the slave plantation (ironically named 'Sweet Home') stems from her desire to keep the
"mother of her children alive" and not from any personal survival instinct. Sethe's
maternal instincts almost lead to her own destruction. Readers can assume the
interpretation that Beloved is a wrathful character looking to wreak revenge on Sethe for
killing her, despite the fact that the murder was, in Sethe's mind, an entirely loving act.
Sethe's guilt at Beloved's death means that she is willing to "give up her life, every
minute, hour and second of it, to take back just one of Beloved's tears". The strength of
her love leads her almost to the point of death as she allows Beloved complete freedom
to destroy her household and relationships; the roles of mother and daughter are
completely reversed. "Was it past bedtime, the light no good for sewing? Beloved didn't
move, said, 'Do it', and Sethe complied". To show her love, to save her child from the
bitter world of slavery that she once experienced, she chose to kill her daughter Beloved.
She justifies her action in the latter part of the novel as she explains to Beloved as an act
of love and not a premeditated murder. She is willing to see her daughter dead rather
than experience the same horror that she had in her life as a slave. This act to me is quite
bold. This is radical feminist. Sethe boldly defies the stereotype of a woman. She moved
out of the box of being meek and submissive. She is willing to do everything to protect her
child. We can also see the nature of a mother. The unconventional way of Sethe in
demonstrating her love to her child clearly repudiates the stereotypical role of a mother in
the patriarchal society. The concept of motherhood then showed by Sethe is different
from the common concept of the stereotype. The stereotype mother is nurturing, for
Sethe, killing is an act of motherhood to her children. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak draws
attention to the heterogeneity and complex women’s experiences, especially in terms of
their varying cultural locations. Resistance to hegemonic constructions of motherhood
thus emerges as common goal for feminists from widely divergent background. In the
discourse of feminism, the space of the maternal accommodates contrary elements such
as victimhood and empowerment, submission and authority, creativity and
destructiveness. The idea of motherhood contains within both repressive and
emancipatory potential


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Sethe’s mother, the slave who kills her children because they are products of
sexual violation of white men, cannot nurse her children because they are products of her
slavery. This loss of maternal care perhaps explains Sethe’s desperation to get her milk
to her children when separated from them during their attempt of escape. In economic
terms (Marxist Feminism) Sethe’s mother demonstrates the dependence of the white
households on the denial of family rights to the blacks. Morrison uses the tropes of
maternity to highlight the grotesque denial of human rights within slavery. Sethe doesn’t
know her mother’s name, but she remembers her by the mark on her body, a circle and a
cross that denotes her identity. “This is your Ma’am. This, she pointed I am the only one
who got this mark now. The rest dead.” (Beloved page 62). For Sethe, this maternal
absence signifies separation from her black cultural heritage, just as the speech of her
foster mother Nan embodies a trace of her lost of mother tongue. “What Nan told her she
had forgotten, along with the language she told it in. The same language her ma’am
spoke, and which would never come back. But the message in that was and had been
there all along.” (Beloved 62).

Perhaps the most baffling figure is Beloved herself. A multiple figuration, she
represents not only Sethe's dead baby, but also the collective sorrow of the "Sixty Million
and more" who perished, unnamed and unremembered, during the Middle Passage.
Twice marked, by tomb engraver’s chisel and handsaw, Beloved reappears as the word
made flesh, representing the persistence of personal and collective memory in the face of
dominant discourses that seek their erasure. She represents the reality of experience as
well as its textuality, its openness to interpretation. A supernatural entity, she is both a
demon to be exorcised, and a healing force compelling other characters to confront
repressed problems. The appearance of Beloved acts as a catalyst that enables Sethe's
liberation from her bondage to guilt about the past through a process of atonement, while
forcing Paul D. to face his `blocked' emotions. The process is not easy. Paul D. must
commit an act akin to incest with the daughter of the woman he loves. Sethe must nurture
the ghost of the daughter she has killed, dwindling into a shadow of her former self, while
Beloved flourishes, pregnant, presumably, with Paul D.'s child. Psychoanalytical critics
interpret Beloved as an exemplar of the pre Oedipal, the return of the repressed, or as a


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trace of a psychic racial memory; while reader-response criticism places her in the
category of the stubborn, or that which defies explanation. More story than character,
African mythological pre-text as well as Western ghost, and Beloved’s resistance to
complete explanation signals the multiplicity of levels at which her text must be read.
If Beloved signifies the presence of the past, hope for the future finds a locus in
Denver, the other daughter, who suggests the possibility of adapting the legacy of the
past to the demands of the present. Trapped in a haunted house and unable to relate to
the community outside her home, Denver at first withdraws into a silence that must be
broken, for her to function as an effective agent of change. The turning point comes with
her decision to educate herself and look for work. "It was a new thought, having a self to
look out for and preserve" (Beloved 252). Denver's response to the written word is
epiphanic, embodying the possibility of writing into history the repressed narratives of
black suffering. What makes such narrative possible is made from the mixture of the milk
and blood that Denver drank at the moment of her sister's death, signifying the
conjunction of love and violence that is her mother's legacy. It is Denver who rescues
Sethe from the ghost of Beloved, before setting out on a quest for connection with the
larger world outside her community. The desire to rewrite history haunts this violent
narrative of mother-daughter relationships, the fragmented stories of the various
characters creating an alternative to official versions of history. Sethe's murder of her
child is based on a real-life incident. In 1850, Margaret Garner, a runaway slave from
Kentucky, tried to kill her children when facing recapture in Ohio. The epigraph dedicates
the novel to the victims who died in the Middle Passage. As a trace of the past, Beloved
straddles both public and private domains. Though set in post abolition days, the
narrative suggests that the persistence of racism has made freedom a perilous
proposition for blacks in America. This freedom has a gendered dimension. Despite
changed historical circumstances and increased availability of choices, Morrison feels that
the female weakness for voluntary self-sacrifice remains a stumbling block in the path to
freedom. In an interview with Gail Caldwell, speaking of women's vulnerability to
"displacing themselves into something other than themselves", she says, "Now in the
modern and contemporary world, women had a lot of choices and didn't have to do that
anymore. But nevertheless, there's still an enormous amount of misery and self-sabotage,


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and we're still shooting ourselves in the foot." Elsewhere, discussing Beloved with Marsha
Darling, Morrison says: "This story is about, among other things, the tension between
being you, one's own Beloved, and being a mother... It seemed that slavery presented an
ideal situation to discuss the problem. That was the situation in which Black women were
denied motherhood, so they would be interested in it." Gender, especially as figured in
the maternal dimension, is thus central to the novel's conception, though complicated by
issues of class and race, the interlocking grids of oppression to which black women are
often subjected. Amy Denver, the `white girl' who assists at Sethe's childbirth,
demonstrates the pervasiveness of women's oppression across the barriers of race, as
well as the emancipatory potential of female bonding.
In the novel Morrison pointed out that stereo-typed gender roles were discarded
under the pressures of slavery. Instead of being treated as weaker than men, women
were also required to do physical labor in competition with men so that their relationship
with each other is not male dominance and female subordination. The all female
household at 124 challenges nuclear male headed family. Later, Paul, Sethe and Denver
form a temporary home that defies the usual definition of the family as biologically
connected social unit. To an extent, Paul D carries the visionary weight of the novel,
because in his sensitive and nurturing role he presents alternative traditional
constructions of masculinity. His story in paralleling with Sethe’s establishes the
persuasiveness of the after-effects of the slavery even as it highlights the gendered
differences that leave him free to wander, while Sethe remains trapped in her maternal
and domestic obligations. The difference, Morrison suggests, is not necessarily innate.
Paul D. can adopt the role of caregiver, and Denver can leave home s the female
adventurer setting out to explore the world. Morrison's revisions of traditional models of
the family reveal that she is not a radical feminist. Her egalitarian ethic envisages a
situation of harmonious cooperation rather than a simple reversal of gendered power
structures. Paul D. is also the agent of Sethe's self-renewal, making her conscious of the
possibilities inherent in acquiring subjectivity independent of the maternal role.
In Marxist Feminism as women are seen as profitable. In the novel this is quite
clear. As we have pointed out earlier the male and female characters in the novel, except
for the Schoolteacher who dominates not basically because they are male but by virtue of


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their color, there is no male dominance in the novel rather the relationship is one of
comradeship. In this regard female during the time of slavery are regarded as commodity.
They have a price. They have value. There was a part in the novel during the escape of
Paul D he realizes that he has a value when somebody paid him to do a work. With this
realization, he thought of Sethe’s value is more than his because Sethe can reproduce.
Sethe and the other women in the story like Baby Suggs are not allowed to feel anything,
but they are there as a labor tool and a source of production. As the Marxist feminist
pointed out the womb is also a place of production. This is basically true as seen in the
novel.

REFERENCES

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex 1945; Harmondsworth: Penguin 1972
Chakravarty, Radha Poisonous Love and Haunted Houses: The Maternal Problematic in
Toni Morrison BRAC University Journal, vol I no 2, 2004 pp 13-20
Morrison, Toni, Beloved, New York: A Division of Random House Inc. June 2004
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Feminism and Critical Theory taken from the handouts given
dated April 16, 2009
Internet sources
www.sparksnotes.com
www.wikipedia.com
www.gradesavers.com
www.bookrags.com
www.projectguttenberg.com
www.slideshare.com


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