NAFF_Online -
Poole, T “Sexuality, violence and irrationality in Toni Morrison's Beloved”, NAFF_Online 5.1 (2007): pp. 26-28.
Within American literature there are several themes that reoccur throughout the decades and from book to book. These themes include sexuality, violence, irrationality and communal and individual identities. However, these themes do not appear within literature as separate entities, as within American literature there are relationships that are particularly interested to explore. On one hand, there is a focus on the relationship between sexuality, violence and irrationality and, on the other, there is a spotlight on the relationship between communal and individual identities. One piece of American literature that shows these relationships very cunningly and is Beloved by Toni Morrison.
Beloved is loosely based on the life and legal case of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her child to prevent the child from being taken into slavery. The book’s central figure is Sethe, an escaped slave who murdered her two-year-old daughter, referred to as Beloved, to save her from a life of slavery. The novel defies white ideology in the traditional sense of constructing a novel as it constantly jumps from the present to the past and wrenches the past to the present in which the characters have to deal with in order to move on with their lives. Beloved is considered different from the traditional slave narratives as it forces its characters, the black community, the author and the reader to confront the very painful and taboo aspects of slavery, such as sexual abuse and violence.
Throughout the novel there are many difficult issues being tackled like the relationship between sexuality (in all its forms), violence and irrationality. For the most part there is a very strong relationship between sexuality and violence and sections of these can be linked with irrationality. One of the most interesting sections in the novel that dives into sexuality with its connection to violence is where the men of Sweet Home wait for Sethe, the only black woman there, to choose her own partner. Though the idea of rape had entered their mind several times and seemed like the easiest option, rather than be starved of the sexual appetite, they waited: “the new girl they dreamed of at night and fucked cows for at dawn while waiting for her to choose” (Morrison 1987, p. 24).
The 'courtesy' that these Sweet Home men bestowed upon Sethe is far from the nephews of Schoolteacher once they had discovered that Sethe was ‘up for grabs’ as she no longer had a baby around to nurse as she had set her children away in her plans to escape. Sethe is attacked, while still on the farm. One holds her down while the other sucks/steals, she says, milk from her breasts. The men cruelly mocked the maternal associations of nursing by treating Sethe as an animal to be milked (Barnett 1997). The men are rapists; they violate her body and her punishment for telling the farm boss about the violations is to be whipped viciously, while nothing comes to her violators (Ledbetter 1995). Though this is a viciously violent act, there are some sexual implications that resulted in such an act. As Ledbetter states: “the men suck the milk from Sethe’s breasts – implicating a tremendous mystery to the male, those moments of body woman, birth and nursing; the mystery can be so alien, terrorizing, that men become paralyzed at their manifestation” (1995 p. 166). However, these mysteries can show how infantile the men are. As they are not completely grown men, mothered constantly through life, they cannot begin to understand the complexity of the female body and fall victim to ‘innocent’ irrational childish behaviour. From this she is unwillingly giving life, perversely, to these white men with “mossy teeth” (Morrison 1987 p. 83) and appetites, and she carries life in her womb and her breasts (Ledbetter 1995).
Sexual assault is scattered all the way through Beloved and it echoes through the memories of the characters that each event effects. The narrator refers to several incidents of sexual assault, including that of the one Sethe when through which is mentioned several times. Paul D works on a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia, where the prisoners are forces to fellate white guards every morning (pp. 126-128, 270). In addition, Ella is locked up and repeatedly raped by a father and son she calls “the lowest yet” (p. 256), and Stamp Paid’s wife, Vashti, is forced into sex by her enslaver (p. 275). Baby Suggs is compelled to have sex with a straw boss who later breaks his coercive promise not to sell her child, trying to hide the visible evidence of their act, and again with an overseer. Sethe’s mother is “taken up many times by the crew” during the Middle Passage (p. 62), as are many other enslaved women. Through the horrors of sexual violence three women – Sethe’s mother, Baby Suggs and Ella – refuse to nurse babies conceived through rape; in doing so denying the sexual connotations and it effects to be enforced upon those who do not wish it (Barnett 1997). Other allusions of sexual violence include the Sweet Home men’s dreams of rape (p. 13), Sethe’s explanation for adopting the mysterious Beloved, for she fears that white men will “jump on” a homeless, wandering black girl (p. 68) and acts of desperate prostitution that are akin to rape such as Sethe’s exchange of sex for the engraving on her baby’s tombstone (pp. 4-5) (Barnett 1997).
It is through these incidents of sexual violence that irrationality rears its head, as far as the white people are concerned. These incidents are Sethe’s explanation for killing her baby daughter. While this act seems irrational where Sethe has not thought of the consequences the process in which she took to come to her violent decision was in fact very rational. Sethe tries to tell the furious Beloved that death actually protected the baby from the deep despair that killed Baby Suggs, from “what Ella knew, what Stamp saw and what made Paul D tremble” (Morrison 1987, p. 251): horrific experiences and memories of rape. Whites do “not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you,” Sethe tells Beloved, “Dirty yourself so bad you [can’t] like yourself anymore". Sethe passionately insists that she protect her beloved daughter and also herself from “undreamable dreams” in which “a gang of whites invade her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon” (Morrison 1987, p. 251). For Sethe, being brutally overworked, maimed, or killed is subordinate to the overreaching horror of being raped and “dirtied” by whites; even dying at the hands of one’s mother is subordinate to rape (Barnett 1997). Sethe’s violence can be seen as an act of freedom, her only choice if her children are not to grow up as slaves. The irony, which can be seen for the ‘irrationality’ of her actions, within the power of the moment, is that Sethe’s act is one freely committed within a situation that apparently allows for no freedom as all. Sethe was given no choice but to dissolve the body from its enslavement to white men (Ledbetter 1995).
It is these sorts of ‘irrational’ acts of violence that Hinson (2001) states is where the “violence within African American communities is originally imposed from outside by white oppressors, whose search for scapegoats translates into a similar search within the black community”. Morrison depicts how, when a white man rides into Sethe’s yard to take her and her children back into slavery, she strikes out at one of her own, exerting herself in the only way possible in the face of violence of slavery. She shows how Beloved’s murder continues a chain of reciprocal violence that entangles the community in the past and initiates a plot that equally bound to the past. The community’s crisis of violence is reflected in a recursion narrative pattern, which is formed but the recurrence of repressed memories of white violence in slavery. However, there is a shift by the end of the novel where no more will Sethe repress her memories and take out her anger on herself or the community. There is a white man who crosses Sethe’s path and she finally directs her anger ‘outward’ to who she feels is responsible for her lifelong suffering. It is at this moment she becomes free from her prison of repressed anger and acknowledges herself as a free woman (Ledbetter 1995). As the linear movement of the novel is interrupted with detours of the repetitions and the returned of the repressed, characters recount their pasts as they often over cross each other the line of whose history belongs to who and the violence becomes shared. This leaves the identity of Beloved’s narrators to become blurred, reflecting the crisis within the text and the novel’s community (Hinson 2001).
In the novel the civil war has ended and all of the slaves are ‘free’. It is at this time in real life and in the novel that identity becomes very important. Now that the slaves are ‘free’, they are starting to rebuild their lives and their communities and creating their own identity. In the time of institutionalized slavery, it tended to disallow individuality and to categorize African Americans as a group without individual traits. More often than not, slave owners denied slaves their very humanity, which is the first essence of individual and community identity. This tendency is evident in Beloved where Schoolteacher, a slavemaster at Sweet Home where Sethe and Paul D were slaves, carefully classifies the animal and human traits of his slaves (Hinson 2001). As Terril George (2006 p. 1) argues: “White discourses and appellation ignored and destroyed black identity.” This idea of ignoring and destroying black identity can be seen on page 260 of the novel; Paul D epitomizes this when he contemplates if being called a man by Mr. Garner, his owner, really makes him a man in reality. So did Garner’s death and Schoolteacher’s cruel regime mean that the males on Sweet Home were no longer men? (Morrison 1987). Sethe is also victimized twice by this system of slavery denying identities: she has no relationship with her own mother, and although she tries to deny it, she instinctively feels that her mother abandoned her by trying to escape. Sethe never had enough milk as a baby, and the seeds were sown therefore her overcompensation with her own children, and her fixation on the importance of nursing them. As a result of this the nephews of Schoolteacher in “stealing her milk” was the worst form of abuse and striping her of any tiny bit of identity she had. For Sethe milk represent motherhood, nurturance and her very essence, so she has not concept of herself as a separate identity, all she can do is to envision of herself a mother (George 2006).
As Waugh (1989 p. 22) states: “for those marginalized by the dominate culture, a sense of identity is constructed through impersonal and social relations (rather than a sense of identity as the reflected of an inner ‘essence’).” This is when the idea of the relationship between community and individual identity comes into play. The community identity is more important than individual identity as everyone bands together in order to keep the identity alive. This idea of community over-riding the individual can be seen in the signs and marks on the bodies of slaves. Potentially it can be a sign of an individual self however fragmented and multiple. It is rather an indication of the relationships, being one of a series of marks, brands or emblems that Morrison employs in her novels, as Rignely states: “not to ‘distinguish’ individuals, but (as blackness itself is a mark) to symbolize their participation in a greater entity, whether that is community or race or both. The marks are hieroglyphs, clues to a culture and a history more than to individual personality” (1998 p. 56).
Within Beloved there are many of these markings displayed on characters like the crossed circle mandala branded beneath the breast of Sethe’s mother, or even the chokecherry tree scares on Sethe’s own back. These marks represent membership rather than separation and if they distinguish anything at all they distinguish a racial (communal) identity, for “most are either chosen or inflected by the condition of blackness itself” (Rignely 1998 p. 56).
When African Americans were given their ‘freedom’ it can be seen as a joyous occasion as they were ‘out’ of white oppression; however, it was also a very unsettling experience as they have been denied an identity so when they were ‘free’ they were left with this no sense of self. An example of this can be seen through Baby Suggs as she recalls her slave name as Jenny Whitlow; only when Mr Garner delivers her into freedom can she turn back and ask him, “why you all call me Jenny?” (p. 167). Her lack of a name – “Nothing … I don’t call myself nothing” – is verification to the “desolated canter where the self that was no self made its home” (p. 165). Baby Suggs has no ‘self’ because she has no frame of reference by which to establish one (Rignely 1998, p. 57). Baby did not even know if any of her eight children were alive, and most of all she did not know the easiest aspects of her identity: “Could she sing? Was she pretty? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Do I have a sister and does she favour me and if my mother knew me would she like me?” (Morrison 1987, p. 165).
While ‘freed’ African Americans left slavery with no sense of individual identity there are individuals within Beloved who represent the communal identity of rejecting a tradition of white naming, which they were given when brought into slavery, as well as a celebration of freedom. Two characters that break the cycle of being called by their white names include Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid. Baby reverts back to her original name that her husband used to call her – Baby – as well as taking on his last name, in spite of Garner suggestion that “Mrs. Baby Suggs ain’t no name for a freed Negro” (p. 167). However, Baby saw it as “all she had left of the ‘husband’ she claimed” (p. 168). This is Baby’s way of leaving white tradition and returning to what she knew.