Table of Contents

Chapter 01 .......................................................................................................................
Dominant image of Afro – American women and its subversion in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved .........................................................................................................
1.1 Image of Black Woman in Toni Morrison Beloved ...................................................
1.2 Derrida Deconstruction And Bell Hooks Feminism In Beloved By Toni Morrison
Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................
Psychological Fixations in Toni Morrison Beloved Psychological Fixation and
Sigmund Freud ................................................................................................................
2.1 Fixation and Post-Freudians .......................................................................................
2.2 Psychosexual Stages ...................................................................................................
2.3 Oral Stage (0-1 year) ...................................................................................................
2.4 Anal Stage (1-3 years) ................................................................................................
2.5 Phallic Stage (3 to 5 or 6 Years ..................................................................................
2.6 Latency Stage (5 or 6 to Puberty)
2.7 Genital Stage (Puberty to Adult).................................................................................
2.8 Pre Oedipal Mother Daughter Relationship in Beloved ............................................
2.9 Reclamation of the Exploited Body in Toni Morrison‘s Beloved ..............................
2.10 Mother as a Healing agent in Toni Morrison's Beloved ...........................................
phallus. ..............................................................................................................................
2.11 The Empathic Connection and the Restoration of the Self .......................................
2.12 Sethe's Journey Begins..............................................................................................
2.13 PAUL D'S EMPATHIC PRESENCE .......................................................................
2.14 Freud Uncanny and Maternal Silence .......................................................................
Chapter 3 .........................................................................................................................
Beloved in Light of Theories Beloved and Julia Kristeva’s the Semiotic and the
Symbolic ...........................................................................................................................
3.2 Object Relations theory by Melanie Klein (1882-1960).............................................
3.3 Disfunctional Love Relations in Toni Morrison‘s Beloved
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................

1
 Afro-American literature is the literature produced in the United States by
writers of African descent. It begins with the work of these writers of the late 18th
century as Phillis Wheatley. Before the culmination of the slave narratives, African
American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives.
Afro-American literature reached high points with slave narratives of the nineteenth
century. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a period of flowering of literature
and the arts. The writers of African American literature were recognized by the
highest awards, including the Nobel Prize to Toni Morrison.

Topics covered in this literature include the role of African Americans in

American society, African American culture, racism, slavery and social equality.
African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituality,
sermons, gospel music, blues or rap. [1] As the place of African Americans in
American society has changed over the centuries, Afro-American literature has been
focused on it.

Before the American Civil War, literature was mainly composed of memoirs
by persons who had escaped from slavery; The genre of slave narratives included
narratives of life under slavery and the path of justice and redemption to freedom.
There was an early distinction between the literature of liberated slaves and the
literature of free blacks born in the North. The free blacks had to express their
oppression in a different narrative form. Free Blacks in the North often speak out
against slavery and racial injustice using spiritual narrative. The spiritual has
addressed many of the same themes of slave narratives, but has been largely ignored
in current scholarly conversation.

With the rise of the 20th century, the non-fiction works of authors such as W.
E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debated how to deal with racist attitudes in
the United States. During the US civil rights movement, writers such as Richard
Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black
nationalism. Today, African American literature has been accepted as an integral part
of American literature, with books such as Alex Haley's The Roots: The Color Purple
(1982) by Alice Walker, Who won the Pulitzer Prize; And Beloved by Toni Morrison
reaching the best-selling and most award-winning status.

2
 African literature can be divided into three distinct categories: pre-colonial,
colonial and post-colonial. Pre-colonial literature often takes the form of oral
narratives that are sometimes accompanied by music and focus around the trickster
figure. Colonial literature examines the horrors of slavery and the slave trade,
revolting against colonialism and drawing inspiration from the African past.
Postcolonial literature focuses on the clash between indigenous and colonial cultures,
expressing hope for the future of Africa.

Within these categories is a subset of women African writers who focus on the
hardships that women face in a patriarchal and colonialist country. Their work often
contains sub-themes of women who find strength in the other's company when they
are abandoned or rejected by their husbands and fathers, who in turn are subjugated
by the English. The stories illustrate the struggles of women who try to bring their
families together and preserve their cultures, but they are often invaded by men.

Some researchers resist the use of Western literary theory to analyze African
American literature. As the literary scholar Henry Louis Gates of Harvard, Jr.said
,"My desire has been to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature
and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories
borrowed whole from other traditions, appropriated from without."[10] One trope
common to African-American literature is "signifying". Gates claims that signifying
―is a trope in which are subsumed several other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyperbole and litotes, and
metalepsis.‖[11] Signifying also refers to the way in which African-American
"authors read and critique other African American texts in an act of rhetorical
self-definition". (12)

A kind of Afro-American literature that developed in the mid-19th century is

the slave narratives, narratives written by fugitive slaves about their life in the South
and often after escaping freedom. They wanted to describe the cruelties of life under
slavery, as well as the persistent humanity of slaves as persons. At the time, the
controversy over slavery led to a passionate literature on both sides of the issue, with
novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe depicting the
abolitionist view of the evils of the " slavery. The southern white writers produced
"Anti-Tom" novels in response, claiming to truly describe life under slavery, as well

3
as the more severe cruelties suffered by free labor in the North. For example, Aunt
Phillis's Cabin (1852) by Mary Henderson Eastman and The Sword and the Distaff
(1853) by William Gilmore Simms.

The narratives of slaves can be classified into three distinct forms: tales of
religious redemption, narratives to inspire the abolitionist struggle and narratives of
progress. Tales written to inspire abolitionist struggle are the most famous because
they tend to have a strong autobiographical motive. Jacobs (1813-1897) was the first
woman to write a slave narrative in the United States. Her story Incidents in the life of
a slave describes Jacobs' struggle for freedom not only for her but for her two
children. Jacobs' story occupies an important place in the history of Afro-American
literature, for it provide first example the special injustices that black women have
undergone in slavery.

The Harlem Renaissance from 1920 to 1940 was the blossoming of African
American literature and art. Based in the Afro-American community of Harlem in
New York, it was part of a greater flowering of social thought and culture. Many
artists, musicians and other black artists have produced classical works in the fields of
jazz and theater; the renaissance is best known for its literature.

Among the most renowned writers of the Renaissance is the poet Langston
Hughes, whose first work was published in The Brownies' Book in 1921. [43]
Another notable writer of the Renaissance is novelist Zora Neale Hurston, author of
Classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) a number of other writers also
became well known during this period. They include Jean Toomer, author of Cane, a
well-known collection of stories, poems and sketches of rural and urban black life,
and Dorothy West, whose novel The Living is Easy examined the life of a black
higher class. Another popular renaissance writer is Counted Cullen, who in his
poems described the everyday black life (as a trip he made to Baltimore which was
ruined by a racial insult). During this period, a number of playwrights also came to
the national attention, including the Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the
Sun focuses on a poor Black family living in Chicago.

African-American literature has reached the mainstream, while the books of

black writers have consistently reached the best-selling, award-winning status. This
was also the time when the work of African American writers began to be accepted by

4
the academic community as a legitimate genre of American literature. [45] The mass
part of the largest movement of black arts, inspired by the Civil Rights and Black
Power Movements, began to be defined and analyzed in African American literature.
A number of scholars and writers are generally expected to help promote and define
African American literature as a genre during this period, including fiction writers
Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and the poet James Emanuel.

Morrison emerged as one of the most important African American writers of

the 20th century. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. Among her
most famous novels is Beloved, who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. This
story describes a slave who found freedom but killed her infant daughter to save her
from a life of slavery. . Another important novel is Song of Solomon, a tale about
materialism, unrequited love, and brotherhood. Morrison was the first African
American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1982, Walker won the Pulitzer
Prize and the American Book Award for his novel The Color Purple. An epistolary
novel (a book written in letters), The Color Purple tells the story of Celie, a young
woman who is sexually abused by her father-in-law and is forced to marry a man who
abuses her physically.

Throughout American history, African-Americans have been discriminated

against and subjected to racist attitudes. This experience inspired some black writers,
at least during the early years of African American literature, to prove that they were
the equals of European-American authors. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said, "it is right
to describe the subtext of the history of black letters as the desire to refute the claim
that because Blacks had no written tradition they were Bearers of a lower culture ".
[47] Refuting the claims of the dominant culture, African American writers were also
trying to subvert the literary and power traditions of the United States. Some
criticisms of African American literature over the years have come from the
community; Some argue that black literature sometimes does not represent black
people in a positive light and that it should be.

WEB Du Bois wrote in the NAACP magazine The Crisis on this subject,
saying in 1921: "We want all that is said of us to tell the best and highest and noblest
among us. We insist That our Art and Propaganda is one a ". He added in 1926: "All
art is a propaganda and must always be, in spite of the groans of the purists." [49]

5
Many Afro-American writers thought that their literature should present the whole
truth about life and people. Langston Hughes presented this point of view in his essay
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926). He wrote that black artists
intended to express themselves freely, regardless of what the black public thought.

The emergence of African-American women's writings has challenged racism

in the black women's movement. Gloria Hull examined the dilemma of black women
in All Men are Black. All women are white, but some of us are brave. This has caused
many black women to turn to each other for a better introspective and analytical
understanding of the problems of black women. Maya Angelou: I know why the
caged bird sings (1970) and The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison (1970) addressed the
question of how self-identity and respect is achieved by a black girl in a society
Which hardly valorises its existence.

Beloved is a complex novel in which women act both as aggressors and

dictators of men; They control the mind, body and subsequent actions of men because
of the fear of violence that is reaffirmed as a central theme in the beloved. In the
context of contemporary feminist theory, Beloved clearly depicts the power
relationship between the genders and how this relationship is maintained by brutal and
disruptive acts. In Morrison's work, women break away from emotion and lose their
socially constructed image of a weaker will; Morrison uses violence to reaffirm the
ability of women while symbolically representing the sacrifices women make to
achieve equal rights.

The acts of Sethe's murder and Beloved rape serve to create a perversion of
gender roles in society, highlighting this text as a feminist literary criticism. In the
end, women find strength through violence, respecting the level of protection afforded
to men. Morrison wonders about the masculinity of rape through the unwilling
seduction of Paul D; Beloved reverses the social roles of men and women because of
sexual violence, breaking Paul D in his feminine personality "... he trembled like Lot's
wife and felt a feminine need to see the nature of sin Behind him "(p.136) After rape,
Paul D. declares that he has lost his manhood; Equivalent to the loss of virginity and
innocence associated with rape of women. "Now he wondered [about his manhood] ...
if the schoolmaster was right, he explained how he had become a rag doll, picked up
and put down anywhere and anytime By [her] ... doing it when he was convinced that

6
he did not have it. "But it was more than the appetite that humiliated him ... nausea
was first, then The repulsion "(p.148).

Paul D shows many examples of feminist literary criticism because of his

perceived notions of how a man should act in relation to society and to women in his
life but fails to respond to one of these Expectations that he has for himself and takes
on a less dominant role in the household. Paul D can be described as a character who
wishes the best for the main female character, Sethe; Because he is really caring for
her and believes that a man should protect women in a household as a dominant male
figure.

It is not acceptable for a man to be less powerful than a woman, and in this
house, Sethe is obviously more dominant than Paul D. This makes him uncertain
about himself and makes him put out his emotions and put them on In his "tobacco"
Tin. "He hides his emotions and extinguishes them because of his experiences in
Alfred, Georgia, but he also hides them because he is afraid of them." While Paul D
tries to assert his dominance in conversations and taking He eventually took on the
traditional female role, and Sethe, in turn, occupied a more traditionally masculine
role in the household, leaving Paul D as a seemingly more feminine character.

Sethe dominates many male characters physically and emotionally and

inculcates fear both in male characters and in female characters. Sethe is coldly
rational and able to act beyond gender constraints; She is isolated from the
community because of her pride and because of the fundamental societal idea that
women need men to survive, emphasizing that women belong to men. "Everyone in
the city wanted Sethe to come at difficult times. His scandalous claims, his
self-sufficiency seemed to demand it ... "(p.202) Sethe is a protector, a typically
masculine role because of her basic instinct for safety and survival for her children,
otherwise she" I made We all went out. Without Halle too. Until then, it was the only
thing I had done on my own ... he came well, as if he was supposed to ... I stopped
him ... I took and put my Babies where they would be safe "(p.191, 193).

The murder of the beloved depicts the physical and mental capacity of women:
she beats her two boys near death and runs away from the throat of her eldest
daughter. Society justifies the act of Sethe because she is a woman and therefore can
not be completely guilty of her actions because she is cheaper than man. The beloved

7
reveal the social constraints of women in society while Baby Suggs and Sethe are
isolated Return to a poor and dominated woman, defining society as what gender
should dictate Morrison perverts the love of woman and Emphasizes violence as a
control mechanism as a sign of desperate liberation: it is a sign that women demand
freedom and are accustomed to Establish Beloved and Sethe as characters capable of
losing gender identity. Toni Morrison integrates the universal themes of feminist
theory into the beloved as established by the oppression of traditional gender identity
as well as the dual nature of male and female characters.

Representation of black Motherhood in afro American Novel

The African American mother can be seen from a many, often contradictory
point of view: she is a woman, who could be analyzed on the basis of psychology or
gender studies;

She is a feminist, civil rights fighter or artist. In her essay "In Search of Our
Mothers' Gardens" (1974), Alice Walker describes how a black woman has been seen
since the days of slavery: "Black women are called in the folklore that so well
identifies status Of society, "The Mule of the World", because we were carried the
burden that all others - all others - refused to wear. 1 Walker adds that they were also
called "Matriarchs," "Superwomen," "Mean and Evil Bitches," "Cast Singers," or
"Sapphire's Mama," and stated that "when [Black women] plead for Understanding,
their character has been destroyed. "2 It shows the difficult position of African
American mothers and declares that they are the ones they are also because of all the
suffering they have had to undertake.

According to Gates and McKay's Norton anthology of African American

Literature (2004), the Afro-American tradition goes back to the African roots with the
celebration. Tribal ceremonies and the cult of matriarchal representation. The woman
was considered.

A symbol of fertility, which gave them power over man. As far as vernacular
tradition is concerned, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. explains that in African American
culture, "the vernacular refers to the songs of the church, the blues, ballads, sermons
and stories that are part of Oral tradition and not primarily the alphabetical culture of
black expression. "There are many examples of the emergence of the theme of

8
motherhood in the vernacular tradition. The oldest works consider mothers as the
givers of life and celebrate fertility.

In her essay, "The Truths of Our Mothers' Lives" (1984), Gloria Wade-Gayles writes
Next: "Because women are biologically capable of carrying children, we assume that
they. By definition, they are capable of feeding children, but there is no gene for
parental education. Women bring to the role of the mother their individual strengths
and weaknesses as individuals, and what they think of themselves as people
influences their performance as a mother "(11). . In Mother Daughter Revolution
(1994), Debold, Wilson and Malave suggest that all testimonies of the mother should
be recognized because "well-worn paths to patriarchy lead to betrayal between
mothers and daughters and among women through The lines of race, class and sexual
orientation. "(36) For many years, feminists of color have challenged criticism of
female problems that seem to have very limited utility for differences regarding
non-white,

Non-bourgeois women (Joseph, "Black Mothers and Daughters: Traditional

and New Perspectives "1993, 18-19). In "Afro-American feminist thought on
maternity, mother Mother-daughter relationship "(2000), Andrea O'Reilly describes
feminist theory on Maternity as "racially codified" and asserts that "maternal
identification in black culture Give rise the empowerment of girls. "(143) In his"
Revolutionary Parenting "(1984), Bell Gres makes the following observations on the
early stages of the struggle for liberation "Some white middle-class and college
women argued that maternity was the place of female oppression." While black
women expressed their views on maternity, this would not have been A serious
obstacle to our freedom for women ... Racism, the availability of jobs, lack of skills or
education ... would have been at the top of the list - but not maternity "(133)

Many Afro-American feminists believe that the false images of the "matriarch
created by white men" and "the super black Mother" perpetuated by black men must
be discredited both by an Afro-American and feminist analysis of Maternity (Collins
117). In "Black Mothers and Daughters: Traditional and New Perspectives" (1993),
Gloria I. Joseph rightly asserts that "while white feminists have indeed confronted
white male analyzes of their own experience as mothers, Rarely control images like
mama, matriarch and welfare mother and thus fail to include [ethnic] mothers. Black

9
feminists describe the maternity of black women, unlike white maternity, as a duty to
the activism of the social community.

In ―Passing the Torch: A Mother and Daughter Reflect on Their Experiences

across In 1998, African-Canadian theorists Wanda Thomas Bernard and Candace
Bernard wrote: "More than a personal act, black motherhood is very political. Black
mothers and grandmothers are considered "guardians of the generations". Black
mothers have always been responsible for providing education, social and political
awareness, in addition to unconditional love, nurturance, socialization and values for
their children and children in their communities. (47)

In "Mother of Mothers, Daughter of Daughters: Reflections on the Mother

Line" (2000), Lowinsky defined the mother line as the "ancient tradition of women"
(227) and the stories of the mother line is a story of "feminine experience: physical,
psychological and historical;

Lifecycle narratives that link generations of women; Stories that show how
times have changed and this shows that nothing changes at all. "(227) She writes that"
women lament the lack of stories of women's lives, but women's stories are all around
us. We do not hear them because our perception is shaped by a culture that trivializes
the "discourse of women" and devalues the death of female knowledge and wisdom
"(228)

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina and Toni Morrison's Beloved are
works that show how women's lives can be oppressed by circumstances beyond and
under their control. Both novels tell fictional stories that examine the lives of women
in the midst of emotional pain and confusion. In Bastard Out of Carolina, Bone tells
of her own abuse and he r mother's reaction to her ordeal. The justification for
Anney's choice comes from the girl she leaves behind. Bone leaves his listeners with
these thoughts about her mother's choice: who had had Mom what she had wanted or
done before being born? Once I was born, her hopes had turned, and I had climbed
her life like a flower tending to the sun. Fourteen years and terrified, fifteen years and
a mother, spent twenty-one years when she married Glen. His life had bent to mine.
How would I be when I was fifteen, twenty, and thirty? Would I be as strong as she
had been, as hungry for love, desperate, determined and ashamed? (Allison 309) The
words of Bone‘s are echoed by the oppressive circumstances under which these two

10
mothers lived. In Beloved, Morrison takes the story of Margaret Garner's (1856) diary
and creates the fictional story of Sethe.1 The story of Se the is one in which she is the
aggressor accused of her own daughter‘s ―murder" Eldest daughter, beloved, and
isolate the younger, Denver. Karla FC Holloway writes: "The story of Beloved is not
entrusted to the single discourse of one of the three women involved in the myth, nor
is there a single dimension. Each of the voices of the three women in this novel,
Denver, Sethe and Beloved, is distinct: another type of discourse "(174).

Sethe relays her own version of the story through her "memory" of the past
and her place in the present after her daughter reappears in her life. Marianne Hirsch
writes: "This novel allows the mother to speak for herself, to speak her own name and
daughter, to speak, after eighteen years, of her indescribable crime to her daughter.
she allows the Beloved to return so that the mother and daughter can talk to each
other. "(8) It is in this course of words with her daughters and her lover that Sethe
reveals her conviction that she saved her children by This act of maternity.

Morrison says of Sethe‘s sacrificial act: Sethe did ―the right thing, but she had
no right to do it‖ (Book TV). Allison, in an interview with Carolyn E. Megan, says,
"[Anney] is going to pay for what she does by the place she puts herself into at the
end of the book. It's just, but it's hard" (76).In Bastard Out of Carolina, Anney's
motherhood is complicated by several oppressive circumstances. Social
discrimination is one of the complicated and oppressive aspects of her life. She is
limited by gender, class, education (sixth grade) and hunger (for food and love). She
becomes a mother and widow while remaining in her adolescence; She is a mother
while she is still a child herself. The biggest complication for Anney's job of raising
her daughters is her decision to marry Glen Waddell. This decision becomes Bone's,
the worst nightmare. Glen comes into the family and takes up space, leaving no room
for the relationship of Anney and Bone.

Anney must make the ultimate choice. She must choose between her husband
and daughter. This choice is the final deconstructive element of this mother-daughter
alliance. Anney testifies Glen violating Bone and ultimately can not resist forgiving
him before even leaving the scene of the horrible act. Bone remembers, "I hated her
now for the way she kept him, the way she was there crying over him. Could she love
me and still hold him like that? (Allison 291).

11
 For Sethe, social discrimination is a circumstance that oppresses her ability to
mother of her children, even though Sethe is limited by race, education, economy and
family structure because of her status as a runaway slave , It is the African American
community that is discriminating against her because of what they considers her
unfairly proud attitude. Sethe is directly accused of abusing her children. Even her
lover, Paul D, judges the motherhood of Sethe: "your love is too thick. Your children
are gone, you do not know where. A dead girl, the other will not leave the court.
(Beloved 164-5). The most scintillating indictment of Sethe comes from the only
woman in the community who can understand Sethe's feelings that lead to infanticide,
since she also committed the same act (258-9). This woman is Ella.

Ella, who was Sethe's closest friend for those twenty-eight days, is Sethe's
most verbal critic after the incident: ―‗I am not got no friends take a handsaw to their
own children‘‖ (Beloved 187). Morrison writes about Ella, who has also sacrificed a
child in connection with her own slave experience, and her reaction to Sethe: ―She
understood Sethe‘s rage in the shed twenty years ago, but not her reaction to it, which
Ella thought was prideful, misdirected, and Sethe herself too complicated‖ (256). The
most important situation affecting the motherhood of Sethe is her own negative
childhood experience. Her mother was hanged as a slave as a punishment for an
attempted escape or a failed insurrection, so Sethe never got to know her mother,
although Sethe had a mother-daughter relationship with Baby Suggs and could count
On her physically and spiritually, her biological mother is never far from
"remembering" after her daughter Beloved returns from the dead.

Deborah Horvitz even suggests, in "The Unnamed Ghosts: Possession and

Disappearance in the Beloved", that the beloved is not only the reincarnation of the
dead girl of Sethe, but is also the detailed representation Of Sethe's mother (158). She
is not only representative of Sethe's mother, but she represents much more. This idea
is aligned with Morrison's stated intention of having liked to represent all African and
African-American women related to the Middle Passage and Slavery (Morrison, Book
TV). The reappearance of the beloved thus becomes the bond of Sethe with her eldest
daughter and the memories of her own mother.

The beloved appearance makes Sethe look at her performance as a mother and
her need refused to be a girl. Sethe wants the relationship she was refused with her

12
mother. Sethe said to Beloved: "You just came back like a good girl, like a girl who is
what I wanted and would have been if my lady had been able to get out of the rice
long enough before hanging it and let me d To be one "(Beloved 203). Her obsession
with the motherhood of her children is the direct result of her denied role as a
daughter, Bernard W. Bell, comments on Sethe's state of entry:
"Socio-psychologically, Beloved is the history of The will of Sethe Suggs for social
freedom and psychological totality "(95).

Sethe battles with the horrible memories from the past and with the present
revenge of ―the infant daughter that she killed in order to save her from the living
death of slavery‖ (Bell 95). As Marianne Hirsch writes: ―Sethe‘s family is determined
by the dynamics of the relationships among the women. The intensity of the women‘s
passion becomes so stifling. At such moments, Paul D comes in to make the story
move along, but until the last scene, he is consistently excluded from the power of
their interconnection‖ (7). Heinze writes: ―Sethe‘s family is a complicated matrix:
power and control, familial roles, sexual relations, and reality continually shift.
Family becomes a function of time and place rather than a fixed and static construct
of father-role, mother-role, and children-roles‖ (94)

In Moorings and Metaphors, Karla F.C. Holloway critiques Sethe‘s story: ―In
Beloved, Morrison has written a tragedy of mother-love denied and has revealed its
consequence. Sethe, who has lost one daughter to infanticide and whose sons have run
away (afraid of the ghostly presence that haunts their house), is vulnerable to the
killing spirit of her dead daughter. It is a tragedy complicated by history‖ (180).
Stephanie J. Shaw comments in ―Mothering under Slavery in the Antebellum South‖:
"Even when slave women had abortions, refused to conceive, or committed
infanticide in order to protect children from a lifetime of slavery, they often did so in
[what was considered] the interest of mothering" (249), which often served as the
slave mother‘s last options.

In fact, Morrison presents the issue of infanticide with Sethe's mother

releasing the babies over board and Ella starving her baby. Their actions prevent
children from living as slaves, their motivations are tainted by their emotions about
the circumstances in which the children are conceived.Sethe totally loves the children
she intends to kill, yet she devotes most of her life To justify her actions, for Deborah

13
Horvitz writes: "Certainly, one of the reasons why the beloved returns is to judge
Sethe" (161).

After observing the beloved Penalty continually inflicted on Sethe, "Denver

thought he understood the bond between her mother and her beloved: Sethe was
trying to catch up with the hug; Beloved was charging. But there would never be an
end, and see her mother having diminished her and disturbed her "(250, 251). It is this
inference that ultimately saves Sethe's life. Bell highlights the self-sufficient strength
Morrison creates in the character of Sethe: Sethe's black consciousness and the
rejection of white perceptions and inscriptions of himself, his children and other
slaves as nonhuman, Marking by letter, Law and whip both as animals and goods - are
synthesized with her black feminine sense of self-sufficiency. Although the racial and
sexual consciousness of Sethe is mixed, the structure and style of the text emphasize
the ambivalence of slaves over maternity, which violates their personal integrity and
that of their families. (96)

It is Denver's shame and inference that reshapes the family in the community,
saves Sethe's life physically and causes her daughters to leave. Denver, despite Sethe's
protected life for her, performs the traditional act of role reversal when her mother
needs help. ). Regarding Sethe's relationship with her daughters, Morrison's triennial
mother-daughter relationship, Wilfred Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems, describe
with emotion the following: it is possible to argue that the most tragic result of the
heinous crime of Sethe is the pity he makes at the simplest An important community
of women for her: the community she trains with her daughters, beloved and Denver.
With Sethe's perpetual guilt, Denver's sense of alienation and Beloved's need for
reward, their unity remains superficial, despite the external evidence to the contrary.
Each response forms a wedge that widens the existing fissure in their superficial bond.
(121)

It is Denver's shame and inference that reshapes the family in the community,
saves Sethe's life physically and causes her daughters to leave. Denver, despite Sethe's
protected life for her, performs the traditional act of role reversal when her mother
needs help. ). Regarding Sethe's relationship with her daughters, Morrison's triennial
mother-daughter relationship, Wilfred Samuels and Clenora Hudson-Weems, describe
with emotion the following: it is possible to argue that the most tragic result of the

14
heinous crime of Sethe is the pity she makes at the simplest An important community
of women for her: the community she trains with her daughters, beloved and Denver.
With Sethe's perpetual guilt, Denver's sense of alienation and Beloved's need for
reward, their unity remains superficial, despite the external evidence to the contrary.
Each response forms a wedge that widens the existing fissure in their superficial bond.
(121).

Despite its popularity and status as one of Morrison's most accomplished

novels, Beloved has never been universally hailed as a success. Some reviewers have
excoriated the novel for what they consider its excessive sentimentality and
sensationalistic depiction of the horrors of slavery, including its characterization of
the slave trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Others, while concurring that Beloved is
at times overwritten, have lauded the novel as a profound and extraordinary act of
imagination. Noting the work's mythic dimensions and political focus, these
commentators have treated the novel as an exploration of family, trauma, and the
repression of memory as well as an attempt to restore the historical record and give
voice to the collective memory of African Americans.

Scholars have additionally debated the nature of the character Beloved, arguing
whether she is actually a ghost or a real person. Numerous reviewers, assuming
Beloved to be a supernatural incarnation of Sethe's daughter, have subsequently
faulted Beloved as an unconvincing and confusing ghost story. Elizabeth E. House,
however, has argued that Beloved is not a ghost, and the novel is actually "a story of
two probable instances of mistaken identity. Beloved is haunted by the loss of her
African parents and thus comes to believe that Sethe is her mother. Sethe longs for her
dead daughter and is rather easily convinced that Beloved is the child she has lost."
Such an interpretation, House contends, clears up many puzzling aspects of the novel
and emphasizes Morrison's concern with familial ties.

In his article Two Decades of Terrible Twos: A Psychoanalytical Analysis of

Beloved Aubrie Cox discusses the dilemma of separation anxiety and its effects on
beloved .She is a child who was violently separated from her mother, by her mother,
far before she was ready. Beloved is separated from her mother not only by death but
also by the barrier between the spiritual and physical realms. In the beginning of the
novel, Beloved has few ways of communicating with the living world. The quickest

15
way she finds to express herself is by moving household items. When frustrated and
angry, she begins to throw objects, and being a spirit, has a greater capacity to throw
than a toddler constrained by corporeal form.

One reason for Beloved‘s developmental problems is the fact that the only
father figure is driven out of the house. According to Freudian psychology: ―There is
no question that heterosexual orientation is a major outcome of the oedipal period for
most girls, and that the traditional psychoanalytical account of the development of
female sexuality, and growth of the girl‘s relationship to her father describes this‖
(Chodorow).Paul D rejects her outwardly and inwardly, thus Beloved does not
complete the transition to the oedipal stage. Chodorow, Nancy. ―Mothering,
Object-Relations, and the Female Oedipal Configuration.‖ Feminist Studies 4 (1978):
137-158. JSTOR Millikin U, Decatur, IL. 19 Nov. 2007

In Toni Morrison‘s Beloved: Institutionalized Trauma, Selfhood, and Familial

and Communal Structure Klay Baynar shows that the psychological effects of slavery
on the individual, as well as the whole slave community, were far more damaging
than even the worst physical sufferings. The African American ―veil‖ acts as a strong
symbol of a white dominant society throughout the novel. During the Reconstruction
era, black Americans were forced behind this ―veil‖ that allowed them to only see
themselves from the white man‘s point of view.

In Beloved, Morrison writes a false removal of this veil for both Sethe and
Baby Suggs. This removal is foreshadowed by the imagery of the Book of Revelation
(four horsemen) in the beginning of the infanticide chapter (Berger 409). When Sethe
sees the ―four horsemen‖ coming to retrieve her and her children and return them to
slavery, Morrison reveals the thoughts of a black mother when faced with returning to
slavery. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Noon. Nonono. Simple. She just
flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious
and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away,
over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they
would be safe. (Morrison 192)

In killing her daughter, Sethe frees her from living a life of dehumanizing
slavery. However, this act of violence did nothing to remove the veil. It forces Sethe
and Denver into a repressive state in which past traumas is lost. Sethe and her family

16
were not the only people that fell victim to the ―veil‖ of oppression. White dominance
also reappeared for Baby Suggs on the day of the infanticide. When ―…they came in
my yard‖ (Morrison 211), Baby Suggs realized that no African American is truly free.
Not in a free state, not after slavery, not ever. Baby Suggs‘s sense of self was
―unmade‖ that day when she realized the freedom she thought she was living was
false (Boudreau 460). ―Rememory‖ in the novel explicates the idea that no trauma is
ever one‘s own, but are shared among groups of people. ―Rememory‖ works as a
collective way for a community to decolonize themselves (Elliot 183).

In his article When a Man Becomes a Woman (And Vice Versa) Kerry Dueker
shows that . Sethe and Paul D in particular demonstrate the horrific results of human
bondage in disturbingly detailed ways. Although only Sethe bears the physical
disfigurement of her beating, both characters carry internal scars that serve as bitter
reminders of their time at Sweet Home. Those defacements have twisted both of their
personalities and made them into people they were not meant to be. For both
characters, this means different things. In Paul D‘s case, slavery has emasculated him,
effectively stealing his manhood by forbidding him to make decisions or exist for
himself. Conversely, Sethe‘s experiences take away her femininity and typically
maternal sensibilities, causing her to adapt conventionally masculine traits in order to
ensure hers and her family‘s survival. Both characters effectively take on the
stereotypical characteristics of the opposite gender as a result of their former
servitude.

Paul D dwells on what it means to be a man. Moreover, as Deborah Ayer

(Sitter) states in her article ―The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved,‖
―Morrison dramatizes Paul D‘s enslavement to an ideal of manhood that distorts his
images of self and others‖ (191). Thus, Paul D is not only enslaved by white men, he
is enslaved by himself and his own ideas on masculinity. . In his mind, a man is not
meant to show emotion, a man is meant to protect the woman, and a man is meant to
have final say in a household. However, even as Paul D defines manhood with these
standards, he fails to live up to it.

Sethe hoped that her liberation would give her an opportunity to return to the
maternal realm; she would have a family and a home of her own to care for, and she
would no longer have to reserve her love for fear of losing those she cherishes.

17
Lorraine Liscio clarifies this idea in her essay ―Beloved‘s Narrative: Writing Mother‘s
Milk‖ when she claims that ―slave narratives attest to the fact that… women's
preponderant concern [―in their quest for freedom‖] was to save their children and
retain control over their reproductive power‖ (34). She logically decides to murder her
children in order to save them from Sweet Home, a kind of thought stereotypically
relegated to the realm of the male.

In article Who is Beloved? Joel Booster discusses the ambiguous identity of

beloved. Whether manifesting the psychological frustrations of Denver, or the merely
the emotional repository for an entire community of former slaves, it is both clear and
unclear that Beloved‘s influence reaches far beyond the property lines of 124. In
Lynda Khoolish‘s article ―To Be Loved and Cry Shame,‖ She summarizes this thesis
quite accurately when she stated, ―Morrison makes the question of who Beloved is so
ambiguous that the characters as well as the readers of the novel are frequently
confused as to Beloved‘s identity‖ (171). Through this ambiguity, Morrison added to
the mystique of the character overall, but weakened the effectiveness of Beloved as a
character through her inability to paint a clear picture of what her presence was meant
to be.

The bond of mother and daughter that Sethe and Beloved shared is stressed
upon countless times throughout this novel, and speaks to perhaps what could be
Beloved‘s main purpose in the novel, a physical manifestation of a mother‘s grief and
love. Beloved returns, and suddenly Sethe‘s attention is turned to nothing but her, and
her needs. Her motherly instincts, combined with the guilt over her own role in her
daughter‘s murder immediately kicks in, and she can do nothing but ―explain away
her own actions, and throw herself over Beloved in the most embarrassing way.‖
(Morrison 296).

There is no reason to suggest that perhaps Denver‘s narrative is less reliable

then the other‘s in the book, it is plausible to suggest that Beloved appears only to
represent ―the jealous love that absence creates when a mother surreptitiously
detaches the love that is placed on one child, and refocuses it onto another, (what the
displaced child will feel is the) more favorable child‖ (Watson, 161). In this way,
Beloved‘s purpose in the novel ceases to have anything to do with the relationship
that she shares with Sethe, but rather exists to contrast for the reader the relationship

18
of Sethe and Denver, with that of the newly found Beloved and Sethe. Beloved in a
similar way contrasts Sethe‘s relationships with every character in the novel.

Toni Morrison‘s Beloved and The Use of Postmodernist Practices in

Contemporary American Fiction discusses the separation anxiety and its effects on
beloved explores some dominant features of postmodernism in Toni Morrison
beloved .Beloved , in regards to content, highlights the renegotiation of the past and
present that invariably presents the risk of memory and its repression. In terms of
form, it is a self-conscious text, which places great concern on linguistic strategies
that produce and assign meaning. The main characters in Beloved are displaced
victims whose stories are predicated on absence; on the signifying presence that is not
signified. Slavery is a deep mark in all character, but strongly personified by Baby
Suggs, whose lack of power, self-determination, and language are the embodiment of
that condition. the novel is loosely based on Margareth Garner‘s real story. Morrison
subverts white male authority by giving voice to the slave mother who has no record
of her own account of the events.

Pastiche is yet another characteristic featured in many postmodernist fictions. It

is a mix of different references and existing styles that creates a mode of
miscegenation infused with irony that generally ―arises from the frustration that
everything has been done before‖ (Lewis 125). Significant element of pastiche in the
novel is the borrowing of a semi-biographical story that becomes infused with various
elements of myth making, blurring differences between privileged and marginal, thus
relying on different perspectives that do not undermine each other.

It reflects on the idea defended by Adorno that ―[t]o this day history lacks any
total subject, however construable. Its substrate is the functional connection of real
individual subjects. . .‖ (Negative Dialectics 304) ― The postmodernist writer distrusts
the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories, and prefers to deal
with other ways of structuring narrative‖ (Lewis 127). In general terms, it can be
perceived in the lack of clarity in the denouement, the pervasive uncertainty
throughout the text, and the breakup of the text into fragments. The narrative weaves
together different individual stories to create one, highlighting the dissimilarities and
contradictions within various memories and accounts.

Beloved, Denver, Sethe, and the narrator who frames them all together, offer

19
each a dissonant voice that exposes not only the fractures of society, but of any
historical narrative. Rather than a linear sequence of events, Morrison creates a text
with many holes and gaps. Beloved‘s ghost represent the past that lingers, the same
one Sethe has to renegotiate in order to reroute her own narrative. When Beloved
leaves, ―Sethe feels deserted, dissociated from that which was her best part, which she
strove so hard to protect, and which h as been lost to her once again‖ (Perez -Torres
701).

Beloved in Search of an Identity: A Reading of Beloved by Toni Morrison,

Beloved in Search of an Identity: A Reading of Beloved by Toni Morrison, Based on
Homi K. Bhabha's TheoriesAbdol Husein Joodaki contends that Beloved by Toni
Morrison, is a novel of ambivalence and resistance which questions the established
boundaries between Self and Other. Concerning the binary opposition between white
and black and the elaboration of African

American aesthetic, Toni Morrison is engaged with the project of

deconstructing colonizing Western master narratives. Beloved meets the three
dynamics of hybridization process proposed by McCarthy. First, as McCarthy argues,
"the subject matter of these novels have a socio-political resonance that takes up
beyond the problem and adventure of an individual, and leads us toward an
exploration of problems associated with the relationship of the individual to
community"((McCarthy et al., 1995, p. 251).

Centered on the memory and history of the Reconstruction era, Beloved

explores the psychological and physical devastation wrought by slavery. Morrison
tries to recover the voices of people who historically have been denied the power of
language and forced to be silent. Sethe develops her sense of self during her
twenty-eight days of freedom as a part of Cincinnati's community. Denver achieves
her sense of self when she leaves 124 and becomes a part of society. Paul D and his
fellow prison inmates were able to escape only by working together. The second
dynamic of post-colonial fiction according to McCarthy is "a self-reflexive and
conscious attitude toward the use of language". An additional concern here is the role
of language in the elaboration of unequal identities (McCarthy et al., 1995, p.
251).The past is very important in the construction of the novel. In order to construct
the story, different characters should remember the horrible experience of slavery

20
even though they do not want to. Their memories are sometimes so horrific that the
language ceases its capacity to convey their depth. So the language of the novel
sometimes becomes fragmented.

The novel also has multiple plot lines and shifting points of view which create
a layered and complex narrative structure. in their discussions of narrative in Beloved,
both Koolish and Dobbs focus solely on the use of oral tradition which provides Sethe
an opportunity to narrate her own and people's story,

The third characteristic of post-colonial fiction according to McCarthy is a

deliberate deflation of characterization and the installation of anti-heroic, flawed, or
broken personas at the epicenter of the novel's discursive field (McCarthy et al., 1995,
p. 251). Damaged identities and alienation are two permanent effects of slavery which
continue to haunt the characters even when they are free people. Sethe, the
protagonist of the novel and survivor of slavery, runs from Sweet Home plantation to
Cincinnati in the hope of a free life, but her twenty eight days of free life is shattered
when her master comes to reclaim her and her children.

Beloved, a mysterious woman who arrives at 124, goes through various

identities: an infant, a sister and a lover. Bhabha defines Beloved's character in The
Location of Culture (1994) as a daughter who returns to Sethe so that her mind will be
homeless no more; she is the sister that returns to Denver, and brings hope of her
father's return, the fugitive who died in his escape, and she is the daughter made of
murderous love who returns to love and hate and free herself.

The uncanny, as Freud in his classic essay, "The uncanny", explains, is kept
from sight; it is the repressed emotions which were hidden but they come into sight at
last. Linda Krumholz contends that Morrison uses ritual as a model for the healing
process from the repressed effects of slavery on Beloved's characters. To make the
novel work as a ritual, Morrison uses some techniques such as fragmentation of the
plot and a shifting of narrative voices; in this way she compels the reader to construct
an interpretive framework.

There is also an element of disruption and uncanny in the novel, embodied in

the character of Beloved. As an eruption of the past and the repressed unconscious,
Beloved catalyzes the healing process for the characters and the reader; thus, she is a

21
disruption necessary for healing (Krumholz, 2004, p. 59). Bhabha discusses that
colonial relationship is going to be disrupted, regardless of any resistance or rebellion
on the part of the colonized. However, in Beloved this rebellion and resistance
materializes through Sixo's resistance, first in physical resistance and then in a song,
or Sethe and Sweet Home's men attempt to escape and at last Sethe's infanticide. In
this way colonizer's superiority is disrupted both by the ambivalent nature of colonial
relationship and resistance.

Sandra Mayfield Argues that Sethe, unlike most African slave women, had a
measure of control over her future. She had the option of selecting one of the five
slave men on this plantation as her husband and the good fortune of bearing his four
children and planning the future for herself and her family. Alice Walker, in her
collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers‟ Gardens, suggests that black women
in the South were particularly resourceful, both before and after slavery. She calls
them ―artists‖ who found within themselves a spirituality that allowed them to paint,
to write, to sing, to compose music, and to write novels. She praises her own mother
for her ability to grow beautiful flowers and for her talent for making her house and
everything in it a place of beauty.

Patricia Hill Collins, in her thorough investigation of the lives of black women
both before and after slavery, suggests that the society and culture which slaves had
known in West Africa enabled them to endure many of the attempts of their white
owners to break their spirits and their bodies: ―Enslaved Africans were property, and
they resisted the dehumanizing effects of slavery by recreating African notions of
family as extended kin units. Blood lines carefully monitored in West Africa were
replaced by a notion of an extended family/community consisting of their black
„brothers‟ and sisters. For black women, the domestic sphere encompassed a broad
range of kin and community relations beyond the nuclear family household‖ (Collins
49).

The kind of disjunction felt between mother and child in Sethe‟s story is
particularly traumatic because both were slaves and because Sethe had lost her mother
in a literal sense before the age of twelve. Sethe floundered between a literal lack of
knowledge of her mother and the isolation she experienced as a slave in South
Carolina where her mother had been a slave. Sethe was described by people who

22
knew her as a woman of remarkable stillness, suggesting that she was calm and
deliberate in difficult situations, as well as suggesting that she had cultivated the kind
of practical rationality that would allow her to survive in a hostile culture.

The violent disjunction between mother and child, the complete existential
break between mother and child that Lacan considered so powerful occurred in its
most graphic form with the death of Beloved. The ghost/apparition almost convinces
everyone in the household that she is the very corporeal presence of the murdered
child. At most, however, she is a remembrance, a fleeting presence, a reminder of the
cruelty of death. Cixous introduced the theoretical concept of ―writing the body‖ in
The Laugh of the Medusa (1975). She demanded in her essay ―Sorties: Out and Out:
Attacks/Ways out/Forays,‖ that women ―write the body.‖ She averred that ―Woman is
body more than man is‖ (Cixous 100).

Morrison‟s sensual writing commands the attention of the reader throughout

the novel. The five slave men who had sex with calves while waiting for Sethe to
select one of them as a husband indicates early on that this novel places a primary
emphasis on corporeal existence. Baby Suggs‟ endurance of the ―nastiness of life‖
suggests that the maternal body

In this story is devalued. Baby Suggs had the most profound influence on
Sethe‟s perception of motherhood. Baby Suggs modeled black motherhood in the
West African sense of ―other mothers.‖ That is, everyone in the community had a
responsibility for the care and growth of children, even if the children were not the
biological issue of the same woman. The caring for the children of others fostered a
sense of community among both African people and white Europeans

Kelly Oliver paraphrases and summarizes the significance of Kristeva for

mothering and motherhood. Oliver explains Kristeva‟s fundamental difference in this
way, ―Following Melanie Klein and in contrast to Freud and Lacan, Kristeva
emphasizes the maternal function and its importance in the development of
subjectivity and access to culture and language by insisting upon the significance of
both the semiotic, or bodily functions, as well as the symbolic, the construction of the
analytical processes of language‖ Kristeva includes the ―semiotic‖ or bodily function
as being equally as important as the ―symbolic‖ or intellectual function in any form of
subjectivity.

23
 The maternal body was sacred to Sethe. She could not imagine that any human
being would not have a sense of awe and wonder directed to the body of a woman
who was carrying new life, about to bring new life into existence. What she could
neither understand nor articulate was the complete objectification of a slave woman‘s
body by the white men who enjoyed ―playing checkers‖ with slaves, as Baby Suggs
had called it, moving people around as if they were objects. Curiously, in her own
way, Sethe functions as a mother goddess of another kind: one who assumed the
prerogative of choosing life or death for her children.

Dr. TANU GUPTA1, RAMANDEEP MAHAL Discuss supernatural element

in the novel. An invisible being inside the house brings chaos in the house and causes
Sethe‘s two sons Howard and Buglar to run away. This ghost seems to the baby‘s
ghost whom Sethe had earlier murdered. Morrison believes that the black culture has
been built on the horrors of the past and it is this history that has fashioned
contemporary black culture in a positive way.

Through her use of linguistic devices, Morrison has represented the black
culture, its imagery and symbolic features and the theme of interracial relations. She
has illustrated black culture as resilient, vibrant, independent and determined. As part
of black culture, the black women stand as the pillars of strength within that
community as guardians and healers.

Apart from the grotesque and unnatural events, the novel has some religious
and supernatural allusions also. Beloved has some allusions to The Bible also. On the
first page of Beloved the reader comes across this optimistic prophetic epigraph from
Romans 9:25, which seems to forecast an improved future for the black slaves: I will
call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, who was not
beloved. (1) In Beloved Sethe is associated with Biblical Seth, the third son of Adam
and Eve. According to Cynthia Dubin Edelberg in American Literature Morrison
believes that, ―the Bible is the wrong book for Blacks.‖(223)

The character of Beloved has been taken under interpretation by many critics.
Ashraf H.A Rushdy in Beloved: A Casebook describes her character from a
psychological angle, ―more than just a character in the novel, though. She is the
embodiment of the past that must be remembered to be forgotten; she symbolizes
what must be reincarnated in order to be buried.‖(41) She is also looked at from the

24
religious point of view and parallels to Jesus Christ are also found. Christ died on the
cross for the sins of mankind and was resurrected.

Critics always saw Beloved as the incarnation of the murdered daughter of

Sethe.According to Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, ―Sethe‘s guilt has recreated
Beloved.‖(56) Sigmund Freud believes that one has to remember and recreate ones
past to overcome traumas. He believes that, ―Sethe must ‗conjure up‘ her
past-symbolized by Beloved- and confront it as an antagonist. Sethe must learn to
regard her problematic past as an ‗enemy worthy of [her] mettle, a piece of [her]
personality, which was solid ground for its existence and out of which things of value
for [her] future life have to be derived.‖(92).

Beloved‘s presence accomplishes all these necessities and the relation between
her and Sethe can be portrayed as a psychoanalytic process that directed to catharsis
and facilitates Sethe to develop into a functioning individual. Beloved‘s alter ego has
an important role in the novel. She is a motivator for Sethe to help her flee from the
farm: *Sethe couldn‘t let her nor any of them live under the Schoolteacher. That was
out.‖ (192) she did not want her children to suffer as slaves. The dead baby also
serves as the motivator for Sethe as not to fall down during the toughest phases of
escape. And most importantly the baby‘s death is a sacrifice that gives the rest of the
family their freedom.

Lindsay Green argues that In the fiction of Toni Morrison, the Mrican
American woman emerges as a strong, central figure despite circumstance. Whether
she is well-loved or not, happy or not, she retains tremendous strength. The dynamics
of the family, including family obligations, family heritages, brothers, sisters,
mothers, and so on, take center stage in Morrison's work. Song Of Solomon, set in
twentieth-century Chicago, and Beloved, set in nineteenth-century Lorraine, Ohio,
reveal patterns and similarities in these resonant maternal figures.= Several things
surface as similarities among these women. Their experience or lack of mothering
during childhood affects the mothers they are as adults. Their motivations as mothers
are very enlightening as some seek control, some seek love, some seek freedom and
sisterhood, and some seek redemption. In all cases, the importance of patriarchy fades
into the background as everything these women do revolves somehow around their
daughterhood and its impact on their motherhood.

25
 In Song of Solomon, there are two main mothers, Ruth Foster Dead and Pilate
Dead. Pilate Dead also represents, by extension, her daughter Reba and her
granddaughter Hagar. Ruth Foster Dead is the unloved wife of a well-to-do landlord;
before she was his wife, she was a wealthy doctor's daughter. Ruth never had an
attachment with her mother, and she had devoted all of her affection, however excess;
I save, to her father. . She uses pregnancy and motherhood as a means of exercising
control in a world where she otherwise has none. Pilate Dead, Ruth's sister-in-law and
an extremely unconventional woman, has borne and raised her daughter without a
husband. Like Ruth, Pilate did not know her mother. Unlike Ruth, she lost her father
very early. Haunted by her past, she attempts to find some emotional stability in the
matriarchal household she establishes with Reba and Hagar.

Another woman haunted by her past is Sethe, the main character in

Morrison's Beloved. Sethe is different from Ruth and Pilate because of her drastically
different position in history and social situation. Sethe, like Ruth and Pilate, suffered
the lack of a mother in her own childhood, having only fragmentary memories of her
"Ma'am." As an adult, she suffers the theft of her milk by her white oppressors. Most
famously, she is a runaway slave who kills her next-to-youngest child, a daughter, to
protect her from slave catchers.

Unlike Ruth, who seeks her own victimization through her child, Sethe is a
mother who, when she finds herself and her children becoming victims, reacts by
bringing immediate death to her child. In both cases, the women's actions are about
exercising power. Sethe's case revolves around escape; she is consumed by the need
to save herself and of her children, all of whom escaped slavery once. She faces a
completely different situation than Ruth, who, never having to escape from anything,
uses her pregnancy and her child to preserve the survival of herself, of her marriage,
and of her own personal desires.

Nancy Jesser Calls for the return to home and 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 the 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. The rented house 124 Bluestone plays a

26
crucial role in marking the possibilities and limits of transformations of spaces
Morrison's characters inhabit. Possibilities, and the shutting down of possibilities,
develop through interactions and processes. For example, the pre-apocalyptic 124
Bluestone (before Sethe takes the handsaw to her children) is a softened space in
which the 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 the community and the exchange of food, she and the home become
open to change and community intervention

Instead of offering a configuration of utopian space, sustainable in isolation,

she offers a warning that spaces can change, over time or suddenly, and that the key to
sustenance is in links to others, to communities. Sweet Home, the quasi-utopian
plantation where Sethe is a slave, offers one critique of the (im) possibility of "home"
within the institution of chattel slavery. Sethe attempts to create a space for herself in
this home through small, unnoticed interior decoration. Her efforts, though
superficially consoling, fail, and in their failure point to the real barriers facing Sethe
in self-actualization and home-making. When Schoolteacher takes over, he begins his
violently dystopic project of "domesticating" the Sweet Home slave community.

For Mr. Garner the farm is a model of good "ownership." His policy of
containment allows the slaves to exercise some selfhood, but by allowing this
contained humanity, Garner's model farm places his slaves in a false position of
community. He presents himself to the other white Kentuckians and to the white
abolitionist Bodwins as an enlightened slaver - one who is not threatened by the
manhood of his slaves and who patronizes them with his outstanding care.

In Sweet Home Sethe performs small acts in an attempt to claim her world:
"The salsify she brought in to Mrs. Garner's kitchen every day just to be able to work
in it, feel like some part of it was hers, because she wanted to love the work she did,
to take the ugly out of it, and the only way she could feel at home on Sweet Home
was if she picked some pretty growing things and took them with her" (22). In a way,
Schoolteacher's coming frees the Sweet Home slaves from feeling any possibility of
"taking the ugly out" of their lives or "wanting to love" their work.

27
 Each generation in Beloved makes its escape to a more "livable" place. Sethe's
mother, who was brought from "livable" Africa to the unlivable plantation, makes the
first journey. She too leaves a daughter behind. Sethe, in her refusal to leave her
children in the worse place, attempts to send them across to the other place. Denver is
left out. As Paul D and Sethe slowly tell their histories, binding the two together,
Denver's jealousy leads her to a misplaced alliance with the past that is not the Sweet
Home past - shutting her out. Paul D's coming, then, begins the process of bringing
the stories together, and this process eventually allows Denver to make the escape
from her worse place to a better one.

Its limitations and boundaries are created and maintained by the white people
in whose interest the language of slave masters works. The Definers define this
community. Yet within these constraints the slaves form a counter-community and
plan to escape together. Soon after her moving to Cincinnati, Baby Suggs goes to the
Clearing to preach her gospel of imagined grace - "the only grace they could have was
the grace they could imagine. . . . if they could not see it, they could not have it" (88).
The Clearing provides a place for "every black man, woman, and child who could
make it through" to love themselves and each other in a way not sustainable in the
constricted and categorized world of white Cincinnati and white America (87). Within
the Clearing, connections and emotions are possible that are unendurable beyond it.

Sethe is caught up in the "enchantment" of the Clearing, and misreads the

touch as Baby Suggs's healing hands. Just as she concludes that she has to "share it"
with Paul D, who had "beat the spirit," Beloved's ghostly fingers shift from massage
to suffocation. in the Clearing, she realizes that the haunting by the ghost has not
helped her "solve" anything because it offers only a stay against time, not time itself.
The revelations about Halle and Paul D's love for her threaten to break up the solid
and static moment she has lived in for years. She is trapped between the competing
desire to be attached to Beloved and her misery, and her desire to be part of a living
family and community. Thus the Clearing - the place of enchantment and release - is
also a place of dangerous flux, and Sethe's quest to find "peace" in the Clearing
presents us with alternative visions (97): a peaceful rest for the past or a death-like
peace in the timeless present.

Sima Farshid Draws a distainful picture of school teacher. Morrison criticizes

28
his inhuman conduct, and furthermore reveals how the mortifying discourse of white
racists sustained their power. On the other hand, she dramatizes how Schoolteacher‘s
vicious exertion of power results in the ensuing resistance of the slaves who resist and
subvert his defining power by such shocking acts as murdering their beloved child or
laughing while getting burned.

One of the remarkable features of Morrison‘s ―literary archaeology‖ is the

picture she portrays of Schoolteacher, the concurrent slave-holder and subject of
knowledge, and the most loathsome figure in her oeuvre. Her portrayal of his
character and conduct highly dramatizes the interaction of power and knowledge
about which Foucault has proclaimed: ―there is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge‖ (Discipline and Punish 1975, 27-28).

Sethe‘s hysterical decision to kill her children while getting caught by

slave-catchers is the most traumatic act of resistance against the master‘s defining
power. Her husband‘s resistance can be observed in learning mathematics when the
schoolteacher offers teaching it to them. Halle learns it for the reason that neither
Schoolteacher nor any other white people could deceive him, and thereby subverts the
master‘s objectives. Besides Sethe, the most subversive Sweet Home slave is Sixo; he
does not learn what is offered by the schoolteacher, because he does not trust the
white masters, and does not like to replace the reminiscence of his African wisdom
with whites‘ knowledge.

Most of Morrison‘s characters are complicated figures that are neither

commended nor condemned by their creator, Schoolteacher appears to be an
exception, as he embodies all the iniquities of the atrocious institution of slavery.
Morrison depicts him as a cruel representative of slavery beneath whose apparently
civilized demeanor, a malicious racist mentality can be discerned, a mindset that
―abstracts the human corporality of the slaves‖, as Lawrence argues, ―into a sign for
the other in the discourse of the dominant ideology‖ (2000, 233). To counter his
dehumanizing view of slaves, Morrison has not given him and his nephews any names
to diminish them derisively to the level of nonhuman creatures that merely function as
the agents of inhuman forces of slavery.

Morrison ―subverts the myth of Southern paternalism‖, as Peach observes, ―in

which the slave owner envisaged as presiding over an extended and subservient

29
family of both black and white‖ (2000, 109).The white frequently looked at the black
as violent, menacing forces, whereas they ignored the fact that most of the aggressive
behaviors of the black were stimulated by the violence and cruelty of the white
themselves.

Rachel Lee explores the relationship between the slippage of words and the
informing voids (desires) of Morrison's novels by examining two of her most
critically recognized works, Sula (1973) and Beloved (1987). in Sula, Morrison offers
to her readers a main character who telescopes that scandal of epistemology. By
contrast, Beloved, set almost a century earlier (c. 1852-1873), deals less with the
metaphysical premises of good and evil to focus instead upon the institution of
slavery and its overwhelming perversion of meaning.

Inspired by a newspaper clipping from the 1850s (Davis 151), Beloved

reconstructs the nuances of a black woman's killing of her infant daughter in response
to the Fugitive Slave Act. Symbolic and discursive substitutions become emblematic
in this latter narrative, where a ghost stands in for the lost living, where memory only
approximates event, and where gestures and words struggle to fill the gaps of
unvoiced longings. In Beloved, Morrison again highlights the variability of meaning
and identity, yet in this case she links approximations of meaning to the historical
condition of being enslaved.

Sula and Morrison seek to describe an absence that antedates presence- a

loneliness existing without relation to another. Yet language falls short. Morrison can
only approximate Sula's loneliness through a catalog of "lost" items: She wept then.
Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems
of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women
she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tidy bodies of Cornish
hens in a nest of rice. (123).

In Beloved, language and expression in general fall short because the

experiences they strive to capture are peculiar- always circumscribed by the legacy of
having been owned. In her later work, Morrison highlights the lack of vocabulary to
speak the experience of the enslaved self as well as the often perilous relation of the
former enslaved to a historically specific language which commodities African
Americans.

30
 Unlike Sula and Nel, the main characters of this later novel, with the exception
of Beloved, remain discrete entities, none having achieved the closeness implied in
"two throats and one eye." Even family members do not realize an affinity like Sula's
and Nel's. Sethe only knows her mother through two gestures: her mother's revealing
to Sethe her circle and cross brand, and the slap Sethe receives upon requesting a
similar mark (61); Joshua/Stamp Paid displaces his emotional attachment to his wife
Vashti by changing his name rather than snapping her neck (233).

Morrison shows how certain symbols become over determined in meaning.

Sethe's breasts, for instance, begin as signifiers of nurturing. Sethe, who is pregnant
with Denver but still has "'milk for [her] baby girl,'" must get to Ohio where her
daughter awaits her. Yet, before Sethe leaves Sweet Home, Schoolteacher's nephews
forcibly "rape" her milk (16-17), rein scribing her breasts as sites of violation and
instruments through which to deprive her children of sustenance; they also epitomize
how "private" body parts become commodified, public, and un-"own"-ed by the self.

―Beloved, who returns from the dead, relies heavily upon gesture to supplement her
words. In response to Denver's question "‗what‘s it like over there, where you were
before?'" Beloved replies, "'Dark . . . I'm small in that place. I'm like this here.' She
raised her head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up" (75). Beloved's
gesture seems to indicate a womb of darkness, Morrison also shows how characters
besides Beloved choose approximating gestures over words. For instance, after Sethe
discovers Beloved's identity (as her returned "ghost" daughter), Sethe falls into a
flurry of mothering activity: playing with Beloved, braiding her hair, feeding her
"fancy food," and clothing her in "ribbon and dress goods" (240).

Morrison closes her story as well as gestures toward unwitting her narrative.
Like the "footprints" by the stream which "come and go, come and go," her narrative
seems to imprint and efface itself- much as Beloved has done within collective
memory. The community deliberately forgets her "like a bad dream" (274), actively
absenting her from their recollections; however, the narrative announces her as the
final word of the text- "Beloved"- that which is desired, missing, yet elusively present.

Parvin Ghasemi and Rasool Hajizadeh argues that Black maternity has
culturally and historically been mythologized and black mothers stereotyped.
Morrison challenges the validity of the historical documentation of black culture and

31
especially the role and significance of women in constructing this culture. Her
revision of the concept of the black motherhood is a major step toward correcting the
historical records concerning black maternity. Historically, the characterization of
black women has been basically depicted in terms of their maternal role, a defined
role which has been imposed on women as their sole source of identity by the society.
While Toni Morrison sees motherhood as an important experience for women, she
does not limit women's roles in the society to motherhood, nor does she restrict
motherhood to biological maternity.

Indeed, for Morrison, mothers are first and foremost human beings with
distinct identities.Black maternity has culturally and historically been mythologized
and black mothers stereotyped because, as Barbara Christian asserts, such idealized
images have served as "a content for some other major dilemma or problem the
society cannot solve" (2). Such myths delineate black mothers as matriarchal figures,
superbly strong and protective, and at the same time, selfless, all embracing,
demanding nothing or little, and totally self-sacrificing creatures whose identities are
inseparable from their nurturing services.

Morrison's mother figures tend to subvert these assumptions dictated by

thesociety. The majority of her mother figures are often independent, strong,
determined (to a degree that they are sometimes abusive), and self-seeking. Thus,
Morrison's portrayal of motherhood, in conflict with the prevailing notion which tends
to idealize motherhood, questions the social construction of matriarchy and maternity
which often fails to perceive the identity and individuality of a mother apart from her
child.

What distinguishes Morrison's mothers from the stereotyped mother figures is

their attempt at determining the course of their own and their children‘s destinies. By
resisting to conform to the definitions imposed on them as stereotypes and rejecting
the socially accepted notions of motherhood, Morrison's mother figures refuse to be
solely their children's nurturing sources

Navid Salehi Babamiri, Naser Dashtpeyma, Leily Jamali Contends that

Beloved is Morrison‘s response to the representation of heroic female‘s life in African
American literature with the special focus on the negative, undesirable and traumatic
effect of hegemonic masculinity over female characters. This novel deals with the

32
oppressions along race, class and gender that women have to tolerate, furthermore; it
shows black men‘s paradigm in using physical assault and constructing the assumed
identity for women. In order to be successful the black woman should resist all kinds
of oppressions as beating and abusing and even the controlling negative stereotypes
like ―mule‖ and ―jezebel.‖

The role of community gathering is also one of the most important factors in
women‘s encouragement towards emancipation. At the beginning of the novel, Sethe,
the tragic heroine of the story was a young black girl who was separated from her
breastfeeding mother so it is no wonder she was denied from her mother‘s milk and
love. She remembers nothing more than a brand implanted in her mother‘s breast and
knows that her mother was never close at hand when she [Sethe] needed her urgently.

Slave women were defined in terms of ―no mothers‖ and thus denied totally
the basic right to mother their own children. In the words of Barbara Hill Rigney:
―The disintegration of family, the denial of a mother‘s right to love her daughter . . . is
perhaps the greatest horror of slavery‖(qtd. in O‘Reilly 130). Baby Suggs realizes that
she is on a higher moral ground than Sethe, in the view of the fact that she quits her
children at birth, because she knew that they would eventually be taken away within
the legacy of slavery. In contrast, Sethe never abandons her children she abides by
them, even though her method of mothering becomes extremely brutal these choices
of maternal ignorance show that mother violence takes many forms.

As Hazel V. Carby points out, the slave woman‘s ―reproductive destiny was
bound to capital accumulation; black women gave birth to property and, directly, to
capital itself in the form of slaves (qtd. In Booker 299) - so by making women to
produce more children they can help the ―capital‖ rather than to maintain the human
relationship. Furthermore, these kinds of women had no pervasive sense of loving to
each other for they knew that one day they all may be come apart from each other.

Baby Suggs thought her life was like checkers game since all came to her were
also taken. So by giving this ―divide and conquer‖ strategy (Booker 301), the white
make it difficult for slaves to establish and maintain strong interpersonal tie.Alice
walker states, ―they stumbled blindly through their lives, creatures so abused and
mutilated in body, so dimmed and confused by pain, that they considered themselves
unworthy even of hope‖ (qtd. in Daniel 15). Therefore; the novel shows how women

33
are denied as human beings by white men, Sethe‘s stolen milk and horrible scars on
her back which her daughter Denever describes as ―tree‖ and the horrible scenes Baby
Sugg witnesses are all the sign of both physical violence and psychic wounds.

As Remer pinpoints; ― white seeks any outlet to assuage their blood stained
consciences, contorting languages and names themselves in a futile attempt to
legitimize slavery and conceives themselves that slavery is justified‖ (1). So by
exchanging the names based on their own wishes, Whites used their own authority to
denigrate and debase slaves. Sethe doesn‘t like to deliver her children by hand; yet
desperately she does something which is beyond the logic of words, reason and
justification, she grisly murders her daughter even to assert her role of motherhood
over societal mores.

According to Mondal, Sethe‘s murder of her daughter seems a less legally and
morally reprehensible crime because it becomes an act of self-defense (1). Yet, in
doing so, she achieves astonishingly powerful status. Denver realizes that before she
saves Sethe, she must save and help herself. Thus, Denver tightly corresponds to
Walker‘s definition of a womanist that a strong woman should love herself first. Alice
Walker claims that a womanist ‗‗loves herself. Regardless‘‘ (qtd. in Harris 4).Though
Denver, like Beloved, is victimized by Sethe, she ferrets for ways to out strip this
victimization and obstacle through community and strength.

Denever and community save Sethe by injecting her great power to know her
life. They provide food and walk away Beloved. The support of her peers enables
Sethe to grasp power again. This final act justifies how Sethe is freed from her guilt
and re-conciliated for what she has done. Thus, Denver puts an end to the infantile
stage in her life and starts as an active and vigorous member of the society. Denver
finds Paul D, and he returns to Sethe to take care of her and heal her tortured soul. All
of them have a chance to leave the past behind and start again by focusing on the
future.

In her article ―Between Gender Equality and Gender Complementarity in Toni

Morrison‘s Beloved‖ Selma Chouchane describes how the institution of slavery
affects gender roles leaving deep scars in the African American family. Article
discusses how Toni Morrison challenges the white patriarchal society by creating a
new kind of gender relations. Through Beloved, Toni Morrison recognizes manhood

34
and womanhood as being not biologically but socially determined. She describes how
the institution of slavery affects gender roles especially those of father and husband,
mother and wife, leaving deep scars in the relations between African American men
and women as well as in their conceptions of themselves.

Concerning the black male protagonist Paul D slavery has emasculated him
and effectively steals his manhood by forbidding him to make decisions or exist for
himself. For the black female protagonist Sethe, her experiences take away her
womanhood and her maternal sensibilities. She adapts conventionally masculine traits
in order to ensure hers and her family's survival. Thus, both characters effectively take
on the stereotypical characteristics of the opposite gender.

Toni Morrison tries to resolve the debate over gender power by introducing a
new kind of gender relations totally different from the patriarchal one. Through the
exorcism of the character Beloved by the end of the novel, Morrison evokes the
second climax in the story after the infanticide. The baby ghost who represents a
threat to her mother Sethe, to her sister Denver and to the whole black community
does no longer exist. After the different stories of betrayal, hate, domination and fear,
Beloved‘s exhaustion initiates a new order in the black society.

The exorcism of the character Beloved rises Sethe‘s longing for death. She
finds herself once again alone with her daughter Denver who works for their living.
Paul D left 124 Bluestone Road, when he learns from Stamp Paid what Sethe did to
her children. After the multiple promises he gives her; to stay with her, to take care of
her and his wish to have a baby with her, he leaves her house because he cannot
understand her act of infanticide.

According to Toni Cade Bambara, ''[a] new person is born when he finds a
value to define an action self and when he can assume autonomy for that self''
(Bambara 133).Sethe's rescue through Paul D can be seen, at first glance, as the
restoration of the traditional gender roles. Mary Paniccia Carden asserts that, '''[i]n
some ways, Paul D's rescue bespeaks a return to patriarchal scripts: we are left with a
strong man bending over the bed of a supine, weakened woman, promising
redemption in a space safe for domesticity'' (Carden, 421).Morrison rejects both the
racist patriarchy that denies black men their masculinity and the individual men who
accept such patriarchal definitions of manhood. By Sethe's rescue through Paul D,

35
Morrison insists on the importance of man in African American womanist landscape.

Morrison considers women as equal partners with men with different roles in
the family, each role is dependent on the other .Morrison criticizes the traditional
values associated with male's dominance and offers a new understanding of gender
relations. First, Paul D brings Sethe's awareness to herself. Thus Sethe starts
recognizing her autonomy and starts loving herself. Beloved resolves the black
man‘s/black woman‘s conflict over gender power. Instead of dominating or being
dominated by the other, a healthy relationship needs the notion of completing and
being completed by the other as John Ruskin‘s statement: ''[w]e are foolish, and,
without excuse foolish in speaking of the 'superiority' of one sex to the other, as if
they could be compared in similar things. Each has what the other has not; each
completes the other and is completed by the other; they are nothing alike, and the
happiness and perfection of both depend on each asking and receiving from the other
what the other only can give'' (Ruskin, 51)..

In ―Gender blurring‖ in Beloved by Toni Morrison ,Author Katrin Rindchen

Year 2002,discusses how the male and the female gender are treated by Morrison.
According to Elaine Showalter the term gender arose in the 1980s as a category of
analysis. As talking about gender implies the involvement of both men and women
the term gender theory marks a shift from women-centered investigations of the 70s
to the researches on gender relations in the 80s. As every culture has its own view of
what is typically male and what is typically female In the concept of gender blurring a
man behaves as it is expected of women and a woman‘s behavior conforms more to
the male character than to her own female one.the assumption of masculinity and
femininity varies from society to society.

According to Ann Beaulieu‘s fearlessness is commonly attributed to men (62),

which implicitly denotes women as the weak gender, easier to frighten and therefore
needing protection. ―it is generally held that men more often than women choose
aggressive, confrontational behavior, particularly when they feel threatened or bested‖
(Beaulieu 62) which defines the man as brave, tough and constantly ready to fight. As
a female ex-slave, sethe generally behaves as a woman. Yet, according to the concept
of gender blurring, her acting does not always conform to what is regarded as
feminine, thus her conduct can sometimes be much more attributed to a man‘s

36
character.

Sethe is physically very strong, even stronger than her two sons. According to
Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu Toni Morrison already genders her characters in the first
chapter of her novel. The reader is told that the house 124, Bluestone Road is ―[F]ull
of a baby‘s venom‖ (Beloved3) and that Howard and Burglar have left the haunted
house, being too timorous to cope with the baby ghost‘s spirit. Their flight contrasts to
their mother‘s, their sister‘s and even their grandmother‘s behavior, for they all stay
enduring the poltergeist without complaining.

According to Beaulieu not only courage is considered a masculine character

trait, but also the readiness to fight, which is too manifested in the character of the
African woman. Sethe has extremely suffered in her past as a slave. She was beaten
and raped - events she suppresses after her flight from Sweet Home. Only 18 years
hereafter and with the return of Beloved she starts to admit her memories to come
back. With what effort she fights back her slavery past is evident when she hears
Baby Suggs voice, who advises her to lie down ―sword and shield‖ and to not ―study
war no more‖ (Beloved86).

Carole Boyce Davies denotes ―Motherhood and/or mothering‖ as the ―central

and defining tropes in Black female reconstruction‖ (135). The first aspect that
indicates Gender-Blurring in Beloved‘s motherhood is the fact that the sex of slaves
was crucial, but the gender of no importance and the passage where Sethe tells her
children about her own mother provides the proof. She cannot remember her mother
well, since she was not only nursed by her but also ―sucked from another women
whose job it was‖ (Beloved60).

The central trope in the novel Beloved is Sethe‘s killing of her daughter
Beloved and it can be argued that this infanticide is a Gender-Blurring in itself. Sethe
defines herself through her motherhood and on account of that through her children.
Since she wants to spare her child a life in slavery, she decides to kill her baby. On the
one hand this action is, without doubt, taken out of love, as Sethe aims at protecting
her baby from the terrible experiences under slavery. As a consequence this killing
out of love is an action based on her emotional feeling and hence agreeing with the
habitual picture of a woman.

37
 On the other hand the brutal procedure of Sethe‘s killing has to be taken into
account, as well. She cuts the throat of her two-year old baby and wants to throw her
other daughter Denver against the wall. Her obviously unscrupulous behavior does no
longer conform to a typical female character, as brutality is by and large more likely
to be attributed to men. Sethe‘s behavior in contradistinction to the conduct of the
classical mother testifies her power of self-determination. Her maternal omnipotence
enables her to decide over her child‘s life and death contradiction to other mothers
who would not be so courageous as to oppose to their children‘s‘ enslavement by such
an action.

Sethe kills her daughter as a result of herself being deprived of a mother.

According to Aoi Mori ―Sethe‘s lack of communication with her own mother drives
her into an extremely protective and, at the same time, deranged motherhood.‖ (Mori,
107).Phillip M. Weinstein defines white American manhood as ―the maintaining of
self-possession, the ad equation of one‘s behavior to one‘s will, the ability to patrol
one‘s property - one‘s self at all times, one‘s wife in this instance - and guarantee that
she remains one‘s own.‖ (Weinstein 286). As Weinstein states ―the central damage
done by slavery to black manhood was to cripple individual agency‖ (Weinstein,
290).

Male helplessness is a central trope in the novel. Both Halle and Paul D suffer
powerlessness most obviously established under schoolteacher‘s leadership. If
manhood means individual power, it is apparent inBeloved that the male slaves are
deprived of this. In Sethe‘s eyes the most terrible action done to her in slavery was the
boys‘ taking of her milk. As Paul D reveals, Halle must have watched the scene from
the loft, still he cannot interfere and help the woman. Paul D has a crucial experience
when he watches Mister, the cock of the farm, which at the same time functions as the
beginning of his problems. Paul D realizes that the cock is more ‗man‘ than Paul A,
Paul F, Halle, Sixo and he himself together. Tied and with an iron bit in his mouth he
sees Mister and compares himself to the animal. While the rooster is free and can
move as he pleases, Paul D‘s hands are in chains which render him unable to use
them.

Weinstein states that ―[I]f manhood means self-ownership, Paul D is owned by

others‖ (287). This ownership does not only refer to the fact that slaves are owned by

38
white farmers but also to the fact that Paul D does not even have power over his own
body. In the prison in Georgia his health condition becomes serious: ―Paul D‘s hands
disobeyed‖ (Beloved108) in the fields in Georgia and he has to vomit despite an
empty stomach. This reflects his powerlessness about his own body. The slave has not
only ceased to be a man after Mr. Garner‘s death but also to be a human being with
the ability to control his own body.

39
 Chapter 01

Dominant image of Afro – American women and its

subversion in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Overall, women are often victims of violence. They are treated as goods and
considered as sources of pleasure for men. In many countries, rape and sexual
violence are practiced as witnesses of male supremacy. Feminist critics argue that
male-dominated criticism should be redone to include female consciousness. They
argue that, to be good, literature and criticism should lead Leyond of both sexes into
an androgynous point of view. The appeal to androgynous is found in the commentary
of Josephine C. Donovan when she states:

"The aesthetics of famine must ensure integration into

the critical process of experiments denoted as famine in
our culture." (P.79)

Some important writings of feminist criticism include Virginia Woolf's "A

Room of Her Own", Sidney Janet's "Female Consciousness", Elene Moors's "Literary
Women in the 19th Century", Elaine Alter shows "A literature of their own‖.

Black feminism in the United States was marked by three distinct phases;

The abolitionist movement which culminated with the suffrages in 1919.

Ensuring the passage of the amendment, civil law and black power began in 1970 and
the era of civil law earlier. The first wave of black feminism focused on equality
primarily on obtaining the right of suffrage. Second wave feminism encourages
women to understand their aspects of personal life as politicized. The issue of class,
race and sexuality is the dominant theme of third wave feminism. The central feminist
preoccupation was the transformation of the societal relationship based on class,
gender and sex. In order to explode black women, various dominant groups have
established various stereotyped images of control. These include the mammy
Matriarch, the Welfare mother and The Jezebel. For African American women
challenge these stereotypes, have been an essential part of their quest for voice.

40
 In pursuit of these themes, many black novelists offer a neglected perspective
of human experience. The common signs and structures used by black novelists
include patterns interconnecting racist, sexist and classist oppression, the spiritual
journey from victimization to the realization of personal autonomy, the centrality of
the female bond and personal relationships in the family And in community, the
iconography and the black female clothing and the black mother language. Helene
Washington pleads for the tradition of black women in "Mid Night Bird", and
"Invented life".

Black women seek a specific language, symbols and images to record their
experiences and even if they can claim a legitimate position in the African American
position and female feminist tradition. It is clear that, for the purpose of liberation,
black women's writers will insist first on their own names, they have a space
"(night-bird). Many artists and writers have emerged from slavery and Reconstruction
before reaching the extreme African-American culture The first literature written by
the black woman appeared in 1861. It includes short stories by Francis Allen Watkens
and Hereat Wilsom autobiography "Sketches of the Life of Black Free ".

Hareat Jacobson, "Incident in the Life of the Slave," is the first autobiography
published by the former slave. The book describes sexual exploitation and provides an
example of black female strength in the face of adversity. The two decades of the 20th
Centuary are marked by the writings of protest. The novel by Zora Neil Heresten in
1937 "their eyes were watching God" celebrated liberating possibilities of love and
autonomy for black women. The difficulties of depression and the Second World War
have pushed African American literature towards social criticism. This is evident in
the novels of Anne Patrey, her novel "The Street" describe the struggle of black
working class women in Harlem. The rewritings of the "myth of the bad negro" in the
native sun excite the reader for his naturalistic truth.

Before 1960, the protagonist of most African-American novels is partly a male

figure who strives to define himself in the social and cultural forces that threaten to
destroy his humanity. Since 1960, female protagonists such as Jane, Sula, Sethe, Miss
Jones Pitman have been demanded, re-imagined and rebuilt to defy male hegemony
and to illuminate the joys and sufferings of those who are poor, black and female. The
stereotype and the archetype, the romantic and realistic character blend with each

41
other as the novelist seeks to celebrate the self-redeeming values of American life
while criticizing the destructive forces. While Morrison's novel "Beloved" describes
the historical rape of black women and their resilience to survive in an oppressive
environment. The most distinct character types include the preacher, Hustler, the
matriarch, the messianic leader, the evil nigger and the liberated women. As Neil said,

"The most authentic writings of the black in 1960 were

founded in the life of the black masses and aimed at
consolidating the Afro-American personality."

Allace walker "The color purple" (1982) is the first novel in which the
lasbian relation is at the heart of the development of the narrative structure. She
directs and attacks relentlessly the male hegemony and the abuse of black women by
black men. She offers a contemporary black feminist view of the lives of black
Southerners in her novels "The Third Life of Grange Coplene" and the "Temple of
My familial".

American fiction,as James Tutlelton in "Tracing the American novel in the

void", is one of the other things: "Self-conscious enterprise only wants to be satisfied
with the freedom claimed in the political declaration, To redo the fictitious form of
representation. "As a result, the tradition of African-American fiction is dominated by
the tension between dialectics (oral and literary traditions), the struggle for freedom,
all forms of oppression, and Personal odesy to realize the full potential of the complex
identity of an African American.

1.1 Image of Black Woman in Toni Morrison Beloved

Beloved Explore the physical, emotional and spiritual cause caused by slavery.
Slavery creates a negative impact on the meaning of the former slave's psyche. The
slaves were considered sub-humans and were treated as commodities. In her novel
beloved, Toni Morrison raises the question of whether the most horrible crime can be
understood and forgiven in the horror of slavery and whether it is possible for an
individual to recover from this trauma.

The main characters of the novel are seethe and her children who manage to
escape their slave honor on the plantation named Sweet Home. In order to save her

42
daughter from slavery, she kills her, which in her mind is an act of maternal love.
Traumatized by guilt, she is incapable of leading normal life as a functioning
individual. As Morrison has seen, "slavery denies black mothers the right to feel
maternal love and make them ambulant to their own offspring." In her words "These
women were not mothers but breeders". Morrison explores the psychology of a
mother when she and her children get free. no longer breeder, a mother is free to love
her children and becomes capable of making unthinkable choices to protect them. The
infanticide act of the mother undergoes the natural order because a mother is
supposed to create life. . Seethe try to justify her act by declaring,

―If I had not killed her, she would die and that is
something it could not bear to happen to her‖ (P. 175)

According to her,

―Death is a kinder alternative then rape; that anyone

white could take your whole self and dirty you so bad
you could not like yourself anymore‖ (P. 252)

Yet she was very anxious about her daughter as she state,

―Do you forgive me? You save her‖. (P. 172)

Rushdie claims that,

―Beloved is more than a character in the novel. She is an embodiment of the

past that must be remembered to be forgotten, she symbolizes what must be recreated
in order to be buried‖ (P. 41)

Demetrakopoulus suggests that,

―Sethe guilt has recreated beloved‖ (P. 566)

As Henderson writes,

―Sethe must regards her past as an enemy worthy of

medal, a piece of personality which was solid ground
for its existence and out of which future life have to
drives‖. (P. 92)

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Beloved first appears when Paul D. Visits Sethe in her house,

―With a table and a loud make voice, he has rid 124 of

its claim to local fame‖. (P. 45)

She is describe as,

―Fully dressed woman walked out of water‖. (P. 90)

Water is associated with birth. When seethe catches sight of beloved face there
is strong sign of giving birth. (P. 661)

Beloved presence full fills all the requirement and her relation with her mother
can be described as a Psyche analytic process that lead to catharsis. In the eyes of law
seethe is forgiven but the black community have not forgiven her. While explaining
her behavior to Paul. D she says,

―It is my job to know what is not and to keep them

away from what I know is terrible, I did that‖ (P. 194)

When she realize that Beloved is her reborn daughter she experiences relief;

―Seethe even looks straight at the shade where the

daughter smile at th things she would not have to
remember now.‖ (P. 214)

Demetrakopoolus describe their relation as (Psychic incest) (P. 58) and argue
that their situation representative of maternal love in general as an obstacle for
mothers to take their position in society and history. In the novel Morrison present
blacks community unwilling to forget their past. She believes that Afro – American
history is distorted and romanticized, ―We live in a land where American can come
and start over, where the state is clean. The past is absent or it is romanticized. This
culture does not encourage dwelling on coming to terms with the truth about past‖. (P.
4)

In an interview to Bony Anglo of Time magazine Morrison express the desire

of the American Nation to repress the memory of slavery, ―I do not want to remember
black people do not want to remember white people do not want to remember (Itilden
curven P. 56) When the black community came to rescue seethe its looked as it, ―For

44
seethe it was though the clearing had come to her with all it heat and simmering leaf
where the voices of women were searching for the right combination, the key, the
code, the second that broke the back of words. It broke over seethe and she trembles
like the baptizer in its wash‖. (P. 308)

For her this is the sign of forgiveness from the black community. The
experience of slavery involves not only a lake of individual self but according to Ayer
Sitter it involves, ―Relationship between oppressed human injured and destroyed by
internalization of oppressive values which can subvert the self‖.

Ayer Argus that,

―Beloved illustrates how every natural Instinet and

emotion is some way twisted by the experience of living
in a cultural that measure individual‘s worth by resale
value and the ability to produce one‘s self without cost‖.
(P. 18)

Slave could not afford to love anyone. For them motherhood and family life
could not be taken granted. Female slaves were abuse by other slaves as well as their
white honor. Sethe refuse to yield to the system allowing herself to be a loving
mother. She is describe as strong,

―The one with iron eyes and backbone to match‖. (P.

10)

When Paul. D complains that her, ―Love is too thick‖. (P. 193)

And it is dangerous to love like that she explain,

―Thick love is no love at all‖. (P. 194)

She describe what happened to her love in freedom,

―Look like I love them more after I got here or maybe I

could not have proper in cuntaky because they were
mine to love‖. (P. 190)

Lewes defines her act of killing her daughter as,

45
 ―A refused to compromise her right to love her
children‖. (P. 2)

Sethe was not only the victim of white society, but also the victim of her
husband. Her husband, assumed to be his protector of the outside world, mistreated
her. he allows the nephew of the school teacher to steal his breast milk.Bonnet note
that,

―Taking milk firm seethe is the violation of the bond of mother and child. Slavery
does not only cause physical pain to set but also violate the feelings to her children.
The robbing of seethe milk is thus the materialization of the perversity of the
institution which kills slaves self‖. (P. 14)

Funston white state,

―It was not seethe who killed her children but it was the effect of slavery the
effect of slavery that drives her to commit the crime fully aware of the act and its
brutality as well as its compassion‖. (P. 17)

Seethe‘s problem after escaping slavery is related to her past memories. Her
conversation indicates that for her,

―The future was the matter of keeping the past away‖. (P. 19)

Her felling as a mother so intense that she is ready to be with her daughter at her
grave,

―When I put that head stone I want to lie in their will you, put your head on my
shoulder and keep you warm and I would have if Bugler, Howard and Denver did not
need me because my mind was homeless them. I could not lay down with you‖. (P.
23)

Although Beloved disappears at the end, his story is persevered in the novel. It
gives voice to the collective conscience of all those who are oppressed by slavery. It
represents a destructive and painful past, but also represents the possibilities for a
bright future. It gives the whole community the opportunity to engage in their
memory. Morrison suggests that Sethe and Denver must learn to overcome the power
of the beloved before creating their own life in the future.

46
As Paul D reminds seethe that,

―There is life beyond their past me and you have got

more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of
tomorrow‖. (P. 273)

Sethe manages to create her family with Paul D. through her, she becomes a
new and different woman. Paul D.'s entry in his life signals the beginning of his
relationship and the introduction of the paternal figure for Denver, Morrison considers
that the black community as a whole must try to cure itself of the trauma of slavery by
displacing Past, one can find happiness on Looking towards the future remained
rather mixed in the past.

1.2 Derrida Deconstruction And Bell Hooks Feminism In Beloved By

Toni Morrison

Deconstruction is a movement of literary criticism originating from the French

critic Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, developed in three books: De la grammatologie
(1967 ; Of Grammatology), L'Écriture et la difference (1967; Writing and Difference),
). Drawing on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Søren
Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche, on the language theories of Ferdinand de
Saussure, and on the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan,
Derrida presented his notion of deconstruction in 1966 at an international symposium
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

The theory of deconstruction embraces the precept that meaning is always

uncertain and that it is not the responsibility of literary criticism to clarify meaning in
a given text. Derrida began with Saussure's ideas about the signified and the signifier:
an (signified) idea is represented by a sign (signifier), but the sign can never be the
same as the idea. The work of literary criticism is to search for a "slip" in the text - to
note duplicity, or to expose how a text has violated the linguistic and thematic rules
that it has put in place internally.

Because it disputes the centrism of the logo-that is, it questions the order and
certainty in the deconstruction of language has been considered by its adversaries as
an intellectually obscure and negativistic cultural form of cultural criticism .Derrida

47
was often asked to define deconstruction: What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course.
(Derrida, 1991, p. 275) . . . deconstruction doesn‘t consist in a set of theorems,
axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods . . . there is no deconstruction,
deconstruction has no specific object . . . (Derrida, 1996, p. 218)There is no method to
deconstruction because texts literally deconstruct themselves in their impossible
attempt to employ language as a ‗transcendental signifier‘ (Usher & Edwards, 1994),
that is, as a way of ‗pointing‘ at some eternal truth or other.

As Spivak (1976) observes, ‗All texts . . . are rehearsing their grammatological

structure, self-deconstructing as they constitute themselves‘ (p. lxxviii). All that the
deconstructionist needs to do is written, because in the final analysis deconstruction is
in the process of writing. In addition, he writes without preconceived objectives as
Barthes (1970) put it, ‗to write is an intransitive verb‘, a verb without an object, an
end in itself. Deconstruction manifests itself in the process of writing rather than in
the product: ‗Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the
deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject‘ (Derrida, 1991, p.
274).Criticism seeks to establish the authorized meaning of the text, the original
meaning placed in the text by the author. Deconstruction consists in putting this
authority ‗out of joint‘ (Derrida, 1995, p. 25).

Towards a reconstruction of the Afro-American identity in the Beloved of

Toni Morrison. Beloved shows how Afro-American identity could be reconstructed
by its own cultural heritage and social structure. It links history and personal and
cultural memories. In this sense, the healing of memories is the first necessary step to
self-identification. Beloved is a narrative structured by a tension between the
oppressive memory of the past and the promises of a just future. After exorcising
Beloved, Paul D says ―Sethe,‖... ―me and you, we got more yesterday than
anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow‖ (273).

The novel focuses on the personal histories to fill the gaps neglected by
historians.Derrida elaborates that Literature as historical institution with its
conventions, rules, etc., but also this institution of fiction which gives in principle the
power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them,....to invent and
even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution, nature and
conventional law, nature and history. (TSICL 37)

48
 Morrison focuses on rebuilding the identity of the black community in
Beloved mainly through his two female protagonists Sethe and Denver. Beloved
Trace is one of the most important concepts of the deconstruction of Derrida,
presented in the 1960s in two of his books "Of Grammatology" and "Writing and
Difference".It is the ―mark of the absence of a presence, an always-already absent
present (Of Gram xvii). . Derrida says ―the trace is the difference which opens
appearance and signification (Dis 65). During this time, the difference transmits
meaning by a different and deferred process. Using the traces of the past, Morrison
evoked not only the trauma implanted in the mind of the individual but also the entire
community.

Morrison offers a feminist principle by highlighting Sethe's journey for

self-recognition in an aggressive environment. Sethe testifies to the results of the
bestiality of slavery on her previous generation. Sethe's mother, like the other black
slaves, was treated with dehumanization, working from dawn until the end of the
night in the rice fields. She did not have enough time to spend it with her child when
she was spending her one day off on Sunday sleeping.. She once showed Sethe a mark
made by her oppressors a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin (61) .just like cattle
are branded. Simultaneously, Sethe‗s journey of suffering leaves physical scars on her
back, another indication of the terrible violence practiced on slaves. Schoolteacher‘s
nephews beat her when she was pregnant with Denver to the point that they injured
her so badly so that her back skin had been dead for years (18).

They held her back and sucked her breasts. Beloved symbolizes the pain of the
past, her return to the flesh can be read as the trace of the traumatic past left in the
minds of each of the characters, for at the end of the novel his disappearance
illustrates the very reason for their rapprochement with them, And with their
community.

Derrida claims that ―there is no breach without difference and no difference

without trace (MP 18). Beloved represents the traces of trauma as well as the means to
heal the psychic wounds dug in the memories of the characters. The wound is
reopened by the appearance of the ghosts in the lives of the protagonists who paves
the way for their re-examination and face it.

49
 After being rejected by society in the years of disapproval and loneliness
(173), Sethe and Denver live isolated from their community, for the latter requires an
explanation or an excuse for their crime. Indeed, Sethe is unable to forget her act of
murder. She feels guilty. At the same time, there seems to be a very small part in his
subconscious capable of forgiving and rebuilding again.Derrida assumes that If there
is something to forgive, it would be what in religious language is called mortal sin,
the worst, the unforgivable (On Cos 32). Therefore, the return of Beloved in the flesh
is remarkable. It refers to the return of the repressed past which was once
unforgivable; Opening the way to forgiveness. Bell hooks argues that ―there is
nothing about the pain of the past that I have not forgiven, but forgiveness does not
mean that one forget‖ (TCPH 119).

Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her reasons:
that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own life....Beloved
denied it. (241-42)Beloved‗s behavior becomes progressively demonic and results in
the progressive physical and mental deterioration of her mother. ―When once or
twice Sethe trie[s] to assert herself—be the unquestioned mother whose word [i]s law
and who kn[ows] what[is] best---Beloved slam[s] things, wipe[s] the table clean of
plates, thr[ows] salt on the floor, br[eaks] a windowpane‖(242). Derrida claims that
―Each time forgiveness is effectively exercised, it seems to suppose some sovereign
power...one only forgives where one can judge and punish‖ (On Cos 59).Beloved
stands as a symbol for an interconnection between the past and the present. She
represents the "arche-phenomenon of 'memory'"23 (Of Gram 70). So she returns and
takes over the characters ‗present-day household.

Denver represents the future generation of the black community that

developed right after slavery. She was born with the help of a white girl named Amy
Denver on the river that divided the free lands and slaves during the flight of Sethe
from Sweet Home. After the act of infanticide, Denver drinks milk from her dirty
mother's nipple with her sister's blood. She even goes to prison with Sethe and suffers
from the same marginalization and isolation imposed by the community. For her,
Beloved represents a refuge, the removal of the threat posed by Sethe.She says
―Beloved is my sister...Waiting for me... Ready for me... to protect her‖ (205-6).

50
 The beloved represents a therapeutic resource for the status and psyche of
Denver. With the arrival of Beloved, Denver feeds her hunger for sisterhood. She is
transformed from a lazy and childish person to an active and mature person. Beloved
is obsessed with Sethe. ―Denver‗s chances of being looked at by her go down to
nothing...when her mother is anywhere around, Beloved has eyes only for Sethe
(121). However, as time passes, Denver begins to recognize the progressive collapse
of her mother under the destructive possession of Beloved; thus ―the job she started
out with, protecting Beloved from Sethe, changed to protecting her mother from
Beloved‖ (243).

By going out of the community and to save her mother's life, Denver takes her
first step towards reconciliation with her society. It recognizes the importance of
communal unity in recovering the past and reclaims the present. Denver serves as a
bridge that causes her mother to lose the possession of the past and return to the
present. It is also one that allows the whole community to face its past. Beloved, who
symbolizes this past, functions as the agent who brings members of the female
community to the rescue of Sethe. Their confrontation with them makes them
understand the act of infanticide of Sethe by sharing many of its miseries: there was ...
something very personal in its fury.

Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn‗t like the idea of past errors taking
possession of the present‖ (256). The voices of women who come together to
accomplish a collective exorcism is a very crucial image in the novel, which means
that by unity the black community could resume its agency and freedom once they
have been removed from it by the Past, and get back on track And self-identification..
A Bell hook believes that ―By confronting the past without shame we are free of its
hold on us‖ (TCPH 119).

Beloved is the instrument by which the main characters as well as the whole
community revise their memories.She is what Derrida calls ―the supplement, which
is ―something that completes or makes an addition‖(Webster Online). She is the past
and present, the center and the periphery as she symbolizes the past that is
intentionally kept ―at bay‖ (42); But it is the nucleus of the self-recognition of the
black community. It causes the whole community to confront it, thus confronting its
past to claim its present.

51
 The supplement is irritating because it is neither presence nor absence ... A
terrifying threat, the supplement is also the first and the safest protection; Against this
threat itself ... The supplement has not only the power to procure an absent presence
through its image; By procuring us with a sign ... For this presence is at the same time
desired and feared. The supplement transgresses and at the same time respects the
interdict...Thus the supplement is dangerous in that it threatens us with death. (DS
96-7)

The beloved does not only represent the past of particular individuals in the
novel, but extends this representation to the sixty millions or more to whom Morrison
dedicates the novel. Moreover, to recall the horrible past that possesses the characters,
the beloved is a threat to their lives; Yet they have to face it and acknowledge its pain
because it is part of their self-definition. Indeed, the characters enter into a process of
what Derrida marks ―Difference that is ―delaying or in diverting the fulfillment of a
need ‗or desire‗(Difference 562).

By examining the desire to repress memory, Sethe, Denver, Paul D and the
whole community enter into a process of psychic recovery. They discover a new way
of reading the world, themselves and others. Still, Toni Morrison echoes the feminist
vision by wanting more space for her female protagonists. It creates a feminine figure
that symbolizes the evil of the past as well as the restoration of sisterhood.

52
 Chapter 2
Psychological Fixations in Toni Morrison Beloved
Psychological Fixation and Sigmund Freud

The fixation is a concept (in human psychology) originating from Sigmund

Freud (1905) to designate the persistence of anachronistic sexual traits. The term
subsequently came to refer to object relations with persons or things in general that
persist from childhood to adult life. The terms of the object were then considered as
object relations with people or things in general ranging from childhood to adult life.

In three essays on the theory of sexuality (1905), Freud distinguished the

fixations of the libido on an incestuous object, from a fixation on a specific and partial
goal, such as voyeurism. Freud has theorized that some humans may develop
psychological fixation because of one or more of the following: A lack of adequate
gratification during one of the psychosexual stages of development. Receive a strong
impression of one of these steps, in which case the personality of the person would
reflect this stage throughout adult life.

2.1 Fixation and Post-Freudians

Melanie Klein saw fixation as pathological inherent - a blocking of potential

sublimation by repression. Erik H. Erikson distinguished the attachment to the area -
for example, oral or anal - from fixation to mode, such as taking, as in the case of the
man who"may eagerly absorb the 'milk of wisdom' where he once desired more
tangible fluids from more sensuous containers". [16]

Eric Berne developed his insight further as part of transactional analysis,

suggesting that "particular games and scripts, and their accompanying physical
symptoms, are based in appropriate zones and modes‖. Heinz Kohut saw the
grandiose self as a fixation upon a normal childhood stage; while other post-Freudians
explored the role of fixation in aggression and criminality.

2.2 Psychosexual Stages

Freud (1905) proposed that psychological development in childhood take

place in a series of fixed stages. These are called psychosexual stages because each

53
stage represents the fixation of the libido (almost translated by sexual impulses or
instincts) on another part of the body. As the person develops physically, certain areas
of his body become important as potential sources of frustration. Freud stressed that
the first five years of life are essential to the formation of the adult personality. Id
must be controlled in order to satisfy social requirements; This creates a conflict
between frustrated desires and social norms. The ego and the superego develop to
exercise this control and direct the need for gratification into socially acceptable
channels.

2.3 Oral Stage (0-1 year)

In the first stage of personality development, the libido is centered in the

mouth of a baby. It is very satisfying to put all sorts of things in his mouth to satisfy
the libido, and therefore his id demand . What at this stage of life is oral, or oriented
towards the mouth, such as aspiration, stinging and breastfeeding.

2.4 Anal Stage (1-3 years)

The libido now focuses on the anus and the child derives great pleasure from
defecating. The child is now fully aware that they are a person in their own right and
that their wishes can put them in conflict with the demands of the outside world.

2.5 Phallic Stage (3 to 5 or 6 Years)

Sensitivity is now concentrated in the genitals and masturbation (in both

sexes) becomes a new source of pleasure. The child becomes aware of the
anatomo-sexual differences that set in motion the conflict between erotic attraction,
resentment, rivalry, jealousy and fear that Freud called the Oedipus complex (in boys)
and the Electra complex (Among girls). This is solved by the identification process,
which implies that the child adopts the characteristics of the same-sex parent.

2.6 Latency Stage (5 or 6 to Puberty)

No other psychosexual development takes place during this stage (latent

means hidden). The libido is dormant. Freud thought that most sexual impulses are
repressed during the latent phase and that sexual energy can be sublimated (re:
defense mechanisms) towards school work, leisure and friendships. Much of the

54
energy of the child is channeled towards the development of new skills and the
acquisition of new knowledge and practice is largely confined to other children of the
same kind.

2.7 Genital Stage (Puberty to Adult)

This is the last stage of Freud's psychosexual theory on personality

development and begins at puberty. It is a period of adolescent sexual
experimentation, the successful resolution of which is established in a loving
relationship with another person in our twenties. The sexual instinct is directed
towards heterosexual pleasure, rather than theself pleasure of during the phallic
phase.For Freud, the proper outlet of the sexual instinct in adults was through
heterosexual intercourse. Fixation and conflict may prevent this with the consequence
that sexual perversions may develop. For example, fixation to the oral phase can
result in a person who gets sexual pleasure mainly from kissing and oral sex rather
than from sexual intercourse.

2.8 Pre Oedipal Mother Daughter Relationship in Beloved

Maternity posed a problematic challenge to African-American women under

the slave regime. The situation, which did not allow mothers to have the opportunity
and freedom to feed their children or to exercise their biological role as carers and
mothers of their children, and in particular their female children had, Very debilitating
consequences on the psyche of women. Patricia Collins refers to the consequences of
this unusual circumstance of mothers and daughters in African American society
when she argues that black women's efforts to provide a physical and psychic basis
for their children have affected maternity styles, Emotional intensity of
mother-daughter relationships. She supports:―Black daughters raised by mothers
grappling with hostile environment have to come to terms with their feelings about
the difference between the idealized versions of maternal love extant in popular
culture and the strict and often troubled mothers in their lives.‖(127) and as Gloria
Wade-Gayles remarks, ―mothers in Black women‘s fiction are strong and
devoted.they are rarely affectionate‖ (quoted in Collins 127).

Motherhood is a central and defining trope in the reconstruction of the black

female. Carole Boyce Davies describes Toni Morrison‘s Beloved as ―one of the most

55
deliberate problematizing‘s of motherhood that I have encountered…‘ (135).In the
novel, Beloved's mother (Sethe) undergoes a torturous (symbolic) journey to
reconstruct the meaning of her life as a woman and a mother. This symbolic journey
questions both morality and convention, and the ideological structures of racism,
which involved women. Morrison brings the dead back into the novel to establish that
―the living embodiment of Sethe‘s mother love and the painful past of enslavement
she represents never is really destroyed‖ (Davies, 137).

Toni Morrison beloved is a novel by a woman about women that mobilizes the
narrative form of heroism in the African-American fictional world. In the narrative, a
protagonist, once a slave, constantly tries to kill all her children rather than see them
enslaved in accordance with the fugitive law of the slave era in the United States. She
exposes in this singular act what Marilyn McKenzie describes as―excesses of mother
love.‖ (228).In the Beloved of Toni Morrison, love manifests itself in sadistic
tendencies. Thus, between Sethe and Beloved, there is a true state of love.

Sethe found the existing circumstance where black women were literally
forced to willingly offer themselves to their masters in a very nauseating sexual
subordination. She sees the situation as not only the banality of the evil or the racial
problem, but also a conspiracy by the racial and patriarchal ideological structure. It is
a combination of political and sexual oppression by whites and men (white and
black). Sethe, therefore, cuts an image of the "emerging woman" in African American
literature which, according to Tyson,―is coming to an awareness of her own
psychological and political oppression and becoming capable of creating a new life
and new choices for herself usually through a harsh experience of initiation but makes
her ready for the change‖ (394). she resists the current order of slavery with its
practice of separating mother and child for good, while sexually abusing the child.

Morrison uses the beloved to show gently one of the ways in which the bodies
of black women were ―scarred and dismembered by slavery and then salvaged and
remembered in the acts of free love.‖ (Ashraf Rushdy 102). The novel is about love
relationship gone array between mother and her daughter. Women as mothers had the
biggest psychological blow in the American slave culture. The practice, which denied
women the opportunity and the privilege of loving their children, served only to
distract them from their children.

56
 Susan Willis avers, ―The tragedy of a woman‘s alienation is its effect on her as
mother. Her emotions split, she showers tenderness and love on her employer‘s child,
and rains violence and disdain on her own‖ (265) In Beloved, Morrison uses two
objects that work in the arena of love to explain how it also has the ability to turn
away. Using "milk" and "breast", which represent the fullness that the child initially
takes her mother to be, Morrison relates maternity to different types of social and
economic exploitation and denial for the child.

Morrison depicts the capacity of the destructive love of a historical truth.

Otten highlights ―infanticide was a common experience among slave mothers, at
times in rage against malefic white fathers, at times in paradoxical acts of mercy
directed toward their children‖ (657). Sethe Suggs‘ love for Beloved is ―tough and she
back now‖ (Beloved 200). She tries to justify her action by pretending that there is just
no alternative to what she does; ―How if I hadn‘t killed her she would have died and
that is something I could not bear to happen to her‖ (200).The reentry of Beloved into
the life of Sethe and their relationship afterward exposes the monstrous potential of
love.

On the part of Beloved, love signifies vengeance. Truder Harris describes her
as "a witch, a ghost, a devil or a succubus" reflecting ―the African belief that the
demise of the body is not the end of being‖ (Otten 659). This belief underlies Sethe‘s
optimism that Beloved would come back to her: I knew she would be. Paul D ran her
off and she had no choice but to come back to me in the flesh. I bet you Baby Suggs,
on the other side, helped (Beloved 200) on her second coming, Beloved enacts a
―spiteful retaliation‖ for her death.

(Mother of Beloved) is a mother whose bond with her own mother was cut off
by slavery. It does not even develop a distinct entity or identity until that separation
occurs. she is therefore difficult for her to identify the boundary between her and
another. As a result, she―didn‘t know where the world stopped and she began‖
(Beloved 164).this mean that she has not mature into subject hood.. Therefore, Sethe
is still in her pre-Oedipal symbiotic stage when its monstrous superego is in control of
how she relates with her mother and immediate environment. Her love becomes the
result of the omnipotence of the unassailable mother.

It is the same reason for "thick love" that "the milk would be there and I would

57
be there", and Paul D seems to confirm this inseparability of mother and child when
he says―...a suckling can‘t be away from its mother for long‖ (16). Because of this
closeness, love or symbiotic relationship with her baby, Sethe considers appropriation
or expropriation of her milk as a waste. When she tells of experience, of forced
slavery as an animal; ―her eyes rolled out tears‖ (17). The repetition of ―And they
took my milk‖ (17) Indicates how intensely it is painful for this loss, especially since
the milk belongs to her daughter who is not separated from herself. Her role and
function as a mother are threatened and must be resisted. Paul D acknowledges it;
―For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially
if it was her children she had settled on to love‖ (45).

= When the slave masters come to take the beloved, it is part of Sethe and the
maternal role that are threatened, and she has no choice but to fight for freedom
because she has no space for A compromised or "thin" love. Freedom for her is
achievable through the death of a part of herself, and this explains the infanticide of
Beloved. Love for Sethe ―becomes a testament of freedom‖ (Otten 658) and a survival
strategy. McKenzie notes that a reader of Beloved is enabled to ―consider enslavement
from a new perspective of how black people were able to endure, to survive, when
they did not own their bodies, their children or anything but their own minds‖
(229).The freedom that Sethe achieves to "love freely" her daughter is also potentially
calamitous. It is often noted that "a mother's freedom to love her child is extremely
dangerous - she is potentially self-consuming, capable of producing what Barbara
Schapiro calls ―intimacy of destructive rage...incited by feelings of love‖ ‖ (658). It
leads Sethe to commit an infanticide, and she believes that Beloved would come back
and explain why she should do what she did as well as hear beloved saying

―I forgive you‖

That is why she does not really recognize the guilt of her action, but rather
makes desperate efforts to gain Beloved's understanding. Therefore, all her investment
in maternity is both an attempt to catch up with her own loss as a girl and assert
herself as the possessive and powerful mother. Deborah Guth reflects, ―instead of
memory reviving the past, then, it is the resurrected past – the actual presence of
Beloved – that slowly summons memory in its wake‖ (585). But this memory is
significant because it signals the triumph of love in time and death.

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 Objects relation theory is a theory of relations between people especially
within a family and especially between the mother and her child. A fundamental
principle is that human beings are forced to form relationships with others and that the
failure to form successful early relationships leads to subsequent problems. Melanie
Klein considers the relationship of the child with the breast as significant. As the child
feeds, he feels satisfied when the breast produces enough milk, in which case it is
loved and cherished. When the child is premature, or if the breast does not produce
enough milk or food, the child is frustrated; the chest is detested and becomes
reciprocal of hostile thoughts.

Another important dimension of Sethe's love for her daughter, Beloved, which
is relevant in the objects relation theory of the Kleinian school, is the projection of her
good aspects on her beloved daughter. In such a situation, the projection of parts of
the self leads to the object perceived as having the characteristics of the projected part
of itself, which also leads to identification. Sethe is presented as projecting everything
―the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful‖ (Beloved 163) onto her
children.Her instincts are those of a protective mother and she does not want to hurt
anything and so; she ―collected every bit of life she had made..., and carried, pushed,
dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them‖
(163).

One of the objectives of projective identification in addition to getting rid of

an undesirable part of oneself is a greedy possession and control of the object, which
also proves to be part of the Sethe problem. Because of the fact that she identifies
with her beloved daughter, Sethe, the next time her child's safety is threatened, attacks
the source of the threat, the white man himself, instead of Child for whom she wants
to protect.

It is an attempt to forget and eventually undo the past. Therefore, in the final
scene, she attacks Mr. Bodkin, annihilates the master slave and keeps forever the girl
she can not lose again. But Guth admits that ―tragically, however, this belated attempt
to alter the course of events will be defeated by Beloved herself‖ (587), for it will not
offer the mother the possibility of reparation. It summarizes Beloved's sub-text and
substance as follows: ―the symbiotic union of mother and child, the earth bond that
allows no separation even while it kills, and no reparation thereafter; the mother

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whose terror and love lead to the most terrifying protection, through whom possession
and dispossession acquire their most fundamental meaning...‖ (587).

Beloved is killed at the age of two. According to classical psychoanalysis,

children begin to undergo the oedipal crisis at this time, which should encourage their
development to separate. Normally, the oedipal crisis is supposed to socialize the
child properly by absorbing the norms of his family, society and culture. This process
always involves the repression of unhealthy desires. Certain importunate demands,
inappropriate behavior by the code of the given society are rationalized in this process
of socialization so that the child can differentiate acceptable and unacceptable
behavior in his and her environment. By the death of Beloved at the age of two, this
process of psychological development is completed and she is by implication denied
the privilege and opportunity to enter the depressive position of Melanie Klein, where
she matures properly in culture and will repay her mother for her monstrous behavior.

The psychological development of the beloved is still in the pre-Oedipal stage

where there is still a symbiotic relationship with the mother. The beloved clings
tenderly to her mother and therefore has no independent existence. Her dependence
on Sethe is such that she expresses herself aggressively whenever Sethe fails to align
her thoughts with her own: and it was so much better than the anger that prevailed
when Sethe thought of something which excludes her. She could bear the hours – nine
or ten of them each day but one – when Sethe was gone (100) Because Beloved is still
psychically a pre-oedipal infant; she does not have an autonomous sense of self, but
rather ―experiences the loss as an existential crisis‖ (FitzGerald 673).

The position of the beloved makes her a prey to ambivalent feelings and
behaviors. She fails to mature in her position where a feeling of guilt should
encourage it to seek to repair. Rather, it lingers in the pre-Oedipal stage where love
supposes vengeance. She came in the guise of love to avenge her death in the hands of
her mother. Beloved, both idealize and demonize her mother because of the problem
of "doubling" associated with the paranoid schizoid position in beloved finds herself.

She is all loving and all abandoning. She waits for her after work; ―Sethe was
licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved‘s eyes...As though every afternoon, she doubted anew
the older woman‘s return‖ (57). And later, Beloved regale Sethe with charges;―...of
leaving her behind. Of not being nice to her‖ (241) FitzGerald opines that ―she

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projects onto Sethe the imago of her internal mother, the woman who was about to
smile at her and who then left her behind‖ (673). It was this woman who loved to
have a vehement attachment to who plays the role of her primary caregiver.

When Beloved has sexual relations with Paul D, it is in order to bring and
retain Sethe for herself rather than becoming mature in adulthood. Her infantile
dependency and her persistent presence in the pre-oedipal stage extend and give her
the opportunity to stifle her mother with her strange kind of love. The beloved thus
undergoes all the essence of reparation, because she does not reunite with her mother
in a transforming kind of love.

2.9 Reclamation of the Exploited Body in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison‘s literary career presents her enduring endeavor to articulate

the age-silenced voice of her downtrodden people who have been kept in the degraded
status of the inferior ―other‖ by power mechanisms at work in the American society.
She vigorously resisted the speech of the Euro-Americans and subverts their myths in
her novels, which impressively represent the sufferings of African-Americans. In her
most applauded novel Beloved (1987), Morrison portrays the investment of the slave
body as a means of production and the ruthless abuses by slaves as one of the horrible
aspects of slavery.

As a result of this ill-treatment, long-exploited slaves have been driven to

consider their bodies as the property of slave owners and therefore no sense of
individuality has been formed and developed in them. As a result, when they escaped
to the North or were released, they were unaware of the ownership of their bodies, or
even if they did, the mere sense of possessing their bodies was not enough to sustain
their lives As untrammeled and dignified persons. . By depicting the exploitation,
torture and lynching of slaves by merciless slaves as a school teacher, Morrison
dramatizes one of the most catastrophic episodes in world history and undermines
such American myths as Alleged humanity and the benevolence of the whites and the
supposed savagery and Violence of the Negroes.

The striking feature of Beloved is the elucidation of the role of

white-dominated discourse and media in strengthening slavery, as Morrison is very
conscious of the mechanism of power and the important role of discourse as ―the

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instrument through which that power is exercised‖, as she has declared in her ―Nobel
Lecture‖ (1993: 268). In different parts of the novel, she shows the function of the
dominant discourse in dehumanizing blacks and presents them as anomalies of
humanity.

Different cases of horrendous treatment of slaves by slavery are depicted and

told in Beloved (1987), the most unforgiving of which appears to be the School
teacher mall treatment of sweet home slaves, who he considers subhuman creatures.
his careful examination of their physical characteristics is clearly a tedious form of
detection of the physical traits of slaves because of their consideration as a
commodity. In order to exercise his power over the slaves and exploit their bodies in a
more profitable way, he analyzes and classifies their attributes and behavior,
especially when they disobey him or try to escape from the hell he has induced in
Sweet Home , he torture their bodies to the most brutal ways and, consequently, his
charade of civilization collapses. Among the most awful things the central character
of the novel persistently recalls is being violated by Schoolteacher‘s nephews, while
he merely takes notes, and then being callously whipped due to telling Mrs. Garner on
them.

In different parts of the novel, we see how bitterly she remembers ―the men
coming to nurse her‖ (Beloved 1987: 6); ―those boys came in there and took my milk.
… Held me down and took it‖ (16); ―two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my
breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it
up‖ (70); ―they handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable
because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses‖ (200).When School teacher detects
Sethe telling Mrs. Garner on them, he whips her back so terribly that ―the nerves in
her back‖ are incised and then get ―lifeless‖ and its ―skin buckle[s] like a washboard‖
(Beloved 1987: 6). The dead scars on her back are so dreadful that Amy (the white
girl who helps her escape and has had ―some whippings‖ herself) cannot help
expressing revulsion after looking at her back. ―Come here, Jesus‖, Amy yells, and
―after that call to Jesus‖ does not ―speak for a while‖, but afterward tells Sethe: ―What
God have in mind, I wonder. I had some whippings, but I don‘t remember nothing
like this‖ (79). The brutal violation of Sethe‘s body indicates her mortification and
―diminishment to a less-than-human status‖, as Henderson affirms, and her ―lifeless‖
back ―functions as an archeological site‖ (1999: 86) on which Schoolteacher‘s

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political and discursive power are engraved. Sethe‘s ―doubly violated‖ body is
―marked‖, as Perez-Torres states, like a ―page of Schoolteacher‘s notebook‖ that is
―inscribed with the discourse of slavery and violation‖ (1999: 186).

Sethe‘s memories of her mother are rather dark; However, she clearly
remembers three points about her: the mark on her chest, her "smiling" face and her
corpse. Once the mother shows her the mark, so that she can recognize it, as Sethe
says to Beloved:

―she opened up her dress front and lifted her breast and pointed under it.
Right on her rib was a circle and a cross burnt right in the skin. She said, ‗This is your
ma‘am …. I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If something happens
to me and you can‘t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark‖ (Beloved
1987: 61).

The properties of the slave owners, therefore, no feeling of individuality was

formed and developed in them. Due to their vital link, slaves who escaped to the
North or attained their freedom in other ways did not know a priori how to lead
themselves as their masters and enjoy their freedom gained. They must discover the
necessary and appropriate means to acquire control of their body and thus of their
self. A few days after reaching the North, Sethe ―along with the others, she had
claimed herself‖, nevertheless she realizes forlornly that ―Freeing yourself was one
thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another‖ (Beloved 1987: 95).

The first experience of ex-slaves was naturally the joyful feeling of owning
their own bodies that Morrison represented in particular in the scene where the baby
Suggs reaches the North. His freedom is obtained by her son‘s ―five years [working
on] Sundays‖ (Beloved 1987: 11) To pay her price to Mr. Garner who now takes him
to a northern town with the intention of asking her friends Bodwins to give her a place
of life. When they get there, Baby Suggs who feels free then seems to see her body
and feel her heartbeat for the first time in her life:

―suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was
dazzling, ‗These hands belong to me. These hands.‘ Next she felt a knocking in her
chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all
along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud‖ (141).

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 To become the master of themselves, they must first have spawned their own
names and terms to identify and define themselves and eliminate degrading terms,
slave owners such as the schoolmaster used to refer to them, because―the articulation
of a self-defining language‖, as Lawrence argues, is crucial ―to the pursuit of
self-ownership‖ (2000: 235). Morrison‘s old wise woman Baby Suggs realizes the
necessity of ―such self-definition immediately upon gaining her freedom‖ (235), .
And therefore rejects the name given to him by Whitlow.

Renaming herself is her first act of "claiming the property of [her] self," but
she is wise enough to know that simply changing her name is not enough to
self-mastery. The next step to "claim" the "liberated self," Baby Suggs accurately
realizes, is to contradict the degrading conceptions that whites have implanted in the
minds of slaves to mortify them and maintain their power over them. Consequently, it
endeavors to help ex-slaves to free themselves from the depressing meaning which the
whites have induced in them.

The ―unchurched preacher‖ of the Clearing, as Lawrence calls her (2000:

235), who has ―opened her great heart to those who could use it‖ (Peach 2000:
87),neither uses religious vocabulary in her speeches, nor asks her neighbors to forget
about the flesh; on the contrary she asks them to seek their lost grace in their tortured
flesh; ―Here,‖ she said, ―in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh
that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your
flesh. They despise it. They don‘t love your eyes; they‘d just as soon pick em out. No
more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they
do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.
Love your hands! … Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them
they aren‘t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and
break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it
they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away ….
This is flesh I‘m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. (Beloved 1987: 88-
89).

Baby Suggs vigorously defies the racist ideology of slavery by honoring the
black body, and thereby helps the community of ex-slaves refute the white‘s
mortifying concepts of the black and hence regain their lost dignity. She performs all

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these things by her simple yet ardent language that revives the sense of nobility and
self-esteem in these ex-slaves through the ―reclamation‖ and ―consecration of black
flesh‖ (Jago Morrison 2003: 128) that has been debased by slavery‘s racist discourse.

2.10 Mother as a Healing agent in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Due to the apparently universal, "biological" fact of being born of a woman,

the primacy of the mother-child connection is particularly important; For each of us,
our first experiences create models for later relationships As in much of Morrison's
work-where "Mother-love" in the context of racism and slavery can be seen as an act
of ―resistance"-the children in Beloved are able to "move from mother-love to
self-love to selfhood"(O'Reilly, 1999: 189).re-experiencing the primordial
mother-infant relationship is more than just an individual healing journey to the
selfhood; A symbolic "return" to the "mother" can also facilitate the possible healing
of the collective self of the African Diaspora, a community whose history has been
fragmented by the horrible legacy of slavery and racism.

Freud (1961) postulated that, because of the prolonged childhood dependency

in childhood, and because mothers are most often the primary caregivers of infants,
small children want the mother to be a Sexual object. This desire is accompanied by a
desire to get rid of the father in order to obtain the total possession of the mother. For
boys, the fear of castration by the father as punishment for this mother, the love and
hatred of the father eventually repress the Oedipus complex. . For girls, however, the
process is a little more complex; While a boy has only to transfer his desire from his
mother to women in general, a girl must go a little further and develop attachment to
men. For both sexes, it is this "loss" of the mother that leads to the formation of the
super-ego, or unconscious. The super-ego, in turn, is what allows individuals to
function socially in a culture.

Based on Saussure's work in linguistics, Jacques Lacan (1985) rephrased this

oedipal conflict, replacing Freud's literary father by the symbolic "right" of the father.
In the linguistic order, the formation of identity depends on the initiation of the
individual from the "Imaginary" pre-verbal domain of the mother in the "symbolic"
world of language and culture. . During the pre-Oedipal period, a child is unable to
distinguish between itself and other objects, living in an "undifferentiated and

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symbiotic relationship with the mother's body so that it never knows who is who, or
who is dependent on whom" (Minsky 144)

In Beloved (Morrison, 1987), a pre-verbal, still nursing, "misguided" girl is

prematurely separated from her mother when, together with her older brothers and
sisters, she is expelled to escape slavery. Her mother, Sethe, is finally able to catch up
with her children, with a new baby in tow. After a brief interval of freedom, during
which she proudly feeds her two daughters, Sethe is forced to make a decision. Faced
with the prospect of returning to a life of slavery with her children, the bond between
the girl and her mother is once again cut off during a failed attempt at suicide murder
Because this final "severance" occurs before she is ready to enter into the Symbolic
realm of language--she is "too little to talk much even" (4)-The little girl becomes
trapped forever in the pre-Oedipal phase and experiences an exaggerated desire for
her mother .The corporeal return of the beloved can thus be considered as a very
literal illustration of the symbolic function of desire.

The nature of a baby's love for the mother, mainly in relation to breast and
mother milk, is insatiable. Although it is possible for her to satisfy the needs of the
baby, a mother can never fully satisfy the baby's desire. . Furthermore, the baby longs
to be the sole object of the mother's desire and to"iso1ate" her mother ―from all other
calls on her potential to satisfy' (Minsky, 1996: 146).

In Morrison's novel, even though Sethe herself feels that she has "milk enough
for all" (1998: loo), Beloved is clearly disturbed by rival "calls" on her mother's
attention. Indeed, she is angry and resentful whenever Sethe does or thinks "anything
that excluded herself' (1998: 100). Although the ghost of the baby has largely
succeeded in advancing his brothers and sisters in a true oedipal form, Beloved's main
rival for Sethe's attention is Paul D. It is the arrival of Paul D. as signifying Phallic
which incites the ghost to take shape.

One of the ―dangers" inherent in the pre-Oedipal relationship is that a "part of

our unconscious identity is projected onto someone else in the external world which,
makes us very vulnerable if that person rejects us" (Minsky, 1996: 39). Beloved , in
the typically narcissistic fashion of an infant, feels unjustly rejected by her mother:
"She left me behind. By myself' (Morrison, 1998: 75). This feeling of utter
abandonment later translates into the resentment and hostility that she exhibits toward

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Sethe. Freudian theory postulates that the oldest reproach against the mother is that
she gave the child "too little milk," which is construed as a "lack of love" (Minsky.
1996: 223). Because Beloved- whose breath is "sweet" like that of a breast fed baby-
is forced to share "her" milk with both her new-born sister and "Schoolteacher's" sons,
she returns to satisfy her desire: "Anything she wanted she got, and when Sethe ran
out of things to give her, Beloved invented desire" (Morrison, 1998: 240).

Freudian psychoanalysis places great emphasis on "penis envy" as experienced

by the little girl, and suggests that only having a baby of her own can ease her
"unconscious sense of lack and injustice" (Minsky, 1996: 55). Julia Kristeva, points
out: "a girl will never be able to re-establish" pre Oedipal "contact with her mother-a
contact which the boy may possibly rediscover through his relationship with the
opposite sex-except by becoming a mother herself' (1986b: 204).this explain why
Beloved herself appears to have "taken the shape of a pregnant woman" (Morrison,
1998: 261) Beloved's desire to permanently remain in the Imaginary is both dangerous
and impossible.

Just as the once nourishing womb becomes potentially tomb-like for the fetus
who is not expelled at term, if the "over-intimate bond with the primal womb" is not
eventually severed "there might be the danger of fusion, of death, of the sleep of
death" (Irizarry, 1991a: 39).At some point, on an individual level, the mother must
ultimately be "rejected" because a symbiotic relationship with her threatens the
existence of self.

Denver developed a fear of the castrating and castrated mother "She cut my
head off every night" (Morrison, 1998: 206). "Watch out for her" Denver warns, "She
can give you dreams" (1998: 216).the symbolic role of the father also appears in
Denver's dreams where she feels that her daddy''-the "angel man" (Morrison, 1998:
209)-will save her from her mother: "I spent all of my outside self-loving Ma'am so
she wouldn't kill me, loving her even when she braided my head at night. I never let
her know my daddy was coming for me" (207 ).

Denver hovers between wanting to participate in the community and being too
afraid to get out of the security of the home. Unlike Beloved, who is prematurely
deprived of Sethe care, Denver has been mothered. Realizing that Sethe is willing to
indefinitely extend the pre-Oedipal relationship with her daughter, Denver finally tries

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to break her own ties. Her initial attempt to enter the symbolic world of Lady Jones'
"school" is unsuccessful, and the damage inflicted on her by the language leaves her
unable to communicate at all to the outside world. She calls this period of retreat. "the
original hunger-the time when, after a year of the wonderful little i, sentences robing
out like pie dough and the company of other children, there was no sound coming
through" (1998: 121).

By the end of the novel, Denver is finally able to step out of the safety of the
yard and risk being "swallowed up in the world beyond the edge of the porch"
(Morrison, 1998: 243). With this final decision, Denver makes her way back to Lady
Jones and is finally "inaugurated" into the world "as a woman" (1998: 248). Denver
physically moves away from 124 Bluestone Road and the symbolic maternal ties
loosen: "As Denver's outside life improved, her home life deteriorated" (1998: 251).

= Finally, as she develops her own self, the "space" that her mother now occupies is
open to heterosexual desires: it was a new thought, which was careful to preserve it.
And it might not have happened to her if she had not met Nelson Lord who was
leaving her grandmother's house while Denver had come in to pay a small thank you
for half a pie. All he did was smile and say,

"take care of you, Denver," but she heard it as though it were what language was
made for. The last time he spoke to her his words blocked up her ears. Now they
opened her mind. (Morrison, 1998: 253).

As Karin Bad suggests, the "incessant literary return to the mother" seen in
much of Toni Morrison's work can be read both on an individual level as "an
expression of a psychological desire to recover the repressed," and on a communal
level as the "expression of a political desire to recover the past" (1995: 567). As Bad
points out, in Morrison‘s work 'the lost memory of the mother's body is similar to
other metaphors of a buried past or a lost history that contributes to the rhetoric of
oppressed people" (1995: 567). This is clearly the case with Beloved. However, while
a return to the mother-"to the roots of African culture"(Badt, 1995: 577) Is the first
step in the process of cultural healing and defragmentation of self on the personal and
communal level, the fate of Beloved herself specifies that this return to the mother
should only be temporary.

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 Morrison evokes particularly poetically the pre Oedipal space, when the
voices of Sethe, Beloved and Denver intermingle in three-part harmony and
eventually fuse as one: Your face is mine.. . Will we smile at me . . . You are my face;
I am you. Why did you leave me who am you?" (Morrison, 1998: 215-216).As Paul.
Points out, Sethe herself did not "know where the world stopped and she began" (165)
Far from a frightening image of madness, the women's community at 124 Bluestone
Rd. Can therefore be read as a subversive, even utopian view of culture beyond the
phallus.

2.11 The Empathic Connection and the Restoration of the Self

The emphasis on all of Toni Morrison's novels is the development of feminine

meaning. Morrison constantly explores how the girl child must combat the effects of
racism and the brutal history of slavery that have had a negative impact on the family.
Throughout the novel, Sethe models a multi-faceted process to restore the various
losses she has endured throughout her life.

The way she heals her fragmented sense of self closely mirrors
self-psychologist Heinz Kohut's therapeutic process in two significant areas. First,
through her "rememories", Sethe carefully rebuilds her sense of self as a caring,
passionate, powerful female. Kohut emphasizes the importance of this return to the
early incidents of childhood in order to reclaim her past strengths, confront the losses,
and locate her own "self" on an historical continuum, as a way of moving into the
future (Kohut Restoration 184).

2.12 Sethe's Journey Begins

The story of Sethe describes the labyrinth of feelings and events that shaped
African-American female individuality into slavery (and later into freedom) and
expresses a wide range of intimate feelings about her life. Essentially, she stands the
experience of each slave, representing the female as she is raped, beaten, humiliated,
threatened, abandoned, orphaned, but surviving.

One of the first tasks that Sethe must accomplish in her journey towards the
restoration of her central soul, which has been fragmented by her various experiences
and relationships, is to find the courage to "go back". Morrison herself discusses the

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difficulty of remembering or coping with loss. She says she also tried to forget:‖One
can't remember; you couldn't get up in the morning and go to work if you did." Yet
Morrison was also guided to write this novel because she wanted to find out what was
"untold or unsaid," to uncover the "deliberate survivalist intent to forget certain
things"(BBC Interview).

In the discussions between Sethe and Baby Suggs (Sethe's mother-in-law),

Morrison established a dialogical tension between the need to explore or face the
difficult past and the need to repress painful memories. Their dialogues show the
different means of survival available to slaves and the different psychological and
emotional effects. Baby Suggs supported and encouraged deliberate forgetfulness as a
means of coping with the loss. She urged Sethe and other "lay it all down" (86).
Through Baby Suggs, Morrison describes the "survivalist" who had to repress her
memories.

Her approach to the pain of the past was to forget it and to place trust only in
oneself (88-89). However, Sethe must confront the reality of Baby Suggs' story as a
way to get in touch with her own. Thus, Sethe's relationship with Baby Suggs
provides the first psychologic and dialogical connection that prepares Sethe for her
own path to restoration and healing.

2.13 PAUL D'S EMPATHIC PRESENCE

=Because journey back is so painful, Morrison provides a companion for

Sethe in the person of Paul D. The relationship and interactions of Sethe and Paul
D'form the complex physical and psychological path to restoration and healing; Their
conversations show the importance of the articulation of feeling; Their sharing of
memories and historical facts helps to restore self by showing the forces that arise in
past action and past human connection; Their narrative tells them their stories and
thus their lives

In their book Toni Morrison, Wilfrid Samuels and Clenna Weems detail the
nurturing, "mothering" qualities of Paul D, thereby underscoring the primal power of
his empathy (123-134). In his warm, safe presence Sethe asks herself: "Would it be all
right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?" (38). In response,
Paul D. offers his empathic presence when he states: "Sethe, if I'm here with you, with

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Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you
girl. . . . Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back
out. . . ." (46).

. This relationship is even more primal since Paul D's presence, both
physically and psychologically, reproduces what British psychologist D.W. Winnicott
calls "the holding environment." This holding environment provides for an infant
those same qualities that, according to Kohut and others, the adult Sethe needs in
order to restore her sense of self.

According to Winnicott, in the environment Paul D provides, Sethe can

experience safely painful feelings and "the possible disintegration" she will encounter
as she journeys back to her moments of loss. Like an infant, Sethe is seeking "unit
status" in order to become, once again, "an individual in her own right". Thus, Paul D
serves as mother, as well as friend, lover, fellow victim and survivor. His therapeutic
presence also parallels Kohut's concept of the therapist as "participant observer"
(Bouson 22), the therapist who is able to give what Kaplan describes as the "affective
response," as well as keeping his "identity differentiated."

Paul D rekindles Sethe's own dormant empathy as she begins to feel hispain.
She observes: "Trust and rememory, yes, the way she believed it could be. . . . The
mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well - to
tell, to refine and tell again" (99).With this intimate connection, Paul D slowly and
lovingly encourages Sethe to talk about Sweet Home and his debut in Cincinnati,
helping him in the first act of restoration: recovering the first memories and personal
history.

Morrison carefully details the early years of Sethe and shows the care that
existed despite the constraints of slave life. Although separated daily from his mother,
Sethe did maintain contact with her until eight o'clock in the day; His mother treated
him "two or three times a week"; She showed Sethe the mark of the slaver under her
chest. Despite these limited interactions, Sethe was able to develop an autonomous
system and create strong identification with her mother. More importantly, she felt
appreciated.

As Nan (one of Sethe's caretakers) relates to her: "She threw them [children]

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all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others
from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave
the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put
her arms around" (62).

Morrison also describes the care and nurture that the slave community
provided through Nan, who cared for young Sethe when her mother was in the fields.
Nan's care highlights the importance of "othermothers" who gave infants like Sethe
the nurture needed to survive and grow.[1]

Sethe's loss of connection with her mother (through no fault of her own)
creates what Kohut calls "failures of empathy" on the part of the mirroring object.
When this failure occurs, the idealized object (often the father) can help the child
form a sense of power and ability to act by empathically channeling and accepting
age-appropriate, grandiose and exhibitionistic behavior, as well as serving as a role
model (Restoration 185). However, other caretakers like Nan can make up this
"failure" in their relationships with the child by serving as the idealized self-object.

Another powerful moment of restoration for Sethe that she must remember
and recognize is her escape and her eventual arrival at Bluestone, an example of how
action supports - even creates - individuality. Beaten but alive, with a newborn baby
in her arms, Sethe represents all escaped slaves and their journey towards freedom.

After her escape, Sethe does not have the chance to claim her new self for
more than twenty-eight days; the arrival of Schoolteacher, his "owner" and the
representative of the ever-present threat of slavery to autonomy and individuality,
shatters her security and sense of control. His sudden appearance triggers Sethe 's
strong protective feelings towards her children, as well as the fragile side of Sethe' s
sense of self - the side that represents impotence, fear, fragmentation, and the
remembered brutality of slaves experience. These feelings, in turn, force the
disastrous act that follows: Sethe's murder of two years, beloved.

Morrison says that in Beloved she wanted to explore the act of self-killing, or
how people sabotage themselves with the best possible intentions (Charlie Rose
Interview). Thus, murder shows deeper feelings hidden by Sethe's previous
courageous actions and struggle for physical survival. Parallel to the murder with

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Denver's recent birth, Morrison highlights the contradictory aspects of Sethe's
self-esteem that must be reconciled if she is to become a full and functional woman
again.

Although Sethe claims want to protect her children from a worse fate than
death, Miller's research suggests that Sethe's act of murder is actually guided - even
guided by impulse - by unconscious feelings and memories. Throughout the text,
Sethe struggles with her guilt over murder, assuming complete responsibility for it,
but not stating these deep feelings of anger and helplessness. Not until the end of the
novel is Sethe able to exorcise the guilt and express the rage she has bottled for
eighteen years. Morrison draws the presence of breathing and the danger of white
society and highlights the ultimate power of Whites who prevent Sethe and others
from having total control over their "selves".

As Schoolteacher remarks, "definition belongs to the definers - not the

defined" (190). And for eighteen years, Sethe accepted Schoolteacher's definition as
nigger woman, creature, cannibal, murderess (150-51). However, the arrival of Paul
D'and his relationship with Sethe dramatically challenged, Schoolteacher's definition
of Sethe's selfhood, enabling her to reconnect with her memories and feelings.

Morrison understands that the simple recovery of memory or the identification

of feeling is not enough to restore the fragmented feeling of self that the various Sethe
losses have created. Since Beloved was Sethe's biggest loss, Morrison creates a
chance for them to meet again, as a way to literally restore what Sethe considers to be
one of her "best things." Sethe's desire to recover herself in the empathic warmth of
Paul D opens her to the possibility of reconnecting to the spiritual world.

With Beloved, Sethe re-visits the passion and the love, as well as the shame,
guilt, and anguish caused by her choice to kill. As Morrison remarked to Bill Moyers,
"The only person I felt who had the right to ask her that question was the child she
killed" (March Interview). Throughout the novel the healing that occurs as a result of
Sethe's empathic reconnections with both Denver and Beloved. Their interactions
restore the early mother/child relationship and recreate the "matrix of the
self-self-object environment" where the nuclear self is created (Bouson 15).The most
powerful passages of restoration occur when the three women speak of their
connections with one another in a series of monologues and dialogues that restore

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truly self-reflective, empathic sharing of feeling (203-17).

Through their exchanges, they reject their previous notions of themselves and
each other, creating new beings in the process. Thus, in these interactions, Morrison
restores a primary relationship - one that is so frequently disturbed or destroyed by
slavery - in which women learn empathic connection: the mother-daughter
relationship and the primordial moments of self-declaration. In this "litany" of voice,
each monologue reveals both history and feeling.

After the monologues and dialogues, the three women withdrew from the
world to talk and play together, something each of which has been deprived of life.
During the ice skating scene, they content and connect completely with each other.
The game teaches empathy and sharing, opens the inner self to the outer world and the
possibility, as Patricia Yaeger observes, of transformation. Thus, the skating scene
acts to consolidate and strengthen each woman's sense of self.

Denver, however, benefits the most positively from the empathic reconnection
that occurred during the skating scene. She represents what Janet Surrey suggests is
the most "accurate" aspect of empathy which "involves a complex process of
validation of the differences between the self and other. It includes, too, the
recognition of the other as a growing individual with changing needs and newly
developing competencies. . . ." (Connection 58). This recognition of both Sethe and
Beloved as others with changing needs leads to a "transformation" when Denver
re-connects with the community beyond 124 Bluestone, in order to save Sethe from
Beloved's overwhelming desire.

Denver developed both power and empathy, first through the stable care she
received at the beginning of life (Sethe, Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid), and then
through her last months with Beloved. In a sense, her relationship with Beloved
allowed her to consolidate her individual self-esteem so that she could see the fate of
her mother. Denver knows what her mother needs because that's what she needs
herself: to leave behind the exorcised past. She feels the danger of staying in past
guilt, and, therefore, is moving to get help. she articulates this new and independent
sense of self when she admits"having a self to look out for" (252).

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 The first step of healing occurs when Ella brings the women to save Sethe
from the clutches of Beloved. The women's singing carries Sethe from the past to the
present in an instant. As she stands in the doorway with Beloved, the last moments of
restoration begin. The appearance of this crowd of women reconnects Sethe to the
power of Baby Suggs' message of "love yourself."

Sethe completes the exorcism of her grief, loss and rage by going after the
white man with a peak of ice. Again, she acts to preserve her beloved children; but
this time she turns anger toward the perceived perpetrator of violence rather than
towards herself or her "best things." This scene also serves as a restoration paradigm
for the beloved. All the explanations and discussions of Sethe did not really have an
impact on her. However, thanks to Sethe's impulsive but deliberate attempt to kill Mr.
Bodwin (Schoolmaster), Beloved sees and feels how much he is loved; Her quest is
over and she disappears. This scene also restores the healing power of the community.

However, Sethe knows no moment of triumph or restoration. Although she

struck at the appropriate symbol of her slavery and grief, she was destroyed by the
loss of Beloved for the second time and lay down in bed. She no longer feels the inner
strength, the will or the energy to continue. But when Paul D reappears, he gives her
the message that she actually has the strength and the right to live:

"You are your own best thing." In a way, he is forcing her to move "from a
relationship of caretaking to one of consideration, caring and empowering; that is,
moving from the early definition of the mother-daughter relationship toward more
comprehensive and flexible adult forms of relationship" (Surrey 63).

Through her empathic ties with Beloved, Paul D. Denver and the community,
she exorcised her guilt and shame; She expressed her deep love for the beloved; She
felt the weight of all the years of loss; She confronted the demons inside and outside;
All this is therapeutic and necessary for Sethe to advance and create a new life. Sethe
has shaped the way we confront the pain of the past that must be explored and
examined thoroughly and confronted with cries and tears. But then, in order for life to
continue, the past must be accepted and left behind.

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2.14 Freud Uncanny and Maternal Silence

Freud develops the concept of the uncanny to approach the return of the
repressed, the engagement between the natural and the supernatural. Uncanny also
derives from the deprivation of the maternal object at the Oedipal stage. Lacan defines
the object a as what is lost for the entry of the subject into the symbolic world, and
thus leads the machine of desire, corresponding to the obsession of the Freudian ego
with the maternal object. At the center of Morrison's fiction is the tension between
fact and fiction, truth and memory, real and reality. Morrison brings them to history
through memories that recall the trauma of maternal silence, which speaks of the
dysfunctional black motherhood resulting from the family fracturing strategy of
chattel bondage. The trauma simultaneously removes the black mother from her
children.

Toni Morrison is widely acclaimed for her strong sense of historical

responsibility, which, throughout her work, is preoccupied with the development of
the Afro-American experience. Conceiving cultural diversity as one of the biggest
obstacles to human communication, her fiction emphasizes the conflicts between past
and present, cultural dialogue and the healing power of the community. In Morrison's
work, the chattel bondage proves haunting and uncanny with its recurring return,
continuing to keep black people victimized and debilitated in post-slavery America. In
the writing of Morrison, the uncanny addresses the memory of the hardships of
slavery.

Mainly due to the shortcomings of black motherhood. Elaborating on the role

of the family in the formation of black subjectivity, Michele Bonnet remarks, ―It is, as
a matter of fact, the disruption of the bond between mother and child that is the most
striking, actually paradigmatic, manifestation‖ of the systematic breaking up of slave
families (1997: 48). The harm done to black motherhood symbolizes the systemic
violence of slavery.

In ―‗Circling the Subject‖: History and Narrative in Beloved‖ (1993), Valerie

Smith Note that Morrison focuses on the black body as a place of revelation of the
living death of slavery as well as the healing of his scars. In this essay, she explores
black bodies, enslaved black bodies and past memories activated by the sensations of

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the present to reveal the body nature of trauma induced by slavery; It then moves to
assert: ―To the extent that characters feel suffering through their bodies they are
healed, physically and psychically, through the body as well‖ (1993: 348).

In her fiction, traumatic memories resist being buried alive with the passage of
time, appearing remarkably as the living dead. With the literal and absolute horror of
the original experience, traumatic memories are only a replica of the primitive and
precipitating trauma that cannot be adapted to conscious life. This is evident in the
beloved, which opens with the venom and violence of a baby ghost harassing and
persecuting the living. In Morrison's novels, mother and child are often distant from
each other as Kristevan foreigners due to dysfunctional black motherhood.

In foreigners to ourselves, Kristeva endorses the term "alien" to domesticate

alterity in the inner psyche of all human beings: ―Foreigner: a choked up rage deep
down in my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur‖
(1991: 1).It is evident that the foreigner is demonized, which recalls the meaning,
which disrupts abjection. However, the foreigner is actually the repressed side of the
subject, embodying what he / she abject in order to identify himself as a speaking
being in the symbolic.

Kristeva describes the encounter with the foreigner as strange and even
self-annoying:

―strange is the experience of the abyss separating me from the other whom
shocks me – I do not even perceive him, perhaps he crushes me because I negate him‖
(1991: 187). Alien and anxiety, the proviking of foreign is undoubtedly self-sabotage
and uncanny. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Lewis Herman points out that rather
than performing a trauma wound-up, psychotherapy does not eliminate it: ―The goal
of recounting the trauma story is integration, not exorcism.‖ (1992: 181).

She advocates the restitution of the decisive trauma, incorporating it into life
as a new chapter. Herman‘s argument coincides with Petar Ramadanovic‘s
conceptualizing of the ―diaspora subject‖ as the way to healing: ―From the advent of
this modern subject [. . .] knowing history involves a responsibility [. . .] which, in its
psychoanalytic version, consists of an overturning of the I so that the other is revealed
and has come there where I was‖ (2001: 91).

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 For example, in Beloved, Denver's healing is only realized after taking
responsibility for history, learning to reconcile with her mother's past, to re-identify
with Sethe as a maternal object a.12 to sum up, the foreigner function as the
desire-inciting real, the object which brings Morrison‘s characters into confrontation
with their own psychological damage. In Morrison‘s works, rememory first refers to
the lingering effect of slavery, the haunting memory of the psychic horror perpetuated
upon black people by the chattel system, which in turn incites the desire for the
premedical bond with the maternal body before the encroachment of slavery-induced
trauma.

From this perspective, rememory both record the ravages of slavery and
orientrats characters towards healing. The trauma presents its uncanny power to
bridge the margin between the past and the present, and in particular to restore the
real. The unconscious nature of the trauma is also illuminated by Ulman and Brothers:
real traumatic events shatter archaic narcissistic fantasies central to the organization
of self-experience and that in this shattering and subsequent faulty [. . .] attempts [sic]
to restore these fantasies lies the unconscious meaning of the traumatic event. (1988:
xii).

The unconscious significance of trauma refers primarily to the devastating

effect of the traumatic event that paralyzed the conscious self; Second, it refers to
trauma crises (the reappearance of symptoms of PTSD), which completely surpasses
the conscious control of the survivor.This moment is illustrated in Morrison's work by
the intrusion of Beloved into the cloistered world of her mother and sister in order to
reconstruct what happened eighteen years ago. Highlighting a ghostly tangle and the
engagement of the past and the present, the traumatic reconstruction locks the
survivor into the prison of precipitating trauma; The distance between the past and the
present destroys, the survivor is stripped of the ability to move away from the horror
of trauma and connect with his uncontaminated psychic part.

In Beloved, the rememory blurs the boundary between self and other. Sethe
describe it to Denver in the following way: ―Someday you are walking down the road
and you hear something or see something going on.So clear. And you think it‘s you
thinking it up. A thought picture. But no‖ (1997: 36). Sethe uses the thought picture to
depict the onset of a cultural trauma which defies linguistic representation.

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 She further says, ―It‘s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to
somebody else.‖ In this novel, traumatized people frequently ―bump into a rememory
that belongs to somebody else.‖ For example, Denver‘s recurring nightmare of
decapitation is suggestive of Sethe‘s failure to transform the overwhelming past into
abstract signifiers: ―what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there‖ (1997: 36).

Although memory deals with something that is physically absent, Morrison's

fiction is content to delineate the memory corporeally in order to advance the scourge
of slavery. For example, even before the physical presence of Beloved, she chased her
two brothers from home. Similarly, Sethe's commentary on specialized trauma
presages the return of Beloved. In the same way, the ghost epitomizes and embodies
the enslaved and enslaving past, functioning as the body memory of slave history.
Morrison often populates her novels with a mixture of black females, either on the
verge of falling apart or to gravitate inextricably towards each other.

In Maternal Body and Voice, Paula Gallant Eckard notes that ―throughout the
history of western culture and literature, maternal perspectives have been ignored and
the mother‘s voice silenced‖ (2002: 1). Under the slavery the black woman was used
mainly to produce an increasing number of slaves for her masters. By denying
motherhood rights, the black mother either shows a fanatical claim to unity with her
children or failed to respond to the basic need of children of empathy and mirror in
their years of formation, a failure that puts in light the weaknesses of black
motherhood and family relationships.

Maternal silence suggests the mother's inability to creep into the ego of her
children as their own object. , Most black mothers strive to define themselves in terms
of maternity in Morrison's work, but their status as other marginalized people cast
doubt on their maternal subjectivity. As Jean Wyatt eloquently claims when studying
Sethe‘s ―problematic relation to language,‖ it ―results from her position as body not
only in a maternal order but also in a social order that systematically denied the
subject position to those it defined as objects of exchange‖ (1993: 478).

In the fiction of Morrison, most black women enter into the meaning of
maternity: they try to neutralize the lack forced upon them by slavery by treating their

79
children as extended parts of themselves. In so doing, they identify themselves as a
complete identity in the language. However, Ellie Ragland-Sullivan remarks, if a
mother fetishizes her child, "a mammocratic state of totalitarian horror. Such
fetishization unveils another idealizing harmony, implying that a child can make up
for what is missing‖ (1991: 75) – the phallus. Clearly, by treating the child as her
phallus, the mother ―‗enjoys‘ by refusing identity to the child qua different from her
desire.‖

In Beloved, Morrison foregrounds the systematic separating of mother and

children which results in the children‘s failure to enter into the symbolic order.
Correspondingly, Michele Bonnet asserts: A dominant theme of the book is that,
because the children have been deprived of proper nurturing, they have been unable to
develop into real persons – it accounts not only for Beloved‘s crippled and ultimately
evil character but also for Denver‘s unnatural childishness and inner emptiness.
(1997: 49).Paul D tries to fly from a life of inhuman servitude and bondabe. As a
result, Elizabeth Kella read Paul D's emotional detachment as a compulsive symptom:
―his compensatory assertion of individuality and free will through travel is figured as
a gendered symptom of this trauma‖ (2000: 137).

On the other hand, he is constantly haunted by his origin, especially after the
fragmentation of Sweet Home.

Her lonely journey is therefore driven by a sense of strangeness which is

symbolized by the ―tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be‖
(Morrison 1997: 72–73). Naturally, he watches the families ―with awe and envy, and
each time he discovered large families of black people he made them identify over
and over who each was, what relation, who, in fact, belonged to who‖ (1997: 219).His
desire to stay in motion attests to his obsession with an ancestral presence under the
strategy of family breakdown of slavery.

Morrison highlights the boundary between life and death, inventing a baby
ghost in the flesh to incarnate presences, to revive the sixty million and more who
have lost their lives and names through the middle passage in this fiction . Nine years
after the death of Baby Suggs, the beloved returns to the body of a young woman.
Beloved complicates her identity by describing her old habitation where―there will
never be a time when I am not crouching and watching others who are crouching too‖

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(1997: 210). It is a place that is meant to evoke two things: a womb where she is kept
small and a slave ship where there is ―nothing to breathe down [. . .] and no room to
move in‖ (1997: 75).Both the womb (which promises life) and the slave ship's cellar
(meaning death) connect it to the darkness that marks blacks as marginalized,
invisible and unhealthy.

= Beloved remains strange, distant and largely silent throughout the novel.
Hysterical and creeping in the tranquility of reason, it represents what Sethe refuses to
recognize as a part of herself under slavish servitude or after her - the strange one.
Sethe is crossed by the desire of the other after the reincarnation of Beloved - which
she repressed or ignored before. Throughout most of the novel, Sethe shows an
unconscious discontent with living abroad, both inside and outside. Yet she is reduced
to being foreign when she yields everything she has to Belen to repair the ghost after
the last return.=

As the narrator observes from the angle of Denver, ―It was as though her
mother had lost her mind, like Grandma Baby calling for pink and not doing the
things she used to‖ (1997: 240).In so doing, Sethe starts a life unfamiliar to her,
surrendering herself entirely too Beloved‘s whimsical desires. Finally, she fails to
keep up with the role of a good mother when she makes an effort to exonerate herself
from blame for the infanticide; on the other hand, Beloved castigates Sethe for it, thus
embodying the foreignness which is her unconscious (Kristeva 1991: 183).

Denver is traumatized by a mortal and murderous mother suspended in the

preoedipal matrix and buried in her mother's body as evidenced by a recurring
nightmare:She cut my head off every night. Buglar and Howard told me she would
andshe did. Her pretty eyes looking at me like I was a stranger. [. . .] Like she didn‘t
want to do it but she had to and it wasn‘t going to hurt. [. . .] She looks over at Buglar
and Howard – see if they all right. Then she comesover to my side. I know she‘ll be
good at it, careful. That when she cuts it off it‘ll be done right; it won‘t hurt. After she
does it I lie there for a minute with just my head. Then she carries it downstairs to
braid my hair. I try not to cry but it hurts so much to comb it. (Morrison 1997: 206).

Through this strange dream, in which maternal tenderness is intertwined with

violence, Denver speaks her anger against maternal silence and violence. Without
mastery of maternal love, it compulsively repeats the dream. For her, in reference to

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another murder, the act of survival appears as―the repeated confrontation with the
necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to [her] own life‖(Caruth 1996:
62).Denver has never encountered decapitation. Rather, her anxiety about decapitation
reflects Beloved's grievance toward Sethe.

Freud points out that ―impressions from our childhood may appear in dreams,
which do not seem to be at the disposal of the waking memory‖ (1997b: 90).

= Denver's apprehension of beloved relates to her memory of childhood

infanticide (Denver is informed of murder by other people), which serves as a source
of hysterical fantasy. Perhaps, in making a symptom, Denver identifies with Beloved
and identification, Freud says,

―is not mere imitation, but an assimilation based upon the same etiological
claim, it expresses a ‗just like,‘ and refers to some common condition which has
remained in the unconscious‖ (1997b: 59).

From this perspective, the identification of Denver with the beloved comes
from their common desire for maternal attention and love. Beloved‘s enumeration of
her mother‘s faults gives voice to Sethe‘s own grief over maternal betrayal. Therefore,
their common desire for maternal love combines and antagonizes them, for each seeks
the mirror-like attention of the other. Sethe makes efforts to restore past maternal
fullness. As a result, she tries to integrate her daughter into her to maintain her own
internal continuity.

Her foregrounding of the uncanny and the real coheres with her desire to
restore the African spiritual self, rendering it an integral part of the psyches of all
black people. Morrison revises Baby Suggs, endowing her with maternal love defying
death; and she dismembers beloved.

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 Chapter 3

Beloved in Light of Theories Beloved and Julia Kristeva’s

the Semiotic and the Symbolic

Julia Kristeva is interested in the identity of the subject. She believes that the
subject can gain her identity through language. When he expresses his intentions,
directly or indirectly, he can claim his subjectivity. Beloved is the good example of
Kristeva's theories of subjectivity, as it deals with slavery issues and how blacks face
their problems. According to Kristeva, semiotics and symbolism refer to two
interrelated aspects of language. Semiotics is defined as the matriarchal aspect of
language that shows the inner impulses and speaker impulses.

These unconscious movements are manifested in the tone of the character,

their rhythmic phrases and the images they use to express what they want to convey.
The semiotic aspect is repressed not only by society, but also by the patriarchal aspect
of the language that Kristeva calls the symbolic. Although the semiotic and symbolic
aspects of language are mutually opposed in their nature, they complement each other
in language.

The speaker's speech is significant when the semiotic and symbolic symbols
are together. As Sutcliffe points out, "semiotics and symbolisms as opposites" are
"necessary between them and the subject in which they are combined" (2003: 337).
Moreover, "no text, even radical, is purely semiotic," but rather "semiotics always
manifests itself within the symbolic" (Sabo, 2010, 59). As Morrison's style is lyrical,
her prose is poetic. The semiotic aspect of language is manifested in her work.
Afro-American slaves and ex-slaves can reaffirm their identity only through musical
expressions. They survive and heal their subjectivity through music.

As Keizer says: Morrison invokes the practices of verbal and musical

improvisation as a sign and expression of the Afro-American identity and agency. As
Morrison herself said ―black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by
the translation of their experience into art and above all in music.‖ (1999, p. 106) ―For
Morrison, African-American writing fundamentally relies on the sounds and rhythms
of black music as a source of narrative content, but also as an aesthetic „mirror‟‖

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(Eckstein, 2006, p. 272).

―The song, laughter and the different words suggest the primordial mother
tongue of the preoedipal realm, the maternal semiotic that exists outside of, and in
opposing to the symbolic language of the father‖ (O‟ Reilly, 2004, p. 89). Moreover,
―music expresses the unspeakable and frightening abject, the thing that language
leaves out‖ (Iannetta, 2002, p. 249). the novel starts with three short sentences
―124WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and
so did the children‖ (2004, p. 3). With such an opening, the reader is curious to know
more about the house and its venom. These phrases are short and musical and allow
the reader to understand something about the setting and the place.

Sethe explains how she escaped Sweet Home, her master's house and on the
way :The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where
she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly
there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there
was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out
before her in shameless beauty. (2004, p. 7)

"The Plash" is the onomatopoeia, and semiotics, because the child is not able
to use words in the semiotic choro, he imitates his surrounding and "the plash" is the
sound of water. Moreover, the repetition of the "rolling" in the text makes it poetic
and adds to the sound effect of the text.

While Morrison uses the stream of consciousness to make the detailed

explanation of slavery, the characters live in the present, but they speak of their past.
The narrator explains that in Sweet Home "all in their twenties, fewer women, fucking
cows, dreams of rape, balls, rubbing their thighs and expecting the new girl"
repetition, of ―ing,‖ "the gerunds, In the text Focuses on Slaves ‟ habitual life and the
way they did things all their life without even a change (2004, p. 15).

In Kristevan terms, poetry affirms semiotics within the symbolic, an

interaction that determines the type of discourse ―Poetry highlights the thetic stage
while advancing the fundamental importance of the semiotic‖ (Sutcliffe, 2003, p.
346). As Paul D and Sethe share their memories, they talk about Denver and her
behavior, but Sethe believes that nothing can hurt her as ―everybody‖ she knows

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―dead or gone or dead or gone‖ but Denver is alive and nothing can hurt her (2004, p.
50).

The black community wants to free Sethe from Beloved; Therefore, they stand
before 124 and sing a song ―yes,yes, yes, oh yes. Hear me. Hear me. Do it, Maker, do
it. Yes‖ (2004, p. 304-305).The repeated "yes" shows that the women encourage
Sethe to leave and join them. Tally says the sound that the women's community
produces ―is intimidated to be the pre-verbal sound of human origin before language‖
(2004, p. 45). Figurative language is part of the semiotic aspect of the language
itself―structural linguistics, operating on phonological oppositions, or on two axes of
metaphor and metonymy, accounts for some of the articulation, operating in what we
have called the semiotic‖ (Kristeva, 1984, p. 41).

Sethe wants to forget her past, she compares the photo of the men who came
to lock her―lifeless‖ ―nerves‖ (2004, p. 6). Both are unaffected and none of them can
understand his emotions.In the conversation between Paul D and Sethe, Sethe relieves
Paul D and assures him that the death of Baby Suggs was that Baby Suggs' death was
―soft as cream‖ and not painful at all (2004, p. 8).Then Sethe likens Mrs. Garner's
disease metaphorically to ―lump in her neck the size of a sweet potato‖ to lessen the
effect of the horrible disease she had (2004, p. 10).

In the same way, the white girl compares Sethe's wounded back to a ―choke
cherry‖ tree not to shock Sethe (2004, p. 18). Moreover, Paul D compares it to ―a
decorative work of an iron smith‖ (2004, p. 21). He wants to assure Sethe that her
back is not as horrible as she thinks. Even the narrator compares Sethe's blood to the
roses that ―blossomed in the blanket‖ to visualize the harshness of the matter and at
the same time not to horrify Sethe (2004, p. 109).Sethe remembers her mother and
also describes her to the beloved figuratively. Sethe thinks her mother worked a lot
during the week,on ―Sunday she slept like a stick‖ to indicate her mother‟s fatigue
and drudgery on Sundays (2004, p. 72).

As Stamp Paid informs Paul D that Sethe killed her daughter. Besides
metonymy and metaphor, the characters use color images and express their feelings
through the colors. The meaning of each color is important in the context the
perceiver feels it; Therefore, the color and mood have a direct relationship. Kneeling
into the reception room where she was usually going to talk, think it was clear why

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Baby Suggs was so hungry for the color. There were only two squares of orange in a
quilt that made the absence heard. The walls of the room were slate-colored, the
ground brown, the wooden dressing table of the color of itself, the white curtains, and
the dominant feature, the quilt on an iron bed, was composed of remains of Serge
blue, black, brown and gray wool --the full range of the dark and the muted that thrift
and modesty allowed. In that sober field, two patches of orange looked wild--like life
in the raw. (2004, p. 46) The color image and the repetition of dark colors show the
dark atmosphere of the house.

Rhythm and tone are parts of the semiotic aspect of the language that are
significant (Thomas, 2008, p. 78). Denver expresses her loneliness at 124 and Paul D
defends her but Sethe shots ―Paul D a look of snow‖ and adds ―what you care‖ (2004,
p. 17)? The diction and the use of the word "snow" manifest the tone of Sethe. It
never allows anyone to interfere with his business. When Beloved arrives and Denver
takes responsibility to take care of her, her love and passion are shown in her words
―she‟s not sick‖ (2004, p. 63)!She regrets that her new friend is sick and that she
wants to save the life of beloved. Beloved gets upset when she plays with Denver and
pronounces,―Don't tell me what to do. Don't you never never tell me what to do‖
(2004, p. 89).

His angry tone is reflected in the repetition of the word "never." She wants to
manipulate everything and can not tolerate that someone dominates her. When Paul D
acknowledges that Sethe killed her daughter, he calls her an animal. At the end of the
novel, when he returns to help Sethe and wash her feet,she says ―and count my feet‖
(2004, p. 321)? With such verbal irony, she takes revenge on Paul D because she
believes that he can not understand maternal love.

Julia Kristeva considers semiotics as maternal and symbolic as the paternal

aspect of language. Consequently, we can consider the transgression of the rules of
the father, with the grammatical and punctuated transgression as the semiotic aspects
of the language. Baby Suggs brought people together and talked with them. If one
considers a priest like the father, Baby Suggs has transgressed his rules because she
―became an unchurched preacher‖ (2004, p. 102).

However, Baby Suggs was not a priest, but people regarded her as holy. She
took the people to the woods and redeem them. However, her method was different

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from the fathers of the church. Instead of preaching, it allowed people to cry, laugh
and walk together and release their energiesAs Habib affirms: "Religion controls the
first aspect by instituting the symbolic o.rder, an institution justifies first by myth and
then by science. On the other hand, poetry, music, dance and theater promulgate a
transymbolic enjoyment that threatens "the unity of the social realm and the subject‟‖
(2007, p. 700).

In the semiotic chora, the child can laugh and move. The movement in the
chora is dance-like. With her methods, Baby Suggs has blessed them all, but―she did
not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glory bound
pure‖ (2004, p. 103).Eckstein claims that Baby Suggs represents an ―Afro-Christian
musical tradition,‖ and Paul D represents ―the secular tradition of the blues‖ (2006, p.
275). As he continues, ―the blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and
episodes of a brutal experience alive in one‟s aching consciousness to finger its
jagged grains to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing
from it a near tragic, near comic lyricism‖ (ibid, 275).

As Sethe's mother was about to die, she wanted to tell her daughter how to
identify her mother if an accident occurred.―Here. Look here. This is your ma'am. If
you can't tell me by my face, look here.‖ ―… the fingers, nor their nails, nor even...‖
(2004, p. 207). The phrase ―the fingers, nor their nails, nor even‖ This is not
grammatical, as it is not significant alone. It is complete with the preceding sentences,
but the author uses it as an independent sentence. The author seems to point out that
blacks and whites are the same, and both are human, so she uses a dependent sentence
as independent. However, the only thing that can separate them is the mark of slavery
on the bodies of black.In addition to grammatical transgression, punctuation
irregularities are also traceable. In the monologue of Beloved there is no punctuation.
It seems that the precipitation of thoughts comes to mind and that it wants to express
them without having missed even one.―I AM BELOVED and she is mine‖ (2004, p.
248).―Her discourse‖ is elliptical; ―that opening pronouncement is the last structure
syntactically marked as sentence‖ (Holloway, 1990, p. 520).

The child is able to have sensory impressions because he has a tactile

relationship with his mother. In the novel there are some examples of sensory
impressions.―Denver‟s secrets were sweet,‖ ―noisome cologne,‖ ―the silence was

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softer,‖ synesthesia is dominant in the previous sentences (2004, p. 43). As can be
seen, some words are related to hearing and some are related to taste senses; Hearing
sensations and taste are juxtaposed here to explain how Denver enjoyed her life and
now she considers them the best part of her life.

In addition to sensory impressions, dreams are important in the novel. Dreams

reveal unconscious desires that cannot be expressed in everyday speech and are linked
to the semiotic aspect of language. When Amy looks at the wounded back of, she
says, ―in her dream walker‘s voice‖ (2004, p. 93).As she has never seen such a scene,
she is shocked that the whites were whipping a pregnant woman so cruelly. Therefore,
his voice is dreamy, for in reality this cruel action cannot happen.

As Mousey emphasizes, Sethe‟s scar reminds her pain and abuse that not only
she but also all he slaves had to endure (2010, p. 7).Sethe dreams of her children and
her husband. Since she can not see them in reality, her mind is preoccupied with their
thought and they come to her dreams. She worries so much about her sons "that she
sees" only their parts in the trees "and that shows her anxiety. She sees" the face of
Halle between the butter press and the increasingly inflated executioner "who She can
not forgive Halle for letting her suffer from the attack of the boys: she sees the
distorted face of Halle in her dream The writer does not convey the right meaning
through language, but sometimes Since it is difficult for characters to express their
thoughts explicitly, they use different techniques such as repetition, metaphor, etc. to
communicate their thoughts.

3.1 Beloved and Kristevan Melancholic Subject

Julia Kristeva considers the subject melancholic because it has a feeling of

loss and is not able to share it with other people. He can not express his feeling
because he considers it private; However, he should use the language to get rid of his
sense of loss.in beloved, Toni Morrison discusses the dark side of slave life and its
mental physical effects. Julia Kristeva is an eminent theorist concerned with different
disciplines such as feminism, linguistics, psychology, etc. Her works attract the
attention of many critics and readers and each year new readers are fascinated by her
revolutionary ideas. Barthes describes Kristeva as the―always destroys the latest
preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one we could be

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proud‖ (Lodge, 2000: 206).

Kristeva's theory of melancholy corresponds to the theory of Freud's loss. In

addition, her emphasis on self-identity and specifically her link between melancholy
and narcissism follows Freud. In considering Freud's theory of the desire for death
with melancholy, it formulates the notion of depression. As it claims, it must―speak of
depression and melancholia without always distinguishing the particularities of the
two ailments but keeping in mind their common structure‖ (Kristeva, 1980: 10-11).

Kristeva defines melancholy as: the abyss of sorrow, a sorrow without

communication which, sometimes, and often in the long term, pretends to make us
lose all interest in words, actions and even life itself (ibid. , 3). The child is in
mourning for his lost mother. As this lost object is part of him, he thinks it is
incomplete without him. As a result of such emotion, the child becomes incapable of
using the language, and this is the first symptom of melancholy.

Morrison selects Garner's story to describe the experience of the painful slaves
and their lives after the abolition of slavery. It recognizes that, unlike the whites,
blacks were silent in American history and literature; Therefore, she intends to give
the voice of blacks to express their pain in her novels.She challenges the dominant
white and Eurocentric discourse by referring to the African and Afro American
presence in the U.S. literary history (Jung, 2009: 41).

In addition to slavery and racism, sexism is another issue discussed in the

novel (Bloom, 2004: 53). Women are ―marketable body‖ and have different husbands
(Dobbs, 1998: 564). They become pregnant, but they are deprived of taking care of
their own children; Even they do not have permission to feed their children with their
own milk. These children are "taken" as slaves or―chased‖ throughout their life
(Morrison, 2004: 6).

As Li mentions, ―slavery prevented individuals from trusting in personal

relationships, because at any time family members could be sold‖ (Li, 2010: 78).The
theory of melancholy is well applicable to the novel since the novel represents black
bodies under pain. Peterson confirms this point: They are… physically and
emotionally free but not psychologically free. They have just managed to escape from
the fact of slavery but have not been released from its effects (Peterson, 2008: 25).

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 Morrison‘s Beloved beautifully exemplifies characters‘ suffering from racism;
In fact, racism becomes the source of all the painful feelings that the characters have
to tolerate. Thus, the reader must plunge into the character's consciousness and
melancholy.

The presence of the beloved is the illustration of the repressed memories of

Sethe. When she is not able to express her traumatic past, Belové represents
everyone―unspoken memories‖ (Rogers, 2010: 187). Moreover, she ―reenacts sexual
violation and thus figures the persistent nightmares common to survivors of trauma‖
(Bloom, 2004: 71).

Not only the presence of Beloved, but also the wounds of Sethe can show the
horrible memories with which she can not agree. Its wounded are not only the
representation of the physical violation, but also the psychic wound it has undergone
these years. As Bell states,the psychic effect of slavery is much more important than
its physical manifestation (ibid., 395).Besides the presence of Beloved, the presence
of Paul D―serves as a catalyst to rekindle Sethe‘s memories, as well as her awareness
of the present‖ (Rogers, 2010: 189).

Although the characters suppress themselves, they want to allow other

characters to perceive their difficult times. They see their past as private, but they
want to face their past.. As the novel begins, Sethe remembers Baby Suggs‘ words: I
had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I
expect, worrying somebody's house into evil Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows. My
first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread.
Can you beat that? Eight children and that's all I remember (Morrison, 2004: 6).

Sethe remembers how her children were beaten and tortured by her memory.
In fact, in this novel, the characters are inarticulate, because they have suffered greatly
during slavery and the only thing they can do is the remember the past events.The
only remaining child Sethe has,is Denver ,who is not satisfied with his life:―the tears
she had not shed for nine years wetting her far too womanly breasts,‖ Denver is
melancholic (ibid., 17).

She suffers from being alone in 124 and not having any intimate friend.
Denver is sad not only because she is alone, but because mother had secrets--things

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she wouldn't tell; things she halfway told‖ (Morrison, 2004: 45). Sethe can no longer
talk poignant memories. Since words can not express the deep sadness she feels, she
prefers to be silent.Let us keep in mind the speech of the depressed_ repetitive and
monotonous. They utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a standstill.
Even phrases they cannot formulate. A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous melody
emerge and dominate the broken logical sequences, changing them into recurring,
obsessive litanies (Kristeva, 1980: 33).

She refuses to speak when she thinks that her past is private and that no one
can feel the pain she has endured. Like Sethe, Paul D is not able to talk about his past
because he can not find the appropriate words to express it ―I just ain't sure I can say
it. Say it right‖ (Morrison, 2004: 85). ―He would keep the rest where it belonged: in
that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut‖
(ibid., 86). He prefers to be silent, for he can not share it with Sethe. Furthermore,
―Paul D‘s reluctance to tell Sethe about Halle‘s end is an attempt to forget the past‖
(Dauterich, 2005: 37). Beloved has the sense of loss as she remembers how her
mother has ―left‖ her ―behind‖ (Morrison, 2004: 89).

She is sad that she lost her mother in the past and nothing can compensate for
this loss. Sethe sometimes remembers the milk she has had, ―enough for all,‖ but the
boys have stolen it (ibid., 118).She represses this memory, but it comes to the surface
repeatedly and bothers her. In Sabo‘s words, The child feeds on the mother‘s body,
but the inevitable withdrawal of this nourishment whether it is from natural process of
weaning or the failure of the mother to produce milk makes the mother the target for a
sense of betrayal and rage. In this sense, the mother becomes both the object of desire
and frustration (Sabo, 2010: 55).

As Tait holds, Sethe does not master language ―to give her own pain meaning,
her suffering is defined by others‖ (Tait, 2008: 47). She continues that ―Sethe receives
the description of her body from two representative power structure: a white woman
and a black man; their definitive gazes construct Sethe‘s perception of her body‖
(ibid., 47).In fact, Sethe remembers her past, but she can not express it through
language. She is angry not only for her milk, but also for her rape.

As Eliot holds, ―for Sethe, fetishization of her body by the white schoolteacher
and his nephews causes psychic fragmentation that continues to thwart the

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development of her subjectivity after she leaves slavery‖ (Elliott, 2000: 186). As
Sethe feels the loss of her milk, Beloved feels the loss of her mother, ―She don't love
me like I love her. I don't love anybody but her,‖ and she thinks that she is not
important for her mother (Morrison, 2004: 137).

The melancholic subject prefers death to life. As Sethe is sad about her past
and has not reconciled with her past memories, she thinks ―Death is a skipped meal
compared to‖ be alive and to observe her child is dead (ibid., 145).Not only beloved,
but also Sethe lost her mother ―They hanged‖ Sethe‘s mother and she feels her
mother‘s absence in her life (Morrison, 2004: 240). In fact, ―Sethe is haunted by the
knowledge that her mother was hanged‖ (Koolish, 2001: 183).

She is sorry she cannot have her mother next to her when she was a child and
needed her most. In Keizer‘s words, Sethe has never got enough milk from her
mother, and this traumatic event forces her to act as super-mother for her children,
even kill them instead of let them live as slaves (Keizer, 1999: 112).―At the same time
that she longs for the mother who expelled her, she feels the presence of the daughter
she abandoned‖ (Iannetta, 2002: 229).

Kristeva has mentioned that melancholic subject is sleepy and listless; besides
she moves slowly, here Sethe is the same Kristevan melancholic subject (MacAfee,
2004: 59). ―Listless and sleepy with hunger Denver saw the flesh between her
mother's forefinger and thumb fade‖ (Morrison, 2004: 285)… ―Sethe no longer
combed her hair or splashed her face with water. She sat in the chair licking her lips
like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew
taller on it‖ (ibid., 295).

Although Sethe joins the black community, she feels sick because she has not
yet reconciled with her past. As a result, Denver is worried about her mother's health;
she says to Paul D she thinks she has ―lost‖ her ―mother‖ (Morrison, 2004: 314).
Sethe is still sick because ―the belated mourning always reconnects‖ her ―to the
unspoken wounds, pains and losses under slavery which are to be transferred‖ (Jung,
2009: 65).The burden of the past has crushed all the characters. They should express
their pain to be relieved. As Iannetta states,―there is a trauma in the past that is
reactivated in the present of the text‖ (Iannetta, 2002: 231).

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 In this case, the characters can face the trauma and try to heal the trauma by
using the language. As Rogers holds, Beloved as a character exists as a representation
of Sethe‘s pain, both the pain that she suffered as a victim of schoollteacher and
others at Sweet Home, as well as pain and regret of having killed her child in order to
spare her same suffering. Beloved is a representation of Sethe‘s need to work through
the events of her past and the complications of memory and emotion that arise from
attempting to revisit such trauma (Rogers, 2010: 183).

In the beloved, the characters, as the melancholy subjects of Kristeva,

sometimes refuse to speak. The beloved presents a racist society and the effect of
slavery on the body and soul of blacks. Throughout the novel, the characters begin to
express themselves and reveal their memories. They have faced the reality and they
have learned to deal with it. Morrison heals her emotional wounds by writing this
novel. As she is very much influenced by racism, and with her family condemning the
whites for what they did for the blacks, she raises her feelings in her novel. In fact, the
beloved is not a story, but the reality that represents the life of the slaves. Sethe is not
the only person who regrets her past, but all characters must learn to respect the
history of slavery; Just as Morrison herself learns to face the memory of slavery
through beloved writing.

3.2 Object Relations theory by Melanie Klein (1882-1960)

The objects relations theory was developed by Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and
it is a theory of psychoanalysis which, in turn, comes from Sigmund Freud. The
objects relations theory affirms that the self-moi exists only in relation to other
objects, which may be external or internal. Internal objects are internalized versions of
external objects, formed mainly by early interaction with the parents. The objects
relations theory was launched in the 1940s and 50s by British psychologists such as
Ronald Fairbain, Winnicott DW, Harry Guntrip and others. There are other theorist of
Object Relation like Joan Riviere, Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, Alice Miller and John
Bowlby. However, Melanie Klein is one of those who have often been credited with
having initiated the theory of object relation and placed the mother-child relationship
at the center of the personality.

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 She was the first psychoanalyst to challenge Freud's account of psychic
development and to remain in the psychoanalytic movement. She argued that fear and
aggressive tendencies, for example, were present during the first two years of the
child's life, which was more important in understanding deviant development than
psychosexual development.

According to Hiles, Klein argues that a child‟s first relation is with its mother
and her breast, which give the infant pleasure. Therefore, both can be defined as good
objects (4). The purpose of a person is to find objects that generate pleasure, also in
later relationships. On the other hand, a "bad object" does not give pleasure, eg. A
rival of someone's love or breast that is taken away. Hiles explains that "the innate
conflict between love and hatred leads to the internalization of good objects and bad
objects.

According to the literary theorist Michael Ryan, psychoanalysis deals with the
unconscious and the conscious in the human brain, whereas the theory of object
relations deals with relations and ―emphasizes the internalization of relations to others
as a formative force that creates the self‖ (35-36).. Psychoanalysis can help explain
the characters‟ different actions and behavior. Psychologist Stephen A. Mitchell
explains that ―object was the term chosen by Freud to designate the target of the
drives, the „other,‟ real or imaginary, toward whom the drive is directed‖ (374).

3.3 Disfunctional Love Relations in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison's Beloved speaks of a lost love relationship between mother

and daughter. Carole Boyce Davies reads the novel as―one of the most deliberate
problematizing‘s of motherhood that I have encountered....‖ (135). Women as
mothers have had the greatest psychological opportunity within the American slave
culture. The practice that denied women the opportunity and the privilege of loving
their children served only to distract them from their children. Susan Willis admits
that

―The tragedy of a woman‘s alienation is its effect on her as mother. Her

emotions split; she showers tenderness and love on her employer‘s child, and rains
violence and disdain on her own‖ (265).

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 The type of love relationship between mother and daughter in this novel also
suggests the unusual and complexity of Toni Morrison's art. She was credited with
creating characters with dual and moral uncertainties. In an interview, she calls her
fictional characters the combination of virtue and flaw, of good intentions gone awry,
of wickedness cleansed and people made whole again. If you judge them all by the
best that they have done, they are wonderful. If you judge them by the worst that they
have done, they are terrible‖ (McKay 423).

In beloved, Morrison uses two objects that work in the arena of love to explain
how it also has the ability to turn aray. By using "milk" and "breast", which represent
the fullness, which the child initially considers for his mother, Morrison relates
motherhood to different types of social and economic exploitations. The type of love
in Morrison's beloved has been termed several appellations. It has been designated as
‗pernicious‘, ‗distorted‘, ‗deadly‘, ‗nefarious‘, ‗ruinous‘, ‗ruthless‘, ‗pathological‘,
‗horrific‘, ‗tough‘ and so on.

In an interview granted in 1977, Toni Morrison acknowledges that all her

works of fiction are about love. But to Terry Otten, ―people do all sorts of things,
under its guise. The violence is a distortion of what, perhaps, we want to do.‖ Love is
―the manifestation of forces which tend to preserve life‖ (Klein 65), And most
psychoanalysts seem to believe that it contains elements of desire for death, for the
sacrifice of his desires includes the possibility of confiscating his life. In Toni
Morrison's Beloved, there is a manifestation of the link between American bourgeois
society and repression. Despite the criticisms of classical psychoanalysis to focus
intensively on ―the interaction of infant and mother as if this existed as a free-standing
relation, independent of economic, political or social conditions which affect the
circumstances of parenting‖ (FitzGerald 669).

Sethe Suggs is a mother whose bond with her own mother was cut off by
slavery. She does not even develop a distinct entity or identity until that separation
occurs. It is therefore difficult for her to identify the boundary between her and
another. As a result, it ―didn‘t know where the world stopped and she began‖
(Beloved 164).Sethe is still in her pre-odipal symbiotic stage with her mother and
must find a surrogate mother to fully undergo the oedipal circle and assume her
subjectivity. She therefore finds this imaginary mother whose individuality she could

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affirm in her responsibility as a mother. According to FitzGerald ―she replaces her
individual identity with her maternal role ....‖ (677).

Concerning the theory of object relations, Denver and Beloved show the
possession and desire of a good object for Sethe, which, according to them, will give
them pleasure. The way Sethe treats her daughters differs, as it allows the Beloved to
behave in a childish and selfish way, but not Denver. Sethe seems to be blind to
Beloved's strange behavior and she finds excuses for this, but not if Denver acts the
same way. An example is when others ask about where Beloved received her new
shoes, and she screams, ―I take the shoes! I take the dress! The shoe strings don‟t
fix!‖ (65).

An adult woman must be able to tie her shoe laces, but the beloved cannot do
it. In addition, her choice of words often shows that she does not yet know any
grammatical rules. Usually, a mother corrects the child's language, but Sethe does not.
Instead, she shows her gratitude for having been loved by her side again. Literary
critic Lynda Koolish explains that

―Sethe expected to find absolution, forgiveness,

understanding, but instead is offered accusatory
censure‖ (436).

The idealized image of a loving daughter and an entire family makes Sethe
blind for the truth. The beloved will always be a good object for her, which highlights
a strong mother-child relationship. When the slave masters come to take the beloved,
it is part of Sethe and her threatened maternal role, and she has no choice but to fight
for freedom because she has no space for one Compromised love or "thin love".
Freedom for her is achievable through the death of a part of her, and this explains the
infanticide of Beloved. Love for Sethe

―becomes a testament of freedom‖ (Otten 658) and a

survival strategy.

McKenzie notes that the reader of Beloved is enabled to ―consider

enslavement from a new perspective of how black people were able to endure, to
survive, when they did not own their bodies, their children or anything but their own
minds‖ (229).

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 But the freedom that Sethe realizes to freely love her daughter is also
potentially calamitous. Otten notes that "a mother's freedom to love her child is
extremely dangerous, potentially self-consuming, capable of producing what Barbara
Schapiro calls an ―intimacy of destructive rage...incited by feelings of love‖ (658).

An important dimension of Sethe's love for her daughter, Beloved, which is

relevant in objects relation theory of the Kleinian school, is the projection of her good
aspects on her beloved daughter. In such a situation, the projection of parts of the
self-results in the object perceived as having the characteristics of the projected part
of the self, which is also reflected in an identification. Sethe is presented as projecting
all of her parts that were precious, fine and beautiful on her children. Her instincts are
those of a protective mother and she does not want to hurt anything. As Melanie Klein
observes concerning the projection ―the projection is now in danger of infecting the
good object, threatening to destroy it, or provoking the possibility of retribution‖
(http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/klein.htm).

One of the objectives of projective identification in addition to getting rid of

an undesirable part of oneself is a greedy possession and control of the object, which
also proves to be part of the problem of Sethe.In the final scene when she attacks Mr.
Bodkin, Sethe's intention is also to annihilate the master slave and keep forever the
girl she can not lose again. But Guth admits that:

―tragically, however, this belated attempt to alter the course of events will be
defeated by Beloved herself‖ (587), For it will not offer the mother the possibility of
reparation. she summarizes Beloved's sub-text and substance as follows:

The symbiotic union of mother and child, the earth bond that allows no
separation even while it kills, and no reparation thereafter; the mother whose terror
and love lead to the most terrifying protection, through whom possession and
dispossession acquire their most fundamental meaning.... (587)

Melanie Klein says that bodily pleasures were arenas in which the central
human struggle between love, hatred, and compensation was manifested. Sexual
intercourse for her is a very dramatic arena in which the impact of each other on the
other and the quality of one's own essence have been exposed and revealed. She goes
on to say that the ability to awaken and satisfy the other represented her own

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capacities for compensation.

Sethe's extended love, which is inhibited and repressed by the slave culture, is
manifested in the sexual relationship Sethe has with Paul D. Her will and willingness
to have sex with Paul D at the least opportunity is What Melanie Klein would
consider as an indication within her of enough capacity for compensation. According
to object relations theory, ―jealousy is based on envy, but involves a relation to at
least two other people. It pertains to a triangular (oedipal) relationship, i.e. it is
whole-object oriented‖ (Hiles 5).

The triangular relationship here is that Paul D is in love with Sethe, which is
his ideal object, and Sethe shows Beloved's love. Paul D is concerned that Sethe
leaves him for the love of beloved. He loves Sethe, but the beloved requires Sethe's
attention, and therefore, Beloved is a rival to him. Hiles explains that ―unresolved
jealousy can lead to the impossibility of forming meaningful relationships and lack of
maturity of ego and Self‖ (5).

Paul D wishes to have a meaningful relationship with Sethe, but his jealousy
prevents such development. When Beloved is naked and shows she is ready to have
sex with him, he is unable to resist this beautiful woman. At this moment, Paul D
makes desire for her and she becomes a good object for him. He also feels pleasure,
but at the same time, he hates her because of what she is doing to him. This can be
seen as an example of what Hiles describes as a splitting between a bad object and an
idealized object (4).

Paul D and Beloved seem to be interconnected in a sexual power game, where

he is the weaker party. Their sexual relationship is different from the relationship
between a mother and a child, but also to the relationship Paul wants to have with
Sethe. Paul feels guilt and shame for what he does to Sethe, the woman he really
loves, but he tries to forget those uncomfortable thoughts.Denver shows the desire of
Beloved, and she does not want to share the beloved company with Sethe. As a result,
Beloved becomes a good object for Denver, who wants a sister to tell secrets and fill
the long solitary days with. By telling stories of Sethe, Denver is ―nursing Beloved‘s
interest like a lover whose pleasure [is] to ove freed the loved‖ (78),

But she does not realize that it is only used by Beloved. Denver shows love for

98
the beloved and hopes to receive the same love in return. Although Denver wants
beloved by herself, she ―[is] alarmed by the harm she [thinks] Beloved [plans] for
Sethe‖ (104).This shows that Denver does not want to lose her mother. The
connection between Denver and Sethe is strong, although Denver does not want to
admit it.

According to Hiles, a child often shows signs of fear of being abandoned by

its mother (3). Similarly, Denver shows fear of being abandoned by Sethe. Denver
realizes that the beloved is wicked and selfish and that Sethe must be saved. This is
the moment when Denver is freed from her main object, that is, her mother.
According to Schultz and Schultz, the ability to free oneself from a primary object
occurs at the beginning of a child's life, and ―the most crucial issues in personality
development . . . in order to establish a strong sense of self and to develop relations
with other objects (people)‖ (323).

Beloved is killed at the age of two. According to classical psychoanalysis, it is

the age at which children begin to undergo an oedipal crisis that should encourage
their development to separate from the individual. Normally, the oedipal crisis is
supposed to socialize the child correctly by absorbing the norms of his family, society
and culture. This process always involves the repression of unhealthy desires. Some
bothered requests, inappropriate behavior by the code of the given society are
rationalized in this process of socialization so that the child can differentiate
acceptable and unacceptable behavior in its environment.

By the death of Beloved at the age of two, this process of psychological

development is over and she is by implication denied the the privilege and
opportunity to enter into what Melanie Klein describes as a depressive position.
Because Beloved is still psychologically a pre-Oedipal infant, she does not have an
autonomous sense of self, rather―experiences the loss as an existential crisis‖
(FitzGerald 673).

In the eyes of Beloved, Sethe is a good object and wants to imitate Sethe as
much as possible. Beloved, feels that she was abandoned by her mother , the main
object that a child recognizes as a good object, when she was an infant. Since she was
separated from her mother at an early age, there was not enough time to establish
normal mother and daughter relationship and Beloved has some memories of the past.

99
Beloved wants an explanation because she does not understand why she was
abandoned.

Beloved shows that she has an idealized image of her mother. At the same
time, she has a problem creating her own identity as a daughter of Sethe. An example
of her thoughts about Sethe is when she thinks, ―you are my face; I am you. Why did
you leave me who am you?‖ (Morrison 216).

The thoughts of beloved often reflect a child's speech pattern and the Beloved
presents herself as someone who has little experience of the outside world. All the
questions she asks of Sethe and Denver show her curiosity and her desire to
understand her environment. Ryan explains that the threat of being abandoned by the
primary object is very powerful to a child (36).

Although Beloved is an adult woman, she shows the same anxiety as a child,
for example when her mother is at work. Psychologist David Bell argues that love can
turn into hatred if someone is not available (10). When Sethe is not there, Beloved
shows tendencies to hate her. Beloved, shows jealousy when someone else gets the
attention of Sethe, for example Paul D. Her sister Denver has known Sethe's love
throughout her life and it is also something Which Beloved perceives as unfair. She
wants all the pleasure that Sethe can give for herself. To lead Paul D far from Sethe,
Beloved seduces him, although she does not love him. She only uses Denver and Paul
D to achieve her goals, which are to find her identity and be loved. It is only Sethe
who can give loved pleasure, and is therefore considered a good object.

In the novel, beloved accuses seethe of leaving her behind: ―She said they
were the same, had the same face, how she could have left her? (Beloved
296).Beloved, both idealizes and demonizes her mother as a result of a problem of
"dubbing" associated with the position of the paranoid schizoids in which i Beloved
finds her. She is all loving and abandoned. She waits for him after work: Sethe was
licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved‘s eyes...As though every afternoon, she doubted anew
the older woman‘s return‖ (71). And later, Beloved regales Sethe with accusations:
―...of leaving her behind.Of not being nice to her‖ (296).

FitzGerald opines that Beloved ―projects onto Sethe the imago of her internal
mother, the woman who was about to smile at her and who then left her behind‖

100
(673).Her infantile dependency and her persistent presence in the pre-oedipal stage
extend and gives her the opportunity to stifle her mother with her strange kind of love.
The essence of reparation is therefore subverted by the beloved, because she does not
meet with her mother in a transforming and life-giving love.

Excessive love is possible according to Melanie Klein if the child's oedipal

process is not conclusive and attachment to each other so much that the child does not
have the opportunity to mature to subjecthood.Mother Sethe cannot help but stray
from her daughter, while Beloved on her part does not have the opportunity to
perform the normal reparation that is normal in developmental growth where the
oedipal circle is completed. The story jumps in time and is presented in fragments of
different characters, which show that everyone around Beloved is affected by its
appearance. With the entry of Beloved, relations develop between the characters.
They show envy, jealousy, greed and love, but Sethe shows too much love, which is
devastating.

When Beloved arrives, she becomes a substitute with important roles to play
for others. She succeeds in playing these different roles and she manages to create
herself as something they all need. On the other hand, she has a problem finding her
own identity. For Sethe, the return of the lost girl is therapeutic, and her grief has
influenced both Denver and her life for many years. Sethe wants to be pardoned by
Beloved and she sees a new chance to raise and love her daughter. Paul D is
suspicious of her beloved and she is not a good object for him, except when she
seduces him. He sees through her intentions and questions the behavior of Sethe and
Beloved. Primarily, Paul D is able to resist his charm, but when she seduces him in
the evenings, he cannot reject it. In these moments, she becomes a good object, which
gives him pleasures.

Eventually, when he feels guilty, she becomes a bad object and someone he
hates. In the night, Beloved becomes a substitute for Sethe, who is the woman he
really loves, and can be considered a good object. Denver also redirects her emotions
from Sethe to Beloved, who plays the role of a sister. When Beloved settles into the
home, Denver's need and desire for a sister are fulfilled and she must no longer be
alone. Denver cannot have enough of Beloved company. In a Kleinian reading,
beloved a good object because she satisfies Denver. This image changes however

101
when Denver realizes that Beloved's power over Sethe's is to killing l her mother.
Beloved seeks the love she hopes to find in her dealings with Sethe. She plays a role
where she acts as if her mother was a good object, but she wants to take the life and
body of Sethe. It turns out that Beloved cannot forgive Sethe for having abandoned
her, while Denver is more in love and forgiving.

Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) is widely regarded as a representative of the

Gothic novel, as it involves Gothic elements in the context of slavery in the southern
United States. Following the convention of fear and horror in the Gothic narrative on
the basis of supernatural intervention, this novel also suggests a modified attitude
towards the image of the Gothic from a detestable existence to a suspicion of
optimism at the End of the novel. The intervention of the ghost of the baby appears
and arouses the anxiety of each person who leaves a haunted house ―full of a baby‘s
venom‖ (3), and makes this space haunted threatening and uncomfortable. In this
sense, the Gothic manifestation emerges and is recognized as a mysterious, strange
and even detestable presence.

The novel works both psychologically and physically in the treatment of the
body and psychological trauma. Morrison tries to articulate the indescribable by
depicting the alienation not only of the black self, but the trauma of the experience of
the black body as a white property. Sethe often talks about the past, but often is not
sure how to articulate her loss of self and how she was alienated from individuality
through slavery. Sethe said that "I was talking about time. It is so difficult for me to
believe it. Some things go. Beam. Some things remain. I thought that was my
memory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. (Morrison:
43). What Sethe tries to articulate is the relativity of time. With this statement, Sethe
articulates the postmodern vital questions of time and the ways in which time is
experienced by an individual who has been denied individuality.

One of Morrison's current themes is the theme of blackness as a marked

identity. The owner of the slave, Mr. Garner, is described as a benevolent and paternal
figure; He is even hard enough and intelligent enough to call his Negro men.
(Morrison: 13). What is problematic is that it is still Mr. Garner who defines their
identity and selfhood. The paternal attitude of Mr. Garner does not change the
institution of slavery and its implications, but it confirms it. Blacks have no right to

102
define who they are and thus lose their sense of individuality in the institution of
slavery.

Black identity is also closely linked to dehumanization. Paul D is tormented

by his memories of wearing a little and reminds of the despair that rose in him when
he carried it. "Men, boys, girls, women. The savagery that rose in the eyes at the
moment when the lips were pushed back. Days after its release, goose fats were
rubbed into the corners of the mouth, but nothing to soothe the tongue or not get out
of the eye. (Morrison: 84).

After having lived in the scandalous house marked with the invisible being for
some years, the two boys, Howard and Buglar, flee in terror; The other members of
the family, however, treat the supernatural intrusion with indifference or
condescension. Since 124 is a source of the Gothic atmosphere, Toni Morrison
maintains this place in the subjective frame, and intends to further emphasize the
impact on the main characters. For most members of the black community, the ghost
of the baby is simply considered the evil and monstrous otherness incompatible with
the real world. Laura Di Prete expounds that ―[the] symbolic reading [of Negroes as
well as the remaining three women of 124] places them in the victim position, as the
separation between self and the other is clearly defined‖ (67).

However, either the acquiescence, the condescension or the rejection of the

characters on the supernatural, the other plays an important role in a narrative gothic.
Tabish Khair indicates that

―it is when the other enters…that the action of most

Gothic narratives really commences‖ (6),

And in the beloved, this abstract other returns later as a substantial existence.

Morrison's text transgresses the limit of physical laws beyond rationality.

Through various manifestations, the phantom makes it not only visible but also
audibly perceptible, of which Stamp Payé is the witness. When Stamp Paid went to
visit Sethe, tried to knock at the door of 124, he could not enter the house but could
only surround him instead. He felt on Bluestone Road the highly identifiable voices
that: what he heard, as he headed toward the porch, he did not understand. On
Bluestone Road, he thought he had heard a hurried, strong, urgent voice conflict,

103
while speaking at the same time, so he did not know how they spoke or to whom. The
speech was not absurd, exactly, nor languages. But something was wrong with the
order of words and he could not describe it or encrypt it to save his life. All he could
distinguish was the word mine. The rest remained out of his mind. [...] the voices
escaped abruptly unless there was a murmur. (Morrison 202-3).

While Stamp Paid heard unusual sound, Denver in 124 after two-year-long
deafness also ―heard‖ the abnormal existence, ―the sound of her dead sister trying to
climb the stairs‖ (122).In this regard, 124 has become a site where the indescribable
fear of heavy historical traps has returned to the present, and the gothic atmosphere of
these dark episodes haunted the house and ―repeatedly signaled the Disturbing return
of pasts upon presents and evoked emotions of terror and laughter‖ (Botting 1).The
incarnation of the body of the ghost is also an emblem of social injustice in the
narrative of slaves, which testifies to the slave's horrible experience of slavery: it is
the inhuman slavery under which the human body Of the black slave is assimilated
and marginalized by white people as simply the Other, abused by the White, who
forces Sethe immoral and atrociously to end her ―crawling-already‖ daughter‘s life.
This is not only a demonstration of motherly love to an extreme but also a repulsion
of unbearable cruelty in slavery.

Blacks in America are continually defined as ―other‖ by mainstream culture‖

(Schreiber 1).Being a black slave means an unresolved link to a physical mark as
dissimilarity and a psychological burden of marginalization, scapegoating and
otherness. In this respect, the black slave is considered the abject, a foreign presence
which corrupts and routs a systematic order in the dominant society of America. Julia
Kristeva explains the being of the abject: ―what is abject…the jettisoned object, is
radically excluded and draws [the subject] toward the place where meaning collapses
[…]. From its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master‖
(Kristeva 2).

Indeed, as an abject, the black slave is entirely excluded from the lines of
kinship and social life, the center, by which he is separated, refused and opposed. This
abject, however, signified by the incarnation of the phantom, tries to pass to the
systematic order and to the conventional frontier of the American society.

104
The return of Beloved can be seen, metaphorically, as a materialization of the
bottomless venom of the object and an attempt to destabilize and transgress the
conventions. The Gothic elements of the novel are too explicit because the character,
intrigue and narrative bear various references to the "macabre": ghost, tombstone (5),
soul, blood (179) and kill (301). It is true that Morrison unfolds these Gothic elements
in order to demonstrate how slavery and racism at their most cruel level disfigure a
black slave like Sethe.

Otherness in the reading of postcolonial discourse tends to be associated with

negativity and abnormality. In her monologue, the beloved is represented both as a
victim of the baby and as black slaves of Africa, who later travel to America,
testifying to horrible scenes that died during the middle passage. She expresses for the
"sixty millions and more" on the slave ships the pains among the undeniable and
unregistered truth of slavery. Beloved, in apparent madness, presents itself as a
dramatic figure of devil. She carries an insatiable desire to take revenge on her mother
when Sethe spit up something she had not eaten,‖ (286) which signifies ―the way that
Beloved has begun to possess [Sethe‘s] body and soul‖ (Peterson 56).

Trudier Harris explains Beloved and Sethe‘s corporal relations in this way:
Like a vampire feeding vicariously, she becomes plump in direct proportion to
Sethe‘s increasing gauntness. Vengeance is not the Lord‘s; it is Beloved‘s. Her very
body becomes a manifestation of her desire for vengeance and of Sethe‘s guilt (132).

In this perspective, her daughter's possession of the life of Sethe reveals not only her
emotion and visceral desire but also reverses mother-daughter relationships and, more
importantly, increases violent sensual perception and creates―a confusion of intense
emotions and physical sensations‖ (Peterson 74).

Beloved transformation into a devil-child releases her strong and violent

sentiments in ―torturing‖ Sethe. When Beloved makes Sethe repay for her murder,
she, as rumor has it, ―beat her, tied her to the bed and pulled out all her hair‖
(Morrison 300) and in this manner she gradually ―ate up her life, took it, swelled up
with it, grew taller on it‖ (295). Love and decorum here renounce the vengeance of
evil. The physical body of Beloved grows constantly after her sexual engagement
with Paul D, and she is described, mysteriously or not, as

105
 ―a pregnant woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun.
Beloved‘s occurrence does not simply show the selfhood prevailing the movement of
confrontation with the identity as an Other through the whole novel, but this existence
insists on the implication of an irreducible presence experienced ―as a valorization of
emotion‖ (94),

A way of expression through violent feelings. Consequently, the Gothic

narrative, as a genre, reveals certain conceptions and beliefs; In a Gothic narrative,
rationality does not always answer the truth. It is, ―the Gothic genre also suggest that
some truth and thoughts are accessible through emotions; that rationality does not
have a monopoly over the understanding of experience‖ (94). Beloved, in the end,
tries to get out of all chaotic quarrels like a "Gothic heroine" to find herself helpless of
slavery and to move away from an existing ghostly figure, obtaining a high sense of
esteem self. Thus, Morrison's most complicated character ―[s]tanding alone on the
porch‖ (Morrison 309),

Holds a smile and tends to have revived a new spiritual life with her
resurrected body. Toni Morrison's novel is a powerful statement and, with this novel,
she succeeds in giving repressed other a voice. Her novel is a great example of how
language and identity are interconnected, but Morrison also claims that your memory
is part of who you are? Her work is unique in her representation of the other, due to
the fact that the otherness of this novel operates on several levels, both physically and
psychologically. Problems of otherness must claim their right to occupy a position in
contemporary literary discourse and must challenge the male-dominated canon by
emphasizing the problems of marginal identity.

106
Conclusion

Toni Morrison is one of the greatest contemporary novelists in American

literature. In 1993, she won the Nobel Prize for literature, which made her, became
the first African-American writer to enjoy this honour. Morrison paints a dark and
powerful portrait of the dehumanizing effects of slavery. Beloved centers on the
powers of memory and history. For the former slaves in the novel, the past is a burden
that they desperately and fully try to forget. Yet for Sethe the protagonist of the novel,
memories of the past are inescapable. They continue to haunt her, literally, in the
spirit of her deceased daughter. . Due to the horror of slavery Sethe‘s murder of
Beloved is transformed into what Morrison controversially deems ―the ultimate
gesture of a loving mother‖, whose action proclaims, ―to kill my children is preferable
to having them die‖. From a single family‘s experiences, Morrison shows how the
psychological and historical legacy of slavery infl uences a family. Part of Morrison‘s
project in Beloved is to recuperate a history that had been lost to the ravages of forced
silences and willed forgetfulness. Morrison writes Sethe‘s story with the voices of the
people who historically had been deprived the power of speaking. Morrison enhances
the world of the novel by investing it with supernatural dimension. Many events in the
novel -- most notably, the presence of a ghost -- push the limits of ordinary
understanding.

Moreover, the characters in Beloved do not hesitate to believe in the

supernatural status of these events. One of the features of this novel is broking the
linear narration in structure. In this novel, Toni Morrison broke the traditional time
order and the linear structure in which the past and the present are juxtaposed. The
juxtaposition of past with present serves to reinforce the idea that the past is alive in
the present, Morrison arrange Beloved who functions as the past to arise from the
dead. She talks with Sethe and plays with Denver and makes love with Paul D
Although Sethe deliberately forgets the past, she remains in the memory of 18 years
ago. Her sense of guilt for killing her daughter exists in the depth of her heart. She has
been seeking the opportunities to explain to her daughter Beloved.

Here Morrison implies that Sethe becomes the slave of the past. Under the protection
of Sethe, Denver knows little about the past and lives in infinite loneliness. But
Beloved‘s arrival gives her a lot of pleasure. Through describing Denver‘s changes

107
after Beloved‘s arrival, Morrison wants to show that people cannot divorced from the
past. After Paul D. makes love with Beloved, he decides to begin a new life with
Sethe.

Ambiguity is another important feature of this novels in narration. Morrison

deliberately expresses more than one meaning of the events which leaves the readers
much more space to participate or respond. As for Beloved‘s identity, however, the
text balances between the explanations that she is an escaped slave woman who has
been sexually abused by a white man or an actual survivor of Middle Passage. And
she is also regarded as ones who are Sethe‘s dead child coming back to haunt her and
a representation of Sethe‘s dead mother. Many scholars at home and broad have
questioned the exact identity of this mysterious figure. Beloved means death,
memory, forgiveness, and punishment to Sethe, a new life for Denver, and a
consolidation with the community. Beloved‘s uncanny memory about the Middle
Passage also offers rediscovered African American history with a different
perspective. Beloved defies all binary definations and categorizations. She is neither
absolute evil nor definite good. Beloved is both a monster to destroy Sethe and a
life-giver who provides a chance for Sethe to have a future.

Beloved is presented as an allegorical figure. Whether she is Sethe‘s daughter,

Sethe‘s mother, or a representation of all of slavery victims, Beloved represents the
past returned to haunt the present. The narrative structure of the text causes readers to
overlook these ambiguities and asks for more interpretations and the readers will be
led into a magic world by Beloved with an ambiguous identity. Through the whole
book, Morrison does take a clear stand on the terrible actions she depicts, but she
directs the blame against the horrific system of racial oppression which creates this
ambiguity.

Ambiguity is another important feature of these novels in narration. Morrison

deliberately expresses more than one meaning of events that leave readers much more
room to participate or respond. As for Beloved's identity, however, the text balances
the explanations that she is an escaped slave who has been sexually abused by a white
man or a true Middle Passage survivor. And she is also considered as the dead child
of Sethe who comes back to haunt her and a representation of the dead mother of
Sethe. Many scholars at home and abroad have questioned the exact identity of this

108
mysterious figure. The beloved means death, memory, forgiveness and punishment at
Sethe, a new life for Denver and a consolidation with the community. Beloved's
strange memory about the Middle Passage also offers an African-American story
rediscovered with a different perspective. Beloved defines all binary definitions and
categorizations. It is neither absolute evil nor definite good. Beloved is both a monster
to destroy Sethe and a life giver who offers Sethe a chance to have a future.

The beloved is presented as an allegorical figure. Whether she is the daughter

of Sethe, Sethe's mother, or a representation of all the victims of slavery, Beloved, the
past has returned for haunting the present. The narrative structure of the text makes
readers unaware of these ambiguities and demands more interpretations and readers
will be led into a magical world by the beloved with an ambiguous identity.
Throughout the book, Morrison takes a clear position on the terrible actions she
portrays, but she blames the horrible system of racial oppression that creates this
ambiguity.

109
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