Sino-US English Teaching, ISSN 1539-8072
February 2012, Vol. 9, No. 2, 958-962 Seeking Self-Emancipation Through Communal Redemption in
Toni Morrison’s Beloved
WU Jing
China Youth University for Political Sciences, Beijing, Chinavisit
Toni Morrison, as an African-American woman writer, attracts the greatest attention in recent years. Being the
winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, she has been hailed as a stand of the Black Women’s Literature
in the 20th century. She is deeply concerned about the spiritual world of black women. Morrison has al爱丁堡国际艺术节
ways put
stress on the relationship between individual and community; her idea that what affects the black community can
have an influence on individuals is an important part in her books that cannot be neglected. By way of the approach
of text analysis, this paper tries to elaborate Morrison’s important idea that estrangement from the community
泰迪造型inevitably means a lack of communal support and understanding, which is harmful to the healthy formation of
individual identity in one of her important works Beloved (1987).
Keywords: lf-emancipation, black community, African-American women writer
Introduction
Having never dreamed of becoming a writer in her life, Toni Morrison, the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, has been hailed as one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century now.
Beloved (1987) is Morrison’s fifth novel, a story deals with slavery and infanticide, and a novel about a slave mother express her maternal love through extremity. It will be much easier to get a general idea of the book Beloved if one is informed of the two facts: Firstly, the novel is bad on the story of a slave mother, named Margaret Garner, who killed her child to keep her away from slavery; condly, the ghost of her dead child, Beloved (the name the ghost called herlf in the novel), returned to Sethe for something unfinished between them. In 1988 Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved . The novel won international acclaim and everlastingly established Morrison in the upper echelon of 20th-century authors.
In Morrison’s works, the community is prented as the source of knowledge and wisdom of survival. In other words, estrangement from the community inevitably means a lack of communal support and understanding, which is harmful to the healthy formation of individual identity.
Community as Support for Self-emancipation in Beloved
The Strategy of Self-impod Denial as Self-defen Results in Communal Self-destruction
In Morrison’s novels, characters’ lives do not make n outside history: The meaning of personal suffering
WU Jing, associate professor of Department of Foreign Studies, China Youth University for Political Sciences.
Rights Rerved.
SEEKING SELF-EMANCIPATION THROUGH COMMUNAL REDEMPTION 959
is available only within a collective temporality. Felman (1991) pointed out that the relationships between narrative, history/trauma, and healing are central to Morrison’s writing:
The task of the literary testimony is… to open up in that belated witness [the reader]… the imaginative capability of perceiving history—what is happening to others—in one’s own body, with the power of sight (of insight) usually afforded
only by one’s own immediate physical involvement. (p. 108)
In Beloved, as in other novels by Morrison, the confliction between the individual and community allows her to prove the key nodes of tension within the social group. In depicting the capacity of the past to haunt individual and community life in the prent, Beloved brings into daylight the “ghosts” that are harbored by memory and that hold their “hosts” in thrall, cruelly dictating thought, emotion, and action. Morrison first disclos, however, as Lawrence (1997) argued, “the workings of the internal mechanisms that have generate the need for exorcism in the first place” (p. 231). And it is the “deeply encoded rejection of the body drives the highly pressurized haunting in Beloved” (Lawrence, 1997, p. 231).
Sethe’s month of “unslaved life” made her realize that “freeing yourlf was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed lf was another” (Morrison, 1987, p. 95). This struggle to claim ownership links her own horrifying story to the story of the entire community. The whole of the black community of Cincinnati is caught in a cycle of abstinence, a suffocating repression of fundamental bodily needs and wants. “Baby Suggs, holy”, the “unchurched preacher” (Morrison, 1987, p. 87), tries to modify this legacy of lf-denial in her lf-loving exhortations, indicating “the roots of her tongue” to calling the Word. Avoiding such restricting abstract concept as sin and purity, Baby Suggs grounds her words in the earthly, physical realm through which the body moves: “She told them that the only grac
e they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not e it, Rights Rerved.
they would not have it” (Morrison, 1987, p. 88). In this unrestricted andorganic religion, Baby Suggs taps a bodily “organ music”, earnestly requesting her listeners to love their “dark, dark liver” and “life-giving parts”
(Morrison, 1987, pp. 88-89). Her speech, both literally and metaphorically, comes from her “big old heart”, supplying a kind of scaffolding of the reconstitution to the ruined communal body. The members of the community must recollect themlves—remember themlves—so that they can remember that the heart “is the prize” (Morrison, 1987, p. 89).
Sethe recalls how this “fixing ceremony” (Morrison, 1987, p. 86) had functioned to declare lf-defined ownership: “Bit by bit… along with the others, she had claimed herlf” (Morrison, 1987, p. 95). However, “the unwritten codes of the community cannot yet entirely accommodate such joyous lf-celebration” as Lawrence (1997, p. 236) argued. Baby Suggs unintentionally insults the community by hosting a spontaneous feast to celebrate the arrival of her daughter-in-law, for the community finds itlf renting what they perceive as her prideful behavior. She has gone beyond the boundary of permissible pleasure: “Her friends and neighbors were angry at her becau she ha
d overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess” (Morrison, 1987, p. 138) becau “Loaves and fishes were His powers—they didn’t belong to an ex-slave” (Morrison, 1987, p. 137).
Ironically, the communal voice that Baby Suggs “hears” the morning after the feast acts as the white master by scolding the “slave” who has violated the code of acceptable behavior. The oppression impod by slave owners is now made perpetual by the oppresd themlves. The community itlf remains an “ex-slave”, unable to identify itlf outside the parameters of the slave experience.
960
SEEKING SELF-EMANCIPATION THROUGH COMMUNAL REDEMPTION Morrison declares that under slavery the lf-impod prohibition on “reckless generosity” is surely a necessary survival strategy, a vital means of lf-defen. Paul D learns to protect himlf by loving “just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croker sack, well, maybe you’d have
a little left over for the next one” (Morrison, 1987, p. 45). Loving “big”, according to Paul D, “would split you
wide open”, so “you protected yourlf and loved small” (Morrison, 1987, p. 162). But this life-killing strategy of lf-defen has grown to be, after slavery, a lethal form of lf-destruction. Having known Sethe’s own story of desperate lf-defen, her “explanation” of killing her children to protect them evokes Paul D’s aspiration to find
a space for uninhibited love: “to get to a place where you could love anything you cho—not to need permission
甘字
for desire—well now, that was freedom” (Morrison, 1987, p. 162). Freed from slavery, the community must now learn to give itlf the permission to desire freely. As a matter of fact, the neighbors are too envious and furious at Baby Suggs’ presumption to nd someone to warn her of Schoolteacher’s approach, a warning that might have avoided the slaughter of one of their own by one of their own.
Communal Redemption Support to Expel Ghost of Slavery Haunted in Individuals
Having moved from “the center of things” (Morrison, 1987, p. 137) to the margins of the community, 124 is haunted. Baby Suggs, who is so disappointed with him and herlf that her heart “collapd” and her voice silenced, spends the last eight years of her life pondering the colors on her quilt. Sethe, incurs rancor and rentment from the women in the community becau of her refusal to def
ine herlf as a breeder of slaves, devoting herlf to beating back the past that is “still waiting” (Morrison, 1987, p. 44). For Denver, who “goes deaf rather than bears in mind the dark time she spent with her mother in prison” (Morrison, 1987, p. 104). They are steeped to the lips in their sterile, isolated lives; the ghost is the only member of the family who eks the Rights Rerved.
紫金大桥
intimacy of physical contact.
Beloved believes that if change is possible, it will happen only when individuals are integrated with the natural world and each other. And human is considered as the only moral agency, which is reprented in Beloved by Denver. Born in a boat filling with the “river of freedom”, she stands for the generation born outside slavery: the future.
Denver is the redemptive figure in this novel. She was only a few days old when Beloved is killed, and her mother’s nipple was covered with her sister’s blood when she nurd. “So Denver took her mother’s milk right along with the blood of her sister” (Morrison, 1987, p. 152). Denver plays the role of an intermediary between spirits and living. Being aware of her mother is in danger when neither Sethe nor Beloved ems to care what the next day might bring, “Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world” and find help (Morrison, 1987, p. 243).
Her efforts reunite the community and lead to everyone’s salvation. It begins with gifts of food attached the givers’ names but culminates in the women’ exorcism to Beloved in the yard of 124.
Ella, the former slave woman who assists Stamp Paid to lead Sethe and the just-born Denver from the Ohio River, leads Sethe’s rescue. She had directed them to the community of former slaves, and then led the community to exclude Sethe for 18 years when Sethe had emed not to need anyone after Beloved’s death. Now, Ella and the others make out that Beloved is infringing the boundary between the dead and the living. Ella respects Beloved only if it remains a mere ghost, even a violent ghost. “But if it on flesh and come in her world, well, the shoe was
SEEKING SELF-EMANCIPATION THROUGH COMMUNAL REDEMPTION 961
on the other foot. She didn’t mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion”
(Morrison, 1987, p. 257). They know that she reprents the unquiet spirits of “the people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood” (Morrison, 1987, p. 181) who anger and suffering could not be contained in the other world provided that the living neither heard nor remembered them. When the community is forced to recognize what she stands for in their own inner lives, Beloved can be exorci
d. The exorcism takes place in the yard of 124, the same place where Beloved’s murder happened. This cond significant gathering at 124 has a destined quality. The women come to offer help, armed with whatever they believe will work: talismans, their Christian faith, anything.
It has been 18 years since the women were in the yard of 124, enjoying the feast Sethe’s mother-in-law had hosted the day before schoolteacher’s arrival to celebrate Sethe’s escape. Seeing Beloved on the porch recalls the day before Beloved was killed when they as young girls picnics in the yard 18 years earlier; and simultaneously reminds them that how the community shares responsibility for Beloved’s death. The community not only did not warn 124 the approaching horman, but also had not gathered around Sethe when she climbed into the cart for the ride to jail becau they felt that she held her head too high. However, Beloved’s prence does make the women to go back in time to being “young and happy” (Morrison, 1987, p. 258). She also lets them bring back the paradisal time they had spent in the Clearing with Baby Suggs as their spiritual leader. It is noteworthy that by the end of the novel “rememorying” calls back positive moments rather than the painful oppressive past. Combined memories of joy with collective strength, the women can react to the need to expel Beloved, the objectification of the angry and rancorous ancestral spirits, with the full power of their spiritual tradition.
They stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all know what that sound sounded like (Morrison, 1987, p. 259).lol英雄
Rights Rerved.
The primal sound exorcis Beloved; and the evil of the “white folks’ jungle” is also driven out of the lives of the women and Sethe’s family at the same time. When the women create the powerful and timeless sound that exorcis Beloved, they purge themlves and Sethe and Denver of all kinds of emotion—pain, grief, remor, anger, and fear which had imprisoned them. It returns them all to a new beginning where, purified, they can create a new life.
The women’s song or shout creates new modes of redemption in Beloved. Tho former slaves still maintain the mode of forgetting as their method of survival after having physically escaped slavery. However, focusing on the image of Beloved standing on the front porch of 124, they are themlves dragged through the veil into a world full of memory of their personal and collective lives and of the “unnamed, unmentioned people left behind”
(Morrison, 1987, p. 92).
For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women arched for the right combination, the key, the code, and the sound that broke the back of words (Morrison, 1987, p. 261).
The song “broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash” (Morrison, 1987, p. 261). Sethe is transformed into a new life. Moreover, the women’s song is potent enough to break “the backs of words”—words ud to define African Americans, such as “animal”, “breeding stock”, and “slaves”. When Sethe is taken back to the Clearing by the women’s song in her yard, it does not simply signify her personal redemption, but the entire community’s; the community has returned finally to loving themlves but also to feeling compassion for tho who have lost their lives. In the end, Sethe’s “rememory” draws the members of the community into one person’s
962
5英尺4英寸
SEEKING SELF-EMANCIPATION THROUGH COMMUNAL REDEMPTION struggle with the torments of a history that refus to die, and the communal body ems ready to articulate a reinvigorated language that empowers its speakers to forge a more open, inclusive community.
Conclusions旱地龙舟
Morrison persistently emphasizes that paration from the community will inevitably be deficient in communal support and understanding. Individual survival should take communal redemption as a foundation and premi. In fact, one may owe Morrison’s appeal and success to her ability to create individuals, with all their idiosyncrasies, while anchoring subjectivity in a collective history without which it would have little meaning.
Morrison’s novels make it possible for us to scrutinize the quality of human relationships under the constraints of historical process and social relations, in the milieu of the collective.
References
Felman, S. (1991). Camus’ the plague, or a monument to witnessing. In S. Felman & L. Dori (Eds.), Testimony: Cris of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge.
Lawrence, D. (1997). Fleshly ghosts and ghostly flesh: The word and the body in Beloved. In D. L. Middleton (Ed.), Toni Morrison’s fiction: Contemporary criticism. New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc..
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Knopf.
Rights Rerved.
