Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter IV

“Claiming Ownership of That Freed Self”

Remembering the Unspeakable in Toni Morrison’s

Beloved

“An Act of Willed Creation:” Exorcising Past Images

In her Oxford Amnesty Lecture on Human Rights (2001), Eva Hoffman raised an essential issue regarding the legacy of the past. “How can we deal with this legacy? How can we speak about events in the past that have become the object of collective memory?” To these questions she offers three solutions: firstly, the recognition of victims; secondly, the identification of causes and effects; thirdly, the necessity to escape the past. The last point is of absolute importance, because otherwise we run the risk of letting the past engulf our present and future actions. Like Hoffman in her Oxford Amnesty speech, Morrison draws our attention to the importance of properly remembering the past and to the necessity of separating it from the living present.

Beloved’s shifting image serves as an embodiment of those historical events whose resurfacing hurts as much as heals. Beloved seems to embody a Lady Lazarus, an allegory of the unforgiving past that returns to haunt the present. At the same time, Beloved’s appearance initiates Sethe’s process of healing, so that memory functions as “an act of willed creation” (Morrison 1984 a, 385). More than a real character, Beloved signifies the living memory of the unspeakable past that both imprisons and liberates—an ambivalent character that both harms and cures, in hellishly unaccountable tenderness.

In order to reestablish the balance between the past and the present, Morrison employs at the end of the novel the voice of the community⁴²—a powerful presence that manages to place an unnatural event on the right axis. In a symbolic act, the community’s black women gather in front of Sethe’s house and become conscious of the great difference between the ordinariness of their peaceful homes and this haunted place—an empty screen at which they gaze in lack of recognition. In reaction to the evil spirit, they experience different forms of exorcism that combine religious and pagan rituals, so that their praying, hollering, and singing produce an initial sound that drives the pregnant and beautiful “devil-child” out of the house.

The question remains open whether Beloved was forced to leave by the others or she left willingly when her mission was accomplished. In Trudier Harris’ interpretation, this scene evokes Fraser’s Golden Bough: “The voices raised serve the same function as the sticks and pans villager of pretechnological cultures might have used to dive evil spirits from their midst” (1991, 162). For Sethe, the voice of the community instills movement, awakening from a lethargic state in which she has lately fallen. Released from her past, Sethe takes action. In her vision, the arrival of Edward Bodwin (the white man that wants to help them) acts as reenactment of the pre-Civil War events, when the slaveholders came to capture her and her children and take them back into slavery. As the supreme proof of love for her children, she attacks the white man whom she considers to be Schoolteacher.⁴³  Sethe’s violent act of protecting her (ghost)child exemplarily reveals how she has learned to claim ownership of her freedom.

Through Sethe’s life story, Morrison ultimately offers a multifaceted representation of a polytropic character, an unconventional heroine whose autonomous identity appears in her double gesture of escaping not only from the unspeakable state of slavery, but also from the memory of the haunting past.  Through Sethe, Morrison stresses the necessity for the black woman to become aware of her self-importance, to put together the shattered images of her identity and reconstruct a future:

‘Sethe,’ [Paul D] says, ‘me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.’

He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers.

‘Me? Me?’ (273)

This poem in prose functions as an epitaph to the narrated events. It spins around a leitmotif—“It was not a story to pass on” (274-75)—which makes us pay attention to the difficult mission of the author who had to pass on, to transmit these terrible events. Morrison stresses here the unsayability of a story that can be either remembered or forgotten by “those to come.” The last paragraph makes us realize once more that the marks of African American history can be lost into oblivion. As the author warns us, any child or adult can either step into Beloved’s “footprints” or choose to never recall “the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for” (274). By rewriting and retracing the past, Morrison suggests that, like her characters, readers must learn how to claim ownership of their freed self.

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