Trauma in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

Literary Methods and Psychological Processes

Rebecca Elizabeth Nyberg

Rebecca Nyberg Vt 2020 Examensarbete för kandidatexamen, 15 hp Engelska

Abstract

In this essay, the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison is observed using a working psychoanalytical approach. Story is observed as an important factor in engaging the reader on a personal level with the experience of trauma. By surveying Morrison’s use of imagery and language, this essay will examine how Morrison employs literary methods that imitate the psychological processes regarding how trauma is communicated to the waking state from the unconscious. The resulting testimony of the novel that arises as the result of these processes is also observed. This essay concludes that Morrison’s use of these literary methods functions to obligate the reader to involve themselves in the process of trauma and its resolution.

Keywords: Toni Morrison, Beloved, dream image, primary and secondary process, displacement, condensation and repetition compulsion.

Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 5

Previous Research ...... 7

Theoretical Framework ...... 9

Empathy and Engagement in Story ...... 12

Repetition in Imagery ...... 14

Repetition in Language ...... 18

Testimony ...... 24

Conclusion ...... 27

Works Cited ...... 28

Introduction The Margaret Garner incident is an account of a slave mother who killed her two-year- old daughter. The Garner incident was acted out and completed on a Monday in January eighteen-fifty-six. From then on, it exists as only an account or report of the event. The act, having been done, moved into the realm of story, sound-images, and concepts, only able to communicate through the interpretation of signs, and hence, as a fabrication of the event. The Margaret Garner incident was written into an article in eighteen-fifty-six and reproduced into The Black Book, a compilation of slave life, edited by Toni Morrison, in nineteen-seventy-four.

In nineteen-eighty-seven, Morrison published her novel Beloved, in which Sethe, a runaway slave, kills her young daughter. The conditions in which Sethe kills her infant closely shadow the events that led to the infanticide in the Margaret Garner case. Both women had escaped slavery, and both women killed their young daughters upon hearing of their master’s return to take them and their children back into slavery. The threat of returning to the dehumanizing and abusive conditions that uphold slavery prompted both women to stop such a fate by using the drastic means of killing. The infanticides were not an act of violence, but rather a reaction, triggered by unresolved trauma and carried out by these women to avoid further violence from being imputed upon their offspring. Trauma was present for both Margaret Garner and the fictitious Sethe.

It is Toni Morrison’s Sethe who presents to the world in story form the results of dehumanization and trauma. Trauma plays a strong role in Sethe’s decision to grab her four children and run to the shed to kill them after she realizes her master has come for them. It is there that she kills the baby, who comes to be known as Beloved. The other three are spared only because of Sethe’s lack of time. Moments before the killing of Beloved, Sethe and her family had been outside, working and at peace. Her decision was sudden and responsive. It was the return of her master that triggered the return of trauma, followed by the desperate act to end further violent events. Toni Morrison had purpose when taking the Margaret Garner incident into the realm of story through her novel Beloved. It is through the novel, specifically through the characters Sethe and Beloved, that Morrison engages the reader to recognize trauma as an experiencer and not just as a

third party. She does this by involving them in the processes and results of trauma using varying literary methods. What methods does Toni Morrison use in her novel to hook the reader into being subjected to the resulting trauma of slavery?

A psychoanalytical approach will demonstrate how the writing techniques in Morrison’s Beloved reveals to and engages the reader in the psychological structure of trauma and its progress from the unconscious to the waking state, or the conscious self. Using this approach, this essay will observe and highlight the repetitions produced by the violent event, the language used by the unconscious to communicate the event, and the need for witness and testimony to begin the resolution of the event and the acceptance of the event by the conscious into memory, resulting in a united self. A psychoanalytical approach will also reveal the separation of mother from daughter as the originating trauma and is the secondary argument of the work proceeding.

This essay argues that Morrison uses storytelling, as opposed to giving a report on the factual events of slavery, to engage the reader on a personal level and to humanize the people subjected to being slaves and thus becoming the possessions and-or objects belonging to a master. Morrison accomplishes this task through the methods of repetition in imagery and language and through testimony. This strategy turns the reader into an experiencer of the trauma.

Beloved tells the story of a slave woman who chose her freedom. She escaped her master and found a new home that did not possess the structures and conditions of slavery. Yet, even though she got away from those conditions which sustain slavery she continued to carry the trauma within her psyche that a life of slavery produced. This trauma caused her to kill her infant daughter, and it is this infant daughter that she believes comes back to haunt her. As the haunting progresses, the history of Sethe’s trauma emerges. She had lost her own mother, a woman she was denied a relationship with, to hanging, and witnessed the body in the tree. Her own mother lost her mother during the middle massage from what appears to be a suicide into the sea. Through out the novel Sethe tries to regain the lost mother-daughter relationship and come to terms with the horrific pain this caused her. Sethe’s trauma is represented by the figure of the ghost Beloved. It is how Sethe and

Beloved behave together that reveals the suffering and loss of being denied motherhood and consequently, the daughter being denied a mother.

Further characters in the novel relevant to this work are Denver, Sethe’s living daughter. Paul. D, one of the men who was a slave with Sethe and who lived under the same masters. Schoolteacher, the master Sethe and Paul. D ran from and finally Bodwin, a white man living in the community Sethe settled into after running from slavery. Bodwin participated in helping former slaves establish themselves after they gained freedom.

This essay will begin its work on examining the literary methods Morrison uses to engage the reader in Sethe’s trauma by first providing previous research on its core topics and then discussing its working theories in the theoretical framework. From there a brief chapter on story and its importance in creating empathy and engagement with a listener and-or reader will be discussed. This will lead into a chapter on how Morrison uses repetition in imagery to engage her reader, and a subsequent chapter on how Morrison uses repetition in language to achieve the same effect. The last chapter in this essay will discuss testimony and its value in resolving trauma. This final chapter leads to a conclusion which ends the essay.

Previous Research Toni Morrison uses storytelling to engage her readers. This is supported through the work of Eusebio L. Rodrigues in the article “The Telling of Beloved”. In this article, Rodrigues establishes that Morrison’s narrator uses the strategies of a melodious orator to bring her audience around her and lure them into the listening, wherein history is not treated as a mere documentary (Rodrigues 154). As the article continues, the musical methods within the narrative is discussed such as repetition, and fragments of story given here and there in tempo throughout the novel. The reader is enchanted by the tactics of Morrison’s narrative and obliged to piece it together. “Both reader and listener have to understand why Beloved and Sethe behave in this unnatural manner” (Rodrigues 163). Whereas Rodrigues argues a melodic tendency through repetition, and an adjustment of speed to maintain the involvement of the listener, this essay states that this is done through literary

tactics that mimic the primary and secondary psychological processes found within the dream image.

In “Literary Criticism as Dream Analysis”, Jeanne A. Roberts argues that literature may be used to further experience and investigate the self. Roberts uses Shakespeare’s Falstaff as an example of how, even though the character has changed in the eyes of the critics from early criticism to the Romantics and to the then modern 1970’s, the variety of Falstaff’s interpretation displays how he bids to be interpreted by the reader. It is the application of such critical thinking that leaves the reader wiser (Roberts 16). Literature is a means by which we are able to explore ourselves (Roberts 14). With Morrison’s choice of literary method, she connects to this ability for the human psyche to explore itself, confident that if the reader is able to see the truth within themselves, they will also see the truth of Sethe.

The secondary argument of this essay is that trauma was already present at the time of the infanticide and that the originating trauma was the separation of daughter from mother. Terry Paul Caeser’s article, “Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” states that “when Sethe tries to explain to Beloved why she cut her throat, she is explaining an anger handed down through generations of mothers who could have no control over their children’s lives, no voice in their upbringing” (Caeser 112). Here further work is shown supporting the idea that unresolved emotions existed prior to the act of killing the infant. Caeser states that “Toni Morrison’s novel is discussed not as a presentation of slavery, but rather of motherhood” (Caeser 111). The dehumanizing event of disallowing the mother-child relationship disrupted the development of not only the child but also of motherhood itself. This shows that Morrison’s novel Beloved engages the reader deeper than a chronicle of slavery would, instead taking the reader into the deep details of the dehumanization and resulting trauma that slavery possesses.

Theoretical Framework The argument of this essay is supported through the work and theories of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, and Dori Laub. While reading the novel Beloved, the reader takes part in the progression of Sethe’s trauma as it reveals itself to her waking state. Using Freud’s working psychoanalytical theories involving the unconscious and the means it uses to form psychological structures capable of finding a place within the waking state, or the conscious, and comparing them to Morrison’s literary methods, this essay will observe how trauma maintains itself to engage a listener through the storytelling process.

The working definition of trauma, which supports the thesis, is taken from the work of Cathy Caruth on Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD). Caruth defines trauma as an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events and a response that occurs in the uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena. These events are too horrific for the mind to place in waking memory; hence, they reside in the unconscious (Caruth 57-58). As stated in the introduction, the originating violent act is seen as the removal of child from mother, the first step in dehumanizing.

Trauma tells its story through hiding itself in image and language because the true story is not fully known by the conscious. “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 4). Freud’s theory of unconscious employment of the defense of repression involves unconscious knowledge of and perception of an event. This conscious failure to perceive the event results in it being stored in the unconscious. Morrison engages the reader as an experiencer in this process through her writing about Sethe’s trauma as it makes the journey from the unconscious to the waking state.

Accompanying this process of the violent act moving from the unconscious into the waking state are the images and language which maintain this progression of trauma from the unconscious. This is similar to how the dream is maintained through image and language. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud writes that the dream must take its construction from the outer world and take its material from that which we have

already experienced (Freud 5-6). For example, if a person is feeling that they may not achieve a work demand, they may dream of sliding down hill as they work to walk upwards. Freud also writes that dreams are presented in visual images and replace thought with hallucinations and that, although the dream’s intention is to communicate, it has not discovered the source material, it has only imitated or elaborated on what resides in the unconscious (Freud 15-16). To further this, he theorizes that dreams are unfinished and unresolved thoughts consisting of fragments of the source material (in this case trauma) and are an unrecognizable reproduction of a sensation residing in the unconscious (Freud 26). The dream then, as a story, uses imagery created through the piecing together of known fragments from the outer world in a similar fashion to Beloved, the apparition who appears at Sethe’s home.

The psychoanalytical theories at work in this essay that explain how the unconscious communicates are the primary process, repetition compulsion, the secondary process, displacement, and condensation. Being animated by the drives, specifically the drive of the id, the primary process acts on urges for basic desires and pleasurable things (Caruth 56). This may form the image of a favorite dinner in one’s mind when one is hungry. These basic urges are seen throughout the novel when Beloved demands water, sweet things, and sex. Repetition compulsion arose through Freud’s observance of “the mind’s unavoidable return to the traumatic experience through the dream-image” (Caruth 59), which led him to further his work on the primary process, wherein that which was too horrific to experience in real-time kept returning. This led to further theorizing on the death drive (the desire to return to an inanimate state) and the development of the secondary process. It is in this process that truth or reality gains the voice that is able to take the dream-image beyond the primary desires of the id for pleasure and into the process of repetition compulsion (Caruth 59-60).

Moreover, while observing the suffering of traumatic effects in individuals, Freud noted a tendency to return to the origin of trauma through repetitive reenactments, wherein the catastrophic events repeat themselves. The repetition of these painful events was not initiated by the individual; it was the trauma itself repeating the violent event through the unknowing acts of the person against their will (Caruth 1-2). Repetitions from trauma

consisted of a complex relationship between knowing and not knowing for the individual. Freud’s work is further supplemented through understanding the repetition compulsion: a state in which a person is subject to the repetition of a painful event until it is able to rewrite itself in a form that will be accepted by the conscious. In order for trauma to exist, it must first not be known consciously. The violent event was too severe or happened too quickly to be processed by the conscious, so it is rejected from being held in the memory of the waking state (Caruth 3-7).

The secondary process involves the further participation of the ego. The unconscious uses the dream to communicate that which has been repressed and remains within the unconscious through constructing something unrecognizable using material taken from the outer world. In this way, that which was too horrific for the waking state to place in memory becomes less horrifying. The return of the traumatic experience in the dream is not the signal of the direct experience but rather the signal of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct in order to attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place. Not having truly known the threat of death in the past, the survivor is continually forced to confront that threat. For consciousness then, the act of survival, as with the experience of trauma, is the repeated confrontation with both the necessity of, and the impossibility of, grasping the threat to one’s own life (Caruth 62).

Furthermore, Freud’s theory of displacement explains how the violent event is shifted and moved out of its original form into something unrecognizable or more pleasurable. Through new imagery, trauma is disguised using the unknown or the ordinary and is able to fool the defense of repression, which aims to keep from the conscious that which is too painful. Another Freudian term relevant to this paper is condensation, wherein what is too painful for the waking state is hidden. Similar to displacement, condensation aims to fool the defense of repression using a different tactic. Condensation is the taking of multiple thoughts stemming from the unconscious and placing them together so that they take one form or symbol, such as a ghost like we find in Beloved: the ghost of slavery that haunts one house and its community. The novel Beloved, through possessing the above-mentioned psychological traits, engages the conscious of both Sethe and reader, first through the primary process and then through the secondary process, which includes

the use of repetition compulsion displacement, and condensation. Through repeating the traumatic event, these mechanisms are designed to rewrite what went so horribly wrong.

In order to understand the importance of Cathy Caruth’s work in her book Unclaimed Experience to this essay, it is necessary to provide a brief summary of its main points. Her work is built upon the understanding of the repetition compulsion: a state in which a person is subject to the ongoing repetition of a painful event until it can rewrite itself in a form that will be accepted by the conscious. Trauma is a break in the mind’s experience of time and therefore cannot reach the waking memory, as memory is dependent upon the concept of past. This, both known and unknown, trauma may be viewed in the form of a narrative which reveals the violent event in repetitions through images and language.

Final work relevant to this essay is by Dori Laub. He suggests three distinct levels of witnessing, the level of being a witness oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself. In the first level, the speech acts used by the subject of the traumatic event are not ‘facts’. The testimony involves events and feelings that are removed and connected. They are the fragments brought forth to the individual from the source of the trauma. The individual brings forth what they know, without participation from a third party. In the second level, there is participation, not in the events but in the account of witnessing them. The listener functions as a companion and is present in reliving the events. In the third level, the process of witnessing is witnessed, with the narrator and the listener alternating between moving closer to and retreating from the experience (Laub 61-62). At this stage, both narrator and listener participate in the process of listening. The listener reiterates the traumatic event in order to increase comprehensibility. The narrator may confirm and add to the testimony as that narration progresses toward its end. It is this voice, the experiencer of the trauma, that witnesses the truth of the traumatic event.

Empathy and Engagement in Story In the novel Beloved human beings are story tellers. Story has value, both for the individual and at the cultural level. Morrison uses story as an effective means of

transferring individual and-or culturally specific events into the awareness of others (individuals and cultures) and even of self. She uses story to hook us into someone we are not but also to tell us who we are. By exploring the unknown parts of Sethe and confronting the demons of slavery in story form, the reader is better able to identify with experiences superseding their own family and culture. Morrison’s literary methods discussed in this essay display insight into how the stories that we tell contribute to the creation of human identity and self, recipes that disclose to the listener-reader what he- she is made of by engaging in them according to the manner of the mixing or within the literary methods employed in the story.

In the same way, the structure and method of Morrison’s literary choices in Beloved are employed to hook the reader into the humanizing effects of narrative by placing the psychological processes discussed in the theoretical chapter into story form. Morrison’s narrative has the intent to humanize. “To raise the question on the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself” (White 5). Toni Morrison strategically employs these attributes of narrative in the novel Beloved in order to turn the reader into what is termed in this essay as an experiencer of the trauma in slavery. In Freud’s Studies in Hysteria 1893-1895, specifically the case of Fraulein Elisabeth von R, while considering the problematic issue of science and psychology, he writes that there is “an intimate relationship between the story of the patients suffering and the symptoms of his illness” (Freud 135). We see in Morrison’s novel a further significance of story and self-reflexivity when Denver prepares to tell her birth story to Beloved. “She swallowed twice to prepare for the telling, to construct of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold Beloved” (Morrison 67). As Denver holds Beloved within this net, the reader also becomes tied into its string and story. The reader and Beloved listen together, intimately and alone with each other as if the one could not be separated from the other. The reader becomes Beloved in this section of the text through the story being told to her. Beloved’s interest in Denver’s birth (born free through her mother’s escape) becomes the reader’s interest in discovering the significance of Beloved in the telling of the story.

Through the story of Beloved, the reader is engaged in the process of the traumatic event as it progresses from where it resides in the unconscious to finding a place in the waking state. The trauma Sethe experienced as a slave was too severe for her to be able to process and therefore was unable to find a place within her conscious. Hence, the trauma began to impose itself upon her through the process of repetition compulsion. The reader is engaged on a personal level with Sethe through literary tactics such as imagery and language structure wherein trauma and its story can be found using reoccurring words and figures, and what is said and not said.

Repetition in Imagery Repetitions tell the story. “124 was spiteful” (Morrison 13), “124 was loud” (Morrison 134), “124 was quiet” (Morrison 186). These are the opening sentences in Book I, Book II, and Book III of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. With these three sentences, the reader is given the basic framework of the progression of the story: the progression of trauma. From these three opening lines, we know there is anger, a voice, and then an absence of that anger and voice. This is due to the repetition of the two words “124 was…” followed by a change to the third word. “124 was…” becomes ordinary to the reader through its familiarity. This repetition of ordinariness provides an opening for emotion and sensation to impose themselves upon the waking state of the reader. Morrison engages the reader’s own conscious through this mimicking of the process of the psychoanalytic theory, wherein that which is residing in the unconscious reveals itself, first driven through the primary process and then disguising itself through methods of displacement and condensation.

Morrison uses repetition to engage the reader within the effects and process of trauma. This repetition of Sethe’s trauma is experienced as rememory in the novel and further supported in Caruth’s work when she cites Freud’s own remarks about how he was struck by his patients’ reliving of violent traumatic events (Caruth 59). It is the rememory of the violent event that the reader engages with, through listening to how Sethe’s own trauma story reveals itself to her in the form of something she dearly loved, her infant daughter. To understand how she does this, it is necessary to explore how she uses repetitions in

the form of dream-image in literary form to mimic the deportment of Freud's working psychoanalytical theory.

The image must first be pleasurable, if not ordinary, in order to be received by the waking state. It must then be further disguised. We see this theory at work in Beloved in Morrison’s repeated use of imagery throughout the novel to engage us in the process of Sethe’s trauma hiding and disguising itself through pleasurable and ordinary images throughout the novel showing how Sethe’s conscious self tries to develop a survivable relationship with those images. This can be further understood by Caruth’s remarks stating that, “Freud’s speculation on the causes of repetition compulsion in relation to the origins of consciousness can indeed be understood as an attempt to grasp the paradoxical relation between survival and consciousness” (Caruth 61). The act of separating child from mother is destructive to the developing child. This is the initial step of Sethe’s trauma. Sethe’s desire to return to mother always confronts the originating act of violence: the separation from mother. This continuation of trauma from mother to child is also seen in Denver’s fear of her own mother. At night before she sleeps and in her dreams she is terrified that her mother will cut off her head and then take the head downstairs to braid the hair (Morrison 162). There appears to be a reality of a destructive force that a history of violence imposes on the human psyche: a history of previous violence that continuously repeats itself (Caruth 76). In this image, Denver is separated twofold: separated from her face (the face being how we recognize ourselves, in this case as daughter) and then separated by her own death.

This coincides with the use of literary imagery functioning as the dream image in Beloved. The imagery has the intent to be paradoxical, functioning on a fictitious level within the characters and, through their stories, engaging the readers’ own conscious. The imagery is pleasant at first glance but then further builds upon itself to reveal the violent act through ordinary events. Morrison repeats the traumatic event of mother-child separation through the literary image she creates upon Sethe’s first meeting the physical form of Beloved. It is this image that will be shown to have a similar function to the that of the psychological process within displacement.

Sethe reacts to seeing Beloved by running to the back and urinating, her bladder so full and spilling everywhere with such speed, her thoughts on the fear of the embarrassment if Paul D were to see her (Morrison 48). This is the readers’ image: an unknown woman suddenly appearing, another young woman and man noticing her, and a mother running around back to relieve herself. The violent act of separating Sethe from her mother was too traumatic for Sethe to process within real time. The emotions of the separation, being too painful for the waking state, were placed in the unconscious through the defense of repression, but the trauma returns to overcome the fact that it was not a direct experience (Caruth 62). This separation of mother from child is repeated in the novel and seen thrice in Sethe’s direct bloodline: her grandmother’s suicide, her mother’s hanging, and Sethe’s daughter’s infanticide.

In her work on trauma, Caruth writes that part of the shock of the violent event is missing the experience, and that is what Morrison communicates here. Functioning similarly to a dream image, the literary image of urination engages what is known and ordinary to communicate an event that was too violent for the conscious mind to perceive through only something desirable so instead disguises itself with the mundane. At this point in the story, the narrator is third person omniscient, one who only observes, much like a person upon awakening attempts to observe the dream they experienced in the night. The narrator does not give judgements to the reader, who must therefore engage with the literary image to interpret its meaning. Beloved is the desired object brought forth from the unconscious through the primary process by providing a pleasurable image of the union of mother and child. However, the desire is not precisely met. Sethe moves away from Beloved by the ordinary act of urinating, an act which separates the two. In this literary image, the traumatic event of the separation of child from mother is repeated through the displacement of Sethe.

The repressed trauma of the mother-child separation returns to Sethe through yet another hidden way, expressed through the imagery work of Beloved herself. Beloved is an accumulation of desire and pain. Her presence is both pleasurable and frightening. Within Beloved, multiple thoughts are combined into one symbol, which is constructed through several impressions of the traumatic experience. Beloved functions as a single dream-

literary image that embodies numerous fragments from the unconscious consisting of the traumatic events. Beloved herself is in fear of knowing she could become fragments (Morrison 109). It is as if she is somehow to privy to the condensed pain and desire which has created her.

This literary method has a function that aligns with condensation. In order to interpret this image of Beloved, the reader must work continuously backwards, gathering what information is known about Sethe through her stories and the images Morrison provides regarding Sethe’s trauma. This amalgamation of desires and thoughts is seen within Beloved when Sethe takes Denver and Beloved to the clearing. It is there that Beloved kisses Sethe. This kiss comes after something tries to strangle Sethe, leaving neck bruises that she bears the moment Beloved kisses her (Morrison 79-82). Thus, in this literary image, we see a mother and two young women in a clearing, the marks of a terrible fright on Sethe’s neck, and one of the young women in front of the mother leaning in and kissing her mouth. Sethe responds to this reunion (the mouth of trauma and hers finally meeting) by grabbing Beloved by the hair to separate herself from Beloved. Sethe reacts this way because “the girl’s breath was exactly like new milk” (Morrison 82). This literary image is another method of repeating the traumatic event of the separation of mother from child. We see this further supported as the three leave the clearing and Denver speaks to Beloved. “I saw your face. You made her choke." Beloved replies, “I kissed her neck. I didn’t choke it. The circle of iron choked it” (Morrison 85). These statements from Beloved reveal that she has an intimate knowledge with the trauma Sethe experienced as a slave which goes beyond the knowledge Sethe’s infant daughter could have possessed.

Caruth writes that trauma exists with a referential return. This return happens through the single image of Beloved. The reader engages not only in Sethe’s own personal violent event but also in the violent events that preceded it. It is made clear that Sethe’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of her mother. Toward the end of the story, Sethe’s identity as daughter begins to emerge. Her separation from her mother denied her the love a daughter is entitled to and this denial of love is seen repeating itself in the acts of Beloved (the dream-image), who insists that, despite Sethe’s attempt to love Beloved as her daughter, Sethe “never waved goodbye or even looked her way before running away

from her” (Morrison 188). Sethe believes that her mother must have tried to run without saying goodbye. Toward the end of the novel, Morrison uses this literary imagery: “Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother” and “Beloved ate up her life” (Morrison 194). Beloved becomes paradoxical and repeats the desire for the mother child bond as well as the pain that results from its denial. Morrison gives Beloved the same characteristics of an apparition or dream- image through her sudden appearance and then disappearance, as well as through the multiple fragments of desire and pain that her presence bears. The narrator never states that Beloved is the infant Sethe killed. The reader must gather who Beloved is from the multiple accounts given of her, and this requires a deeper engagement with the language of the novel.

Repetition in Language Before exploring how Morrison uses language to bring Sethe’s trauma into the reader’s own waking state, it is important to note that Freud was pre-linguistic. The work on linguistics stemming in Formulism, leading to Structuralism and then Post-structuralism, came after access to these linguistic foundations. But as stated previously, Freud did observe the significance of story in psychoanalytic practice. Yet in literature, it is not only the story that experiences the processes of trauma emerging from the unconscious to the waking state, but also the reader. The language of such literature produces the story that will now be examined. The methodical use of language within the story functions to form a paradoxical relationship between the narrative and the reader as the trauma is processed into to the waking state. The act of storytelling is beholden to the audience who listens. “What is passed, finally, is not just the meanings of words but their performance” (Caruth 111). Through story, the establishment of a history is gained and how that history played a role in carrying out decisions after the traumatic event is illustrated.

Throughout Beloved, the reader and Sethe are bound together through what they are unable to understand. The traumatic event, which was not fully comprehended by Sethe, is brought forth to the reader while mimicking the same lack of understandability. As the story progresses, the reader and Sethe move back and forth through knowing and not knowing. This is similar to the method in psychoanalysis where both therapist and patient participate in discovering the trauma. “If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic

experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the relationship between knowing and not knowing” (Caruth 3). The therapist must piece together the root of the trauma by gathering the information from the patient’s stories but also from what the patient does not talk about it. The reader learns that Sethe was exposed to several violent events before the infanticide. Just before the infanticide occurs the narrator in Beloved states that Sethe hears the wings of birds about her despite there not being birds flying about her head. The reader must question why Sethe hears these birds and what they are representing. The sensation of bird wings appears to be triggered by the arrival of Schoolteacher, suggesting that trauma was already present before the killing of the baby girl, an act that repeated the preceding violent event by again separating mother from daughter.

This language to hint at pre-existing trauma Morrison uses, such as the bird’s, functions to engage the reader’s waking state. The reader must decipher the fragments of knowing and not knowing provided by Morrison’s narrative, specifically her use of language in Book II of Beloved. Book II maintains at least three narrators who appear to be Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. As the narrative progresses who Beloved is needs further consideration. She speaks of many experiences, suggesting that she may have gone beyond the apparition of one murdered daughter to include the heartache and fear of many. Through her story, Beloved’s words lead to an awakening that is paradoxically released in the repetition of the event that caused the wound. Beloved is telling the story of the truth and maintaining the violent event during the repetition in her narrative. The story wants the attention of a listener to tell the truth of trauma too horrific to comprehend within the waking state.

Morrison uses language to highlight the pain and the panic resulting from separating mother from daughter. This separation is an unjust exertion of force and power carrying with it the same sensation as physical violence. This violence, being not entirely known to the conscious, exists as fragments residing in the unconscious, fragments that desire witness through the use of semiotic and other forms of language. The physical act of the violence, having been completed, can only be brought forth again through language. Thus, the language itself becomes the site of the trauma, and language begs a listener

(Caruth 57-72). Stories convey more than just information. They demand active participation between narrator and listener. Just as the unconscious must bring the not knowing and knowing to the conscious, so does the story bring the same to the reader.

Book II tells its story through fragments and varying perspectives. “Beloved. She my daughter. She mine.” (Morrison 157) is seen again in the form of “Beloved is my sister” (Morrison 161), and then shifted again to read as “I am Beloved and she is mine” (Morrison 165). In these three quotes, we see varying stages of the conscious processing the painful event.

A complete sentence follows the subject + verb + object order. The first quote is missing a verb, the action word. A verb puts the subject into motion or provides further clarification of the subject. It gives meaning to something. Without a verb, a sentence cannot exist. What is missing from that first quote is action and-or the event around the subject. The painful event is missing, but what does appear is the repetition of the personal and possessive pronouns “Beloved”, “she”, “my”, and “mine”. By employing possessive pronouns and leaving out the verb, Morrison is engaging the reader in the process of Sethe’s psyche bringing her trauma to the waking state. This is not just a linguistic trait of Sethe. On the same page she states, “I know what it is like to be without the milk that belongs to you” (Morrison 157), which is a complex sentence that follows the subject, verb, object word order. This lack of a verb in the first quote, or lack of bringing forth the painful event to the waking state, is supported through Caruth’s work of knowing and not knowing. The desired object is brought forth, as is the desire for that object, using possessive pronouns, but the action and-or the violent event are entirely excluded. The reader knows the desired object but has yet to fully engage in the cause of that desired object being taken away. Sethe wants her daughter but has yet to accept the painful events that led to her loss.

This fragmented use of language then shifts in the second quote, the complete simple sentence possessing the required subject, verb, and object order: “Beloved is my sister.” The use of a verb brings meaning to Beloved, and who she is becomes further clarified. She is someone’s sister. There is no fragment here. She belongs to someone and there is

no ambiguity in that belonging. The root form of the word “is” is “be”, which means to exist or live. In this quote, we see the inclusion of action and, by that inclusion, the embracing of the physical event. Yet we also see the choice of the possessive pronoun “my”, which engages the reader with an affinity to Beloved; she belongs, paradoxically, to both Denver and the reader.

This possessing of Beloved is repeated in the third quote, “I am Beloved and she is mine.” The narrator tells us directly who she is: “I am Beloved.” She then confuses the reader by adding “and she is mine”. Perhaps the narrator is talking about Sethe; however, the use of this form and word order brings the reader back to the subject of the first independent clause: the “she” in the second clause refers to Beloved. This “she” and “possessing” will be observed in further detail in the following paragraph.

Who Beloved is may be questioned in pages 165 to 170 of Book II. This is not the experience of an infant girl killed by her mother. This is not a summary of a woman who ran to the shed and killed her infant daughter. There is no saw, nor are there two brothers injured in the shed with her. She does not talk about her throat being cut or her mother trying to hold her head in place. There is no chronicle of the day the infant girl died. Instead, the reader is given jumbled fragments in paragraphs with minimal punctuation:

Beloved

You are my sister

You are my daughter

You are my face; You are me. (Morrison 169)

This literary structure reads like free verse that does not hold to the rules or the order one expects to find in sentences. The reader is given the repetition of fragments that include consistent themes. The language is free flowing, resembling a stream of consciousness or

an awakening. The reader is told that what is happening in the narrative is happening now. This is maintained using the present tense.

What is often referred to in this narrative is the face: wanting it, seeing it, possessing it, and it belonging to someone else. There is no clear identity to the face. It seems to be shifting and in flux and so belongs to many instead of just one. Each time the face is spoken of, what follows is the three words, “a hot thing”.

The woman with my face is in the sea a hot thing (Morrison 165)

I want her face a hot thing (Morrison 166)

They do not push the woman with my face…a hot thing (Morrison 166)

I am her face my own face has left me a hot thing (Morrison 167)

It is the face I lost she is my face smiling…we can join a hot thing (Morrison 167)

Caruth refers to key figures in language that represent trauma, departure, falling, burning, and awakening (Caruth 4-6). We see this departure in “my own face has left me” and in the want for her face. A leaving has happened, a separation from something with a like face. This upholds the secondary argument of this essay that the originating trauma was separation from mother. However, in this narrative, it takes on a grander sense, a sense of many being taken. The falling is implied by the woman in the sea. We are told only that she was not pushed, and that she goes into the sea. The falling body is another leaving happening, heightened by the falling. The narrative possesses the powerlessness experienced in trauma. The narrator has paid close attention to the woman who was not pushed, and recognizes her own face in the woman’s, but is only able to watch as the woman goes into the sea. Combined with the unstructured child-like narration, this section appears to be from the viewpoint of a child able to understand only that the woman with the child’s face is gone into the sea. “A hot thing” repeats itself throughout the narrative, often appearing after the statements regarding face and the loss of it, the

confusion of who, and then shifting from the face belonging to her and then to another. A hot thing burns and suddenly calls attention to itself through the burning. The separation of narrator from the face she desires is proceeded by “a hot thing.” Thus, we see “a hot thing” or burning occur when dehumanization begins, denying or not recognizing the need of mother for child. This face in flux represents the worry of, or the anxiety in, losing mother. “A hot thing” repeatedly stands between mother and daughter: the originating trauma.

The fourth key figure in the literature Caruth discusses is awakening. Beloved, the daughter lost to infanticide, is aware of slavery. We see this awareness of slavery within the narrative: “If they put an iron circle around your neck I will bite it away” (Morrison 169). The awakening involves recognizing the slavery that the mother experienced and how that experience affected her choices as mother. All three women in Sethe’s line, grandmother, mother, and daughter (Sethe), chose to deny slavery by going into the sea, by running, and by committing infanticide: acts that were made because of the presence of slavery. Trauma was already present when Sethe killed her baby daughter, and thus the infanticide was caused by this trauma. Beloved, the apparition of trauma, represents the violent act of slavery grounding itself in the first step of dehumanization, the separating of mother and child. Beloved asks, “Will we smile at me?” (Morrison 169). This phrase unites mother and daughter with the word “we” as Beloved wonders whether together they can come to terms, smile at the trauma, “me”, Beloved. This awakening is paradoxical, uniting daughter Sethe’s emotions with the adult mother, the mother’s emotions with the child, and then with the reader who, through Morrison’s construction of an unstructured narrative ungoverned by the rules of grammar, is forced to investigate the images created through this employment of language by the characters. The reader becomes an additional experiencer of the trauma by engaging in the process of how trauma tells its story. This use of language by Morrison leads the reader toward an awakening to the horrifying effects of slavery on the human psyche.

Testimony In his work “Truth and Testimony: The Process of the Struggle”, Dori Laub refers to the Holocaust and to the importance of the survivors telling their story in order to come to terms with the trauma of the violent event. He recognizes three separate and distinct levels of witnessing: “The level of being witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being a witness to the testimony of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (Laub 61).

Survivors need to tell their stories in order to survive the traumatic effects of the experience. “There is, in each survivor, an imperative need to tell and thus come to know one’s story, unimpeded by ghosts from the past which one has to protect oneself” (Laub 63). Dori Laub’s work on trauma and testimony may also be applied to the traumatizing effects of slavery, as both Holocaust and slavery form their foundation in the dehumanization of a people.

Laub states that when one’s history is abolished; one’s identity ceases to exist as well (Laub 67). Morrison takes the reader through this regaining of identity as Sethe processes her trauma and becomes able to recognize herself and her trauma as a whole survivor. In Book III, Laub’s first level is present as Sethe begins to witness herself within the experience of slavery. The more Beloved takes from Sethe, the more Sethe speaks of her sufferings. There was something that led to the infanticide; there was trauma existing before the act. This is seen when Sethe pleads for Beloved’s forgiveness, but Beloved instead denies all Sethe’s love, asserting that Sethe “never waved goodbye or even looked her way before running away from her” (Morrison 188). This statement is similar to the conditions surrounding the separation of Sethe from her own mother. It appears to be Sethe witnessing the feelings she possessed as a child toward her own mother through the apparition of Beloved, making Beloved paradoxically Sethe’s wounded child and a representation of the pain from mother: “Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother” (Morrison 194). Sethe further responds to Beloved by articulating her own trauma. She begins to tell the story of how she was dehumanized. We observe this witnessing of oneself within the trauma when Sethe expresses how they “dirty you so bad you couldn’t be yourself anymore” (Morrison 194). By telling her story of slavery, Sethe begins to

establish a history and hence an identity that is built upon the survivorship of those experiences.

Laub asserts that, in his second level, being witness to the testimony of others, the listener performs the function of a companion and does not interrupt the process of self-witness. This is seen through the behavior of Denver. Laub writes, “the listener (or the interviewer) becomes the Holocaust witness before the narrator” (Laub 67). In this case what is being witnessed is slavery, and the reader engages in this level of witness through Denver. It is Denver who notices Beloved becoming plumper, her mother becoming thinner, and Beloved looking like the mother. During this level, the survivor must engage in a process wherein they are able to re-engage with the self who existed before the trauma. Yet when one is born into slavery, there is no “before” identity of freedom. This lack of regaining a free self is observed in Sethe when the narrator states that “no one, nobody on this earth would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper” (Morrison 195). This precludes Sethe’s own freedom from being on the animal side of the paper. Thus, Sethe must establish an identity of a free self. This is seen toward the end of the novel when Sethe questions the idea of self, “Me? me?” (Morrison 211). This absence of a former free self whom she could regain appears to bind Sethe to her trauma, unable to free herself from Beloved. It is Denver (who was born free) who decides that, in order to save her mother, she must leave the yard.

Beloved is a condensed symbol of the trauma of slavery. She is a psychological construct of a violent event too horrible for the waking state to accept. “Bearing witness to one’s own trauma makes and breaks a promise: the promise of the testimony as a realization of the truth” (Laub 73). In Morrison’s novel, the truth is that Sethe committed the infanticide because of the trauma she experienced during slavery, and that the little girl is indeed dead and not coming back. It is also the truth that Sethe was a slave, that her mother was hanged, that there was a middle passage, and that none of this will be erased through her testimony.

It is in the third level, the process of being a witness to witnessing itself, that Denver’s endeavors to gain help from outside are fulfilled. Through Denver’s stories, the

community is able to bear witness to Sethe’s trauma. It is this final stage of witnessing that saves Sethe from Beloved and from herself. At this level, where there is another person actively listening, this “other” contributes to the establishment of a self, someone who may be heard (Laub 66). There is someone to save. This occurs in the novel when the women of the community gather to deal with the ghost. Sethe herself is still not of sound mind and remains in the clutches of her trauma. This can be observed when the narrator writes that Sethe hears the wings again and intends to kill Bodwin, a white man “with a black hat, wide brimmed” (Morrison 203), similar to that of Schoolteacher. The women of the community and Denver tackle Sethe and stop her from acting on the impulses created by her trauma. Beloved disappears, repeating another separation. “The testimony is inherently a process of facing loss…which entails yet another repetition of the experience of separation and loss” (Laub 74). There is yet another witness to the event, the witness created through the attentions of the reader, who has been listening all along, engaged in the same process of investigating and deciphering both the images and the language the characters themselves have been subject to. The narrator is third person and omniscient and thus follows the third level, the process of being witness to witnessing, and using storytelling and narrative becomes paradoxical. The novel bears witness to slavery, to the horrific conditions that maintain it, and to the deep psychological disruption of the separation of mother and child. The reader bears witness through listening to the story.

Conclusion

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved tells the story of one woman’s psychological process as she comes to terms with her trauma. Morrison gives voice to these unspeakable things through the literary methods she employs. These methods behoove the listening and engagement of the reader so that healing may begin through the right to give testimony to one’s own story and through the understanding of that story. There is an innate feature in storytelling that passes on the true experience of events. Story telling functions differently than giving a report of an event.

Morrison’s use of storytelling and literary methods in Beloved relate the story to the reader by mimicking the working psychoanalytical theories of Freud regarding the psychological structures and processes within the psyche that maintain in the unconscious the violent event that caused the trauma and communicate that event to the waking state. The literary methods of repetition, imagery, language, and testimony are used to draw the reader into a process of learning about the traumatic effects of the violent act. The reader is led toward a resolution and understanding of the originating violent act, the separation of mother and child, which was the first step in the character Sethe’s dehumanization. These methods of the psyche applied as literary tactics give the reader an intimacy with the violent act and with Sethe. The reader’s own waking state must learn and investigate alongside Sethe’s conscious the material stemming from the unconscious. Engaging the reader as an experiencer Morrison exposes the reader to the pain and symptoms of trauma. They may come to understand the conditions that create and sustain the originating violent act in an individual which disrupts a person from being able to recognize themselves and the truth of their history, and also understand how this disruption interferes with the ability to authorize one’s own idea of self.

Further work on establishing self-identity through mother would be beneficial to supplement the understanding of this essay and the unspeakable events that create trauma, and hence its structures and productions that have been highlighted through the work of Freud, Caruth, and Laub.

Works Cited Caeser, Terry Paul. ”Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's "Beloved".” Revista de Letras Vol.34 1994: 111-120. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Freud, Sigmund. ”The Interpretation of Dreams.” u.d. Psychclassics.yorku.ca. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/dreams.pdf. . 2020. —. ”The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud Vol. II 893-1895: Studies on Hysteria.” u.d. Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. https://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=se.002.0000a. 2020. Gray, Alisdair. Lanark. Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd, 2007. Laub, Dori. ”Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” Caruth, Cathy. Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The JOhn Hopkins University Press, 1995. 61-75. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Random House, 2014. Roberts, Jeanne A. ”"Literary Criticism as Dream Analysis".” CEA Critic Vol.33 No.1 November 1970: 14-16. Rodrigues, Eusebio L. ”The Telling of "Beloved".” The Journal of Narrative Technique Vol.21 No.2 Spring 1991: 153-169. White, Hayden. ”The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 1980: 5-27.