Not a Sweet Little Bird in Sight: Comparing Paths to Liberation and Selfhood in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Tess Weitzner

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in the Department of English and American Literatures, Middlebury College

May, 2018

I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this work

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Brett Millier for keeping me grounded in my focus and for pushing me out of the nest when she knew I was ready.

I would also like to thank my family for supporting me from the moment my topic hatched.

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Table of Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………………..…………………4

Thesis

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..…5

Section i: Giving a Voice to the Smothered: Engagements with Postmodern Literary Techniques………………………………………………………………………………...7

Section ii: Between Feminisms………………………………………………………..…18

Section iii: Magical Realism……………………………………………………………..22

Section iv: Flight and Inversion: The Motif of Birds……………………………………26

Works Cited & Works Consulted……………………………………………………………..…40

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Preface

In the tradition of literary criticism, comparisons are everywhere you look. As readers, we are always permitted to ask, “So what?” I am interested in comparing two specific works of

Angela Carter and Toni Morrison to learn more about these texts and their creators. These authors seem to constantly oscillate between falling into and out of the same literary and contextual categories that literary critics have designed. They wrote around the same time, they wrote about heroic, complicated women, and they wrote about these women in ways that, at times, strongly align with some pertinent feminist ideologies, and, at other times, challenge them.

But there is so much more than that, namely, the nuances of the “new” women they created.

They pull in tradition and myth just to break them, and in doing so, re-shape the way we think about women and especially women’s liberation. Their texts are feminist, but there are many ways to write a feminist narrative. So what does it matter that they are a little different but also a little similar?

Morrison’s handling of race and ethnicity is considerably more comprehensive and frequent than Carter’s, and the oppressive experiences endured by Morrison’s characters tend to be far more emotionally and physically traumatic. In this scenario, we can ask how these oppressions are formed, what they have in common, and how identity lends itself to oppression and freedom. To analyze one author as the “white, British one” and the other as “the African-

American one” is not to position them against each other, or to pretend that Carter speaks for the entire white British experience, while Morrison speaks for the entire African American experience. There are, of course, so many more voices, and many of them work together even if they represent different identity categories. My hope is that this comparison is a snapshot of two distinct feminist voices whose heroines might have more in common than meets the eye. Weitzner 5

Introduction

What could an African American slave and a white, British circus performer possibly have in common? A comprehensive comparison between the fictional experiences of Sophie

Fevvers, of Angela Carter’s 1984 novel Nights at the Circus, and of Sethe Suggs, of Toni

Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved indicates that more is shared than meets the eye. These texts gave to the world two supremely distinct heroines who sharply deviated from the literary trajectories of 1980s feminism. What does it mean to be a fictional character who is a product of a feminist agenda? How similar are their characterizations and their experiences of oppression and liberation?

Critical precedent demonstrates how Morrison and Carter used these novels to break dominant cultural myth and recover negated histories. Can we learn more about these myth- breaking female protagonists by comparing them? Possessing different identities on the premises of race, class, and community, these heroines led overtly disparate lives. Furthermore, their experiences of oppression can’t be weighed as equally traumatic. However, both engage in complex struggles of self-reconciliation and self-defined liberation that are developed by surprisingly similar themes and styles. Thematically, both Fevvers and Sethe fight to achieve personal identities greater than those of objects or animals, as such demeaning reductions are often imposed by external forces. In achieving these self-defined identities, they both grapple with notions of selfhood, self-acceptance, and self-ownership that are rooted in the relationship between the physical body and the spirit. Stylistically, Carter and Morrison drive these plots with the heavy use of magical realism, metafiction, and the recurring motifs of birds and flight.

Contextually, both authors constructed heroines to drive texts that deconstruct and decode cultural myths. Weitzner 6

These engagements with deconstruction, magical realism, and metafiction signify the authors’ use of postmodern literary techniques. Carter and Morrison both explicitly defined themselves as feminists, and their stories can each be viewed as an intersection of literary postmodernism and feminism. However, the ideological melodies of second-wave feminism,

African-American feminism, and white British feminism were not perfectly harmonious when these two novels were published. Yet, surprising similarities in the literary approaches to these novels make themselves known through the analysis of texts, contexts, and authorial statements.

Employing feminist theory and critical race theory, this examination of these shared literary approaches may offer a more comprehensive understanding of the constructions of Sophie and

Sethe as they are simultaneously reflected in, and products of these socio-historical circumstances. While these two authors do use a number of surprisingly similar approaches to develop the paths to liberation of Fevvers and Sethe, this comparison will not be productive if we weigh their experiences of oppression as identical. That equality is simply false. In “An Open

Letter to Mary Daly,” Audre Lorde writes,

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries… but that does not mean it is identical within those differences [...] To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference [...] For then beyond sisterhood is still racism.

The lived experiences of misogyny and objectification in Sophie Fevvers’ life are certainly not to be trivialized, but their traumas are not akin to the notoriously penetrative pain and suffering of slavery and racism as endured by Sethe. Rather, this comparison aims to examine two paths to liberation taken by two distinct female protagonists, and to understand what it means that their creators shared such similar literary themes and styles in the context of the mid-1980s. What does it mean that the same literary approaches are used to paint two different pictures of two seemingly different women?

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I. Giving a Voice to the Smothered: Engagements with Postmodern Literary Techniques

Two groundbreaking novelists, Morrison and Carter are often regarded as writers who redefined the traditional boundaries of the genre. Beloved and Nights at the Circus appeared as triumphant works that each author wrote relatively late in her career. Morrison was 56 when her novel was published, and Carter was 44, just eight years shy of her death in 1992. Carter tells the story of Sophie Fevvers, a bird-woman circus aerialiste who grows wings from her back. Jack

Walser, an American journalist, wants to know the truth behind the “Cockney Venus.” Is she fact or is she fiction? Morrison tells the story of Sethe Suggs, an escaped slave who kills one of her children when her master comes to reclaim her children as his property. In that moment, Sethe decided she would rather pass her children onto heaven than let them live a life of bondage, but she is haunted by the ghost of her dead baby and suffers the psychological scars of slavery. In giving literary life to suppressed representations of women, both summoned highly original characters by blending what they believed to be their heroines’ quieted histories with more commonly known myth. Sally Keenan, in her writing, From Myth to Memory: The Revisionary

Writing of Angela Carter, Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison, argues that their writing shares, “an appropriation of prior myths and fictions” which the authors use to “disrupt and challenge forms of discursive inheritance which have effaced or distorted the histories of women in western culture.” Morrison specifically challenges the histories of her respective ethnic communities in the United States (2). Consequently, their writing recontextualizes our knowledge of history and reality and, “...contribute[s] to the challenge posed to post-

Enlightenment western hegemonic discourses by those who it left out, its gendered and racial others” (3-4). Indeed, new representations of women, and especially women of color, had been at the time largely shut out of the global canon. Weitzner 8

These myth-breaking stories are inevitable products of their socio-historical contexts, just as they are critiques of these environments. While Nights at the Circus and Beloved were both written in the mid-1980s, neither is set in the author’s present day. Fevvers takes flight in 1899,

“before the last cobwebs of the century blow away” (39) while Sethe lives at 124 Bluestone

Road in the 1870s. In their respective regions, Sethe and Sophie live during times of great transition. “[Nights] is set at exactly the moment in European history when things began to change” said Carter in a 1994 interview. “It’s set at that time quite deliberately, and [Fevvers is] the new woman. All the women who have been in the first brothel with her end up doing these

‘new women’ jobs, like becoming hotel managers and running typing agencies, and so on,” (“A

Conversation”). Jeannette King, in her critical work, The Victorian Woman Question in

Contemporary Feminist Fiction argues that, “By making female experiences central to their narratives, such novels gave women back their place in history, not just as victims but as agents”

(10).

As part of this process of re-authorization, Beloved is set during the “Reconstruction” period of the United States, a dozen years post- Civil War; another time of great change, re-birth, and regeneration (Davis, 78). Though Ohio was technically a free state, the KKK still ran rampant throughout the South and southern border states, inciting fear in any person of color, regardless of class, profession, or status. Institutional racism—an even more omnipotent force— had long settled into the soil and soul of the country. Through her work, Morrison believes her

“ideal situation is to take from the past and apply it to the future” (Ruas). In considering the nature of her work as it directly relates to the social climate of the 1980s, Morrison articulates how the story engages with an ongoing struggle by black women:

The whole problem was trying to do two things: to love something bigger than yourself...and also not to sabotage yourself, not to murder yourself...This story is about, among other things, the tension between Weitzner 9

being yourself, one’s own Beloved, and being a mother...You can surrender yourself to a man and think that you cannot live or be without that man; you have no existence. And you can do the same with children. It seemed that slavery presented an ideal situation to discuss the problem. That was the situation in which Black women were denied motherhood (Darling 35).

Both authors are also often considered innovators in fiction, and by virtue of these innovations they successfully filled in some of the gaps left open by a patriarchal-dominated history. Their approaches produced “historiographic metafiction” that writers such as David

James describe as self-scrutinizing and self-reflexive (211). In furthering a comparison of the two authors, James notes that, “Even though Morrison echoes Carter’s preference for ‘putting new wine in old bottles’, she would be less inclined to share Carter’s enthusiasm for ensuring the

‘pressure of new wine makes the old bottles explode’” (211). While Morrison also declared, “I am not experimental” (213), she still held colossal influence in changing our conception of what fiction could be and what fiction could do. As Kimberly Chabot Davis points out, Morrison defines herself in interviews as an “anti-postmodernist author of black-topic texts” (76).

However, even if she does not identify as postmodernist, she undoubtedly uses some now- established techniques of the movement to tell her story, namely, deconstruction and re-thinking of the definition and functions of history. Morrison instead describes her process as “...trying very hard to recreate something out of an old art form” (211). The old art form she references seems to be the long-standing tradition of storytelling, and the “something” is, in short, a profound narrative of the psychological scars of slavery.

Statements from the authorial interviews available to us demonstrate a shared inclination to explore the experiences of a single woman, or type of woman by constructing her in the image of a particular idea. Both authors believed the representation or the story of that women to be smothered by a dominant history. The act of writing fiction about American chattel slavery through the perspective of a former female slave was in itself revolutionary, and the complicated Weitzner 10 theme of infanticide surfaced new questions in the western literary canon. In Barbara Smith’s words, “The use of Black women’s language and cultural experience in books by Black women about Black women...takes their writing far beyond the confines of white/male literary structures” (21). Our understanding of Sethe’s time at Sweet Home and the psychological pain she endured thereafter provides for the mainstream literary canon nuances of a history otherwise unknown. We, as a collective, largely white American audience, might already know of the demeaning circumstances and damaging effects of chattel slavery. However, our historical conscious is deepened and these lived realities are validated when they are presented to us through such an intimately personal story, and a story in which slavery itself was made to feel

“intimate.”

While the nuances of Beloved are profoundly layered and involved, Morrison’s creative trajectory appears straightforward. In a 2001 interview she explained, “I am provoked...by

Margaret Garner. What must that feel like?” Historically, Margaret Garner was a slave who chose to kill her toddler daughter rather than permit her to endure a life of bondage. Originally labeled a mad murderer, Garner was later heralded as a symbol of “tragedy and resistance”

(Taylor). Though Garner gained notoriety, the circumstances that pressured her into the decision were exceedingly common for the era. African American historian Nikki M. Taylor understands the phenomena of Garner’s case to be a product of the gender ideals and familial obligations, arguing that enslaved women were expected to be selfless and sacrificing. “Good mothers,” she writes, “did not abandon their children, just as good wives did not abandon their husbands, on a quest for personal freedom” (chapter 1). Given this cultural imposition of maternal altruism,

Garner was one of thousands, if not millions of enslaved women to endure this emotional struggle and moral dilemma. Whereas Garner, like Sethe, did not abandon her children, she does, Weitzner 11 arguably, continue to prioritize their needs. In killing their children, they re-assert their identities as mothers and resist the influence of their oppressor or master. These social codes insisted that a woman would give her entire self to her family, irrevocably putting their needs before her own, and conforming to an ideology in which prioritizing the self is criminal. The moment schoolteacher and his nephews arrive at 124 to reclaim the people they believe to be their property, an intense wave of panic overcomes Sethe. Arriving at the realization that her children may be returned to bondage, Sethe asserts herself as a being of agency. Sethe can easily pose as representative of many women who were faced with the dilemma of putting their own needs before the needs of others and proving to themselves and to others their right to control their children.

In the novel’s foreword, Morrison elaborates, “The heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom. The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless” (xvii). Evidence of

Sethe’s own guilt and shame as imposed by outside voices run abundant in the novel. For example, Denver becomes too ashamed to attend reading lessons after another child, Nelson

Lord, “...asked her the question about her mother.” That is, Nelson addressed the rumours of what Sethe did to her children, and the query alone induced in Denver “certain odd and terrifying feelings about her mother” as well as “monstrous and unmanageable dreams” (121). The weight of Sethe’s reputation materializes into a suffocating, maddening force on all the residents of 124.

While it might seem that an other-wordly force would coerce Sethe to commit such an inhumane act of infanticide, we begin to understand that her treacherous journey through motherhood was an all-too familiar experience for enslaved women. As the reader pieces together the mosaic of circumstances and pressures in Sethe’s life which Morrison lays out for us, we see that the Weitzner 12 ranges of choices with which she is left is hardly a range at all. Rather, a binary. As she perceives her world, to let schoolteacher take her children is to cede control over her children. To kill them is to reclaim her right to control them. While she feels shame and regret in the years that follow, she also begins to reconcile this negativity with an understanding of the environment that she believed left her with no choice. For a short time, she tries denying the sum of exhausting troubles that come her way but finds that disengaging is not the solution to the pain of rememory.

Carter too works to provide for readers re-imagined representations of women whose realities were not yet reflected in the mainstream canon. “It’s not very pleasant for women to find out about how they are represented in the world,” she declared (“A Conversation”). Like

Morrison, Carter expresses interests in writing Nights that are also rooted in a question of a female’s lived experience. She aims to explore what the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire describes as a woman “who will have wings and will renew the world” (“A Conversation”).

“[Fevvers is] very literally the winged victory, but very, very literally so,” she remarked. “How inconvenient to have wings, and by extension, how very, very difficult to be born so out of key with the world” (“A Conversation”). Indeed, a woman needn’t have wings grow from her back to feel misunderstood, or to believe she is treated unequally in the social realm. Again, like

Morrison, Carter pursues the question of a symbolic woman, or a female paradigm asking what must that feel like? The woman that Fevvers represents is not ashamed of her sexuality, nor her body, and she understands the relationship between her body, power, and confidence. With this large and clumsy frame of hers, she is not afraid or ashamed to occupy space in the physical or verbal sense. For example, “Her laughter spilled out of the window and made the tin ornaments of the tree outside the god-hut shake and tingle” (294). Her wings relay not only an element of magical realism and a defining, personal trait of Fevvers, but a metaphor for the occupation of Weitzner 13 verbal and physical space which women were historically denied. In the last line of the novel,

Fevvers asserts before Walser this commitment to her occupation of space: “It just goes to show, there’s nothing like confidence!” (295).

The texts share an inherent social commentary that the earlier eras they reference exercise treatments of women undeniably applicable—if not similar—to the present; social climates of these historically transitioning times are metaphorically anchored to the authors’ present day. In telling these modern stories, the incorporation of myth proves key in the recuperation of lost histories. Upon publication, Sethe and Fevvers presented themselves to the world as re-imagined versions of traditional feminine figures of patriarchal myth and discourse. These mythological connections are often twisted, negated, or re-shaped, to help construct the “New Woman” that is

Sethe and Fevvers. As heroines whose identities maintained aspects of traditional myth, but were not created in their exact image, Fevvers and Sethe provided for these modern stories a sense of familiarity. The texts in which they reside are also relaying the notion that as long as these myths have been around, historically, so have these women. There have always been women whose only relationship with sexuality is rape, or sex as currency. There have always been women who choose to have children and believe in their right to decide what is best for them. There have always been women whose sense of self is sacrificed for the happiness or stability of another.

There have always been women whose difference or label of “otherness” threatens their very humanity. And there have always been women who fight as hard as they can against the oppressive forces that presented them with such challenges in the first place. Fevvers and Sethe are influenced by these women, and are shaped by their mythological predecessors, but with idiosyncrasies specifically designed to address and attack the oppressive forces and structures of their present moment. Weitzner 14

From one work of mythological criticism, these heroines share characteristics that are born from biblical tradition. Namely, destruction, seduction, and bravery. In her essay, “The

Irrepressible Lilith of Angela Carter and Toni Morrison,” Gillian Alban explains that as the first insubordinate wife of Adam, Lilith exhibits a particular strength and sexuality toward which men express both dread and fascination, awe and repulsion. She embodies a disruptive influence,

“enabling women to discard stultifying female roles” (16) and thus becomes the “nefarious scapegoat” (13) of the patriarchy. Alban argues that many contemporary women writers have turned to the Lilith figure, embracing her female power. “Both Carter and Morrison illuminate

Lilith’s outrageous qualities while creating a powerful model for contemporary women” (17). In

Lilith’s image, Sethe and Fevvers are beautiful, strong, irrepressible, disruptive, and, eventually, sexually independent. For possessing these characteristics, they are often feared and misunderstood by men.

With respect to Sethe, the myth of Lilith is especially used to articulate the issue of motherhood, as Shirley Stave argues. This material informs the “tremendous power” that women draw from giving birth while foregrounding “motherhood’s darker side, the loss of the self to the all-consuming child” (49-50). In tracing the parallels between Sethe and Lilith, Stave interprets

Sethe as representing the “Great Mother Goddess” for her experience of successive pregnancies while enslaved, and the repeated imagery of her breasts dripping with milk (51). Most significantly, Stave understands a parallel to Lilith in Sethe’s act of killing her daughter in which

“the sacrifice of the child and the drinking of the blood are divided between two aspects of a single self: Sethe commits the sacrifice, and Denver, the daughter/child-self, drinks the blood of

Beloved at Sethe's breast” (51-52). At the end of the novel, Denver says, “I tasted its blood when Weitzner 15

Mama nursed me” (247). Lastly, Alban explains that in giving a voice to Sethe, her defiance is valorized:

In rejecting Eden with its seeming perfection—and rejecting its God as well—Sethe/Lilith arrives at an identity created through self and community rather than one imposed by some other being. [...] She herself becomes archetypally constitutive of the fusion of the disabling Good Mother/Terrible Mother duality. Patriarchal culture has privileged motherhood to the point of apotheosis, but that privilege is predicated upon its fear of and subsequent desire to control the mother (58).

The mythical undertones of Medea also run deep in the characterization of Sethe. Given that the

Greek mythical mother killed her offspring, the parallel is quite apparent. To frame the figure of

Medea as a slave brings the tragic myth into a modern context. In her critical work, “Medea as

Slave. On Toni Morrison’s Beloved” Imaculada Kangussu articulates how the topos of “the horrible infanticide as a reaction to a tragic situation” is recurrent throughout history, as it has commontly been appealing to women. In her words, “While Medea is a mythical character, Sethe

– the character created by Toni Morrison – is a fiction based on a real person, on Margaret

Garner, who has really killed her daughter, and because of this gesture became an important and almost mythical personage in the struggle of North American abolitionists” (i). Sethe therefore embodies a culmination of myth, reality, and the woman born from Morrison’s imagination. The fact that her character as well as her story draw from these multiple vessels of “truth” (myth, history, reality, and imagination) also further illustrates Morrisons’ engagement with literary postmodernism.

Carter also engaged with this philosophical movement to create her heroine. While the concept of the “dirty,” “fallen,” or “misguided” angel or bird-human existed long before Fevvers, she seems to be the first who is at once female, sexualized, and cockney. Gabriel García

Marquez, for example, published the short story “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes”

(“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”) in 1968. In creating Fevvers, Carter drew on several mythological figures, and re-shaped them to partially break from their patriarchal roots. The Weitzner 16 originality of Fevvers is partially materialized in her contradictions and paradoxes. Sporting her wings, she possesses the beautiful features of a mythical nymph, yet with her height and clumsy, masculine etiquette, she lacks their ethereal grace. She is not a dainty fairy, nor a sweet little songbird. She is a figure who evokes Helen of Troy, and yet is a “decidedly deromanticized

Helen” (Boehm 195). She is knowingly an object of the male gaze, yet chooses to be so. She is one being, and yet, like Sethe, she is a symbol of many women; she is a “female paradigm”

(Keenan, 95).

As the “Winged Victory” and “Angel of Death,” Fevvers harks back to several Greek and biblical figures, including Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, and Azrael, the angel of death from the Old Testament. As the “Cockney Venus,” Fevvers is likened to the Greek goddess of love, who was often symbolized by a dove. In another nod to Greek mythology, a portrait of

Leda and the Swan appropriately hangs from the mantle in Ma Nelson’s London brothel. A young Fevvers posits that her father may well be a swan, suggesting that she is positioned as

Leda. She does claim, after all, that she was “hatched” from an egg. However, writers such as

King point out that Fevvers actually identifies more with “the power of the male God disguised as a bird, rather than with the helpless human Leda” (135). Fevvers, effectually, encompasses a melding of several mythological figures, especially those of Ancient Greek origin associated with love, sex, power, and desire.

The concept of Fevvers as this “Angel of Death,” “Iron Maiden,” or “Madonna of the

Arena” achieves special significance in her setting in the 1980s. Carter uses these myths to create

Fevvers as a woman whose nuances and personality might also be understood in modern terms.

Helen Stoddart perceives Nights as a novel about Britain in the 1980s and argues a strong parallel between Margaret Thatcher and the characterization of Fevvers. Like the stoic British Weitzner 17 prime minister, the aerialist is recognized as a “self-promoting individualist” (8) whose success in the public eye is likened to the way Thatcher’s success in government “depended on the way she quickly appropriated what had previously been seen as masculine values and symbols” (9).

They are both women who recognize the importance of the world’s perception of their image.

Here, especially, Fevvers acknowledges her objectification, her very embodiment of spectacle and symbolism. “...during my blossoming years...I existed only as an object in men’s eyes...”

(Carter, 39). Where the parallel to Thatcher is eventually lost, or becomes paradoxical, Carter’s re-vision of myth becomes even clearer. Unlike Thatcher, who championed a near Victorian-era brand of repression of pornography, prostitution, and sexual promiscuity (Curti), Fevvers openly embraces sexual expression and sex work. This belief is evident in her association with the nineteenth century counterculture institutions of the circus, the brothel, and the music hall. For example, she considers prostitution not a disease, but a “rational choice” (King 139). Also dissimilarly, Fevvers eventually loses faith in employing or capitalizing on “male symbols and fixities” for her own benefit (Stoddart, 10). The construction of her identity becomes predicated on symbols and realities less dependent on “the past and the patriarchal” (10). In contrast to a dainty, ephemeral Hellenic figure, Fevvers is enormous, clumsy, bad-breathed and dirty- mouthed. She wholly embraces her grotesqueness. However, while Fevvers is in part defined through this opposition to patriarchal myth, critics such as Stoddart argue that her exact construction as it relates to myth cannot be clearly defined beyond this negation. While she is an

“embodiment of possibility,” she is impossible to be pinned down because “women are shown to have such varied relationships to the used myths and fictions about them that circulate, depending on their changeable interrelationships and position within wider social hierarchies”

(53). The “new” myth that Fevvers embodies is her own perception of the “New Women,” for Weitzner 18 she is a paradigm of the many women who do not conform to the patriarchy’s view of what a woman should be.

II. Between Feminisms

With respect to the burgeoning social ideologies of the time, Nights at the Circus and

Beloved were published at a transitional period between feminisms; second-wave feminism seemed to be dying down while third-wave feminism began to solidify into widespread discussion and action. And, while Carter and Morrison are often defined as feminists, their respective novels as well as critics of their era indicate that their conceptions of the feminist movements were not identical. While an exact explanation of their personal feminist ideologies cannot be produced, the feminist implications of their texts can certainly be compared and dissected. Holding these innovative texts side by side allows us a clearer view of the range of interpretations and manifestations of 1980s feminism in 1980s fiction.

The use of metafiction further solidifies the notion of both novels as manifestations of postmodern techniques and feminism. Critics widely hold Nights as a feminist text, naming it, for example, “a complex metafictional feminist novel” (Boehm 193). Fevvers embodies a feminist concept of the “New Woman” if not the “New Women,” for she is a paradigm of many women. Boehm also argues that Nights is intentionally written to undermine traditional androcentric reading strategies:

Carter...attempts to teach us how to read a feminist virtuoso performance within her text, through the example of Jack Walser. For while Fevvers is foregrounded as the new myth of the free, confident, creative woman, the more interesting transformation actually occurs to her male reader...Identity, Walser comes to understand, is constructed through both the fictions we are told and the fictions we tell (201).

While the kinky and grotesque nuances of Nights might suggest that the novel was aimed solely at a female audience, this was not the effect. The metafictional prowess of the story Weitzner 19 actively encourages all of its readers, and especially its male audience, to learn from it. From this perspective, Walser is a stand-in for the collective public, including (and especially) the male audience. As a journalist, he parallels the reader in that we both yearn to uncover more about

Fevvers’ life. In the last scene of the novel, Walser maintains himself as a stand-in for the reader, explaining, “All that seemed to happen to me in the third person as though, most of my life, I watched it but did not live it” (294). On the other hand, Fevvers is Carter’s ideological mouthpiece, embodying the woman of the future in which Carter places faith: “Look at me! With a grand, proud, ironic grace, she exhibited before the eyes of the audience as if she were a marvelous present too good to be played with. Look, not touch” (15). The “Cockney Venus” represents the many women whose stories were smothered by history’s patriarchal hegemonic hands. By the end of the first scene in the dressing room, for example, it’s not hard for us to imagine that Fevvers is speaking directly to us; our hands might tremble in search of our reporter’s notebook, and we can’t help but begin to wonder is she fact or is she fiction?

We can use a feminist lens to further analyze Fevvers’ embodiment of a collective female experience. From a twentieth-century perspective, Carter “revisits Victorian ideals of sexual difference” and implicitly situates her “challenge to Victorian ideas about the female body in relation to recent debates about the body in feminist theory” (King 132). In the opening scenes of the novel, for example, Lizzie proudly declares what seems to be one of the second-wave feminist cruxes of the novel: “Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!” (21). Here, Lizzie tackles the long- debated relationship between corporeal freedom and marriage, echoing one of the objectives of late second-wave feminism. In King’s argument, Fevvers courts ‘deviance’ in order to further her own evolution, “ignoring the social imperative of marriage and the evolutionary imperative Weitzner 20 of maternity” (132).” Second-wave feminists expressed a desire to unsubscribe to the institution of marriage, traditional gender roles, and notions of femininity. Even though the movement had diversified by 1985 to increase representation of women of color, the social agenda still lacked specific attention to the realities and needs of women of color and poor women.

Morrison’s feminism is devoted to the intention of giving humanity and justice to black women by producing a neo-slave narrative that paints a deep and full picture of the atrocious histories of American chattel slavery and American racism. Beloved’s portrayal of physical and sexual violence is continuous, highly graphic, and “focuses precisely on the ways in which slavery violates structures and determines the psychic life of the black subject” (Hutcheon 43).

Such an insight was substantially unprecedented, and the novel is revolutionary as both a neo- slave narrative and a feminist text. In a 2012 interview with Christopher Bollen, Morrison articulates her social philosophy in the 1980s:

This was also at a time when feminists were very serious and aggressive about not being told that they had to have children. Part of liberation was not being forced into motherhood. Freedom was not having children, and I thought that, for this woman, it was just the opposite. Freedom for her was having children and being able to control them in some way—that they weren’t cubs that somebody could just buy. So, again, it was just the opposite of what was the contemporary theme at the moment. Those differences were not just about slavery or black and white—although there was some of that—but in the early days, I used to complain bitterly because white feminists were always having very important meetings, but they were leaving their maids behind! (Interview Magazine, 2012)

Morrison’s last remark especially emphasizes the need for increased contributions of women of color to the feminist conversation in the 1980s. Once involved in the movement, women of color could then help improve the feminist discourse to acknowledge more seriously the specific problems they face. Morrison’s question of female agency in motherhood echoes the controversies that historically surrounded the culpability of Margaret Garner. The character of

Sethe Suggs embodies this very conviction of freedom. “Beloved, she is my daughter. She is mine,” Sethe declares. “She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now” (236). Naturally, not everyone in the novel (or everyone who reads the Weitzner 21 story) agrees with Sethe’s logic of killing her daughter is an act of love that makes her “safe.”

However, Sethe’s convictions draw attention to the radical assertion that as a slave who is also a mother, she can claim a right to the fate of her child. Barbara Smith further articulates the necessity of Morrison’s voice in the canon working towards a literary feminist agenda. In critically reading texts such as Beloved, Smith also calls for “A Black feminist approach to literature that embodies the realization that the politics of sex...and race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers.” This approach is so desperately needed, Smith argues, because there is no developed body of black feminist political theory that can be applied to close readings or study of art created by black women (21). In part, the metafictional component of Beloved directly calls for this kind of criticism. Sethe reaches from the page to the reader and encourages him or her to consider all of these “interlocking factors” of identity and experience. Beloved as self-conscious fiction is partially evident in the intertwining of each character’s distinct story. These stories are shared with one another, just as they are shared with the reader. For example, Denver loves to hear the story of her birth, and holds it to be true. She also enjoys sharing this story with Beloved. At the same time, these stories can be doubted by one another. For example, Ella does not believe the story of Sethe’s arrival at 124.

She tells Stamp Paid, “So what? I ain’t saying she wasn’t their ma’ammy, but who’s to say they was Baby Suggs’ grandchildren? [...] And tell me this, how she have that baby in the woods by herself? Said a whitewoman come out the trees and helped her. Shoot. You believe that?” (220).

At the end of the novel, the text almost addresses us directly: “This is not a story to pass on”

(323). We, as readers, think back to the extraordinarily harsh conditions that Sethe endures and the waves of nausea and exhaustion that overcame her. We, too, might struggle to believe Weitzner 22 everything she shares. We may be challenged to decide for ourselves which narratives contain the “true” history.

Much the way that Nights can be read as resistance against androcentric reading strategies, so does the metafictional component of Beloved challenge the white gaze; it does not coddle or privilege the white reader. What the story does not principally aim to do is “convince white readers’ of the slave’s humanity [...] but to address black readers by inviting [them] to return to the very part of [their] past that many have repressed, forgotten or ignored” (Mobley

48). Black female readers might then receive this uncovering of the past as both pertinent and personal. Whereas Carter arrived at new representations of women by re-writing myths about gender, Morrison re-wrote myths that incorporate both gender and race, reflecting “...how gender determines destiny especially if one is not only a woman but also colored,” (Rahmani 64). In grappling with one of the main themes of infanticide, for example, we are led by Morrison to view Sethe not only as a mother, but as black, as formerly enslaved, as poor, and a woman who is tragically much more familiar with rape than with pleasurable sex. Sethe suffers the overlapping oppressions that follow the overlapping identity of female and black. As a woman, she bears the burden and the joy of being a mother, but as black, she must fight exceedingly hard to maintain this identity as mother. As an enslaved black woman, she is perceived as little more than a vessel of milk, or a mare to be tamed; object or animal, but hardly human.

III. Magical Realism

Another gesture of literary postmodernism, the heavy employment of magical realism in

Nights at the Circus and Beloved is a key element in understanding the process of myth-breaking and myth-making. By extension, magical realism encourages readers to grapple with the effect of Weitzner 23 a female figure with magical qualities or encounters in each text. How then do we, as readers, come to terms with Sethe and Fevvers as they engage with realities beyond our own? We might begin to recognize the shared product of “recovery” as articulated by Keenan (i). That is, the use of magical realism reveals itself as inherently intertwined with the authorial intentions of feminism, postmodernism and the creation of historical metafiction. The fusing of these literary approaches permits Fevvers and Sethe to lead fictional lives that actively serve to occupy sociohistorical spaces otherwise left untouched, distorted, or severely repressed. Consequently, it becomes clearer that even though these protagonists exhibit “unrealistic” qualities, they ironically materialize as “the women who have always existed” and can then be seen as metaphorically believable and realistic.

Carter and Morrison succeed in allowing their readers to align their convictions with those of the characters; if they believe in the supernatural, or the “non-real,” so do we. Keenan observes how Carter “...plots a precipitous negotiation in her stories and novels between the familiar and the every day, and a world of estrangement, dream, and desire, touching on what is repressed by or ‘abominable’ to our rational, conscious minds” (3). Furthermore, Helen Stoddart discusses how, “The distinction between fact and fiction emerges as a dead end, mainly because

Carter is a writer who was, above all, absorbed in ideas, which, by definition, transcended these two categories” (4). In a similar respect, the power of supernatural elements in Beloved help build it as a ghost story about slavery. Critics such as Thomas R. Edwards acknowledge these elements as necessary in the novel’s lasting effect. He says, “The ghost of the eldest daughter is no projection of a neurotic observer, no superstitious mass delusion...If you believe in Beloved at all you must accept the ghost in the same way you accept the other, solidly realistic figures in the story” (18-19). Just the same, Margaret Atwood believes Morrison’s treatment of the Weitzner 24 supernatural carries a “magnificent practicality” because “[A]ll the main characters in the book believe in ghosts, so it’s merely natural for this one to be there” (40). Atwood also refers to Baby

Suggs’ explanation: “Not a house in this country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead

Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband’s spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don’t talk to me. You lucky” (6). The flesh-and-blood spirit of Beloved, then, functions as a character-as-symbol, and possesses far more agency over Sethe and the other residents of

124 than would any hallucination or transient apparition. She is constructed as real, and so she is read as real. Years after the novel was published, Morrison still asks, “who is the Beloved?”

Beloved’s influence exists not only as a single figure, or symbol in the text, but a presence that carries into the modern day, especially with respect to the experiences of black women.

The central role of magical realism in both texts serves to bolster the novels’ metafictional qualities. Consequently, this creation is understood as part of the feminist intention to recover and create women’s negated stories and representations. Critics such as Heather

Johnson explain that Nights can be read as metafiction because of devices that encourage the text to consider its own “status as a piece of writing” (71). For example, the frequent references to

Fevvers’ origins gives the novel a biographical effect. In another respect, the figure of Walser as a journalist provokes the reader to ask what he asks: “Is she fact or is she fiction?” (71).

Moreover, if Nights is a metafictional text, Fevvers is a metafictional character. She reminds us that a real discrepancy exists between fiction and reality. And, while Walser represents the act of writing, Fevvers represents speech, encouraging us to consider how Walser’s intention to objectively “record” the truth eventually falls apart. Because the novel itself questions the “truth” of history, the narrative mimics Carter’s very gesture to question the authority of well- established histories. Johnson concludes that Nights “presents history as personal narrative or Weitzner 25 reconstruction, illustrating the novel’s impressive engagement with contemporary developments

[...] such as historiography, which questions the ‘truth’ of historical narratives” (76). Therefore,

Carter’s multilayered use of postmodern literary techniques further bolsters the feminist content of her novel.

Beloved as a magical realist work functions by re-examining the past “in its original vigour,” as Jeanette Winterson puts it (12). According to Linda Hutcheon, “If Beloved is a story about a ghost, it is a story which itself has a ghostly status or existence, haunting...the gaps and silences of the tradition on which it draws, seeking release” (43). This “tradition” refers to what

Morrison might call the “official” history, mostly dominated by white, male writers. In tackling this established history, Morrison also describes herself not as an “African American writer” but as an “American writer” (Colbert). While Morrison speaks predominantly about different experiences of the African American identity, she categorizes herself as an American writer to make a point about the use of race and racism in the United States; they are socially constructed, negotiated, exploited, and re-shaped again to benefit those who originally established them

(Colbert). Perhaps to describe herself as an American writer is to place the stories she writes not solely as African American history, but African American history as it is inherently woven into the whole of American history. Davis points out that, “Morrison acknowledges that history is always fictional, always a representation, yet she is also committed to the project of recording

African American history in order to heal her readers” (76). Again, the “believability” of Sethe is paramount, because it grounds Morrison’s ability to fill in these historical gaps and tell a history of its own. Sethe is “unbelievable” enough to the extent that a point is made about her archetype’s absence in the “official history” and “believable” enough for an audience to take seriously Morrison’s claim that many women lived a life of maternal psychological suffering as Weitzner 26

Sethe did. The experiences of Sethe as an agent of motherhood, infanticide, and self-liberation are presented as visceral, shocking, and intensely physical, such that Sethe’s story feels new, untouched until the novel’s publication.

Effectually, these metafictional, magical realist novels encourage their respective cultures and audiences to engage in a new way of reading. Metafiction can be framed as “a powerful tool of feminist critique, for to draw attention to the structures of fiction is also to draw attention to the conventionality of the codes that govern human behavior, to reveal how such codes have been constructed and how they can therefore be changed” (Greene). In one sense, readers can understand that winged women and infant ghosts are just as absent from the dominant cultural narratives as are accurate and comprehensive representations of women and their struggles.

Carter and Morrison are, on principle, describing realities painfully abandoned by the history books. In another sense, the use of magical or “unbelievable” elements forces readers to question the discourses and structures that define for them what is “real” and what is not.

IV. Flight and Inversion: The Motifs of Birds

To compare the women who drove these texts that re-imagined myth and re-wrote negated histories, we can start by examining their characterizations, and their experiences of oppression. One of the strongest parallels lies in the stylistic use of birds, wings, and the act of flight. In Nights at the Circus, the function of magical realism is tightly braided into these powerful motifs and symbols. Imagery and symbolism of birds in Beloved also function as vehicles of the supernatural. Like the use of magical realism, they mark the novel as metafictional and re-mythologizing. The motif of birds is also key in the construction of a pursuit of a self-defined sense of freedom in both novels. Carter’s employment of such imagery, Weitzner 27 however, is much more overt, though Morrison’s is equally ubiquitous. In outlining the implications of a new genre that emerges at the crossroads of postmodernism and feminism,

Lidia Curti claims that, “The genre here moves from novel to spectacle, with the staging of the

‘play’ between the poetics of feminism and postmodernism. It is a sort of dance, and dance by no chance is a recurrent topos in the present feminist imaginary, in the same way as...flying and flight, wings and angels are” (81). Truly, the wings as they are represented in both texts are loaded with mythological and cultural reference, and they pose as codes that are emphasized by

Carter and inverted by Morrison.

In Nights, Fevvers’ wings are one of the strongest feminist symbols in the novels, and function as Fevvers’ defining trait. They steer the trajectory of her life, notably initiating her relationship with Walser. According to Fevvers, her wings fully develop once she reaches puberty, suggesting they are an inherent part of her womanhood, akin to menstruation. Upon their arrival, they are met with shock but positivity in the female-dominated community of Ma

Nelson’s brothel. They also come to serve as a force of power, as Ma Nelson directs Fevvers to pose in the parlor as a cupid-like figure. Wielding a sword, Fevvers greets the nightly guests as they enter, reminding them with this phallic imagery of the agency possessed by the women in the house. Upon witnessing Fevvers’ first successful flight, Ma Nelson declares, “I think you must be the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no woman will be bound down to the ground” (25). Certainly, then, Fevvers embraces this animal-like trait. She later comes to identify herself as bird-like, admitting, for example, that, “I won’t touch a morsel of chicken, or duck, or guineafowl, and so on, not wanting to play cannibal” (77). However, at the same time that these wings represent hope and a proud idiosyncrasy of Fevvers’, they also come to differentiate her from other people, and for this is Weitzner 28 she is later objectified as a spectacle, kidnapped, and subjected to an attempted human sacrifice.

To make ends meet, Fevvers uses her wings as a form of currency, much the way that a woman might sell her sex as a prostitute. Her wings, after all, represent a part of her womanhood, and her reluctant agreement to be a part of Madame Schreck's museum of freaks speaks to a larger social phenomenon of the exploitation of both the female body and human difference.

Furthermore, Fevvers admits to dying her wings to increase their appeal to audience at the circus.

Like her participation in the museum of freaks, this decision to alter her naturally-given animal trait implies that she acknowledges the unique treatment society will give her for this differentiating trait, and she will intentionally emphasize this difference as a survival mechanism.

When defending herself or others, Fevvers oscillates between depending on her wings for strength and turning to other weapons, many of which are rife with phallic imagery. For example, in confronting Madame Schreck, she carries her up into the high ceilings, declaring,

“Now I can negotiate from a position of strength” (72). At the same time, she discloses that she keeps Ma Nelson’s “swordlet” on her at all times. Even when not using weapons, Fevvers’ actions are often described as masculine: “She invitingly shook the bottle until it ejaculated afresh” (12). When saving Walser from the tiger, she uses a hosepipe and “...shook out the last few drops in a disturbingly masculine fashion” (166). Fevvers’ confidence and composure, in supplement with the unique power she derives from her wings, might then be reconciled by some onlookers as a masculine trait. “It flickered through [Walser’s] mind: Is she really a man?” (35).

If she is not a woman, she must be a man, and if she is then not a man, she might be an animal, and if not an animal, then perhaps an object, a mere spectacle or vessel of entertainment. And, though it is Fevvers’ wings that subject her to danger and exploitation, she does not appear to Weitzner 29 lament their existence. Rather, she embraces them, and confronts her reality by simply cursing the forces who treat her ill. She remarks for example, “If I hadn’t bust a wing in the train-wreck,

I’d fly us all to Vladivostok in two shakes” (244). Her insistence on her grasp of her own identity and reality also deepens the novel’s metafictional implications. She continues, “I’m not the right one to ask questions of when it comes to what is real and what is not, because [...] half the people who clap eyes on me don’t believe what they see, and the other half thinks they’re seeing things”

(244).

Towards the end of the novel, she not only embraces her wings anew, but perceives them as symbolically belonging to all women. She declares, “...all the women will have wings, the same as I [...] the dolls’ house doors will open, the brothel will spill forth their prisoners, the cages, gilded or otherwise, all over the world, in every land, will let forth their inmates singing together the dawn chorus of the new, the transformed--” (285). Simultaneously, she embraces the part of herself that is animal-like, while identifying her whole self with all other women, thus strengthening Carter’s construction of Fevvers as representing many women whose freedoms are suppressed. By extension, Keenan also argues that Fevvers represents hope for the feminist movement as a whole. After all, her wings, combined with her large stature, boisterous etiquette, and sexualized nature further allows her to break from patriarchal myth because she does not identify with the likes of the asexual fairy, dainty fairy, the nymph, and so on. Her wings represent freedom in more than one way. Keenan discusses how Fevvers’ “‘tremendous red and purple pinions’ [are] nothing less than a resymbolising of women, an attempt to dislodge them from within the frame of that patriarchal mirror of masculine self-reflection” (86). As King points out, Fevvers’ success in achieving flight has far more to do with practice than with her magical gift of wings. “[S]he achieves release from Victorian gender constraints and resists Weitzner 30 objectification when she is admired for what she does, rather than what she is, when her flight, rather than her wings, is the focus of attention” (137). French feminist Hélène Cixous writes,

“Flying is a woman’s gesture [...] for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers.”

While Fevvers’ wings offer hope and possibility, Sethe’s own bumps on her back represent smothering oppression; a painful grounding of hope. We can view Sethe’s escape from

Sweet Home as a sort of “flight,” but understand how the psychological scars of slavery keep her

“grounded” or forbidden from flight for a lengthy duration of the novel. The conflict that presents itself to Sethe, and many former slaves, of getting to “...a place where you could love anything you chose -- not to need permission for desire” (191) might be conceived as a struggle towards achieving metaphorical flight. Indeed, such a flight would signify a departure from the

“self” that is still steeped in the memory and “re-memory” of slavery; a departure from the self as defined by someone else, and the arrival of a self whose identity is not forcefully imposed by an oppressive exterior but established on one’s own terms.

In Beloved, the hummingbird symbolizes the difficulty in the achievement of this flight.

It speaks to the traumatizing power of visions and re-memories of slavery. A buzzing that suddenly beats inside Sethe’s head. Without warning, Sethe observes her former master, schoolteacher, approaching 124, and under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she understands schoolteacher’s legal right to reclaim her, along with her children. When she recognized schoolteacher’s hat, “...she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything it was No.

No. Nono. Nonono” (192). What we might otherwise conceptualize as a sweet little bird is now a Weitzner 31 symbol of the staggeringly painful psychological impacts of slavery. With its penetrating beak, it bolsters the central theme of the power of memory and rememory. In the presence of this buzzing, Sethe responds by thinking, “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 [...] and the hummingbird wings beat on” (192). Here, Morrison relays that the act of achieving freedom was a heavily mental and emotional process, as much as it was physical. To remove the body from the source of oppression was not enough to end the process of fully recognizing oneself as woman, mother, and human. Rather, one had to slowly rid themselves of the feelings of inferiority, and the imposition of themselves as animal or object. Articulating one of the central messages of the story, Sethe thinks to herself how “Freeing yourself was one thing. Claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (111-112).

The hummingbird is just one of many birds in the novel, all of which hold a symbolism whose traditional association is entirely inverted. The result is that nearly all references to birds in the novel relay a mood or scene of pain and suffering much more than any notion of celebratory or liberating flight. Susana Vega Gonzalez, in her critical work, “Broken Wings of

Freedom: Bird Imagery in Toni Morrison’s Novels” describes this representational phenomenon:

Disruption and inversion of human nature were at the heart of slavery and racism and this is what Morrison intends to portray in her novels. lf human beings are turned into animals, then birds can be grounded with broken wings. We have seen that in many of the cases...birds are often fraught with negative meaning, one of suffering, pain, humiliation, madness, and death, in keeping with the disruptive character of nature that is present in this author (82).

Morrison’s creation of this “disruptive nature” is what relays Sweet Home as a hell on Earth, emphasizing that slavery inverts and disrupts all humanity. Gonzalez spells out these symbolic inversions to reveal that the rooster, “Mister,” summons darkness instead of light; a cardinal Weitzner 32 evokes acts and memories of murder, rather than beauty; a dove foreshadows rape instead of peace and purity; the hawk represents an enraged mother, rather than a free spirit on its way to heaven; the little buzzing hummingbird stands as a bloodthirsty warrior who, like Sethe, succeeds in their mission of protecting their territory (her daughter) from a predator

(schoolteacher), loses themselves in the process.

The comparison of Sethe to a hawk is especially potent, as it likens her children to prey:

“So Stamp Paid did not tell [Paul D] how she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way; one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand” (185). At the same time, such a description still functions to emphasize Sethe’s devotion to her controlling the fates of her children and offers a metaphorical tableau of the infanticide. Clearly, Sethe would be happier in a life in which Paul D’s comparison of a hawk would not be so accurate, but in this life, she is left with no choice but to embrace it. Under this same symbolic framework, slavery represents

Sethe’s animal-like hunger that forced her to work so vigorously and obsessively in “collecting” or “snatching” her children. When Buglar, as a toddler, wandered into danger, Sethe recalled,

“Once he got up on the well, right on it. I flew. Snatched him just in time” (188). As Paul D does, Sethe perceives her motherhood as hawk-like. This act of comparing herself to a bird of prey is also part of her intention to recollect her past at Sweet Home, as she considers the type of mother that her circumstances permitted her to become. She views her act of “flight” as part of her duties as a mother; in flying like a bird, she is acting like a mother, fulfilling the needs of her own humanity. This metaphor encourages readers to conceptualize how stunted enslaved women were in attaining any agency over their children. To exhibit love for something or someone was to risk pain, and so Paul D believed he had to learn to “love small” (191) whereas Sethe’s Weitzner 33 greatest flaw is her inability to love small. When women such as Sethe did exhibit agency over their children in the name of absolute love, it seemed to be too cold and controlling, and then it becomes clear that it was hardly agency at all. Consumed by work, Sethe was forced to tie a rope around her child’s ankle to ensure his safety. “I didn’t like the look of it,” she lamented, “but I didn’t know what else to do” (189). Her act of infanticide was the ultimate manifestation of this forced decision to control the fates of her children, so that she might act as their mother in some way.

When Sethe tells us outright, “It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves” (7) we can begin to comprehend the image of Sweet Home as deceptively peaceful or orderly. Produced by the same means of visual manipulation, the birds each character witnesses have the façade of beauty or peace when in the reality of Beloved they are harbingers of pain and suffering.

Consequently, if every bird in these characters’ lives has posed only as a symbol of oppression, why would anyone want wings? As readers who are grappling with the psychological influences of Sweet Home as it represents the whole of American chattel slavery, we may even begin to recognize this hellish association with each winged creature, for we know well that Beloved is rich in code-breaking. If flying is in fact the gesture of the woman, then repeated imagery of grounded birds indeed represents the suppressed ability of Sethe to identify as woman, as mother, as a free human. In one of the ultimate acts of “inversion,” Sethe is milked like a cow by schoolteacher’s nephews. Obviously traumatized by this sexual assault, she experiences unease not only in recalling the horror of the boys with “mossy teeth,” but in grieving the act’s theft of her breast milk. Naturally, Sethe strongly associates her breast milk with her motherhood. The designation “slave mother” is nearly oxymoronic, as women had very little agency over the lives Weitzner 34 of their loved ones. Sethe’s milk strongly represents for her one of the remaining, if not the only, conduits of motherhood. In constructing the self-as-mother, Sethe understands her own children to be a part of herself:

“And no matter, for the sadness was at her center, the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home. Sad as it was she did not know where her children were buried or what they looked like if alive, fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like” (165).

In the absence of her children, her sense of self is lost. Sethe’s notion of humanity is rooted in her reclamation of motherhood, and thus tightly bound to her identity as mother. In the limited scope in which she can take care of her children and practice agency over their lives at Sweet

Home, milk is one of the remaining proofs of motherhood. Though all mammals nurse, Sethe conceptualizes the theft of her milk to be a theft of her humanity. For if she cannot exercise any rite of motherhood, she can hardly consider herself human and sees little point to her free life at

124 if she cannot exercise her motherhood. She recalls, “All I knew was I had to get milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to to get it to her fast enough [...] Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me” (18). Here, Sethe asserts her right to care for her own child and relays the pain that follows a separation of mother and child: “They don’t know what it’s like to send your children off when your breasts are full” (19).

When Sethe would have reached freedom in Ohio, “The milk would be there and I would be there with it” (19). Sethe’s breast milk therefore possesses what she sees as her own maternal agency and is both a figurative and literal conduit of her maternal love and fulfillment of parental duty. For her milk to be exploited by white men is a microcosmic example of the deprivation of motherhood that is a hallmark of American chattel slavery. Because we are provided with such intense details of lives of bondage, we are offered the choice to sympathize with Sethe’s decision to not want her kids to endure the same tortures. We might choose to agree with Stamp Paid who Weitzner 35 says, She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out-hurt the hurter” (276). Or, we might choose to agree with Paul D who thinks, “This here Sethe talked about safety with a hacksaw” (193).

As much as we learn of these sufferings in bondage, we also learn about the consequences of the shock of freedom. Though Sethe can’t entirely shake off the chains of slavery, she tries to break them and learn how to live as a free self. Upon schoolteacher’s arrival at 124, Sethe fathoms with painful intensity the implications of surrendering her children to life at Sweet Home. While she experiences guilt in the years that follow the murder, she paints for us a picture that supports the idea that her decision was hardly a choice at all. In short, her act of infanticide was, in the moment of execution, a desperate assertion of her own humanity.

By this same reasoning, to be deprived of her milk is to be deprived of her humanity.

When Sethe reports this attack by the boys with the mossy teeth, she is punished by a flogging.

The scar that forms on her back takes the shape of a “chokecherry tree,” as Amy Denver observes. Sethe cannot see the image, but she knows it’s there. “Could have cherries too now for all I know”(18). The branches and little puss-filled blossoms serve as a constant reminder of the time Sethe fought back for what she believed was rightly hers. From this perspective, to be deprived of milk is to be deprived of the departure from the identity imposed by bondage to a self-imposed identity; theft of milk is theft of “flight.” At 124, Sethe comes closer to feeling like the human and the mother she knows herself to be, stating, “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms” (18). Like the scenery of Sweet Home, the image of the chokecherry tree embedded in flesh is eerily beautiful, because it represents such a horrendous history. Effectively, both Sweet Home and Sethe’s scar mimic Morrison’s linguistic approach to the novel itself. Using beautiful rhythmic language, Weitzner 36

Morrison tells the ugly history of slavery. However, this approach doesn’t entirely leave the story in paradox, as the same language is slowly used to offer messages of humanity, liberation, and hope. After Sethe’s arrival at the personal decision of “No sighing at a new betrayal or hand- clapping at a small victory” (204), she finds joy in ice skating with Denver and Beloved. As they slide and laugh on the frozen lake, “Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light. Nobody saw them falling” (205). This description can be interpreted as a sign that they achieve a joy and sense of liberation (as symbolized by the wings) in a place where they are freed from an outside gaze. In a sense, they find solace in being able to escape their blackness for a short while. Sethe begins to surrender even more personal identity in exchange for respite when, in a fit of laughter, “She stayed that way for a while on all fours”

(206). However, this surrendering doesn’t last long, because “...when her laughter died, the tears did not and it was some time before Beloved or Denver knew the difference” (206). Sethe might have heard echoes of Paul D’s reminder, “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (194). She comes closer to the exhausting realization that she can’t find true happiness or freedom if she surrenders who she really is.

What both women experience is a process of reclamation of the self, which forces them to confront their own self-definition and personal autonomy. Fevvers’ wings and Sethe’s scar, as symbols of their selfhood, are met with both awe and fascination, pride and disgust. They are grotesque, and leave Walser and Paul D, respectively, torn over their relationship with them. As the heroines demonstrate increased pride in these symbolic parts of themselves, they prove to exhibit a deep inner strength. Through the eyes of the men in their lives, this power also proves to be formidable, inciting fear and caution. In Nights, Walser always enters the spheres that belong to Fevvers, and finds himself entirely unprepared to objectively uncover the truth and Weitzner 37 expose her as a fake. In the dressing room, as well as the entire realm of the circus, Fevvers exercises control over his behavior, and he cannot seem to escape her influence. Even in disguise, he constantly fears exposure by her, and succumbs even more drastically to her will when she saves him from the tigress. In Beloved, Vega Gonzalez articulates how the disruptions of humanity, as represented by inversions of traditional bird symbolization, affect everyone at

Sweet Home, not only the women. Paul D observes, for example, how “Mister,” the rooster,

“...was allowed to be and stay what he was” (86) while Paul D was subjected daily to sexual assault by the white guards. The bird therefore taunts Paul D in its preservation of its own masculinity and pride, fittingly named. Both Paul D and Sethe are subjected to similar horrors of dehumanization, but in the reclamation of the power of self-imposed identity, Paul D later becomes frightened of Sethe. He observes, “This here Sethe was new [...] More important than what Sethe had done was what she had claimed. It scared him” (193). Here, Paul D is frightened by Sethe’s very conviction that to kill her children was to love them. Sethe herself oscillates between defending herself and feeling guilty for having killed her daughter.

As the heroines reclaim power wrongfully taken from them, both authors offer commentary that men have always feared powerful women. Both Fevvers and Sethe suffer the efforts of their oppressors to disempower the body through the white gaze. Fevvers is targeted for her wings, the likes of which offer to onlookers an opportunity to view her as “other.” Most of the physical violence that she would have endured, she is lucky enough to escape. Her experiences of bondage include her time at Madame Schreck’s museum of freaks, her kidnapping by Christian Rosencruetz, and her kidnapping by the band of Siberian runaways.

Each of her oppressors imposes an identity on her that they wish to exploit for their own personal use and ignore her humanity or other sense of selfhood. Rosencreutz, for example, believes her Weitzner 38 to be the only “virgo intacta” and intends to sacrifice her to achieve immortality. Like each oppressor, he is convinced of the right to control her based on that imposed identity.

Whereas Fevvers’ wings are the substance of her grotesqueness and often the root of her objectification, the very color of Sethe’s skin is enough to dehumanize her in the eyes of her oppressors. Carl Plasa explains, “...even as whiteness has typically sought to mask and efface itself by an appeal to the ‘normative’ white power,” by contrast, engages constantly in the project of rendering itself visible [...] in the context of Beloved, upon the enslaved black body by means of physical violence” (86). Even post-slavery, Sethe carries with her the physical scars that symbolize her emotional trauma that followed her from Kentucky to Ohio, from her life as the slave of a white man to her life as the slave of her own guilt and psychological hauntings. Plasa continues, “These processes of inscription and marking -- ‘with whips, fires, and ropes’ -- are perhaps given most spectacular form [...] in the “revolting clump of scars” that Sethe bears on her back...” (86). Sethe’s scar and breastmilk are symbolic extensions of her blackness, because without her blackness, she may not be enslaved or tortured to the same degree. Her scar, breastmilk, and, most significantly, the color of her skin induce and then represent, respectively, reclamations of the self: the self as human, the self as woman, the self as mother, and the self as free. Conclusively, for a white woman to endure the objectification and “animalization” that a woman of color experiences, she must possess a part of her that is literally animal-like or object- like. As metafictional characters, these women look their readers in the eyes. We are not only made to sense their sweat, their smells, and all that oozes from their weary bodies, but to understand why they seep. We come closer to understanding what tortured them so, and what aspects of their physical self they claim. They reclaim the physical parts of themselves that their oppressors used against them by imposed identities. Finally, as part of these acts of reclamation, Weitzner 39 both Fevvers and Sethe resist the oppressive figures in their lives who claim to know them better than they do. Fevvers denies herself to be the “virgo intacta” or a messenger of the tsar and escapes the clutches of Rosencruetz and the band of runaways, respectively. She can be bird- woman, and she can even be spectacle, but entirely on her own terms. Sethe asserts herself not as mare but as mother in the face of the “all-knowing” schoolteacher. In this refusal to accept an imposed identity, they are speaking against the figures who consider themselves as possessing or embodying some sort of “established knowledge.” By extension, Fevvers and Sethe are resisting the “dominant” truths or “official” histories of their time and place and are reflecting the same process of resistance and recuperation assumed by the very novels in which they live.

WORKS CITED

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Primary Sources

Carter, Angela. “A Conversation with Angela Carter.” Interview by Anna Katsavos. The Review of Contemporary Fiction. Vol. 14.3. Fall 1994.

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Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage Books, 1987.

Morrison, Toni. Interview with Stephen Colbert. The Colbert Report, 19 November 2014. http://www.cc.com/video-clips/9yc4ry/the-colbert-report-toni-morrison

Morrison, Toni. Interview with Susan Swain. In-Depth, C-Span, 4 February 2001. https://www.c-span.org/video/?162375-1/depth-toni-morrison

Morrison, Toni. Interview with Charles Ruas. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery, edited by Taylor-Guthrie, 1994.

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Stave, Shirley A. "Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Vindication of Lilith." South Atlantic Review, vol. 58, no. 1, 1993, pp. 49-66.

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Evans, Judith. “Chapter 6: Equality and Difference in Feminist Thought” Feminist Theory Today: An Introduction to Second-Wave Feminism. SAGE Publications, 1995.