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Toni Morrison, Beloved, Race and Tragedy

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Toni Morrison, Beloved, Race and Tragedy Toni Morrison, Beloved, Race and Tragedy Submitted by David Roger Whitehouse to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in August 2018 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that any material that has previously been submitted and approved for the award of a degree by this or any other University has been acknowledged. Signature......... 1 Abstract This thesis investigates Toni Morrison’s engagement with tragedy in her novel Beloved. In opposition to late twentieth-century interpretations of Beloved, which see this novel as reordering or revisiting history in order to establish in its characters a sense of self-worth, this thesis understands Beloved as the narrative which calls a halt to the search for a worthy sense of self in a prescribed history. It argues that the form of this novel is designed and arranged in order to present in dramatic time a conception of a consciousness recognisable as already and always existing in African American individuals: that is, before, during and after slavery. This thesis contends that an engagement with tragedy is crucial in the achievement of this end. In an engagement with Morrison’s Nobel Lecture (1993), Chapter One argues that the significations of cultural authority are the result of a process in which negotiations of difference take place (Bhabha 2005). In a study of Morrison’s engagement with Du Bois’s (1897) theory of double consciousness, Chapter Two researches the complex nature of true fulfilment for the marginalized. Du Bois’s difficulty in establishing a simple claim to equality is contrasted with Morrison’s rejection of the discourses of difference, exclusion and marginalization (Morrison 1993). Chapter Three develops this line of enquiry to include Morrison’s adaption of ancient, tragic drama to the demands of African American writing. Morrison’s innovatory use of the separate and external configuration of human sensibilities in the form of Beloved is carefully considered in this chapter. Chapter Four engages with theories concerning the imposition of difference and the material conditions of appropriation, and the signifying system it spawns (Guillaumin 1995). It discusses Morrison’s aesthetic engagement with the master/slave relationship. 2 Table of Contents Introduction p. 4 Chapter 1. p. 25 Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, the archaic demands of culture, and the appropriateness of tragedy in the postmodern presentation of the unspeakable. Chapter 2. p. 84 The role of Beloved, Du Bois’s conceptualization of double-consciousness, Sula and Nel. Chapter 3. p. 132 Toni Morrison, Beloved, Hegel’s theory of tragedy, and a commitment to the historical consciousness of the form. Chapter 4. p. 179 Toni Morrison’s aesthetic presentation of self- expression and autonomy in a group designated as an undifferentiated mass. References p. 239 3 Introduction James Berger (1996), in considering Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), feels that it returns to an essentially liberal view of the traumatic effects of ‘institutional racism’ (408), positioning this novel in the discursive contexts of the decade of its publication. His perception of the ‘liberal position’ (415) is developed within a critique of ‘Reaganist’ conservatism of the 1980s, and the oppositional forces of ‘black nationalism’ and the New Left. Neo conservative polemics thrived within conservative denials that race was a ‘continuing, traumatic and structural problem in contemporary America’ (Berger 1996: 408). The conservative view of race ‘attributed the poverty and violence of urban [African American] ghettos to individual moral deficiencies’ (411). In this context racial injustice was thought to have little influence on life in the slums. Berger points out that ‘the few negative reviews’ (411) of Beloved ‘emerged’ from this position (411) and perceived the African American community as an underclass which consisted of ‘single mothers on welfare, drug addicts and gang members’ (411). In this way, American racial trauma became ‘submerged’ and ‘disguised’ (412) within a debate which concentrated more and more on problems concerning ‘crime, welfare and the underclass’ (412). Berger contextualizes this debate as one of the consequences of Daniel Moynihan’s report which, in the 1960s, ‘strongly endorsed investment’ (412) in employment and housing in African American communities. This report cited as 4 the reason for this support the fractured family life and family structure in the community which it saw as a continuing cause of poverty. Berger points out that Moynihan was ‘particularly critical’ of what he believed was the matriarchal organization of black families (412). The report, he believes, ‘severed’ the links between ‘liberal activists and thinkers’ and encouraged African American feelings of militancy that were to arise within black nationalism (412). In contrast, the 1970s witnessed a vigorous attack on the idea that ‘there was nothing of value in the black community’ (413) and Berger points to the growing belief in the extraordinary powers within African American communities to absorb the racialized criteria foisted on them and to establish a firm base from which to develop an African American culture (Berger 1996). In these terms, the new left ‘denied any dysfunction within African American communities’ (414). In light of these arguments Beloved is placed as an ‘intervention’ in the debates which preceded but were also associated with its inspiration. Challenging ideas of moral deficiency and environmental deprivation, and the inability of ‘white’ America to recognise the insidious presence of racism at the centre of the debate, Berger claims that Morrison’s view is that ‘power and official knowledge continue to violate African American lives’ (411). And more than that, he claims that Morrison in Beloved ‘revives traditional liberalism by insisting on African American personal and cultural agency and a powerful role for women’ (415). In Ashraf Rushdy’s opinion, it is recollection which serves and conserves a sense of self. In Beloved, he says, Morrison has presented a story ‘in which memory is the crucial device of being’ (1990:307). The joining of recollection and 5 sense of self is achieved, he believes, through the construction of ‘primal scenes’ (303) whose significance is manifested in their recollection during a second critical event. The primal scene, he argues ‘need only be of such significance that an individual would recollect it’ and not another at a moment in time ‘when driven to re-evaluate her or his life’ (303). Consequently, a primal scene is an occasion which facilitates self-discovery through ‘memory and through what Morrison felicitously calls “rememory” ’ (303). It is the presence once again of Paul ‘D’ in Sethe’s life that triggers thoughts of their slave past and the memories they share. This is the catalyst, according to Rushdy, which leads to the events which cause both characters to remember the traumas of their past lives as part of the same story, their story. In this way, memory is neither ‘stable’ nor ‘personal’ but is a ‘communal property of friends, of family, of a people’ (321). In Morrison’s novels, Rushdy sees the ‘magic of memory’ as ‘interpersonal’ (322) and fundamental to the beneficial relationships between people who have been subjected to disturbing experiences and who also remember. In this context, memory is a personal thing but its sharing assists healing and self-discovery within the individual in the community: Sethe’s and Paul’s became ‘communal property’ as ‘re-memories’ (322). Two years later, Rushdy (1992) was still very interested in how the past is remembered. He labels Morrison’s efforts to relate events from the past as ‘this black aesthetic of remembering’ (568). Not only does Morrison use a theory based on an inherited culture, an ‘inherited history’, but she ‘delicately yet resolutely’ takes up ‘the task of reviving the very figures of that history’ (568). It is the search to represent the compellingly human dilemma of the slave which prevents 6 Morrison’s work from forming a ‘master plot of victim and victimizer’, he says (568). In ‘articulating this critical and hopeful feminist voice’ (568), Rushdy believes that what Morrison does is to revise history around subjective characters whose experiences are able to signify on the accepted readings of the past. Their experiences as slaves are perceived as crimes against the individual because they demean and disregard what are seen as self-evident, human values. However, it is noteworthy that if the past is to be revised it means that history is to be implicated in the successful, or otherwise, presentation of the African American character. And, critically, this would mean an encroachment into a history made in America by white Americans. James Baldwin (1988) has also spoken in terms of the aesthetic concerning Morrison’s work. ‘Her gift is allegory’ but ‘her books and allegory are not always what they seem to be about’. In acknowledging this Baldwin feels that ‘Beloved could be about the story of truth’ (284). But the truth he refers to, he feels, is not wholly achievable in a revision of history or a revival of the characters who took part. He points out that ‘whites want black writers to mostly deliver something as if it were an official version of the black experience’ (285). However, ‘no true account really of black life can be held, can be contained, in the American vocabulary’ (285). Within these views it is possible to detect differences between Rushdy’s black aesthetic of remembering and Baldwin’s mistrust of the representation of experience within a language where the ‘allegedly inferior are actually made so’ (Baldwin 1995: 25).
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