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Projecting Mother Image: A Study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye
*Md. NazmusSaquebKathon & **KimanaKibriani Lecturers, Department of English Shanto-Mariam University of Creative Technology Uttara, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Abstract Morrison‘s status as a black woman writer cannot be neglected. There is an acute lack of historical accounts of black women as autonomous and determining participants during the period of slavery, emancipation and reconstruction. In Beloved, by drawing attention to the circumstances under which Sethe, the protagonist, makes her escape, Morrison gives women‘s experience of slavery a voice and most importantly a language. Sethe here is an active historical agent as opposed to a passive victim or absence. In Beloved, Morrison probes deep into the psychological effects of missing mother-infant bond and unearths the psychological damage of slavery to the mother-daughter relationship. Morrison‘s Beloved draws our attention to the psychological turmoil experienced by Sethe in the context of slavery. Morrison‘s another novel The Bluest Eye demonstrates a very unusual kind of mother-daughter relationship devoid of compassion, love and sympathy which results in the daughter‘s eventual dysfunctional sense of identity. This paper takes the psychoanalytic approach to examine the mother/daughter relationships and how they influence the daughter‘s psychological and social adjustment.
Keywords: Mother Image, Slavery, Mother-child relationship, Motherhood
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The works of Morrison portrays black women who have nothing to fall back on, not maleness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, in their struggle to discover the authentic black female self.All the history that the readers have learnt about slavery is stretched out in Morrison‘s novels on a giant canvas, the separation of women and children from men, the treatment of slaves, both male and female, children and adults, as beasts of burden, the sexual exploitations of African women by white men. Beloved explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual damage caused by slavery. Slavery creates a negative impact on the former slaves‘ senses of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Slaves were told they were subhuman and were traded as commodities whose worth could be expressed in dollars. Beloved is set during the Reconstruction era in 1873. It centers on the powers of memory and history. For the former slaves in the novel, the past is a burden that they desperately and willfully try to forget. Yet for Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, memories of slavery are inescapable. They continue to haunt her, literally, in the spirit of her deceased daughter. Eighteen years earlier, Sethe had murdered this daughter in order to save her from a life of slavery. Morrison borrowed the event from the real story of Margaret Garner, who, like Sethe, escaped from slavery in Kentucky and murdered her child when slave catchers caught up with her in Ohio. Sethe‘s most striking characteristic; however, is her devotion to her children. As Sethe is unwilling to relinquish her children to the physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma she herself has endured as a slave, she tries to murder them in an act that is, in her mind, one of motherly love and protection. Her memories of this cruel act and of the brutality she herself suffered as a slave infuse her everyday life. It leads her to believe that past trauma can never really be eradicated—it continues, somehow, to exist in the present. She thus spends her life attempting to avoid encounters with her past. Perhaps Sethe‘s fear of the past is what leads her to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Beloved is the reincarnation of her murdered daughter. Indeed, even after she acknowledges Beloved‘s identity, Sethe shows her to be still enslaved by the past, because she quickly succumbs to Beloved‘s demands and allows herself to be consumed by Beloved. Only when Sethe learns to confront the past face-to-face, to assert her in its presence, She can come out from its oppressive power and begin to live freely, peacefully, and responsibly in the present.
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Beloved‘s elusive, complex identity is central to our understanding of the novel. She may, as Sethe originally believes, be an ordinary woman who was locked up by a white man and never let out of doors. Her limited linguistic ability, neediness, baby-soft skin, and emotional instability could all be explained by a lifetime spent in captivity. But these traits could also support the theory that is held by most of the characters in the novel, as well as most readers: Beloved is the embodied spirit of Sethe‘s dead daughter. Beloved is the age the baby would have been had it lived, and she bears the name printed on the baby‘s tombstone. She first appears to Sethe soaking wet, as though newly born. Additionally, Beloved knows about a pair of earrings Sethe possessed long ago, she hums a songSethe made up for her children and she has a long scar under her chin where her death-wound would have been dealt. Another interpretation views Beloved as a representation of Sethe‘s dead mother. Beloved recounts memories that correspond to those that Sethe‘s mother might have had of her passage to America from Africa. Beloved has a strange manner of speaking and seems to wear a perpetual smile—traits we are told were shared by Sethe‘s mother. At the end of the novel Beloved and Sethe have switched places, with Beloved acting as the mother and Sethe as the child. Their role reversal may simply mark more explicitly what has been Beloved‘s role all along. On a more general level, Beloved may also stand for all of the slaves who made the passage across the Atlantic. She may give voice to and embody the collective unconscious of all those oppressed by slavery‘s history and legacy. Beloved is presented as an allegorical figure. Whether she is Sethe‘s daughter, Sethe‘s mother, or a representative of all of slavery‘s victims, Beloved represents the past returned to haunt the present. Although Beloved vanishes at the end of the book, she is never really gone—her dress and her story, forgotten by the town but preserved by the novel, remain. Beloved represents a destructive and painful past, but she also signals the possibility of a brighter future. She gives the people of 124, and eventually the entire community, a chance to engage with the memories they have suppressed. Through confrontation, the community can reclaim and learn from its forgotten and ignored memories. In Beloved,Setheconstantly combines her identity with that of her child. Setheunintentionally named Beloved after herself. When the minister at her daughter‘s funeral addressed the living (including Sethe) as ―Dearly Beloved,‖ she believed he was referring to her dead daughter. Rather than engraving her child‘s real name on her tombstone, she engraved ―Beloved,‖ a
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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 name that now refers both to herself and to the baby. Sethe feels debased and dehumanized by her experiences as a slave and thus cannot love herself. Instead, she puts all the energy that should be spent on loving herself into loving her children. Her own identity is defined entirely in terms of motherhood. Sethe herself cannot conceive of the word ―beloved‖ as referring to herself but only to her child; she regards her children as the ―best part‖ of herself. Because Beloved‘s name refers to Sethe as well, and because Sethe defines her children as part of herself, Beloved functions as a sort of alter ego for Sethe. Morrison based her plot on a Cincinnati murder case arising from a woman's sacrifice of her children to keep them out of the grasp of slave catchers. As Morrison saw it, slavery denied black mothers the right to feel maternal love and eventually made them ambivalent toward their own offspring, particularly those sired by slave ship crews, overseers, and masters. In her words, "[These women] were not mothers but breeders." In Beloved, Morrison explores the psychology of motherhood when a slave mother and her children experience freedom. No longer a "breeder," the mother is free to love her children absolutely and, therefore, becomes capable of making unthinkable sacrifices to protect them. An iron-willed, iron-eyed woman, Sethe is haunted not only by the ghost of her dead daughter but also by the memories of her life as a slave. While she has been scarred by the physical brutality of schoolteacher's nephews, she seems even more deeply disturbed by her discovery that most white people view her as nothing more than an animal. She asserts her humanity through her determination to reach freedom and to give her children a free life. When faced with the reality that her children may be sent back into slavery, Sethe chooses to free them through death rather than allow them to encounter even a portion of her past experiences. In Sethe's mind, killing her children to save them from slavery is the ultimate expression of a mother's love. Morrison shows us that Beloved is a multifaceted character: She is the ghost of a child, the ghost of the nameless slaves, and the ghost of a terrible but inescapable past. Sethe and Denver will have to learn to overcome Beloved's power — the power of the past — before they can create a life for themselves in the future. A mother killing her own child is an act that subverts the natural order of the world. A mother is expected to create life, not destroy it. The truth about Beloved's death is finally revealed, and Morrison leads up to the story with images of death and unnatural circumstances.
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Beloved embodies not just the spirit of the child Sethe killed but also all of the past pain and suffering from which Sethe and Denver have never been able to escape. Initially they are fascinated by Beloved and what she represents, but in this chapter Morrison demonstrates how destructive centering one's life around the past can be. As Beloved feeds upon their fascination, Sethe and Denver's lives devolve into chaos and then into near-starvation. At the end of the novel, Beloved disintegrates into nothingness, thereby opening the way to wholeness for Sethe. Gossips forget her over time. Sethe and Denver gradually heal from their harrowing battle with the tireless, vindictive ghost.The ghost's footprints recede into nature as Beloved, returned to her grave, no longer clamors for her mother's kiss. Beloved quickly becomes a dominant force in Sethe's house. She drives Paul D out of Sethe's bed and seduces him. She becomes the sole focus of Sethe's life after Sethe realizes that this young woman is the reincarnation of her dead child. Drawing Sethe into an unhealthy, obsessive relationship, Beloved grows stronger while Sethe's body and mind weaken. Sethe quits her job and withdraws completely into the house. With the aid of Denver and some female neighbours, Sethe escapes Beloved's control through a violent scene in which she mistakes Bodwin for a slave catcher and tries to stab him with an ice pick. Beloved vanishes, and Paul D returns, helping Sethe rediscover the value of life and her own self-worth. Some debate exists over the identity of Beloved. While some critics claim that she is the spirit of Sethe's murdered daughter, others argue that she is a human woman who is mentally unstable. The most common interpretation of the Beloved character, however, is that she is the spirit of Sethe's dead child and, as Denver notes, "something more." That something more is a collective spirit of all the unnamed slaves who were torn from their homes in Africa and brought to America in the cramped and unsanitary holds of slave ships. In a sense, Beloved is not only Sethe's daughter but her mother as well. Because Beloved is supernatural and represents the spirit of multiple people, Morrison doesn't develop her character as an individual. Beloved acts as a force rather than as a person, compelling Sethe, Denver, and Paul D to behave in certain ways. Beloved defines herself through Sethe's experiences and actions, and in the beginning, she acts as a somewhat positive force, helping Sethe face the past by repeatedly asking her to tell stories about her life. In the end, however, Beloved's need becomes overwhelming and her attachment to Sethe becomes destructive.
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Morrison dedicates the book to "sixty Million and more," an estimated number of people who died in slavery. Beloved represents Sethe's unnamed child but also the unnamed masses that died and were forgotten. With this book, Morrison states that they are beloved as well. The novel The Bluest Eye demonstrates a very unusual kind of mother–daughter relationship devoid of compassion, love and sympathy which results in the daughter‘s eventual dysfunctional sense of identity. It also shows how the daughter's relationship with her mother psychologically shapes the daughter in the area of social adjustment. In many ways the mother is an example to the daughter. Frequently the daughter finds herself either repeating patterns or refraining from demonstrating her mother's behavior.
The mother in The Bluest Eye, Pauline Breedlove, has imposed her own self-hatred and low self-esteem on her daughter, Pecola. Mrs. Breedlove defines herself as physically unattractive and teaches her daughter to identify herself as the same. ―And they took the ugliness in their hands and threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it, each according to their own ways. Mrs. Breedlove handled her as an actor does a prop for the articulation of character, for support of a role she frequently imagines was hers martyrdom. … And Pecola … She hid behind hers. Concealed, veiled, eclipsed – peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom and then only to yearn for the return of her mask.‖ The above passage illustrates Pecola's inheritance of self-hatred which is passed down by her mother. The racist values that society had taught Mrs. Breedlove is also passed down to her daughter. Mrs. Breedlove learns society's lessons well: whites are more beautiful than blacks and white is good; black is bad. Therefore, she chooses to find pleasure and happiness with the white Fisher family in which she is the housekeeper thus, leaving her own home and family unattended. Pauline Breedlove loves the white family she works for, but abhors her ownfamily. This is demonstrated by her lack of concern for her own family. For example, Mrs. Breedlove takes pride in the Fisher home but neglects the care of her own home. She loves the Fisher home because it is so much better than herown home. Mrs. Breedlove admires everything about the Fisher home, especially its whiteness. She even prefers the Fisher girl's golden hair as opposed toher daughter‘s ―black wool‖. Pecola's mother, Pauline, in her youth used to find solace at the movie theatre. A virtual newly-wed, pregnant and lonely, Pauline describes her time at the picture show as, ―The
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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 onliest time I be happy‖. Seeing such women as Jean Harlow on the large screen, Pauline attempts to mirror the Caucasian look, ―I fixed my hair up like I'd seen hers [Jean Harlow] on a magazine. A part on the side, with one little curl on the forehead. It looked just like her. Well, almost just like‖. In the same manner, Pauline's daughter is also obsessed with the desire to have blue eyes, an Anglo characteristic. Pecola yearns for ―blue eyes‖ early in the novel. While at ―Yacobowski's Fresh Veg. Meat and Sundries Store,‖ Pecola has three pennies with which she may purchase any candy available behind the display window. Pecola chooses the Mary Janes. The image on the wrapper is the face of a white girl, ―Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort‖. Morrison establishes the motive for Pecola's selection, ―To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane‖. Thus Pecola's admiration for unattainable physical traits not only stems from her mother's motion picture influences, but also from Pauline's treatment of white children in comparison to her own. This is best exemplified in the scene with the berry cobbler. Pecola, out of curiosity, lightly touches the pan that houses the cobbler resulting in the ―splattering [of] blackish blueberries everywhere‖. The cobbler, fresh from the oven, burns Pecola's legs when it spills. However, Pauline virtually ignores Pecola. Instead, she rushes to the assistance of the distraught ―pink-and-yellow girl‖, the daughter of the white people for whom Pauline works. The intimacy between the white girl and Pauline is further reinforced when the reader discovers that the young girl has an informal name for Pauline, ―Polly‖. Pauline, in turn, refers to the Caucasian child as ―baby‖. On the other hand, Pauline denotes her own daughter, Pecola, as ―Crazy fool‖, whereas Pecola calls her mother by the formal name of ―Mrs. Breedlove‖. Here, the dialogue represents more than just ―spilled pie.‖ The reader is given no option but to overhear the dysfunction in this mother/daughter relationship. Pecola infers that if she embodies the look of an Anglo with blue eyes, she, too, may possess the love of her mother. Pauline Breedlove is projected as an abusive mother who not only mentally abuses Pecola, but also physically abuses her. For example, on the very occasion in Fisher‘s kitchen Mrs. Breedlove physically abuses Pecola to punish her for the ruined kitchen floor and blueberry pie she had made for the Fisher girl. She jumps on Pecola, knocks her to the floor and slaps
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Volume III, Issue V, July 2015 – ISSN 2321-7065 her repeatedly. Mrs.Breedlove is unconcerned with Pecola's pain. Instead she is preoccupied with the ruined pie and stained floor. Pauline Breedlove‘s character deviates from the stereotypical image of a loving, tender concerned mother.She lacks the warmness and closeness of a mother which is clearly evident in Pecola‘s complete ignorance of her puberty and menstruation. The nature of the mother/ daughter relationship existing between Pecola and Pauline Breedlove is simply that of a provider and dependent minor. Mrs. Breedlove refrains from demonstrating any type of affection for her children. It is her coldness towards her children and her teachings of self- hatred that psychologically destroy Pecola. Pauline Breedlove plays a major role in Pecola's mental breakdown. Mrs. Breedlove joins in with society's disgust and isolation of Pecola. She as a mother absolutely gives no mental support when Pecola was ravaged and ‗ruined‘ by her own father. She rather blames her and thus is a willing participant in the destruction of Pecola's self-image. Her preference for the white Fisher girl over Pecola validates Pecola's low self-esteem. Into Pecola Mrs. Breedlove ―beats a fear of growing upa fear of other people, and a fear of life‖. Pauline Breedlove reinforces society's values of the American standard of beauty, which is European based. In conclusion, The Bluest Eye demonstrates that the mothers are like role models, who as examples shape their daughters' attitudes and behaviours. In addition, the constant hatred and disgust of the mother, Pauline Breedlove towards her daughter is actually a projection of her own insecurities and self-hatred that paved the way for Pecola to follow her lead to the path of self-destruction and disgrace.
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References 1. Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison’s World of Fiction (Whitston Publishing Company 1993) 2. David, Ron. Toni Morrison Explained (Random House Reference, 2000) 3. Duvall, John N. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison (St. Louis University 2002) 4. Gates, H.L. Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the Racial Self (Oxford Uni. Press 1987) 5. Irfan, Ayesha. A Reader’s Companion to Toni Morisson’s Beloved (Asia Book Club 2002) 6. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye (New York 1987) 7. Morrison, Toni. Beloved (Picador, 1987) 8. Rigney, Barbara. The Voices of Toni Morrison (Ohio State University, 1994) 9. Rosenburg, Ruth. Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The BluestEye (Black American Literature Forum 1987) 10. Smith, Valerie. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives: Past and Present (New York 1993)
Web References: http://slaveryintheus.wikispaces.com/Beloved http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/beloved/canalysis.html http://impactnovels.wikispaces.com/file/view/Beloved.doc/326783926/Beloved.doc http://www.gradesaver.com/beloved/q-and-a/what-is-the-importance-of-beloveds- appearance-how-do-you-relate-her-figure-to-the-theme-of-the-novel-58571/ https://www.scribd.com/doc/155522328/Beloved-SparkNotes http://cis01.central.ucv.ro/litere/idd/cursuri/an_3/lit_straina/engleza/lit_engl_an3_sem 2_sorop_07.doc http://authorgroupie.blogspot.in/2013/10/a-comparison-of-bluest-eye-and- beloved.html
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