Psychological Approach in Morrison’s “Beloved”

Psychological Approach in Morrison’s “Beloved”

The fight for psychological stability is a continuous one in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel situated in an era of slavery and its aftermath. It is a complicated process that requires access to painful memories, which the characters in the story try to recover, achieve “the join” so desperately wished for in Beloved’s soliloquy chapter. Refuse, when they no longer refuse the most profound knowledge of the meanings of their individual and historical pasts.

All four of these characters, and, to some extent, every black character in the novel who believes he or she has seen Beloved (as well as Bodwin, the one white character who also sees Beloved), experiences Beloved either as a fractured aspect of Sethe’s psyche or as a kind of doppelganger for his or her own feelings of loss, grief, confusion, and rage, and, in the case of Bodwin, feelings of accountability, culpability, and guilt. The novel not to be passed on, the story not told in traditional slave narratives; Is that of psychosis, dissociation, of climbing out of one’s body to forget, “that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up” (251).

This reading is not meant to exclude or even necessarily to contradict other passages of who Beloved is. The question of the identity of the mysterious young woman who appears on a stump not far from the house on Bluestone Road is crucial to almost any reading of the novel. Yet Toni Morrison herself has been explicit in encouraging her readers to arrive at interpretations which may or may not coincide with those intended by the author; in her essay “Unspeakable Things, Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Morrison makes the case for a reading of Beloved consistent with what Holloway has called a “plurisignant” (Holloway 618) text, one with “the concurrent presence of multiple as well as ambiguous meanings” (Holloway 629):

These spaces, which I am filling in, and can fill in because they were

planned, can conceivably be filled in with other significances. That is

planned as well. The point is that into these spaces should fall the

ruminations of the reader and his or her invented or recollected or

misunderstood knowingness. The reader as narrator asks the questions the

community asks. (Morrison, “Unspeakable” 29)

The characters believe that Beloved is the ghost of the “crawling already? Baby,” but Morrison makes the question of who Beloved is so ambiguous that the characters, as well as the readers, are frequently confused as to Beloved’s identity. Most readers and critics of the novel assume that Beloved is who Morrison herself has claimed she is. When asked who summons the spirit, Morrison replies that Beloved “is a spirit, on the one hand, literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead … [S]he is also … a survivor from a true, actual slave ship,” further explaining that Beloved could be both one who returned from Middle Passage and the ghost of “the crawling already? Baby” because “the language of both experiences–death and Middle Passage–is the same” (“In the Realm” 5-6).

Who Beloved is, fittingly, is not merely ambiguous but multiply inscribed, Simultaneously, she represents many things, many people, each of which is true. For Sethe, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Ella, and the thirty women of the community who come to exorcise her, the adult Beloved is a catalyst for healing who functions as a version of the beautiful African woman wearing a canary yellow dress who spits on Jadine in Tar Baby; she is a doppelganger, an alter ego, a shadow, a darker and more authentic version of the self. Morrison describes the African woman as the “original self–the self we betray when we lie, the one that is always there. And whatever that self looks like … one measures one’s self against it” (“An Interview” 422).

While none of the residents of 124 and the surrounding community appear to welcome the precursor to the adult Beloved, the poltergeist-like spirit of the murdered “crawling already? Baby” (except for Denver who thinks of the ghost as a kind of playmate, a mischief-making ally who among other things will assist her in preventing Paul D from displacing her as the entire focus of her mother’s attentions), the description each character supplies about the spiteful two-year-old provides the first major clue in the novel that the residents of 124 unconsciously summon the disembodied spirit, and, later, the apparently incarnated Beloved, in order to displace onto a shadow self the knowledge of feelings too painful to otherwise allow to surface to consciousness.

Paul D’s response to the ghost, which, as for the other characters, reflects his own repressed emotions about the past, about his personal history, is to inquire, “Good God … what kind of evil you got in here?” (8). His memories are so suffused with terror, humiliation, and physical, sexual, and emotional violation that it is not surprising that his response to something associated with his feelings about the past, and his own capacity to remember as well as to feel, is simply to condemn it as evil. Denver contradicts this description of the ghost with a definition of her own, explaining that the ghost is, as she experiences herself, “rebuked. Lonely and rebuked,”(13). (2) And despite the fact that Paul D tells Denver that Sethe has described the ghost as “sad … not evil,” Sethe offers the final pronouncement on the ghost’s character by denying the ghost’s loneliness, as she denies her own, acknowledging instead only the anger that acts as an armor for the sadness that lies beneath it: “I don’t know about lonely…. Mad, maybe” (13).

R.D. Laing and other psychologists, particularly those who have written about Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), have described schizophrenia and other mental illnesses as coping strategies, as the only “sane” response to a world gone mad, as “a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unlivable situation” (79). Morrison’s world view in this regard is not unlike Laing’s: madness is not only not a sign of weakness or failure, but it is an act of sanity, resistance, and survival. (3) The meaning of characters in Beloved, whose lives have been so devastated by the unspeakable abuse of slavery that they exhibit clinical signs of MPD, is therefore not merely an indictment of pain, but an acknowledgement of power, of African Americans leaping generations and continents to claim self as other and other as self, a black female vision of reciprocity and reincarnation. The characters in Beloved not only take on ancestral pain, but their struggle for individual wholeness becomes a struggle for ancestral healing. At moments where characters bump up against one another’s painful memories and experience one another’s suffering, Morrison evokes not only shared sorrow but the possibility of tribal and ancestral healing of individual characters.

For healing to take place, dissociation must give way to the full reclaiming of that wounded self, the reintegration of that denied self as part of the core of one’s being. Each character in Beloved goes through a process by which he or she gains not only an awareness of that shadow but a reflective awareness of the psychological origins of the split-off self. The shattering and reclaiming of memory proceed in similar ways for most of the central protagonists of the novel. The memory of what has happened to them has pushed aside, externalized, repressed, placed in a box, given over to someone else. But where psychic disintegration has taken place, each character splits into a “core self” and “alters,” none of whom possess the others’ memories. Within each individual, there is no memory/knowledge that a split has taken place.

Eventually, in each of these characters, the memory returns unbidden. Without choosing consciously to be aware, Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Ella, and even Bodwin, as dissociative persons, become gradually aware of at least one alternate self in the person of Beloved. As evidence of the existence of an alternate self or selves begins piling up, it becomes so compelling that the characters have to acknowledge the existence of these selves. In the process of remembering, which in Beloved is equivalent to the process of healing, each character begins to realize who is doing what, which psyche is in effect “up at-bat.”, each character must come to accept his or her memories. When each begins to remember and acknowledge their alter selves as part of their core self, they reintegrate.

The theme of the splitting self is a familiar one in Morrison, all of whose novels to some extent explore the split within the individual caused by the juxtaposition of a self-definition and that grotesque parody of social status by which perpetrators of slavery, racism, and sexual violence have attempted to define African Americans. As Morrison, herself insists, “the trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed to be a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis” (“Unspeakable” 16). Morrison observes that Pecola, the protagonist of her first novel, The Bluest Eye, “is not seen by herself until she hallucinates a self” (“Unspeakable” 22). In this regard, she serves as a prototype for Sethe and other characters in Beloved, who also remain invisible to themselves until each of them hallucinates an alter self in the form of the young woman who, calling herself Beloved, appears on Sethe’s doorstep. Pecola’s hallucinated self appears only after Cholly’s second rape of his daughter and offers Pecola an explicit explanation for her sudden emergence in Pecola’s life and thus in the novel; she tells Pecola that she didn’t come before because “you didn’t need me before” (152), an explanation that also sets the stage for the reader to understand Beloved’s appearance as a self or alter initially willed by Sethe and then gradually taken on by many members of the community within and beyond the confines of 124. (4)

The willing of necessary spirits in Beloved is prefigured in Sethe’s description of Denver as “a charmed child” (41) who, while in the womb, sensing that Sethe would die without help, wills the appearance of Amy Denver, literally “pull[s] a white girl out of the hill” to act as midwife and healer for her mother (42). Beloved, the willed self, is needed not only by Denver to conquer her fear of being abandoned (or murdered) by Sethe and her fear of stepping off the edge of 124, but needed by Sethe to resolve her guilt over the murder of her daughter, and by Paul, D to unlock his heart. Beloved is all the characters’ fearful thoughts, unspoken.

That Beloved exists as the repository of unresolved feelings is suggested by the fact that Stamp Paid confirms that initially, Beloved is seen only by Sethe, Denver, Paul D, and himself, each of whom has an enormous burden of guilt, shame, sadness, and fear. When Paul D tells Stamp that he doesn’t know where Beloved comes from, Stamp tellingly reveals Beloved’s mercurial visibility: “Huh. Look like you and me the only ones outside 124 lay eyes on her” (234). When Paul D asks Denver about the identity of Beloved, “you think she sure `nough your sister?” Denver responds, “at times. At times I think she was–more” (266). Finally, Paul D. asks the crucial question at the center of my contention about the novel: “but what if the girl was not a girl, but something in disguise?” (127).

The character Beloved provides the most complicated challenge to an attempt to theorize her as a dissociative double for characters in the novel who have significantly suffered under slavery, for she also appears in the book as a character in her own right, a character who wrestles with her own demons. The novel’s four soliloquy chapters (200-204, 205-209, 210-213, and 214-217), spoken sequentially in the dissociative voices of Sethe, Denver, Beloved, and a merged chapter containing both Beloved and Denver’s voices, summon the most agonized memories of each of the characters as they journey through their actual and ancestral pasts, as each attempt to claim Beloved as a part of themselves, as each name her “mine.”

Both Beloved and Sethe are on the slave ship, dying of thirst, so hungry that paradoxically, they cannot eat the bits of rotting sea-green bread that are proffered them. Some of the captive Africans die and are pushed into the sea; others jump. Under unspeakable conditions, a disassociative split takes place, and each person splits off into all those whom they have loved and splits off pieces of themselves as well: the heart Baby Suggs commands them to love may disappear into a tobacco tin; one’s face becomes not one’s face. Willing oneself to forgetfulness, to amnesia, to numbness, one’s self feels lost forever.

Beloved’s soliloquy includes a nightmare exploration of the sexual assault of children, a subject almost entirely silenced during the original narratives, yet allusively present in the work of writers like Harriet Jacobs, whose Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl provides many clues that the interstices in such texts are as important as that which is written explicitly. (5) The speaker in this chapter of Beloved, who cannot differentiate her face from another’s, who repeatedly murmurs, “I am not dead … I see her face, which is mine … she is my face smiling at me,” breaks into pieces, splits off, dissociates, becomes a nineteenth-century African American Sybil, a multiple personality whose childhood is maimed by the man who sexually enters her, who “puts his finger there,” who “hurts where [she] sleep[s]” (212). The place where Beloved sleeps is both a geographic and a psychic location: literally the physical place in which she lies down, but also the site of her body itself, her vagina, her vulva, her clitoris, the place in which her innocence sleeps, the place in which she is still unawakened sexually. This reading is confirmed by the reappearance of this image in an even more explicit passage: “[Beloved] said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skin stuck their fingers in her and said Beloved in the dark and bitch in the light” (241). Beloved rememories, merges with and becomes, all the unnamed African women and girls during Middle Passage who, raped by their captors, are called “beloved” at night and “bitch” in the morning.

The dead man who sleeps on Beloved’s face is an emblem of those who literally have died in the holds of the ships during Middle Passage, ships packed so tightly that the bodies of the dead frequently obstructed the breath and movement of the living. In addition, each captive also has a “dead man” sleeping on his or her face: the ghost of one’s self, a self which has been strip-mined of vitality, dignity, humanity, of life itself. Denied the right to keep her own body inviolate, Beloved breaks into pieces, shatters into a core self and alters:

Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is

looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t

know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed … the girl who

waited to be loved and cry shame erupts into her separate parts. (274-75)

Beloved is repeatedly described as fragmented, split off, shattered; unlike Sethe, Beloved has knowledge of the splitting self, which Morrison indicates when the narrator in the novel observes that “among the things [Beloved] could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces” (133).

All the African American girls and women in the novel are versions of Beloved, and finally, so too are the men. Beloved serves as a wrenched-open version of himself for Paul D and as the exposer of his less virtuous impulses to Stamp Paid. Despite the richly ambiguous suggestions about who Beloved is, Morrison is explicit in describing Beloved as a projection of the thoughts and feelings of every character who actually sees her:

After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw

her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her. It took

longer for those who had spoken to her, lived with her, fallen in love with

her, to forget, until they realized they couldn’t remember or repeat a

single thing she said, and began to believe that, other than what they

themselves were thinking, she hadn’t said anything at all. So, in the end,

they forgot her too. Remembering seemed unwise. (274)

It is for this reason that Beloved’s given name, although referred to explicitly by Denver, is never revealed in the novel: Beloved is everyone’s Beloved. (6) Beloved’s lack of name signifies that she is everybody, the powerfully loved baby, while it simultaneously suggests a figure of absence, loss, and powerlessness.