Experience in a Domestic Context: Commodified Subjectivity in Toni
by Mary Jane Suero Elliott
Many of the characters in Beloved are born into slavery and experience
the imposed objectivity of its commodifying ideology. Clearly, as we
know from historical and slave narratives, such objectivity does not
exclude all possibility of experiencing some degree of subjectivity. In
Beloved, however, denial and oppression of black identity by the larger
slave-owning society leads to an internalization of this colonizing
discourse and subsequently to an inability for some, and for others a
constant struggle, to develop a self-empowered subjectivity when free
from physical slavery. Thus, although the end of slavery signals the
beginning of a "post" colonial(1) period for African Americans, their
status continues to be defined by slavery's colonial ideologies.(2) The
imposed perception of themselves as commodified beings, when
internalized, results in their continued struggle to develop an
empowered, agentive sense of self.
In Yearning, bell hooks writes about black subjectivity as "an
oppositional worldview, a consciousness, an identity, a standpoint that
exists not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanization but
as that movement which enables creative, expansive self-actualization"
(15). For Sethe, Beloved's central character, self-actualization, or
the development of subjectivity, can be realized only outside the
limits of a colonial discourse and within a collectively defined
alternate discourse signifying individual empowerment. This alternative
discourse, I argue, is found in the free black community to which Sethe
flees. But her subjectivity is realized only when she becomes a full
member of her community. Membership depends on both Sethe's and the
community's recognition of internalized ideologies of oppression.
Morrison's text, then, can be read as postcolonial(3) because it
delineates a process of self-liberation through communal support within
the colonial context of slavery.
In a postcolonial analysis of Beloved, the work of Homi Bhabha(4) and
Gloria Anzaldua helps us to read Sethe's self-actualization as a
resistive process against objectifying colonial definitions of black
identity. Anzaldua's definition of "mestiza consciousness"(5)
complements Bhabha's definition of the shifting positionalities within
the "colonial subject" and the formation of a colonial subjectivity
through the colonial fetish and stereotype. For Anzaldua, all women of
color have the potential to reflect a mestiza consciousness. As an
oppressed woman of color, Sethe has this potential. In Sethe, then, the
text develops a mestiza character. Together, the theories of Anzaldua
and Bhabha serve to recontextualize Sethe's motivations for murdering
her child, the subsequent ostracism by her community, her obsessive
love for Beloved, and her final release from the ideological confines
of colonial commodification. This recontextualization of Sethe's story
defines Beloved as a mestiza text.
Within the postcolonial framework through which I read Beloved,(6)
resisting the colonial perception of self as commodified inferior is
part of what Satya P. Mohanty terms "decolonization." Developing an
empowered subjectivity involves learning to define oneself through a
perspective uninformed by dominant definitions of black identity.
Acquiring a perspective outside of colonial constructs of inferiorized
subject positions subverts these constructs and thus decolonizes the
self. The process of decolonization is an important part of this
mestiza text because the main character moves from a limiting
"counterstance" position, signifying a mere inversion of colonial
roles, to mestiza consciousness, signifying an alternative discourse
outside colonial ideologies. Significantly, in Beloved decolonization
occurs in a communal context. The book's central characters begin to
define themselves against a colonially defined and internalized
isolation, fear, or even pride only with the support of others who also
have experienced oppression. Attempts at self-liberation fail when they
are not founded on mutual trust between individuals or support from
decolonization is not only an individual process within a communal
context, but also a collective occurrence. The text's emphasis on
"rememory" as collective(7) as well as individual theorizes a process
of collective decolonization.(8) Linda Krumholz's definition of slavery
begins to address the idea of collectivity as conceptualized in
Beloved. She defines slavery, and thus implicitly the nation's
colonialist history, as a "national trauma" (396) not limited to
individuals or to African Americans. I read Krumholz's concept of
national trauma as specifically informed by a colonialist past and a
neocolonialist present. The national, historical process of healing and
rememory identified by Krumholz becomes, in my definition of rememory,
a process of collective decolonization.
Morrison's text implicitly speaks to the need for collective
decolonization in its focus on rememory and the necessity of
confronting the past's unresolved issues. A postcolonial reading
highlights the implications of the text for alternative
conceptualizations of national history.(9) Reading slavery explicitly
as a colonial institution forces a certain kind of rememory: slavery is
a historical reality for every U.S. citizen, not just for contemporary
African Americans. Importantly, Morrison's historical revisioning,
which calls for collective rememory, defines the U.S. as an oppressive
colonialist nation, thus challenging official historical narratives of
democratic benevolence. It also places the U.S. as a nation in a
parallel position to Sethe and slavery; Sethe and her relationship to
slavery as a colonialist institution embodies in microcosm a
specifically postcolonial facet of Morrison's historical rememory. In
this equation, Sethe represents national identity as defined by
colonial constructs. Just as the colonialist nature of national history
manifests itself through the institutionalization of slavery, Sethe's
act of infanticide manifests her internalization of the oppressive
ideologies that justify her enslavement. As a result, her story is
about learning how to resist effectively, how to develop an empowered
rather than a destructive subjectivity. Just as she needs to confront
unresolved issues in her past, the nation, in an act of collective
decolonization, also must confront the colonialist past in order to
change the neocolonialist present.
Morrison's revisioning, read within a postcolonial framework, is
radical in its conclusion to the national narrative embodied in Sethe's
story. Her decolonized subjectivity does not signify power over others,
but empowerment within a context of communal support. Thus Morrison, in
creating an alternative outside binary colonialist constructs for
Sethe's developing subjectivity, also creates an alternative for U.S.
history. She not only rewrites the past, but in a reading of Sethe as
representative of an alternative national identity, Morrison offers an
alternative for the national future. By this logic, the U.S. need not
follow the colonialist trajectory it has been simultaneously following
and creating. Morrison thus denaturalizes ideologies of nationhood that
require an oppressive, strictly boundaried stance. Morrison's concept
of rememory, read as postcolonial, challenges and begins to redefine
traditional definitions of nationhood, of an isolated yet dominant
imperialist power, one boundaried both internationally and
domestically. Sethe learns she cannot be truly "free" without
undergoing a process of decolonization, defined by the novel as
contextualized, necessarily, in her African American community. If
Sethe learns to decolonize herself through and within a communal
context, then in the parallel between Sethe and national identity, the
nation must re-think its position in an international context. At the
very least, Morrison's historical revisioning speaks to the need to
alter national self-definitions, representations, and positionings in a
emphasizes Sethe's contact with slavery's commodification that results
in psychological, emotional, and spiritual damage. Bhabha's concept of
the "colonial subject" helps theorize the specific nature of this
The construction of the colonial subject in discourse, and the exercise of
Because in the colonial economy, of slavery the black woman, both
metaphorically and visually, embodies the interconnection between "the
economy of pleasure and desire" and "the economy of domination and
power," she also represents the "difference" demanded by colonial
discourse. In Morrison's text, Sethe, the black female slave,
represents this difference as racial and sexual "other." This
difference, once created to justify colonial domination, must be
continuously reiterated in order to rationalize colonial force. This
constructed difference is re-enacted through Sethe's body by the
schoolteacher and his nephews:
colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of
difference--racial and sexual. Such an articulation becomes crucial if it
is held that the body is always simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed
in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse,
domination and power. (67)
I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my
Here we have white othering of a black woman and the resulting damage
of a fetishized identity. The schoolteacher observes Sethe's rape and
makes it a discursive act, exploiting Sethe as a racial and sexual
other in order to re-write her identity as that of a subhuman creature,
bestial rather than human. Sethe, then, experiences the fetishization
of herself and her body by the schoolteacher and his nephews. In having
his nephews act out, on Sethe's body, the constructed degradation of
one racially and sexually othered, the schoolteacher reinforces
slavery's colonial discourse through his own, simultaneously enacted,
discursivity. Sethe's personhood, as it has been allowed to exist under
slavery, is reduced further to animality. Bhabha differentiates between
the sexual fetish and the sexualized "fetish of colonial discourse"
(78), locating the latter in the ambivalent space (72) occupied by the
colonized. This space is "in between" an imposed identity and the
reality of their humanity for the colonized and between the recognized
and the disavowed, between fear and desire for the colonizers. The
tropes of the sexual fetish are present in the colonial fetish, but
syncretized with certain tropes of colonialist experience and identity
to embody the larger socio-political context of colonial relations. In
this context, the white schoolteacher inhabits the in between space of
the colonizer, thus needing to rationalize slavery's dominating and
oppressive ideologies in a discursive act that also serves to justify
his position within these ideologies. For Sethe, the fetishization of
her body by the white schoolteacher and his nephews causes psychic
fragmentation that continues to thwart the development of her
subjectivity after she leaves slavery. Sethe wants to concentrate on
her future; however, her commodified status, dramatized
fetishistically, forms a barrier which prevents her from resisting
objectifying colonial influence.
breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and
writing it up. I don't want to know or have to remember that. I have other
things to do: worry about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age
and sickness not to speak of love. But her brain was not interested in the
Sethe's community both perpetuates the legacy of slavery, demonstrating
a collective internalization of the commodification discourse, and
plays an important role in the process of the development of her
subjectivity against colonial lessons of disempowerment. Morrison
Sethe had had twenty-eight days ... of unslaved life.... Days of healing,
Sethe lives an "unslaved life" for only twenty-eight days, although she
never returns to literal slavery. Consequently, Morrison defines an
unslaved life as a life with the freedom to develop one's subjectivity.
This process is closely bound to inclusion in and participation with
one's community. Sethe frees herself, but she does not "claim ownership
of that freed self" alone. The past does not hold the power to
frustrate the growth of her subjectivity when development is part of a
collective endeavor. Her people "teach" her how to be herself because,
until this moment, she learns, through coercion, lessons of
invisibility and silence. The necessary reciprocity of communal living
and the continuous learning experience of constant communication with
others help Sethe learn to see herself as an empowered subject within a
supportive community rather than the inferior other within colonial
ideology. Morrison, however, does not portray a simplistic image of
communal perfection. She writes instead about the warped codes of
morality that eventually cause a collective desertion of Sethe when she
most needs support. Because the generous invitation to a bountiful
feast at Baby Suggs's is taken as a sign of pride, the community hopes
and waits for Sethe's downfall. The community, therefore, begins to
withdraw its enveloping and empowering support the day after the party:
ease and real-talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty
other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done: of
feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better....
All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with
the day.... Bit by bit ... along with the others, she had claimed herself.
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was
nobody ran on ahead.... to say some new whitefolks with the Look just rode
The people of the community tacitly withdraw their support by denying
Sethe, without warning, access to a system of communication developed
by and for the community. Because of the chronological order of
events--the party, the silence of the community, the appearance of the
white schoolteacher at 124, Sethe's murder of her daughter, and the
subsequent ostracism of Sethe from the community--we can isolate the
moment when Sethe's troubles begin as the moment when the community
decides to withdraw its support. As Charles Scruggs points out,
"Somehow the members of the black community imagine that Baby Suggs has
not suffered in slavery as they have suffered, and this ignorance of
their mutual history makes mutual trust impossible" (103). Mutual trust
is essential for the collective formation of an empowering alternate
discourse. Their mutual distrust both reflects the internalized lessons
of commodification and negates the mutual support necessary for the
development of individual and communal subjectivity. Because the
concept of history is linked closely in this text to slavery and the
specific context of a colonized past, a denial of the collective nature
of this experience keeps them from challenging and restructuring
definitive ideologies as a community. Moreover, the community's need to
see a successful black family's downfall indirectly causes Sethe to
perform the act for which it cannot morally forgive her.
in. The righteous Look every Negro learned to recognize .... Like a flag
hoisted this righteousness telegraphed and announced the faggot, the whip,
the fist, the lie, long before it went public. Nobody warned them ... some
... thing--like ... meanness let them stand aside, or not pay attention.
Why does Morrison so carefully outline and emphasize the communal
responsibility at which the community fails? Anzaldua's concept of
borderlands, which parallels the text's theorization of the
relationship between self and community, helps address this question.
According to her definition, border culture is created by "the
lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third[,] ... a border
culture." Anzaldua explains:
[a] borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional
The community in which Sethe lives is similar in several important
aspects to the "borderland" defined above. The free black community in
the nineteenth century represents a borderland between two more
established cultures: the black slave culture and the free white
slave-owning culture. Like Anzaldua's borderland, the free black
community in Beloved has no fixed, institutionalized, organized moral
and social codes of behavior and thought. It can be defined as an
"unnatural boundary" because it is a relatively new community with no
social precedents, whose vulnerable existence is compounded by
unrelenting white hatred and disrespect. Living "in between" two
conflicting cultures results in the tension, ambivalence, and unrest
that Anzaldua describes. Anzaldua also describes how "[t]ribal rights
over those of the individual insured the survival of the tribe.... The
welfare of the family, the community, and the tribe is more important
than the welfare of the individual. The individual exists first as
kin--a sister, a father, a padrino--and last as self" (18). Beloved's
free black community can be compared to Anzaldua's tribe, to a culture
that needs to protect itself from, while existing within, a dominant
colonial culture. Compounding this problem is the fact that the
colonial culture legitimizes only the selfless state of slavery for
blacks. The community, therefore, struggles constantly for the right,
the opportunity, and the freedom to exist. Paradoxically, it must
continue the process that the dominant culture has begun--the
suppression of black individual subjectivity--in order to validate its
position in society and the choices it has made. Thus, as I will argue
below, Sethe is punished severely for trying to assert her own and her
daughter's rights to subjectivity by a community still operating within
a ruling ideology that commodifies black personhood.
residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of
transition.... The only `legitimate' inhabitants are those in power, the
whites and those who align themselves with whites. Tension[,] ...
ambivalence[,] and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. (3-4)
Morrison articulates another motivation behind the communal ostracism
of Sethe in the following excerpt:
Whitepeople believed that ... under every dark skin was a jungle.... In a
The continued internalization of being labeled "other" leads to the
denial of black individual voice and subjectivity, thereby twisting the
free black community's moral code to the point where it will turn on
one of its own. Internalization of white fear and hate intensifies the
tension and ambivalence that Anzaldua describes as part of a border
culture. Because of the internalization of a white colonial morality
and the constant ambivalence of a border culture, the free black
community self-destructively measures and judges Sethe by a morality
that denies subjectivity. The fact that Sethe's community operates
under an internalized system oppressive to black identity informs her
motivations for killing her child. Because her community chooses to
withdraw its support, it denies Sethe the opportunity to escape from
the schoolteacher as he rides to 124 with the sheriff. The community's
inaction forces Sethe to try to save her children from a life of
imposed silence and denied selfhood by some other means. Sethe "flew,
snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing ... her face beaked
... her hands worked like claws ... she collected them every which way
... into the woodshed" (157) where she tries "to kill her children"
(158). When Paul D learns about Sethe's act, he is repulsed. He cannot
understand that infanticide is the only possibility, the only course of
action open to Sethe within a colonial discourse. Her internalization
of the lessons of commodification encourages Sethe to act, in a highly
problematic attempt to save her children from commodification, as if
they are not only extensions of herself, but also her possessions. In
an internal dialogue with Beloved, Sethe thinks,
way ... they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying
to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human ...
the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the
jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable)
place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. (198-99)
Some other way, he said. Let schoolteacher haul us away, I guess, to
By killing Beloved, Sethe refuses to allow her daughter to be
objectified and commodified by a colonialist culture. To Sethe, killing
her child saves her not only from the physical suffering of slavery but
also from its "measuring," which signifies an appropriation of
discourse and an oppression of black identity. Despite its protective
motivation, however, Sethe's act effectively denies her daughter the
chance to live. It signifies her appropriation of the potential of her
daughter's yet unrealized subjectivity. Bhabha's theory of the colonial
subject defines Sethe's act as limited by its reaction to a
commodifying ideology. "It is always in relation to the place of the
Other that colonial desire is articulated: the phantasmic space of
possession that no one subject can singly or fixedly occupy, and
therefore permits the dream of the inversion of roles" (44). Through
his theorization of the colonial subject, representing both the
colonized and the colonizer, Bhabha defines the colonial subject
position as shifting rather than fixed. In the creation of a colonial
subjecthood, colonial discourse forms a space in which the
positionalities of master and slave not only define each other, but can
shift into an inversion of roles. Such an inversion of roles cannot be
subversive because it remains within and therefore defined by a
colonialist paradigm of domination and commodification. Although
several critics read Sethe's act as resistive,(10) Bhabha's concept of
the colonial subject, which enables a colonial contextualization of her
act, defines her resistance as limited by the isolationist ideologies
of a Western colonialism. Bhabha's definition of a shifting colonial
subject positionality allows a reading of Sethe's identity in relation
to the ruling colonial paradigm by foregrounding Sethe's changing
position within a colonially constructed value system. In a reading of
Beloved as postcolonial, Sethe's act becomes a desperate attempt at
liberation within a context of limited choices because of her
community's re-enactment of a colonial system's power relations.
measure your behind before he tore it up? I have felt what it felt like and
nobody ... is going to make you feel it too. Not you, not none of mine, and
when I tell you you mine, I also mean I'm yours. I wouldn't draw breath
without my children.... My plan was to take us all to the other side where
my own ma'am is. (203)
In murdering her daughter, Sethe attempts, in Anzaldua's terms, a
"counterstance"(11) against the colonial forces that coercively have
defined her as property and that threaten to do the same to her
children. Her counterstance exemplifies her attempt to subvert the
oppressive system by a kind of inversion of roles. In this case, Sethe
tries to control her children's fate by killing them, thus occupying
the colonizer's commodifying role. Subsequently, the community's
manifestation of collective internalization of an objectifying ideology
(the ostracism of Sethe) creates a "domino effect" which leads to
Sethe's reinscription within the ideological confines of a colonial
discourse. As Morrison writes, "Those twenty-eight happy days were
followed by eighteen years of disapproval and a solitary life" (173).
Sethe's "solitary life" is static; there is no potential for personal
growth. Sethe describes her life in those eighteen years as "unlivable"
(173). Because of her decision to kill her child and thus protect her
from the "unlivable" life of denied subjectivity in slavery, she
herself returns to a life in which she is unable to continue learning
to "claim her freed self."
redundant cyclicity of "eighteen years of solitary life" cannot end,
and Sethe cannot break through the stasis of her existence, until she
can step outside the confines of the dominant colonial discourse. She
cannot do so without finding resolution to her relationship with her
daughter. Beloved returns to 124 for the same reason she has haunted
Sethe, to force her mother to confront her past. The act that ends her
life, her mother denying Beloved her own identity, begins a cycle from
which neither mother nor daughter can escape without some movement
towards resolution. When Beloved returns as a visible and tangible
presence, Sethe no longer can ignore and deny her painful past. Sethe
is incapable of personal growth for many years because she refuses to
face her own commodification and its internalization. Instead, Sethe's
denial of the colonial forces in her life continues to block the
development of her subjectivity. Within the narrative, Beloved's
physical presence and the ensuing interactive relationship it begins
between mother and daughter eventually force Sethe to acknowledge the
internalized colonization that she has hitherto ignored.
The first month Sethe and Beloved spend together seems idyllic (240).
Soon, however, the unresolved tension dominates the atmosphere: "it was
Beloved who made demands. Anything she wanted she got, and when Sethe
ran out of things to give her, Beloved invented desire.... the mood
changed and the arguments began.... She took the best of
everything--first" (240-41). Beloved knows only desire; she knows only
what she lacks. But she cannot be satisfied; her unbalanced self,
consisting only of desire, is inexhaustibly hungry. Sethe responds by
trying to satisfy Beloved's desire: "Sethe played all the harder with
Beloved, who never got enough of anything" (240). Sethe is driven by
the guilt of the past, by the memory of what she did to her daughter,
which causes her to focus obsessively on Beloved and neglect all other
aspects of her personality and her life:
Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her
Sethe's obsessive focus is as unbalanced as Beloved's desire. In trying
to erase a past that cannot be erased by wanting to exchange her life
for Beloved's pain, she succeeds only in re-emphasizing the limitation
of her own subjectivity. Her obsession cannot lead to a positive
resolution between herself and Beloved because it mimics the binary
paradigms of a colonial discourse of commodification. While Sethe must
deal with her past, she cannot deal with it at the expense of her
present existence and through the continued denial of her own
internalization of a commodifying ideology. Sethe and Beloved are
"locked in a love that wore everybody out" (243). The desperate
emotional interaction between Sethe and Beloved intensifies as they
continue trapped in a cycle with no relief. Sethe "sat in the chair
licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life,
took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman
yielded it up without a murmur" (250). Sethe still attempts to erase
the past, this time by taking the place of Beloved herself. The past
and the objectifying appropriation it represents, however, cannot be
erased; Sethe must acknowledge her own complicity in colonial
appropriations within a binary system of violent possession and only
thus be enabled to create an alternate discourse of self-empowerment.
reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own
life. That she would trade places any day. Give up her life, every minute
and hour of it, to take back just one of Beloved's tears. (241-42)
Anzaldua's concept of the counterstance and Bhabha's definition of the
colonial subject help in reading the cloistering of Sethe and Beloved
at 124. Because of the specific consequences of her previous attempt at
a counterstance, Sethe now plays the role of slave to Beloved's master.
Thus, in another shift of colonial subject positions, Sethe no longer
attempts subversion through an assumption of the colonizer's role, but
instead attempts to negate the consequences of her original
counterstance on Beloved and on herself by re-inverting the roles of
colonizer and colonized within her relationship with her daughter. She
allows Beloved, in effect, to play the colonizer and gradually redefine
Sethe as her possession. In their individual inner monologues (200-17),
the significant phrase is "She is mine." This sentence is repeated
continuously by the two women as they desperately try to reach the
other through a discourse of ownership. Sethe has internalized the
lessons of her reduction and violation, and this internalization
manifests itself in her relationship with Beloved.
According to Bhabha, the dominant being is at stake in the constructed
field of the dominated; the privileged being is always defined by the
unprivileged position of the dominated. When working within a colonial
discourse of commodification, such as slavery, in which human beings
are divided into binary identities of owner and owned, Sethe
desperately tries to give her daughter subjectivity in ways
metaphorized as feeding, storytelling, placating, and serving. In
trying to give her daughter the subjectivity she took away, so that she
herself may achieve some peace and therefore perhaps a more fulfilled
identity, Sethe re-enacts the master/slave relationship based on
binaries that she internalized as a child. Their dialectic relationship
cannot succeed in freeing either Sethe or Beloved from their past
because it is based on a system in which both positions are defined
ultimately by oppression. Sethe cannot define herself as a subject
through this system. Instead, she must find an alternate discursive
space in which she can learn to become a subject.
How can Sethe escape the relentless definition of herself and her
community as property? How can she find an alternative to the
colonial/slave system of binaries that has infiltrated every part of
her life? Through "sewing" metaphors, both Anzaldua and Bhabha locate
sites of resistance within the "in between" space of colonized
experience and identification appropriate to Sethe's position. Both
Bhabha's metaphor of the "sutured stereotype" (80) and Anzaldua's
metaphor of the "interface" between masks are characterized by
ambivalence. The sutured stereotype, created and imposed by colonial
discourses, can result in the internalized ambivalence of Anzaldua's
interfaced masks.(12) This ambivalence, although a product of racist
colonial ideologies, is also a potential site for resistance. The
transformative potential of Anzaldua's "mestiza" identity can, in a
cathartic or epiphanous moment, transform the negative tension of
ambivalence into an empowering source of resistance. Implicit in
Bhabha's definition of the sutured stereotype is the potential
disruption of its coherence.
Beloved, this potential is realized when Sethe's community renews its
support, thereby enabling her to disrupt the hitherto totalizing
influence of othering, commodifying ideologies on her sense of self. It
is through communal support that Sethe is able to face the symbol of
the colonial oppression in her life and thus enter the empowering
social and psychological space of a collectively defined discourse. In
this case, it is the women of the community that "came together" and
"arrived at 124 ... the first thing they saw was themselves.... there
they were, young and happy, playing in Baby Suggs' yard, not feeling
the envy that surfaced the next day" (258). In coming together to help
one of their own, the women are able to envision the past in which they
had experienced a collectively empowering "mutual trust" with the
family of 124. Their positive common memory strengthens their communal
resolve, and they begin to pray for Sethe. "Then Ella hollered.
Instantly the kneelers and the standers joined her. They stopped
praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there
were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what
that sound sounded like" (254). In this case, the position of the
community of women reflects the unique position of black women vis a
vis a colonialist social system. Their role in Sethe's liberaton is
part of the text's gendered revisioning of history. Significantly, the
disruptive discourse is defined by specifically racial and gendered
The women of the community
use the "sound" to position themselves outside the dominant discourse,
a discourse defined and imposed by white colonizers. They need to
position themselves selves thus in order to reach Sethe. Because the
communal application of a morality warped by an internalization of
inappropriate, oppressive lessons results in Sethe's tragedy, using the
dominant discourse to reach Sethe can cause only more damage. The
following occurs when Sethe hears the voices:
For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat
What succeeds in breaking through the cycle imprisoning Sethe and
Beloved in its redundant sterility is the sound of the community's
voice. The use of a communal voice to negate the effects of an
oppressive discourse on Sethe's life serves to link her once again to
the community and to the potential to develop her subjectivity.(13) As
she trembles "like the baptized in its wash," it is as if Sethe has
been reborn outside of the confines of a limiting ideology and within
an alternate, empowering communal discourse.(14) Bhabha's discussion of
postcolonial stereotypes and fetishes theorizes sound's ability to
break through the oppressive ideological barriers of colonial
discourse. In this case, the sound is located outside a dominant
discourse informed by a colonial power structure because it is outside
or "beyond" the colonizer's language, a language infiltrated and
defined by a colonial discourse of domination. The fetish is embodied
by the stereotype through language; the stereotype is the linguistic
representation of the content of the fetish. Significantly, then, Sethe
steps outside of the colonial discourse through a simultaneous return
to a collectively defined alternate discourse. Examining the text
through Bhabha's definition of the stereotype links Sethe's
fetishization by the school-teacher to her eventual disruption of the
meaning behind the fetishistic event. The concept of the sound, here
representing communal support, refers to the fetish through Bhabha's
definition of the stereotype in relation to language. Through sound,
not language, Sethe is able to break away from the oppressive hold of a
colonially fetishized past.
and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right
combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.
Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a
wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock pods off chestnut
trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash.
Sethe watches the women gathered around 124, Edward Bodwin, a white
man, rides towards the house. Sethe mistakes him for the schoolteacher.
Her reaction to what she perceives to be a threat, a symbol of
slavery's objectification, signals a break from the internalization of
he is coming into her yard and he is coming for her best thing.... And if
With communal support, Sethe faces her internalization and re-enactment
of colonial paradigms instead of denying her own complicity and
ignoring its consequences on Beloved. In this way, Sethe realizes the
potential inherent within her identity and, instead of merely inverting
colonial subject positions, positions herself against, rather than
within, colonial subjecthood. Anzaldua's definition of the mestiza
further explicates Sethe's new positionality vis a vis the colonial
discourse: "The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for
contradictions. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the
ambivalence into something else. She can be jarred out of ambivalence
by an intense ... emotional event which inverts ... the ambivalence"
(Borderlands 79). Sethe's inversion of a limiting ambivalence enables
her to attack the representation of the enslaving force in her life
instead of turning, like the community has in the past, on one of her
own. She has an ice pick in her hand, but because she no longer needs
to repeat the past, she can attack the true source of her oppression
instead of Beloved. Sethe no longer attempts to exercise agency through
a counterstance; she has moved beyond attempting resistance by
inverting binary roles in a colonial power hierarchy. Her act is thus
cathartic; it finally frees both Sethe and her daughter. The support of
the community, reaching Sethe through voice, acts as the catalyst for
the cathartic act that ends the vicious cycle from which Sethe and
Beloved cannot break out alone.
she thinks anything, it is no. No no. Nonono. She flies. The icepick is not
in her hand; it is her hand. Standing alone on the porch, Beloved is
smiling. But now her hand is empty. Sethe is ... running into the faces of
the people out there, joining them. (260-61)
positions in a relationship define one another, then Beloved's
disappearance at the conclusion of the text can be read as an act of
resolution. Beloved's haunting of 124 is one stage in the relationship
between Sethe and Beloved in which each of their positions defines and
thus affects the other profoundly. As long as Sethe cannot further the
development of her subjectivity because of the constraints of an
internalized or self-colonization, Beloved cannot find peace.
Anzaldua's concept of the mestiza suggests the kind of break Sethe has
made away from oppressive colonial influences: "By creating a new
mythos--that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we
see ourselves ...--la mestiza creates a new consciousness.... The work
of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality
that keeps her prisoner" (Borderlands 80). Beloved's disappearance
mirrors Sethe's "birth" into a "new consciousness."
Because developing subjectivity is a continuous process and one is
never a completed subject, the text does not conclude with total
resolution. By the end of the novel, however, the characters are no
longer trapped in a static, redundant pattern of existence. Sethe now
can work towards an empowered subjectivity because she has broken
through limitations imposed by slavery, by communal ostracism, and by
severed or thwarted familial relationships. Although the
interrelationships between Sethe, her community, and her daughter have
been damaged by a colonized past, it is through these familial and
communal bonds that Sethe disrupts the ideologies of a commodifying
culture, and, with her community, restructures a definitive communal
community is defined implicitly by the text as an internal colony,
theories of postcolonialism serve to highlight colonial structures
embedded in the text. Furthermore, a postcolonial contextualization
permits certain metaphorizations of Sethe's character and her
relationship to colonial constructs. In the parallel identified
earlier, Sethe, as representative of national identity, both embodies
the problematic history of the U.S. as a colonizing, slave-holding
culture and exemplifies an alternative for the national future. Sethe's
act of infanticide, a destructive attempt at resistance, is instructive
as a metaphor for problematic power dynamics at a national level. Her
act of resistance is ultimately ineffective because it does not "free"
either herself or Beloved. As an act appropriated from the colonial
social order and appropriating another's subjectivity, it only serves
to enslave further both Sethe and her daughter. Later, Sethe's ability
to re-enter her community in a mutually empowering way and thus to
become truly "free" through the process of decolonization points to a
necessary decolonization at a national level. A neocolonialist present
exposes the nation's unresolved colonialist history.
The alternative discourse created in the text by the free black
community can be translated to national ideologies. The novel's
liberatory potential lies in its embodiment of mestiza identity and
consciousness. Through the concept of rememory, the text calls for a
process of decolonization that is communal rather than isolated and
individualized. As a mestiza text, Beloved crosses borders and
transgresses boundaries; within the text, Sethe learns to transcend the
boundaries between self and other and, as a whole, the novel forces
readers to cross borders through a definition of rememory that
signifies collective decolonization. Through Sethe's story of
colonization, internalized colonial paradigms, ineffective attempts at
resistance, and eventual decolonization in a communal context, Morrison
speaks to the need for collective decolonization before the "national
trauma" can reach resolution. Beloved, then, is a "voice" that, by
disrupting the dominant discourse of national history, serves as an
alternative ideological model for all descendents of a colonialist
(1.) I use the prefix "post" to suggest both the literal meaning
"after" (in this case, "after" the political liberation of a nation
from imperialist rule as well as "after" the termination of the
institution of slavery by the U.S. government), and to suggest the
meaning advanced by the prefix "neo" (a continued economic and
(2.) For a discussion on the internal colonialism of the U.S., see
(3.) My reading of the text differs from most readings in its
definition of Sethe's community as a colonized group. Many critics
interpret the text through psychoanalysis. These include Ferguson,
Fitzgerald, Hirsch, Mathieson, Schapiro, and Wyatt. Some of these also
focus on Morrison's definition of "rememory" (Henderson, Hirsch's
"Maternity and Rememory," Jablon, Mobley, and Rody). Non-psychoanalytic
interpretations include examinations of the role of myth, especially
Biblical legends, within the text (Davis, Jones, and Warner). Other
analyses examine the role of history and the process of historical
recovery (Goldman, Henderson, Horvitz, and House). House, Moglen, and
Schmudde address the concept of the supernatural. Generally, most
readings that define Sethe and her community through a discourse of
commodification contextualze this discourse within the national
boundaries of U.S. history.
In the introduction to his volume of essays, The Location of Culture,
Bhabha offers one of a few postcolonial readings of Beloved. My study
differs from that of Bhabha in its more extensive emphasis on the
commodification discourse as the definitive postcolonial paradigm
operating within the narrative.
(5.) As other feminist critics have noted, one of the limitations of
Bhabha's work is his failure to address gender issues. It is therefore
necessary to incorporate the experience of women in reading a
postcolonial text such as Beloved through Bhabha's theories.
(6.) In "Colonial Legacies," and "The Epistemic Status," Satya P.
Mohanty also reads Beloved as postcolonial. In contrast to the argument
I present here, however, he interprets Morrison's revisioning of
history and Sethe's development of subjectivity through an alternative
theory of identity.
Morrison, the concept of rememory has implications beyond the personal.
Sethe articulates these implications in the following passage: "even if
I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there.
Right in the place where it happened." The past, then, is not
individually contained. Rather, in Beloved, memories of the past are
defined as pictures "out there, in the world ... floating around ...
outside my head" (36). Krumholz extends these implications to include
the historical and the national. For more general discussions on the
concept of rememory and collectivity, see Halbwachs, Knapp, and Nora.
(8.) For the most part, critics who focus on the idea of "collective"
rememory in Beloved limit their discussions to African Americans and
their need to deal with issues of the national past. Krumholz writes,
"Sethe's process of healing in Beloved, her process of learning to live
with her past, is a model for the readers who must confront Sethe's
past as part of our own past, a collective past that lives right here
where we live." She argues that "Morrison constructs a parallel between
the individual processes of psychological recovery and a historical or
national process" (395). According to Krumholz, the rememory of a
suppressed, fragmented history is a psychological necessity for author,
readers, and characters (395). She does not extend this definition of
collectivity, however, to a metaphorization of national identity
through individual subjectivity.
(9.) Keenan contextualizes her reading of the text in a general
postcolonial framework and positions the text as a rewriting of history
in a transnational framework: "Beloved ha[s] assumed a central place
within current writing by African Americans which insists on an
examination of U.S. culture and history, one that takes account of the
processes of `internal colonization'" (46). According to Keenan, the
revisioning of U.S. history as one internally colonized is also a
"recasting of our understanding of the past which resonates beyond the
borders of [the North American] continent" (46). Her contextualization
of the novel, however, remains focused on African American history and
the role of the African Diaspora.
(10.) Wyatt reads Sethe's murderous act as an extreme manifestation of
the maternal bond. Keenan sees Sethe's resistive maternal identity as
an integral part of her developing subjectivity (66). I would argue
instead that Sethe's maternal resistance is limited by the internalized
violence by which it is informed. Ledbetter interprets Sethe's act of
infanticide as counter-resistive to the fetishization of her body
through the symbolics of maternity by the school-teacher and his
nephews. The schoolteacher and the white men who witness the
consequences of Sethe's act experience a loss of control, and thus of
pleasure and satisfaction. Sethe's violence, then, can be read as a
powerful, albeit problematic act of resistance. Fitzgerald also defines
Sethe's act through maternal resistance. Sethe "refutes the position as
object in the discourse of slavery by asserting her position as subject
in the discourse of the good mother. But the version of motherhood she
articulates offers an exaggerated, idealized view of exclusive maternal
counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed ... both
are reduced to a common denominator of violence. The counterstance
refutes the dominant culture's views and beliefs, and, for this, is
proudly defiant. [However,] [a]ll reaction is limited by ... what it is
reacting.... At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will
have to.... disengage from the dominant culture ... and cross the
border into a wholly new and separate territory" (Anzaldua, Borderlands
(12.) According to Anzaldua,
`interfacing' means sewing a piece of material between two pieces of fabric
Anzaldua defines masks as different "faces" adopted that can "pass" and
thus make women of color "less vulnerable to ... oppressors"
("Introduction" xv). For Anzaldua, then, the developed "in between"
spaces are both a source of ambivalence and a potential source of
resistance and eventual self-empowerment. (13.) Sitter primarily
focuses on Paul D's story, arguing that Paul D and Sethe's stories are
interdependent. For both, communal support enables freedom from the
past, from the distorting self-images imposed on them by slavery.
to provide support and stability to collar, cuff, yoke. Between the masks
we've internalized ... are our interfaces. The masks are already steeped
with self-hatred and other internalized oppressions. However, it is... the
interface ... between the masks that provides the space from which we can
thrust out and crack the masks. ("Introduction" xv)
(14.) Krumholz reads the climactic scene in which the community of
black women help Sethe save herself in ways similar to my
interpretation. For Krumholz, this event represents a cleansing and a
re-birth. Krumholz, however, emphasizes a psychoanalytical reading
through the notion of historical recovery as ritual, while I stress the
decolonization process the catharsis represents.
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Mary Jane Suero Elliott teaches literature and writing in the English
Department at Seattle University. She specializes in Latino fiction and
currently is working on a book examining representations of Latina
transmigratory subjectivity in contemporary Chicana, Puerto Rican, and
Cuban-American women's novels.