© 2019 JETIR April 2019, Volume 6, Issue 4 www.jetir.
org (ISSN-2349-5162)
Traumatic Experience of Motherhood in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved
Dr.Amutha Arockia Mary P.R
Assistant Professor of English
Auxilium College (Autonomous), Vellore-632006
Abstract
The experience and expression of motherhood and the voice of the ‘mute’ mothers reverberating
in Black Writing is an obvious phenomenon in Toni Morrison. One of the major themes to be considered
in Beloved is mother-daughter relationship. Deconstruction and reconstruction of the mother image,
the unexpressed emotions and traumatic experience of being a slave mother, a burden and pressure of
forcing life and survival in a mother’s body, the bond and exchange of painful memories between mother
and daughter is well- expressed in the alternate fictional canon of Toni Morrison. Mother-daughter
bonding and bondage suffuses Morrison's text.Morrison’s novel Beloved flourishes with the essence
of motherhood. The memories of Sethe, have an indepthmaternal feelings. The love, which leads to a
murderous love of a mother, her fear to save her children from slavery, her grief for her lost children
dominates the novels.
Feminist literary critics, those who are keen on psychoanalytic theories,
involved in the more generalized feminist critique of motherhood as both as an institution and
experience. Both of which being theoretical obstacles, especially the position of the mother in dominant
theories of language, as highlighted by French feminist thought and the practical constraints on a
mother's time, energy, and creative powers have been considered. The experience and expression of
motherhood and the voice of the ‘mute’ mothers recuperated in the most recent fiction from repudiation
of the mother, in various ways, by both nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers. Some
have seen a movement across the historical terrain of novel writing in particular that anticipates the
pattern of second-wave feminism. Feminist critics like Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert traces the female
literary history, questions the imitative literary fore-fathers image and the absence of the fore-mothers,
they recommend the need of sisterhood and female sub-culture to be the subtheme of feminist criticism
to position the feminist critic as daughter, anxiously trying to sort out her relations to her (literary) fore-
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mothers and suffering, like most feminist daughters, from deeply unresolved feelings about mothers and
motherhood.
Elaine Showalter explains that a ‘Female Culture’, “means a conscious
acceptance of the relationships between women, as mothers, daughters, sisters and friends, their
sexuality, marriage motherhood, their ideas about female body etc., as the positive ingredients of
woman’s existence.” (Showalter 131) The female culture challenge the masculine economy
ofrepresentation and hegemonic dominance especially in case of Black Feministwriting by introducing
black women, the triply invisible persons, and place them in center stage.
“The simple act of telling a woman’s story from a woman’s point of view is a
revolutionary act”(Christ 8). Telling a story from a woman’s point of view is not merely to establish
rhetorical approach to their lives but also to learn to value everything about being a woman.
Women can exercise free and complete control over the bodies that they can make radical choices
to prove that they are not victims, of sexist husbands and lovers. Besides sexuality, motherhood,
marriage, abortion, relationships with husbands and children are also some of the major subjects. Certain
characters such as mother, grandmother, sisterhood were portrayed as ‘the guardian of the generations’
Carole Boyce Davies calls them “mother-healers” ‘daughters’ seem to acknowledge “what these mother
passed on would take you anywhere in the world you wanted to go” (Washington 161).
Deconstruction and reconstruction of the mother image, the unexpressed emotions and traumatic
experience of being a slave mother, a burden and pressure of forcing life and survival in a mother’s body,
the bond and exchange of painful memories between mother and daughter is well expressed in the
fictional canon of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker Gloria Naylor and Ntozoke Shange.
Considered one of the foremost figures in contemporary American fiction, Morrison has won
international acclaim including the Nobel Prize for works in which she examines the role of race in
American society. Using unconventional narrative structures, poetic language, myth, and folklore,
Morrison addresses such issues as black victimization, the emotional and social effects of racial and
sexual oppression, and the difficulties African Americans face in trying to achieve a sense of identity in
a society dominated by white racist cultural values.
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Morrison published her fifth novel, Beloved in 1987. Morrison traces the history of slavery in
the novel Beloved and delineates the psychological and emotional effects of slavery.Set in the twelve
years after the end of the Civil War, Beloved focuses on Sethe, a former slave who had escaped with
her four children from a Kentucky plantation known as Sweet Home in 1855. The traumatic events
of her past-which include an attempted suicide and her decision to murder her eldest daughter in an
attempt to save her once and for all from bondage—are narrated in discontinuous flashbacks. Having
been released from prison through the aid of abolitionists, Sethe lives with her youngest daughter,
Denver, in an isolated farmhouse near Cincinnati, Ohio, and believes that the ghost of her deceased
daughter, "Beloved," haunts the house. The novel opens with the unannounced arrival of Paul D., a
former slave from the Sweet Home plantation. His attempts to form a sexual relationship with Sethe,
however, are thwarted by a mysterious woman named Beloved, whom Sethe and Denver believe to
be an incarnation of Sethe's dead child. Although rumored to be a ghost, Beloved becomes Paul D.'s
lover as well as a close friend to Denver. Beloved's memories of her past, however, suggest that she
is not a ghost, but someone who has suffered the rigors of a transatlantic crossing aboard a slave
ship and the trauma of watching her mother throw herself overboard. While Beloved, who
considers Sethe her long-lost mother, initially shows spite and anger towards Sethe, she is gradually
appeased by Sethe and Denver's attempts at reconciliation. The novel closes with Beloved's apparent
departure.
The plot of Beloved is complex and circuitous, as the narrative is shaped through
flashbacks, memories, and its stream-of-consciousness structure. Its readers do not learn the story
in a linear fashion; however, a sequential order does exist between its fragments.
One of the major themes to be considered in Belovedis mother-daughter
relationship.Morrison’s novel Beloved flourishes with the essence of motherhood. The memories of
Sethe, have an indepthmaternal feeling. The love, which leads to a murderous love of a mother, her fear
to save her children from slavery, her grief for her lost children dominates the novels.
Mother-daughter bonding and bondage suffuses Morrison's text. Sethe remembers her
nameless mother, simply as an image, a woman in a field with a stooped back in a cloth hat.This is
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mainly how she remembers her mother, simply as an image, a woman in a field with a stooped
back in a cloth hat.Sethe did not know why, when her mother was hanged. Probably Ma'am (reference
in the text for Sethe’smother) was caught trying to escape from the plantation, but the daughter born
in bondage refuses to believe her mother could have run. It would mean that she left Sethe behind,
emphasizing in this generation the continuous pattern of severed mother-daughter relationships. In
other words, her memories of Ma'am are buried not only because their relationship was vague but it
is inextricably woven with feelings of painful abandonment. If Sethe remembers her mother, she
must also remember that she believes her mother deserted her.
As Sethe tells this story to Denver and Beloved, she becomes frightened: recollecting
the memories of her mother and being a mother haunts her.Sethe has forgotten the words of her
mother's language; they continue to exist inside her as feelings and images that repeatedly emerge as
a code that she relies on without realizing it. This code stored as memories,holds animated, such as
the one of her mother dancing juba, as well as the most painful fact of Sethe's life: her mother's
absence.
Sethe is shocked as she continues to find meaning in a code she thought she no longer
understood. She remembers that she felt the dancing feet of her dead mother, as she was about to give
birth to Denver. Pregnant and thinking she is going to die because her swollen feet cannot take
another step, she wants to stop walking; every time she does so, the movement of her unborn child
causes her such pain that she feels she is being rammed by an antelope. Sethe wonders why an
antelope, since she cannot remember having ever seen one, it is because the image of the antelope is
really an image of Ma'am dancing. Sethe'santelope kicking baby and her antelope dancing mother
are one and the same.Stored in childhood but only now unlocked, the link between the unborn
Denver's kicks and the dead ma'am's kicks as she danced the antelope erupts in Sethe's memory.
As she bears the next generation in her matrilineal line, Sethe keeps her mother's African antelope
dancingalive: she links the pulses of her unchained, vigorously moving mother and her energetic,
womb-kicking daughter forever.
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Sethe further recollects the memories of her mother as she was told by her, that she was
named after her father the only child her mother did not kill and allowed to survive.
Significantly, Sethe is flooded with these memories in response to questions from her own
daughter, Beloved, who wants to know everything in Sethe's memory and actually feeds and
fattens on these stones. What Beloved demands is that Sethe reveal memory and story about her
life before Sweet Home,memory about her African speaking,branded mother and her life right
after Sweet Home when she cut Beloved's throat. In other words, because they share identities,
the ghost-child's Fascination lies in the "joined" union between Sethe's mother and herself. Sethe's
memory is being pried wide open by Beloved’s presence? She forces Sethe to listen to her own
voice and to remember her own mother.
This cycle of mother-daughter fusion, loss, betrayal, and recovery between Sethe and her mother
plays itself out again in the present relationship between Sethe and Beloved. Beloved transforms from
a lonely, affectionate girl into a possessive, demanding tyrant, and her ruthlessness almost kills
Sethe.Sethe is as haunted by the girl's presence as she was by her absence because possession of any
kind involving human beings is destructive.These "possessive" attachments raise the important moral
dilemma underlying Sethe's act; either Sethe must be held accountable for Beloved's death or the
institution of slavery alone killed the child.
Sethe gives Beloved story after story of her love and devotion to her She tells her how nothing
was more important than getting her milk to her, how she waved flies away from her in the grape
arbor, how it pained her to see her baby bitten by a mosquito, and how she would trade her own life
for Beloved's. Sethe tries to impress upon her how slavery made it impossible for her to be the mother
she wished to be.
Sethe gives Beloved story after story of her love and devotion to her She tells her how nothing
was more important than getting her milk to her, how she waved flies away from her in the grape
arbor, how it pained her to see her baby bitten by a mosquito, and how she would trade her own life
for Beloved's. Sethe tries to impress upon her how slavery made it impossible for her to be the mother
she wished to be.
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For Sethe her children are her "best thing," yet they have all been ruined. The murdered
Beloved torments Sethe. Howard and Buglar have left home, and Denver is so afraid of the world
that it is only starvation that forces her off the front porch. Sethe begs the ruling Beloved not only for
forgiveness but also for the return, of her "self". But Beloved does not care, what is even most
striking here is that Beloved responds to Sethe's entreaties not only in the language of the murdered
daughter but also in the tortured language of the "woman from the sea." (Sethe’smother). Beloved
existence is experienced with multiple identities.
Morrison's ghost moving beyond human barriers, communicates the death-like Middle Passage
suffered by Sethemother. She, Sethe's mothers the woman “from the sea.” Although at different times
Sethe, her mother, and her daughter all live with the agonizing feeling that they have been betrayed
by their mothers, perhaps most heartbreaking is the image of mother-daughter separation evoked
when Beloved insists that a Sethe, voluntarily and without being pushed, went into the sea.
The agony stems from the child's assumption that she is being deliberately abandoned by
her ma'am. A little girl stands on an enormous ship not understanding why her mother jumps
overboard. Beloved lost her mother when she "went into the sea instead of smiling at [her]." (Beloved
64) And Sethe's mother wants an unidentified, lost woman on the ship, probably her ma'am, to know
how urgently she tries "to help her but the clouds are in the way." (Beloved 65)This Beloved,
Sethe'smother, wants desperately either to save her own mother or die with her, but she loses her
again "because of the noisy clouds of smoke." (Beloved 276)There was a riot on the ship and the
noisy clouds of smoke were caused by guards' gunfire, which prevented the daughter from reaching
her mother.
Beloved is characterized by mothers losing their children 'Sethe's mother
in-law barely glanced at the last of her eight children "because it wasn't worth the trouble." Sethe's
own mother, hanged when Sethe was a small child, had not been allowed to nurse her. But Sethe
defines herself as mother in defiance of the near-impossibility of that role.
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The power of Beloved's rage is directly linked to the power of Sethe's love. Sethe's love for
Beloved is indeed a murderous love. The destructive love is also projected woman which suggests
one perspective on the strain of destructive parental love in Morrison's novels.
For Sethe motherhood is her strength and weakness. Sethe is haunted with both the memories of
being a daughter and a mother.Sethe’s “murderous – love” is the expression and representation of
psycho-depressions of helpless mothers who want to construct a free-generation. Her success and
failure of being a daughter and mother reveals the untold story of black women.
Work Cited
Morrison ,Toni. Beloved. London:Vintage 1997.
Peterson, Nancy I ed. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press,1997.
Christ, Carol P. (Spring 1978). “Why Women Need the Goddess"(PDF). Heresies: A
Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. Heresies Collective. 2 (1): 8–13.
Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860-1960. Anchor;
Reissue edition (September 1, 1988). 1988. ISBN 978-0385248426.
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