[For this year’s installment in my annual Halloween series, I’ll be AmericanStudying ghosts in American society and popular culture. Boo (in the best sense)!]
On the
psychological and historical sides to Toni
Morrison’s haunting masterpiece.
A few years ago I
wrote about (and, fortunately if belatedly, corrected) the shame of not
having covered Moby-Dick in my first
eight years of blogging in this space. Well, I could certainly say the same for
Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), one of
the most acclaimed
American novels of the 20th century and a hugely important work
of historical fiction, African American literature, postmodern fiction, and
more. (I did write about it in a paragraph of this
post on representations of the Middle Passage, if that counts for
anything!) It was largely thanks to Beloved
that Morrison became
in 1993 the first black woman to win the Nobel
Prize in Literature, a truly groundbreaking moment in world literary and
cultural history (and one, to be clear, that she deserved well before Beloved’s publication, but that was
likely cemented by that book and moment). I’ve also had the chance to teach
excerpts from or the whole of Morrison’s novel in many different classes, and
have found that it’s one of those rare works that is both tremendously dense
and demanding and yet entirely rewards all effort put into it. Beloved is quite simply a magisterial
novel.
It’s also, at
its heart, a
ghost story (sorry, NYT, but I
don’t agree with that piece!). Yet without minimizing the actual horror or
thriller sides to Morrison’s novel (I hope by now it’s beyond clear to any
consistent reader that I have absolutely no problem with genre
fiction), I would argue that Beloved’s
titular ghost is at least as symbolic and thematic as she is scary. Perhaps the
clearest element to that symbolism is psychological: the novel’s protagonist
Sethe, like her historical inspiration
Margaret Garner, has killed one of her young children rather than allow her
to be captured into a state of slavery; and it stands to reason that she would
be haunted by the spectral presence of that lost child (or, more exactly, of
the woman she might have grown up to be, and a symbolically pregnant woman at
that). The historian Kidada
Williams has researched and written powerfully about the psychological
effects of racial violence; while of course Sethe’s and Garner’s acts of
violence are far different from those committed by the Klan against African
Americans, they are inspired by the same kinds and systems of racial terrorism
and would certainly produce their own forms of psychological trauma. Of course
it is Schoolteacher (the novel’s
hateful slaveowner) who truly deserves Beloved’s ghostly presence and wrath,
but it stands to reason that a sensitive and thoughtful character like Sethe
would be far more haunted than a villain like Schoolteacher.
But as Slavoj
Zizek (back when he was just an edgy psychoanalytical literary critic, rather
than some sort of strange post-postmodern performance artist) argues
in his reading of Beloved as part
of his book The
Fragile Absolute (2000), both the guilt and the haunting past
symbolized by Beloved are as much communal as they are individual. That is,
slavery was already by the late 19th century setting of Morrison’s
novel a ghost, literally past but still haunting America in the present so
fully and potently; and it’s fair to say that it was no less present and
haunting in the 1980s moment of Morrison’s writing, nor in the 2010s one of
mine here. To frame a historical novel of slavery as a ghost story might seem
to lessen the realism and perhaps the significance of the historical
representations; but Morrison’s novel proves that the opposite is true, that
the ghost story metaphor offers a pitch-perfect form through which to confront
the legacies and effects and presence of our darkest collective (as well as
individual) histories. Which, in turn, makes the ghost story all the more scary
and compelling.
Next
GhostStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other ghost stories or histories you’d share?
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