Maternity and Rememory

MARIANNE HIRSC H

5 Maternity and Rememory :

Toni Morrison's Beloved

Under these arrangements the customary lexis of sexuality ,

including "reproduction," "motherhood, " "pleasure," an d
"desire," are thrown into unrelieved crisis . Hortense

Spillers (1987 )
Memory, prehistoric memory, has no time.

Toni Morrison

(1987 )
In 1928, Virginia Woolf suggested that "we think back throug h
our mothers if we are women" (Woolf, 1957, p . 79) . Although in A
Room of One's Own, Woolf connects this act of thinking back an d
through the mother with the woman writer's relation to a female
literary tradition, she also brings this form of thought back t o
her own personal motivation for writing . In her memoir, Moments of Being, Woolf reveals that every day from the age o f
thirteen, when her mother died, to the age of forty-four, whe n
she wrote To the Lighthouse, she was haunted by her mother' s
ghost (1985, p. 80) . Completing the novel enabled her to exorcis e
the ghost and to cease thinking about her mother . Informed by
childhood desire and nostalgia, Woolf's composition of thi s
novel follows an expected generational sequence . The thirty-yea r
distance between the mother's death and the daughter's abilit y
to write it is itself a literary and a psychological factor tha t
explains the quality of maternal representation in many women' s
I would like to thank the editors of this volume as well as Elizabet h
Abel, Mary Childers, Carla Freccero, Lynn Higgins, Gail Reimer, Brend a
Silver, Valerie Smith, Leo Spitzer, and Mary Helen Washington for thei r
suggestions on earlier drafts of this chapter and Toni Morrison for he r
encouragement . This chapter was completed in the fall of 1990 .

93

narratives : the distancing and objectification of mothers, the nostalgia tha t

surrounds them, the tone of celebration and mystification, and the invers e
degradation with which they are shaped . '
How much more unusual to have the opposite sequence-a maternal narrative haunted by the ghost of a child . Through such a violent and disturbing
reversal of generational continuity, Toni Morrison's Beloved allows us to look a t
women's writing from the different perspective of maternal subjectivity (Morrison, 1987) . 2
I undertake this exploration of maternity at a moment of crucial urgency fo r
feminist inquiry. At a moment when science and the legal system are engaged i n
the process of charting definitions and rights of families, children, fathers, an d
mothers-in debates around choice, reproductive technologies, custody, adoption, enforced sterilization, child care, AIDS, and so on-it is crucial for feminists to understand the terms through which we want to enter these debates . At
a moment when the popular women's movement is rallying around a "famil y
agenda," it is necessary for academic feminists to focus on "family" as rigorousl y
as possible . And yet Morrison's novel can also help to define how difficult it is t o
do so in an ideological climate dominated by a hegemonic familial mythos that
continues to perpetuate itself even as it ceases, more and more, to correspond t o
the realities of most of our lives . The nuclear patriarchal oedipal family, whic h
grants authority to the father, fragility and the future to the children, and th e
total care of that fragility, the devoted nurturing of that future, to the mother ,
persists in the unconscious of contemporary United States culture-eve n
throughout its subcultures . Although it has outlived its viability, the oedipal
family romance remains a cultural master narrative and reference point agains t
which other arrangements are measured, structuring feeling and thinking ,
theories and narratives, about family and about mothers most especially, eve n
among feminists .
How can feminists, how can mothers, claim a discourse that more and mor e
speaks for us? Although it is unlikely that feminists will ever reach a comfortabl e
consensus on these issues, it is crucial that we understand the terms of th e
argument, and to do so we must try to scrutinize motherhood from personal ,
subjective, legal, psychological, biological, economic, historical, and technological vantage points . Yet we are virtually prevented from doing so by a mythos o f
the nuclear family that is founded on maternal objectification and erasure .
Jocasta, the silent and virtually absent mother in the narrative of Oedipus, serve s
as an emblem for the way in which the psychological story of subject-formatio n
focuses on the child and leaves out the mother . If the notion of the individual
subject is defined in such a way that its very formation and development, that
subjectivity itself, needs to take place either against or in relation to the background of an object-a silent maternal figure-how can maternity be studie d
1. I trace the shape of these representations more fully in

The Mother/Daughter Plot:

Narrative Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989) .

2. Subsequent page numbers in the text refer to this edition .


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from the perspectives of mothers? Are there such perspectives if our theorie s
insist on defining subjectivity from the point of view of the developing child? 3
Are there such perspectives if our theories persist in conceiving the symbolic i n
relation to a presymbolic dominated by a maternal figure who never emerge s
beyond it as mother? Are there such perspectives if mothers are mythified ,
mystified, objectified, abjected, othered, in the process of subject-formation a s
we tend to conceive it, and in the theories that conceive it in this way ?
In my work on maternity, I have been trying to imagine what model o r
definition of subjectivity might be derived from a theory that began wit h
mothers rather than with children . I have been wondering whether we coul d
envision development other than as a process of separation from a self-effacin g
"holding" background . If we started our study of the subject with mothers ,
mothers who are always already double-both child and adult, both daughte r
and mother-rather than with children, what different formulations of subjectivity might emerge? In what ways might such a study enable us to combine a
grammatical/psychological conception of the subject, in the sense of "developing person" and "subject of discourse," with the social/political notion of a
subject who is "subjected to" and "interpellated by" certain structures of power,
certain hegemonic ideologies and institutions?4 In trying to arrive at a notion o f
maternal subjectivity, I see the mother as doubly "subjected" : she is "subject to "
the institutions of family and maternity as defined by the hegemonic culture ,
and those institutions in turn "subject" her to the needs, demands, and desire s
both of the culture itself and of the child whom she rears to become subject t o
that culture in his or her own right. Thus, the mother is the "object" to th e
child's "subjectivity" in that other sense of "the subject" as the ego or the "I" the subject of discourse, of consciousness, of identity . The term subject remain s
useful, then, precisely because of its ambiguity and multivalence . Unlike such
other humanist terms as self or identity and individuality, which imply an
undivided sense of self-ownership, subject combines the divisions, contradictions, and erasures theorized in poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and neo Marxism with the sense of uniqueness and singularity that, although a leftove r
from humanism, continues to be powerful in the constitution of personhood a s
our culture conceives it . 5 Furthermore, the notion of "subject" also includes a
definition of "subjectivity" as "interiority" and depth . It is precisely the notion of
"subject" and "subjectivity" that enables us to ask what happens, in the proces s
of the work of maternity and in the process of the child's "subject formation," t o
the maternal "I," to maternal self-consciousness, identity, and selfhood . It en -

ables us to attempt to describe and to theorize maternal "subjectivity" in thi s

complicated and contradictory sense .
As a text for this exploration, Beloved tests in very particular ways the familia l
ideologies that have controlled maternal representations . Morrison's Sethe is a
slave mother, and, as such, she participates in a different familial and materna l
mythos and has a different relation to any conception of "selfhood," "individuality," or "subjectivity ." The slave mother is interpellated first and primarily into
the institution of slavery : family and maternity therefore have different meanings for her . And she is "subjected" less subtly with the whip and the chain ; he r
very body marks her as a slave . Slavery heightens and intensifies the experienc e
of family and of motherhood, of connection and separation . It raises question s
about what it means to have a self, and to give that self away . It raises questions
about what family means, and about the ways in which nuclear configurations
(dominant in the master culture and in that culture's master narrative) prevai l
as points of reference even in economies in which they are thoroughly displace d
and disrupted . 6
Since the infamous Moynihan report in 1965, Americans have come to se e
the African-American family as a matriarchy in which mothers rather tha n
fathers have power and presence (Moynihan, 1965) . But we have also been taugh t
that children need to be dispossessed of a maternal power deemed illegitimat e
and harmful . Moynihan and later Bill Moyers in his 1986 television documentar y
on "The Vanishing Black Family : Crisis in Black America," as well as othe r
analysts of what we are told is "the crisis of the black family," see the history o f
slavery with which mothers mark their children as the root of familial structure s
that are dysfunctional, especially for sons .' In recent years, African-America n
writers, feminist scholars, and cultural critics have unveiled the racist assumptions that underlie these representations, as they have confronted with on e
another the divergent ideologies of gender that shape black femininity an d
masculinity, on the one hand, and white femininity and masculinity, on th e
other. They have insisted, as Patricia Hill Collins (1990) does most recently, tha t
the maternal practices of African-American mothers can provide models for a
critique of hegemonic familial structures dominated by patriarchy and capital ism and therefore oppressive to women and children .
Beloved reveals these divergences : it tests the notion of matriarchal powe r
and its effects on children by allowing an African-American mother herself t o
speak, to assert and to probe, however tentatively, a maternal subjectivity, th e

3. For more extensive discussions of the child-centered bias of psychoanalytic an d

feminist theories, see Suleiman (1985, 1988) and Chodorow and Contratto (1989) .
4. For a useful discussion of the term subject and the various theoretical appropriations of that term, see Paul Smith (1988) .
5. For a feminist critique of the postmodernist dismantling of the humanist subject ,
see Miller (1988). See also Owens (1983) and Jardine (1985) .

6. The figure of the slave mother appears in a number of recent discussions both o f
maternity and of slavery, perhaps because the violation of maternal love can be useful i n
defining both the extent of the inhumanity of slavery and the power of that love . Fo r
example, Chester (1987) uses Harriet Jacobs as a paradigm of the socially powerles s
mother. See also Williams's novel (1986) about maternity under slavery .
7. See Moyers (1986) . For an excellent summary and analysis of the twenty-five-yea r
history of media representations of the black family, see Gresham and Wilkerson (1989) .


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voice of both mother and subject. I would like to offer this maternal voice as a
paradigm, more broadly useful, for a different, a feminist, way of thinking abou t
families and about mothers . 8 Freud used the family of Oedipus-a family tha t
transgresses against the most basic definitions of convention and norm to th e
point of constituting, rather, a counterfamily-as a model for the emotions tha t
structured his vision of Family. Similarly, we might use, in Beloved, a family
constituted under a slave economy that violates the most basic definitions of
humanity and individuality, as a paradigm for and a critique of the emotions an d
the patterns that structure both the hegemonic master narrative of Family, an d
its fantasies about other models-Moynihan's black matriarchy, for example .
This is an attempt, then, to respond to Hortense Spillers's blunt question "Does the Freudian text translate in short? . . . Is the Freudian landscape a n
applicable text (say nothing of appropriate) to social and historical situation s
that do not replicate moments of its own cultural origins and involvements?" by demonstrating that the particular historical situation of United States slaver y
foregrounds the need to historicize psychoanalytic and literary paradigm s
(Spillers, 1989, pp . 160-168) . Slave mothers, because they "own" neither them selves nor their children, pose the question of maternal discourse with particular emphasis . As the maternal subject in Morrison's novel becomes the repository for the most repressed, the most unspeakable cultural memories an d
narratives, the novel scrutinizes its potential to represent a resistant, even a n
oppositional cultural voice . It may seem surprising, even counterintuitive, t o
identify maternal discourse as oppositional : mothers, after all, are usually see n
as the conservers of value and tradition . Yet the peculiar maternal memory
defined in Toni Morrison's novel as rememory serves as a ground of resistance
and opposition . Rememory is neither memory nor forgetting, but memory
combined with (the threat of) repetition ; it is neither noun nor verb, but bot h
combined . Rememory is Morrison's attempt to re-conceive the memory of slavery, finding a way to re-member, and to do so differently, what an entire culture
has been trying to repress .
Teresa de Lauretis has recently suggested that "feminist theory came into its
own in a post-colonial mode," that "a feminist critical theory as such begin s
when the feminist critique of socio-cultural formations (discourses, forms o f
representation, ideologies) becomes conscious of itself and turns inward . . . i n
pursuit of consciousness-to question its own relation to or possible complicit y
with those ideologies, its own heterogeneous body of writing and interpretations, their basic assumptions and terms, and the practices which they enabl e
and from which they emerge" (1990, pp. 137-138) . Looking at family from th e
perspective of maternity is such an inherently demystifying act . Moving toward
8 . I use the term feminist here without qualifying it as either black or white because I
hope to be able to cut across the divergent familial ideologies the novel reveals without ,
however, erasing the differences between them . A feminist discussion of maternity, as I see
it, is precisely a discussion that takes differences that are due to race, class, ethnicity, an d
historical specificity into account, even while allowing points of convergence to emerge .

Maternity and Rememory

97

Family from the oblique perspective of counterfamilies, feminist theory ca n

come to a consciousness about its terms and conceptions, about their multiplicities and divergences . We can perform the act of "translation" suggested by
Spillers and attempt to cut across what she defines as the parallel and presumably nonintersecting lines that "the African-American text" draws in relation t o
"a Eurocentric psychomythology" (Spillers, 1989, p . 175) . Translation needs to
be performed in multiple directions, however, as the oedipal patriarchal mytho s
of Family is confronted with alternative models . Scrutinizing familial definitions and narratives in heightened and intensified form, we can perhaps unmas k
the master narrative of Family as no more than the master's narrative .
Elsewhere I have suggested that Toni Morrison's Sethe, the maternal protagonist of her novel Beloved, is a revision of Sophocles' silent Jocasta or of th e
powerful mythic figure of Demeter (Hirsch, 1989, pp . 5-8). Like the Oedipu s
story, Morrison's novel is about the murdered/abandoned child, here a daughter ,
returning from the other side to question the mother, and, like the story o f
Demeter and Persephone, it is about a temporary, perhaps a cyclical, reunio n
between the mother and the daughter she lost . Like those two texts, Beloved is a
ghost story about a child who returns to reestablish connection, a deep bodil y
and emotional connection with the mother who was responsible for her death .
Beloved is not only about the child's longing for a lost maternal object but abou t
the immense loss experienced by a mother who is unable to keep her childre n
alive and to rear them : It is about maternal fantasies of reparation and recovery .
It is about the embodiment of maternal memory and about the material and
erotic confrontation with a past that, paradoxically, is represented and embodie d
by the child . Yet Morrison's novel, unlike the Oedipus story, begins with th e
mother, and allows her to tell her tale, to attempt to explain her incomprehensible act .
The novel begins in 1873, eight years after the end of the Civil War, i n
Cincinnati and returns through flashbacks to the Mississippi slave plantatio n
ironically called Sweet Home . There the owner, Mr . Garner, who believed in
treating his slaves humanely, created an atmosphere of relative comfort : Sethe
and Halle could "marry," Halle could buy his mother's freedom, the Sweet Hom e
slaves were "men," and not "boys ." When Garner dies and his brother-in-law,
referred to as Schoolteacher, arrives with his nephews to run the plantation, th e
slaves come to know both the material and the psychological humiliations of
their condition . Schoolteacher uses them to prove the animality of the black rac e
by measuring their heads and keeping tables about them .
When life becomes intolerable, Sethe and the Sweet Home men undertake a
nightmarish escape plan ; most are killed or disappear, including Halle, bu t
Sethe and Paul D . separately make it to "freedom ." For Sethe this is hardly a
triumphant escape : she sends her three children ahead, and in the final stages o f
her fourth pregnancy, she is brutally raped of her breast milk by Schoolteacher' s
nephews and then badly beaten and scarred when she complains to her mistress .
In this wounded condition, she rushes on across the Ohio to bring her milk t o
the baby she sent ahead, but on the way she gives birth to Denver with the help of


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a "whitegirl," Amy . There is a brief respite when she reaches 124 Bluestone Roa d
and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, who nurses her back to health . But all too
soon, her freedom and her children's is threatened by the arrival of School teacher who comes to claim them under the Fugitive Slave Act . As Sethe sees
them arrive, she "tries to put her babies where they'd be safe" : she kills the bab y
girl and would have killed her two boys and herself too if there had been time .
Her infanticide does buy her and the children a form of "freedom ." Eventuall y
released from jail, Sethe lives a life of guilt and abandonment : Baby Suggs ,
broken by her grief, dies, and the two boys, afraid of their mother, run off .
Only Sethe, Denver, and the ghost of the baby girl are left eighteen year s
later, when Paul D . arrives to tell his part of the story of escape and liberation :
the death of Sixo, one of the Sweet Home men, who was roasted alive singin g
after trying to escape ; Halle's smearing his face with butter after watching the
nephews' assault on Sethe ; and the indignities Paul D . himself suffered when he
was forced to wear a bit in his mouth, and when he worked on a chain gang an d
escaped, chained to a group of other men . He also tells how he dealt with thes e
memories until seeing Sethe : by sealing them and the emotions they evoked off
into a tin tobacco box which he wore inside his chest .
The mother-daughter narrative in Morrison's Beloved depends on male inter vention for its inception . In this it seems to confirm not only a pattern set in th e
Demeter story-there is no story before Hades abducts Persephone-but als o
psychoanalytic patterns described by Freud and Lacan, who identify the symbolic space of narrative with the paternal third term, the name of the father . Pau l
D .'s sudden appearance disrupts the uneasy household in which Sethe an d
Denver have coexisted with the baby ghost . His presence makes it possible for
Sethe to find a way to tell the story of motherhood under slavery, a story by whic h
she has been obsessed for the eighteen years following her escape . His presenc e
also dispels the ghost, evoking instead the appearance of the mysterious femal e
figure who turns out to be the murdered baby Beloved returned from the dead t o
make contact with the mother she has been longing for on the other side .
Familial structures in this novel are necessarily shaped by the institution o f
slavery. Freud (1908) insists in his essay "Family Romances" that once childre n
understand reproduction, the mother is "certissima," whereas the father i s
"semper incertus," and he builds an entire theory of childhood desire an d
nostalgia around this difference . But Sethe spoke to her own mother only once .
When she saw her mother hanged one morning, Sethe was not allowed to chec k
for the mark under her breast by means of which she might have been able t o
recognize her definitively as her mother . When Sethe's mother showed Sethe
the mark that branded them both as descendants of a maternal lineage o f
enslavement, she rewrote the slave owner's inscription as her own subversive
maternal language . 9 With this maternal act, Morrison's narrative aptly qualifie s
the ahistoricity of psychoanalytic certainties . Sethe is permanently separate d
from her husband, Halle, and separates herself from her own children when sh e
9 . This is the illuminating point made by Goldman (1990) .

Maternity and Rememory 9 9

sends them ahead to freedom . In this economy in which even one's own body i s
not one's property, the white masters can rob Sethe of everything, including he r
mother's milk . Her maternal labor is supposed to be theirs, not hers or he r
children's; she needs to devise a discourse of resistance to assert her own mater nal knowledge : "All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl . Nobody wa s
going to nurse her like me" (p . 16) .
It is no surprise, then, that the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone Road do no t
constitute a nuclear family that might fit Freudian paradigms . Morrison under scores this incongruity when she writes the ambiguous "124," which opens th e
novel : (Oedipal) triangles are repeatedly broken and displaced, as a fourth term
either supplements or replaces the third . Sethe, her daughter Denver, and th e
grandmother, Baby Suggs, are joined by the ghost ; after the grandmother' s
death, Sethe, Denver, and the ghost are joined by Paul D ; and after the ghost i s
chased off, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D ., whose shadows on the road do form a
triangle, are quickly joined by the ghostly Beloved who thoroughly disrupts an y
possible nuclear configuration . When Paul D . leaves and the three women ar e
left in the house, their hermetic interaction is unbearable and the three nee d
again to be disrupted, first by Denver's departure, then by the community
women's return, and, eventually, by the exorcism of the ghost and the return o f
Paul D . This sequence of rupture and dislocation confronts us with the novel' s
first words and shapes the novel as a whole . Morrison herself explains this choic e
of beginning : "The reader is snatched, yanked, thrown into an environmen t
completely foreign, and I want it as the first stroke of the shared experience tha t
might be possible between the reader and the novel's population . Snatched jus t
as the slaves were from one place to another, from any place to another, withou t
preparation and without defense" (Morrison, 1989) . She underscores the difficulty of the " 124 "-numbers seen, difficult to read and pronounce : is it on e
twenty-four or one, two, four? And what, when we read "124 was spiteful," i s
"124"-a number, a character, a house?
Sweet Home itself already functions as a distorted family : the Garners substi tute the slaves for their children, and when Mr . Garner dies, a trio arrives mad e
up of Schoolteacher and his two nephews . The fact that the white families in th e
novel-the Garners, the Bodwins, Amy Denver-are all childless and mother less serves to heighten the symbolic import of the theft of Sethe's milk and clear s
the space for an exploration of the black mother, a figure Morrison reclaims fro m
prevailing stereotypes . Under slavery, where mothers cannot "own" their children, they experience separation and loss all the more intensely . Possessives
dominate in this novel as the characters problematically insist that they ow n
each other : "you are mine ." Yet at the end of the novel, Sethe is tentatively able t o
allow a maternal voice and subjectivity to emerge, to question the hierarchy o f
motherhood over selfhood on which her life had rested until that moment, for ,
reversing the prevalent sequence, Sethe was a mother before she became a
subject. This does not mean, of course, that Sethe does not have an interio r
subjective life at Sweet Home or in Cincinnati ; she certainly does to the point of
resistance, escape, and murder. It does mean that because of her status in the


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"peculiar institution," she was personally and legally not an "I," not a subject ,
until after she freed herself, and she did not free herself until after she wa s
already a mother . For this reason, Sethe's subjectivity is not in fact "born" unti l
the very end of the novel when she both recognizes Beloved as her child an d
begins to recognize herself as "Me? Me? "
Here is the moment in which maternal subjectivity is born . It echoes another
moment in an earlier Morrison novel, Nel's self-recognition as subject in Sula :
"I'm me . I'm not their daughter . I'm not Nei . I'm me . Me" (Morrison, 1973, p .
24) . We need, however, to assess the difference between this sort of daughterl y
subjectivity and the maternal subjectivity we find in Beloved. We need to examine what makes Sethe's moment of birth into maternal subjectivity possible an d
what its implications are at the present moment of feminist consciousness an d
social thinking about maternity .
Birth is an important theme in Morrison's novel, and Sethe's "Me? Me?" gain s
in significance as we place it in the context of other birth moments . The birth o f
Denver, in particular, occurs at a crucially symbolic juncture in the text, one t o
which many of the characters return . Denver is born during Sethe's flight t o
freedom in a boat, just before the crossing of the Ohio into freedom . Seth e
repeats to all who marvel at her ability to make it under these circumstances
that she gave birth not alone but with the help of a "whitegirl," Amy Denver .
Several things occur at the same time, then : the birth of a new child, Denver ;
Sethe's emergence into freedom and reunification with her other children ; he r
birth as a free subject ; and the sisterhood, the collaboration of a white wome n
and a black woman, united by their gender, their poverty, their subordinat e
social status, and by their stories of cruel masters, absent mothers, unknow n
fathers-yet forever separated by the absolute reality of slavery . In a privilege d
moment of connection around a work they share, privileged because they ar e
allowed to have a space separate from any social framework ("no patroller cam e
and no preacher"), Sethe and Amy can talk fora few brief hours, Amy can ru b
Sethe's feet and wrap Sethe's baby in her undergarment . Significantly, as well ,
she takes the place not only of the other black women who would have acted a s
midwives in such a birth but also of the black father whose power to name th e
child she occupies by "giving" the baby the name Denver.
What is significant in this privileged moment in the novel is how it narrate s
and ultimately mythifies birth, maternal creation, subject-formation, and future hope . This process of mythification, and its ultimate demystification by th e
events of the novel, sets up the structure of narrative and counternarratives ,
memory/forgetting and rememory, on which the novel is structured .
Although Denver's birth is referred to on several occasions, the only ful l
account of it occurs in a scene between Denver and Beloved, who, in Faulkneria n
fashion, reconstruct the scene together based on the stories Denver had heard
her whole life from Sethe and from Baby Suggs . It is the interaction between th e
sisters that finally makes the story and Sethe's own role in it come alive fo r
Denver : "Denver was seeing it now and feeling it-through Beloved . Feeling
what it must have felt to her mother . Seeing how it must have looked" (p. 78) . In

Maternity and Rememory 10 1

her adoration of Beloved, Denver gives her the most precious thing she owns ,
the story of her own origin, and through that act of giving, the story grows and i s
enriched, uniting the sisters, keeping one interested in the other . More than a
sister, Denver becomes a "mother" who feeds stories to her "child . "
In the sisters' daughterly reconstruction, the narrative of birth acquire s
mythic proportions : not only does it occur outside of time (it is late afternoon ,
the sun is still shining, but the stars are already out), outside the social, betwee n
slavery and freedom, on the edge of the river (the river Lethe?), but in celebrating the power of maternal creation against immeasurable odds, it becomes a
glorious tale of mythic maternal heroism-a mythic birth of a hero . This is th e
child's search for her origins ; this is the mediated memory of slavery held by a
generation that is already born into freedom . But the daughter cannot tell tha t
story without heroizing and mythifying it .
Throughout her painful journey and labor, Sethe, who feels the pain, an d
Amy, who watches it, both wonder "what God had in mind ." Just after the baby i s
born, "the wet sticky women clambered ashore to see what, indeed, God had i n
mind ." They face a fantastic landscape that archetypically repeats the birth the y
have just enacted : "Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the river bank float toward the water in silver-blue lines hard to see unless you are in o r
near them, lying right at the river's edge when the sun-shots are low an d
drained . Often they are mistook for insects-but they are seeds in which th e
whole generation sleeps confident of a future . And for a moment it is easy t o
believe each has one-will become all of what is contained in the spore : will live
out its days as planned . This moment of certainty lasts no longer than that ;
longer perhaps than the spore itself" (p . 84) . Under the shower of bluefern, w e
have a story of maternal creation and survival that, unlike the rest of the novel, i s
"a story to pass on," a story that does get passed on, that is hopeful and forward looking and therefore understandable to the empathic, but ultimately self interested, daughters . It is a story of sisterhood and hope with which daughter s
can identify, out of which memories and inspirations for the future are made . I n
allowing them to heroize this tale, Morrison allows the daughters to find them selves in the mother's story so that Denver might develop into the mature, self reliant, caring, and community-oriented woman she becomes at the end of th e
novel .
This account of Denver's birth corresponds to Sara Ruddick's recent discus sion of the philosophical preconceptions of the birth process : "Birth is a beginning whose end and shape can be neither predicted, nor controlled . . . . To
engage in giving birth is an expression of trust in others and a determination t o
become trustworthy . It is an expression of hopefulness in oneself and in `nature, '
one's own and that of the child to whom one has given birth" (1989, pp . 209210) . As the novel articulates that hope here, it can use it as a critique of th e
culture of slavery in which mothers give birth neither to hope nor to individual s
nor to a future, but to property .
The story of Denver's birth is embedded in and materially marked by anothe r
story that the daughters can only begin to understand and that is also inscribed


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on the mother's body-the story of slavery and escape, which qualifies an d

transforms the story of individual and cultural birth and rebirth . This is th e
story Denver hates, the story she wants to silence, and from which Sethe tries t o
protect her : "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay" (p . 42) .
"Denver hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself, which i s
why Amy was all she ever asked about . The rest was a gleaming powerful world
made more so by Denver's absence from it" (p . 62) . But that story is there
nevertheless, inflecting and informing the other . Thus the blood is not just th e
blood of birth but the blood on Sethe's back where she was beaten, the blood o n
her feet on which she had to run . The milk is not just the milk she developed fo r
this new baby but the milk she was carrying for the baby girl she had to sen d
ahead, the milk taken by the masters at Sweet Home provoking her escape .
Sethe's body, the birthing maternal body, is marked by the narrative of slavery ,
just as her own mother's body was marked by a circle and cross under her breast .
In this novel, the mother's body is not merely a vehicle for the child's birth an d
creation : it has a narrative of its own . It is not merely the vehicle of a birth int o
freedom : it must itself be (re)created and cared for in the transition betwee n
slavery and freedom . Sethe cannot be freed ; she cannot begin to be born into
subjectivity without a "mother" of her own, and in the novel that mother is Bab y
Suggs . But this birth constitutes one in a series of counternarratives to th e
other .
Our introduction to Baby Suggs and to the scene of Sethe's arrival at 12 4
Bluestone Road occurs by way of Baby Suggs's work as an "unchurche d
preacher" in the clearing, where she gathers the freed slaves and teaches them t o
love themselves, to love, nurture, and celebrate every part of the bodies that ha d
been despised and tortured by the white masters : "we flesh," she insists, "fles h
that needs to be loved" (p . 88) . When Sethe arrives, Baby Suggs does just that she washes Sethe in sections, wraps her body as though in swaddling clothes ,
and sews her a new dress . She soaks her feet, rubs her nipples, greases he r
wounded back, washes the blood that has inscribed on the sheets the narrative o f
Sethe's suffering . It is thus that Sethe can literally be born again .
Baby Suggs, the freed mother who has lost all of her own children, can offe r
Sethe an alternate to the maternal care she could have from her own mother . In
her only moment of meaningful contact with her mother, Sethe was shown th e
mark under her mother's breast and was slapped when she wanted to be marke d
as well . She is marked by her mother, of course, not only by the bodily scars of
slavery, but by her mother's history of infanticide which she ends up repeating .
Baby Suggs, the alternate mother, the mother-in-law, in contrast, tries to eras e
the marks as she washes Sethe . In Baby Suggs's house, she can be nurture d
differently than she had been by Nan who had nursed her and told her, in a
language she no longer remembers or understands, that she was special, tha t
she was the only one her mother had not thrown away . And Sethe herself ca n
perhaps mother differently from Baby Suggs who, in order to be free, had t o
separate herself from her only remaining child, and who could now barely
remember how her children looked or what they were like .

Maternity and Rememory 10 3

Sethe's negative memories-she does not speak her mother tongue, she wa s
not marked, she had not been thrown away, she could not properly recognize th e
mother who had been hanged, her mother had not done her hair-had to b e
replaced by Baby Suggs's positive love of her flesh, by the spit the baby gir l
drooled on her face, by the "real-talk" with new neighbors . And through tha t
love, Baby Suggs herself hopes to repair some of her own losses . Together,
perhaps, they could invent a new and different form of mother-daughter relatio n
and transmission . As Sethe explains to Paul D . eighteen years later, "Freein g
yourself was one thing ; claiming ownership of that freed self was another" (p.
95) .
The self that Sethe learned to claim with the help of Baby Suggs and th e
community during the short twenty-eight days of her rebirth process is no t
entirely hers to own ; if Baby Suggs puts her together, it is not just for herself . As
she rushes to get her milk to her baby, interrupted only by the birth of anothe r
child, Sethe constructs herself as the object of her children's needs . Sethe's is a
maternal self, connected to the new baby she has just given birth to, to "th e
crawling-already baby girl" she is still nursing, and to the two boys who used he r
body as their toy . It is connected to the memories of Halle and Sweet Home an d
the past, and that past is part of any future life she can possibly build with he r
children and her mother-in-law . Again, Sethe explains these connections to Pau l
D . : "I did it. . . . I birthed them and I got them out and it wasn't no accident . . . . It was a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before . It fel t
good . Good and right..l was big, Paul D ., and deep and wide and when I stretche d
out my arms all my children could get in between . I was that wide" (p . 162) . As
she emerges from captivity at 124 Bluestone Road, as she emerges in body and i n
soul, Sethe conceives of herself in and through these affiliations .
These multiple connections are ever more pressing and confusing when thi s
rebirth scene is repeated at the end of the novel, this time with Paul D . in the
maternal nurturing role . After losing her daughter for the second time, Seth e
retreated to Baby Suggs's bed with "no plans at all," ready to die . Again her bod y
has to be restored to her, for she has lost it: "If he bathes her in sections will th e
parts hold together?" she wonders . But in this scene the birthing and nurturing
is mutual and multiple . Through the memory of Sixo and the Thirty-Mil e
Woman, Paul D . realizes what Sethe can do for him : "She is a friend of my mind .
She gather me, man . The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to m e
in the right order" (pp . 272, 273).
And, as he holds her hand with one of his hands and her face with the other ,
he can help her to realize that it was not her child who was her best thing : "You
your best thing, Sethe . You are ." He can help her get to the point of asking, "Me ?
Me?" With this double question, this double assertion of herself not in th e
affirmative as Nel had done in Sula but in the interrogative, not in the subjec t
and object position "I'm me" but in the object position alone, the materna l
subject appears . It is a subject constructed in question and in relation . After al l
the threes and fours, we have a two here ; after Denver's heroic birth into individ uality and after Sethe's repeated birth into family and community, we have a


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birth into a couple here, a couple with one child, Denver, who returns onl y
during the day. We might ask whether this is a reversion to oedipal mediation s
and triangulations, to the heterosexual adulthood Freud dictates for women, t o
a story that is always already read . We might ask why Sethe's moment of selfrealization is located in the plot of heterosexual romance . It is obvious tha t
Sethe and Paul D . do not correspond to the heterosexual couple that is th e
cornerstone of the oedipal family : Paul D . is not the father, he has no authority ,
he has been walking for eighteen years and comes to Sethe to put his story next
to hers, not to exercise patriarchal privilege . Sethe and Paul D ., the coupl e
attempting to give birth to "some kind of tomorrow," are not alone in that room .
With them are their rememories-Baby Suggs, the children who have gone, th e
community women who have returned, Sixo and the Thirty-Mile Woman, Halle ,
the other Pauls . Their story is not single, but multiple : they have put thei r
stories next to each other, next to the stories of all the others . Sethe's materna l
subjectivity is still affiliative ; it cannot be born without the physical interconnection of "his holding fingers" which are "holding hers ." And no adult materna l
subjectivity can be voiced, even tentatively and questioningly, without th e
haunting rememories of slavery inscribed on their bodies-Sethe's chokecherr y
tree that marks her back but that she will never see or feel, Paul D .'s continue d
consciousness of the bit in his mouth and the collar around his neck-an d
embodied in the murdered third child, Beloved . It is here, in the act of re memory, that we can find the differences between the freed person, the free d
mother, that Sethe was when she first arrived at 124 and the maternal subjec t
who says "Me? Me?" at the end of the novel .
Two other more obscure scenes of birth and origin serve to throw light on thi s
evolution . The first, more straightforward one is the uncanny scene of Beloved' s
arrival out of the water, her thirst, and Sethe's simultaneous seemingly endles s
urination, equated with "water breaking from a breaking womb" (p . 51) . Sethe
speculates that this literal rebirth of the baby's/young woman's ghost "in th e
flesh" must have occurred with the help, on the other side, of Baby Suggs . Late r
that ghost's own rememories, however, place this particular "birth" momen t
into a series of other infinitely more disturbing ones .
There is no account of the baby girl's birth at Sweet Home ; there is only a very
brief account of her death, of the truth Sethe calls "simple" and believes she wil l
no longer have to remember : "I stopped him . . . . I took and put my babie s
where they'd be safe ." This is the end of hope and trust, the opposition of th e
outlook of birth described by Ruddick . Yet, as impossible as that may be to
absorb, it is a maternal act of, to borrow another term from Sara Ruddick ,
preservation : Sethe wants to make sure her baby will be safe from the dehuman ization of slavery.' 0 This moment is, of course, the most problematic of th e
novel, and, as such, it takes the text out of the pattern of narrative and counternarrative, to the point of antinarrative . Sethe's act of infanticide is simply no t
10 . Ruddick, Maternal Thinking; see especially the chapter entitled "Preservative
Love ."

Maternity and Rememory 10 5

told: It is read about in the newspaper clipping by Paul D . ; it is circled around by
Sethe ; it is barely touched on by Beloved . "Sethe knew that the circle she wa s
making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one . That she coul d
never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask . If they didn't get it right
off-she could never explain" (p . 163) .
To Beloved herself that moment when her head is hit and her throat is cu t
seems not to feel like violence, as it appeared to the terrified surviving childre n
who could not sleep for years . She complains instead of abandonment : "Belove d
accused her of leaving her behind . Of not being nice to her, not smiling at her .
She said they were the same, had the same face, how could she have left her?" (p .
241) . The "hot things" she is obsessed with, the milk her mother carried for he r
from Sweet Home and the blood that separated her from that milk forever, bot h
constitute the strange combination of connection and separation she has com e
back to tell about .
What Beloved remembers as a point of origin offers a devastating counternar rative to the story of Denver's birth and even to the narratives of Sethe's repeated
rebirths . Beloved's is a composite personal and cultural memory that boldly
equates the womb with the tomb with the slaveship, the crouching in the Middl e
Passage with the fetal position, the sea with uterine fluid, milk with blood . I n
this memory, Sethe and Beloved are together, "she is my face smiling at m e
doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing" (p . 213) . Here Sethe ,
Denver, and Beloved merge, as personal pronouns cease to differentiate betwee n
their voices and positions : "Will we smile at me?" And Sethe, Denver, an d
Beloved insert themselves into a long line of female transmission where maternal love, maternal pain, and maternal violence are dangerously indistinguishable . Beloved's chapter stands alone in the novel . Her voice is fragmented ye t
continuous, unpunctuated yet ruptured, particular yet sweeping . This is Beloved's narrative, but, again, neither she nor anyone can tell it because Belove d
actually embodies that narrative .' 1 Beloved is memory itself; she is the story o f
slavery, the memory of slavery come back to confront the community whos e
future, until that point, had been to "keep the past at bay," the community that
had been trying not to remember . The embodiment of that past, Belove d
threatens to take possession of their present lives . Paul D. disquietingly insists :
"She reminds me of something . Something, look like, I'm supposed to remember" (p . 234) . As Valerie Smith (1989) suggests, when he has sex with Beloved, h e
has to face the bodily memory of slavery, because memory is always in the flesh .
11 . In my discussion of Beloved as "embodiment" of the story of slavery, I do not mea n
to suggest that her appearance is that of a "symptom," particularly as Sethe's symptom, a s
Spillers has brilliantly, though to my mind problematically, argued in her paper "Ton i
Morrison's Beloved: Managing Memory." I find problematic such a psychologizing of the
figure of Beloved, although I do believe that the novel represents a psychoanalytic proces s
of healing . The term embodiment is broader than symptom and is meant to suggest the
far-reaching nature of Beloved's intervention and disturbance of the communal "manag ing" of memory.


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But when she becomes pregnant and her body grows to unmanageable proportions, she threatens to perpetuate the pain of memory to the lethal point wher e
she has to be stopped . As the embodiment of her story, Beloved offers a model of
subjectivity different from the daughterly subjectivity of the differentiated Denver or the maternal subjectivity of Sethe, and it is the confrontation with Beloved's desperate, destructive, and cannibalistic confusion of boundaries tha t
allows Sethe ultimately to define her own subjectivity as "Me? Me? "
Sethe, when she realizes who has returned, believes she can now cease to
remember her pain ; she believes she can explain and reconcile . She believes
that, like Woolf's maternal ghost, the child ghost can be exorcised, put aside, lai d
to rest . But she is wrong . It is her maternal rememory combined with Paul's
return and Denver's longing that has made the return of Beloved and of the stor y
she embodies possible . But that story's emergence cannot again lead to forgetting : Sethe cannot become Lethe . The merging, undifferentiated, engulfing ,
collective voice that emerges from Beloved's memories threatens to kill . As Amy
had asserted in relation to Sethe's aching feet, "Anything dead coming back t o
life hurts" (p . 35) . Contrary to Denver's heroic birth and emergence into freedom, Beloved incarnates the terrifying equation of birth and death, past and
future, mother and child, loss and reparation, retribution and forgiveness, rag e
and reconciliation . She is the past that persists in the present . "All of it is now i t
is always now ." As Sethe insists to Denver, Sweet Home, slavery, the past, is never
gone . It retains its material presence "even though it's all over-over and don e
with-it's going to always be there waiting for you . . . . Places, places are stil l
there . If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays ,
and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world" (p . 36) .
Sethe can know this, she can be the privileged and dangerous ground fo r
rememory, because she is a mother. Memories of children may seem to fade, bu t
like the chokecherry tree, they are always there, even when we don't feel thei r
pain . As mother, Sethe has known the connection with her children, both a t
Sweet Home and, differently, at 124 . She has lived the loss of her baby girl fo r
eighteen years . And, now, after Beloved's return, she is almost, but not quite ,
reengulfed by the relation not only with Beloved but with all the other children ,
all the other mothers whose rememories the figure of Beloved represents .
In the terms of Hortense Spillers (1987), "we might well ask if this phenome non of marking and branding actually `transfers' from one generation to an other, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of meanings tha t
repeat the initiating moments?" As though in response to such a question ,
Morrison casts the black mother as the holder of meaning and rememory whose
mark does extend across generations in the service of her community's selfrecognition . Thus she becomes the voice of resistance in a society that manage d
to find a way to survive through repression . Through Sethe's, the mother's ,
rememory the inhabitants of Bluestone Road are forced to confront Beloved ,
beautiful and seductive, yet devastating and terrifying like Sweet Home . She is
the rememory of slavery, the story of a past that is still there, out there in th e
world for everyone to bump into like a burned down house . Beloved comes forth

Maternity and Rememory 10 7

to tell the story that Paul D . had locked up in a metal tin, the story that Sethe ha d
never told Denver, the story of the past that Ella believed should not be allowe d
to take over the present, the story that Stamp believed he had already paid for .
And what she tells threatens, in her beautifully pregnant body, to engulf an d
transform . What she tells can be neither reconciled nor integrated, neithe r
forgotten nor remembered .
When the community women return to help Sethe send Beloved back to th e
other side, Sethe is born once again : "the voices of women searched for the righ t
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 the pods off chestnut trees . It broke
over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash" (p . 261) . Denver has
been feeding her, and Paul D . has helped her say "Me? Me?" As though as a
consequence and a precondition, the novel's last chapter repeatedly asserts tha t
Beloved is now again gone and forgotten . Even as the novel had convinced u s
that nothing ever dies, the novel also has to end ; like all ghost stories, it mus t
find a way to send the ghost back and to recover from the disruption it caused .
This, seemingly, is what happens here, enabling a look toward "some kind of
tomorrow" after having confronted the yesterday the characters so fully share .
"They forgot her like a had dream . . . all trace is gone" (pp . 274-275) .
Yet Beloved's story, the suppressed narrative of slavery and of maternity ,
cannot find closure . 12 In Beloved, time is neither linear nor cyclical ; memory
and forgetting are replaced by the strange third option Morrison calls re memory : repetition + memory, not simply a recollection of the past but it s
return, its re-presentation, its re-incarnation, and thereby the re-vision of memory itself. Through the rememory of Beloved, the past again becomes present
but its presence does not re-engulf, it does not kill . It can be survived . "Down by
the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go . They are s o
familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them
out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there" (p. 275) . It
is Sethe, the mother, who is the agent of this reincarnation and of the survival
it can tolerate . At the end of the novel, Sethe is the maternal subject who in
saying "Me? Me?" has offered her own self both for herself to contemplate as a
proposition and for connection with Paul D ., her children, her community. The
connections she establishes, however, are different from the undifferentiate d
mirrorings experienced by Beloved on the other side ; they are different from
Sethe's own wide all-encompassing body that could contain all the love she fel t
for her children when she was first freed and that is reflected back to her b y
Beloved's falsely pregnant body. By daring to voice her "Me? Me?" first, she can
understand perhaps the false possessiveness of "mine" and the "too thick love "
that enabled her to kill her child . And she can live with the unending pain of tha t
12 . Gayle Greene cites a conversation with Toni Morrison in which she claimed tha t
the novel's ending was not intended as an ending but as a transition to another section ; i t
was declared an ending by the book's editors and not by its author . See Greene (1991) .


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108

understanding . She can experience the separation involved in voicing a singula r

first person pronoun, and it is this knowledge that enables her to accept the
connection of Paul D ., his story next to hers, and the story of the others as well .
Thus Sethe can undertake and perpetuate the act of rememory which, in thi s
novel, has no end and no beginning, and she can do so and not be destroyed by it .
Linear and cyclical narratives of family are replaced, in Morrison's novel, by
another shape, constructed like rememory, made possible by the 124, the gap i n
the sequence that opens up spaces of difference, upsets binaries, erases distinctions, reverses sequences . The trace is there and it is gone . The house burned
down but it still exists, "out there ." Sethe and Beloved have the same face .
Beloved and Amy (Aimee), Amy Denver and Denver, have the same name . Th e
Pauls have the same name . The grandmother is baby, Baby Suggs. Sethe is th e
mother; Beloved is the child . Sethe is the child ; Beloved, pregnant, combs her
hair, counts her teeth, beats her up . Sethe diminishes ; Beloved grows . Mr .
Bodwin is Schoolteacher . Mrs . Bodwin teaches Denver. Slave life is like free life
in Ella's thoughts, "every day was a test and a trial" (p. 256) . This sameness nee d
not destroy : it can illuminate .
The novel's early reflections on maternal memory-never good enough t o
remember the good (Baby Suggs agonizes about all the details about her eigh t
children she cannot remember) and never bad enough to forget the pain-ar e
replaced later on with maternal rememory which is like weather . It is always
there, "not the breath of the disremembered to be accounted for, but wind in th e
eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly . Just weather." Maternal rememory,
once Sethe fully experiences it in the novel, may indeed be capable of performin g
a task deemed impossible in the beginning of the novel-to remember th e
beautiful trees of Sweet Home and the bodies hanging from them . As the story of
the past embodied in Beloved emerges, such distinctions and separations vanis h
and no one position remains comfortably distinguishable, categorizable i n
schoolteacher-style into separate characteristics . A series of counternarratives ,
of counterfamilies, offers a metonymic escape route out of the master narrativ e
of Family-the master's narrative .
Emerging from that master story we can begin to adumbrate another tale the shape of maternal subjectivity that can replace the oedipal configuratio n
with a multiply interconnected embodied subject, one who is both multipl y
"subjected" and a resisting agent in her own plot, one who is "wide enough" to
contain all the memories of the past-all the pain, the guilt, the love, th e
knowledge, the power of the experience of maternity-yet clear enough to offe r
her "Me? Me?" to others who can then put it next to theirs . The maternal
emerges out of these interconnections as a critique of the individuality an d
possession that made slavery possible in the first place . No longer a fixed place in
a stable structure, it becomes a shifting function in a plural process .
Sethe and Beloved are rendered paralyzed when they claim to own each othe r
to the point of killing each other. That sense of ownership is a repetition of a slav e
system supported by such conceptions of individuality, autonomy, and self possession. Sethe is happier, more hopeful, when she accepts Paul D .'s holding

fingers and his story next to hers . The act of putting their stories and thei r
subjectivities next to each other, an act that issues from maternal experience bu t
that Morrison locates not between mothers and children but in the adult hetero sexual couple of Sethe and Paul D ., suggests a relation from subject to subjec t
that can reconceive the objectification of slavery and of patriarchy . The individual subjects of Morrison's novel are shattered subjects who yearn for wholenes s
and wonder what will hold them together and who might help them to becom e
whole . By putting these shattered subjects and their stories next to each other ,
the novel suggests how unspeakable memories might in fact be spoken, how a
story that should not be passed on can in fact be transmitted . This act o f
transmission is a peculiarly maternal one .

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Part II The Paradoxica l

Nature of the Maternal Positio n