Melanie Fehrenbacher

Student

Assiduous Student

Mrs. Huynh-Duc

AP English 11

12 December 2017

How Memory Connects Fiction to Historical Events in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Set in the 1870s during Reconstruction with frequent flashbacks to as early as the 1830s, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is undeniably a novel about American slavery. Featuring nonlinear narration that shifts in and out of the past and through the perspectives of many characters, this novel reveals an oppressive history of slavery through the reconstruction of its characters’ fragmented memories. This layered form of storytelling, referred to by critics and Morrison herself as “memory and rememory,” allows Morrison to explore the comprehensive and traumatic effects of slavery on a personal level. The ultimate result is an interconnection between history and fiction; Beloved underscores a deeper revelation of the demonic and degrading institution of 19^th-century slavery, making it more personal, palpable, and affective for the 21^st-century reader.

The act of remembering is difficult for Morrison’s characters because they each want desperately to move away from their experiences in slavery. Their histories have been wrought by oppressive suffering, and as the protagonist Sethe states in the novel, each character struggles with “the serious work of beating back the past” (73). However, before they are able to move from the past, they must first confront it—something each character resists in his or her own unique way. This resistance is reflected in the narration; instead of having sections of the novel dedicated to explaining the past to the reader, traumatic past events are leaked piecemeal to the reader at the same time as memories of these events percolate into the minds of the characters.

In addition to shifting in and out of flashbacks, the novel shifts in and out of different perspectives with the remembering of different characters. An omniscient narrator is essentially absent from the storytelling, and instead, Morrison establishes a community of rememberers whose consciousnesses overlap at times, and at other times remain independent. The lack of exposition inherent in the narration, both in regards to time and point of view, thus requires the reader to connect the fragmented memories together to gather the full picture of what is happening and what has already happened. Readers of the novel must engage in the act of creative reconstruction. They have to piece together the fragments and different accounts in order to find coherent meaning for themselves.

Although it seems at first that the characters’ memories interrupt and muddle the natural progression of the novel, the order in which different elements of the story are revealed is significant. This indirect way of uncovering the plot places the reader in a situation similar to that of the characters. The novel is primarily centered on the protagonist, Sethe, and the murder of her daughter who was unnamed and not “even two years old” when Sethe slit her throat in 1855 (4). This infanticide is revealed slowly through snippets of foreshadowing and character memories, and it is not until halfway through the novel that the details of the killing are fully unveiled for readers. For example, the novel opens with the lines “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom,” and Sethe recalls in passing “the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (5). It is subtly revealed to the reader how she has sex with the gravestone man just to get the word “Beloved” engraved on the headstone, and the reader witnesses along with Sethe and her other daughter Denver, how the baby returns to their home at 124 Bluestone in the form of a haunting ghost. However, an explanation of who this “baby” is, Sethe’s sexual act, and the ghost in their home remains unclear to the reader in the novel’s opening pages.

Later, Denver foreshadows the dead baby’s resurrection into the full grown woman when she tells Sethe, “I think the baby got plans” (37); however, the baby’s subsequent reincarnation is similarly only revealed through subtle hints. For example, Denver suddenly remembers how her school friend, Nelson Lord, once asked, “Didn’t your mother get locked away for murder?” (104). Paul D also wonders to himself, “But what if the girl was not a girl, but something in disguise?” (127). These and other hints make it possible for the reader to connect that Sethe killed her daughter, and Beloved (the full grown woman who comes to live with Sethe, Paul D, and Denver) is the daughter’s human resurrection. However, up to the novel’s midpoint, the details surrounding the infanticide are still spared from the reader.

At the end of Part I, Stamp Paid shows Paul D a newspaper clipping from Sethe’s indictment eighteen years prior. After learning himself of the murder and disgustedly reminding Sethe that she has “two feet… not four” (165), Paul D moves out of 124. Meanwhile, as a result of informing Paul D, Stamp Paid has reminded himself of the painful event. Through his memory, a detailed, grotesque recollection of the murder is finally depicted to the reader:

A nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other… But neither Stamp Paid nor Baby Suggs could make her put her crawling-already? girl down. Out of the shed, back in the house, she held on.

“It’s time to nurse your youngest,” [Baby Suggs] said.

Sethe reached for the baby without letting the dead one go.

Baby Suggs shook her head. “One at a time,” she said and traded the living for the dead. When she came back, Sethe was aiming a bloody nipple into the baby’s mouth. (151-2)

This moment is bone-chilling and stomach-churning; however, the reader does not automatically denounce Sethe for her murder like Paul D initially does. The placement of the infanticide’s details halfway in the novel follows the revelation of numerous slavery memories which have served to connect the reader to a historical context. It also allows the reader to shape extensive impressions of Sethe before learning what she has done.

During slavery, black “men and women were moved around like checkers” by whites (23). As Sethe and Halle’s relationship demonstrates, enslaved persons were not permitted to have a wedding; as Sixo’s relationship with the Thirty-Mile woman demonstrates, they snuck around in order to maintain inter-plantation relationships. The 19^th-century concept of family life was made distinct by race--black families were often ripped apart, and black children were sold off into slavery by whites without remorse. Baby Suggs recalls of her own seven children, “It wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood anyway” (139).

Memories further demonstrate how it was socially acceptable for whites to rape and murder slaves. For example, Sethe recalls how the two white nephews sexually assaulted her on the Sweet Home plantation: “Two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up” (70). The numerous violations—sexual assault, milk meant for her baby taken from her body, being observed like an animal, and being beaten so that a “chokecherry tree” remains on her back (16)— all are what ultimately induces Sethe to escape for freedom.

Twenty-eight days later, she is tracked down by the schoolteacher and one of the nephews who abused her, and she commits the murder of her child in a panic. Ironically, the nephew looks upon her holding her dead child and thinks: “What she go and do that for? On account of a beating? Hell he’d been beat a million times and he was white” (150). Morrison purposefully juxtaposes these white and black perspectives in order to demonstrate the contradiction inherent in 19^th-century culture. Often times the “values” of whites and their actions did not match up; in this case, Sethe’s murder and her subsequent infamy emphasizes how during the time of slavery, “definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined” (190).

Another memory that underscores white brutality is recalled by Paul D from his days in prison in Alfred, Georgia. He remembers the extreme abuse that whites carried out, particularly through the iron tools they used to keep slaves restrained:

All forty-six men woke to rifle shot…When all forty-six were standing in a line in the trench, another rifle shot signaled the climb out and up to the ground above, where one thousand feet of the best hand-forged chain in Georgia stretched. Each man bent and waited. The first man picked up the end and threaded it through the loop on his leg iron…

Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus. Paul D did not know that then…convinced he was next, Paul D retched—vomiting up nothing at all. An observing guard smashed his shoulder with the rifle… (109-110)

This memory, one of many, shows the reader the hidden side of slavery. The horrifying, personally degrading, and physically destructive institution that Morrison depicts through Paul D’s time in Alfred, Georgia is not reflected textbooks, nor is it fully remembered among descendents. Morrison seeks to make slavery accessible to readers for whom slavery is not a memory, but a remote historical fact to be ignored, repressed, or forgotten.

Thus, through character memory, a context of slavery is vividly presented to the reader, and as a result, Sethe’s infanticide is able to be perceived differently than from an archetypal 21^st-century perspective. When looked upon in conjunction with the horrifying ills in society, the killing is somewhat humanized—it is remembered in a period in which whites were constantly violating blacks. While Morrison does not sanction Sethe’s murder, the way in which it is revealed to the reader serves to demonstrate how Sethe was taking control for her own family, demonstrating her freedom, and doing what she thought was right. She brought her kids into the world, and she would rather take them out than witness their return to the iniquitous institution from which she had escaped. As Sethe explains to Paul D, “They [the kids] ain’t at Sweet Home. Schoolteacher ain’t got em…It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that” (165).

This example further reveals how Morrison uses character memory as the nexus between fiction and historical fact. Character rememory represents slavery both for the former slaves themselves as well as for their cultural descendants. Sethe’s story is based on an actual historical event; Margaret Garner killed her own two-year-old daughter when she was confronted with the threat of her children being returned to the south in bondage. Again, Morrison is not justifying Margaret Garner’s actions in Beloved, but through the parallel drawn between history and fiction in the novel, the reader can ascertain a more distinct, personal picture of slavery. Morrison’s depiction of slaves, shown to withstand oppression at a number of levels, greatly differs from the context of today’s society and thus ultimately renders a deeper understanding of history for the reader.

While the memories of characters and their placement in the novel are instrumental in establishing historical context, it is also important to acknowledge how each character engages in rememory differently. As the historical context of slavery is being unveiled for the reader, each character is concurrently undergoing a healing process from the past, bringing back to life former traumatic events through their memory so he or she can deal with them and move on. Paul D deliberately represses his memories, while Sethe is reminded of her past on a visceral level; meanwhile, Denver unintentionally goes deaf and mute to tune out traumatic events. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts,” Amy Denver once tells Sethe (35). Indeed, the reader is privy to each character’s personal struggle as their painful past is brought back to life through their own individualized rememory.

Paul D is aware of his memory repression; he keeps his horrifying slave days in a “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be” (72). Throughout the novel, the reader watches as he “disremembers”-- the opposite of remembering, implying an almost conscious choice. As evinced in the above description of his time in Alfred, Georgia Paul D’s experience in slavery is depicted as particularly brutal. He was often restrained by iron artifacts, and he often felt emasculated and dehumanized. Thus, after his escape from prison in Alfred, Paul D purposefully “shut[s] down a generous portion of his head operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing” (41). He figuratively buries his emotion and memory into a rusted tin in his chest.

However, when he revisits Sethe after years of escape (literally from slavery and figuratively from the pain he endured), “the closed portion of his head open[s] like a greased lock” (41). With Sethe, he is able to release his pain and revisit his past. Paul D’s growth is particularly evinced in the scene when he tells Sethe about how her husband Halle was secretly watching from the loft while the nephews sexually assaulted her on the Sweet Home plantation:

“Did you speak to [Halle]? Didn’t you say anything to him? Something!”

“I couldn’t, Sethe. I just…couldn’t.”

“Why!”

“I had a bit in my mouth.” (69)

For the first time, Paul D opens up about the embarrassment, the pain, and the degradation he endured as a slave. He describes how the iron bit made “the need to spit is so deep you cry for it” (72). He tells of his feelings of dehumanization in the presence of a strutting rooster: “I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub” (73). Paul D temporarily lapses and reseals the tin in his chest when he learns of Sethe’s infanticide; however, when he returns to 124 Bluestone at the end of the novel, he gains a full realization of how Sethe frees him from the oppression of his memories: “only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood” (273). Having dealt with his past in Alfred, at Sweet Home, and with the schoolteacher, he is finally able to lay it down. He tells Sethe, “We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (273).

While Paul D deliberately represses his memories and it takes his relationship with Sethe to move past them, Sethe modifies, amplifies, and subverts her own memory in her attempt to keep the past at bay. She has to be reminded of her past, but once she is engaged, she finds herself insatiable to learn more: “Her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (70). With Paul D’s arrival at 124 Bluestone, he revives their old memories at Sweet Home:

Now he had added more: new pictures and old rememories that broke her heart. Into the empty space of not knowing about Halle—a space sometimes colored with righteous resentment at what could have been his cowardice, or stupidity or bad luck—that empty place of no definite news was filled now with brand-new sorrow and who could tell how many more on the way. (95)

Thus, like Paul D, Sethe undergoes the painful processes of dealing with her sorrowful memories, and just as he relies on her to move forward, she “counts on” him to reveal to her the truth of her past (95).

More significantly, Sethe revisits her past on a physical level. The chokecherry tree on her back, the memory of her milk being stolen from her breasts, and even her physical struggle in Part III against an enlarging Beloved, all reveal how Sethe seemingly remembers her past through her body more so than with her mind. However, it is Sethe’s maternity that allows her to persevere through the painful process of remembering. At one point, Sethe wonders to herself, “Other people went crazy, why couldn’t she?” (70). While it might have been easier for her to surrender with Halle, insanely rubbing butter all over her body, or to bury herself along with her dead baby, Sethe perseveres for her surviving children. As she says in her monologue: “I wouldn’t draw breath without my children” (203). Memories come to her sensorily, but it is Sethe’s dedication as a mother that is particularly obvious by the novel’s conclusion.

Denver, on the other hand, “[goes] deaf rather than hear the answer” (105). She was in Sethe’s womb during slavery and never witnesses first-hand the abuse that her mother and Paul D endured, but upon learning about her mother’s crime, she seals up her ears and mouth for two years and remains metaphorically enslaved in 124 Bluestone during her childhood. Her perspective of the infanticide uniquely differs from her mother’s; while Sethe sees herself as a protector of her children, Denver spends much of her life fearing her own death: “[Sethe] cut my head off every night. Buglar and Howard told me she would” (206). Sethe raises Denver by keeping her from the past, but the past comes back whether she wants it to or not.

Ultimately, however, Denver overcomes her past, which has largely been infected by a fear of her mother. The novel reveals how Denver makes the transformation from a girl to a woman. In Part III, she watches as Beloved takes over the house and how “the bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became” (250). As a result, Denver takes on the responsibility of keeping the house, and finally leaves 124 for the first time in several years to seek help from the community. Through Denver’s efforts, Beloved’s evil and her own demons of loneliness are conquered. The final picture the reader sees of Denver is a romantic one: her face is glowing “like someone had turned up the gas jet” in the presence of a young man running to meet her (267).

In conclusion, readers of Toni Morrison’s Beloved are like voyeurs—they are plunged among the characters’ fractured memories and multiple voices and must piece together a big picture among frequently shifting perspectives and unannounced flashbacks. The experience of reading this novel becomes an analogy for the slaves’ sense of dislocation; memory becomes the avenue to explore and represent dimensions of slave life that the classic slave narrative omitted. Ultimately, the novel illustrates the relationship between history and memory. Indeed, by having access to character memory, depicted through vivid verbs and sensory imagery, the reader gains a clearer picture of the institution of slavery and how it personally affected slaves. While Beloved evinces how “being alive was the hard part” for slaves both during slavery and Reconstruction (7), Amy Denver says it best when she tells Sethe: “Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know?” (78).