Toni Morrison’s critical approach, described in Playing in the Dark, often involves the scrutiny of the binary and the denaturalization of those racial binaries. In her novel Beloved, the racial binary is accompanied by the idea of family, where the dominant group can achieve the ideal family while the subordinate group cannot. As a form of othering, the white patriarchal structure marginalizes slave families by making it seem as though the heteronormative family structure—husband, wife, and children—is unattainable by them. Most importantly, it is understood that the production of kin allowed by the heteronormative family structure is unattainable to the black family. This is the environment in which Beloved was murdered, and her soul lingers in this turmoil. Beloved represents the need to confront the past to move on, and more specifically transcend the past that prevents the black family from achieving kinship.
In “Kinless or Queer: The Unthinkable Queer Slave in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ and Robert O’Hara’s ‘Insurrection: Holding History’,” Rebecca Balon establishes several important ideas relating to slave family dynamics. To explain the nonnormativity of slave sexuality about queer theory’s common practice of equating nonnormativity and queerness, Balon refers to David Halperin’s work in Saint Foucault. By definition, “queer” is whatever is at odds with the normal, dominant ideology, delineating any positionality against the normative. It is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but rather is available to any sexually marginalized group or person. This definition includes black slaves because of their sexual disqualification. As queer individuals face oppression through the idea that they do not live as “normal” men and women, black individuals are also deemed as not-normal for their gender. When Garner of Sweet Home is talking about his slaves, the man he is conversing with says, “Ain’t no nigger men” (Morrison 12). If black men and women are not perceived as truly being men and women, they cannot form an acceptable heteronormative family.
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For Baby Suggs, her sexual relationships and the production of offspring do not reflect heteronormative patriarchal values. As the narrator says, “Men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers” (28). Sethe has a much different experience. When she arrives at Sweet Home, the male slaves make a symbolic gesture of civilized, manly restraint and they “let the iron-eyed girl be, so she could choose even though each one would have beaten the others to mush to have her” (Morrison 10). They wait for a year for her to choose a husband, battling to control their sexual urges, so the sexual agency and self-determination of all parties are reaffirmed. The plantation master establishes Sweet Home as a place where the conditional humanity of slave identity relies on heterosexual monogamy (Balon 144). She further exercises her agency in the making of her wedding dress, asserting her humanity through the performance of legitimacy usually denied to slaves: “When he asked her to be his wife, Sethe happily agreed and then was stuck not knowing the next step. There should be a ceremony, shouldn’t there? A preacher, some dancing, a party, something” (Morrison 31). Her relationship with Halle embodies heteronormative ideals of choice, monogamy, and childbearing. Sethe’s humanity is most complete once she is “Halle’s woman. Pregnant every year” (Morrison 10). In the context of the novel, humanity, manliness, motherhood, and heteronormativity are mutually constitutive, and the reader witnesses the damage this causes when reality breaks the heteronormative façade established at Sweet Home.
While Balon mostly agrees with Halperin’s definition of queerness, she argues that the lack of kinlessness compounds its relation to blackness: “The kinlessness of slaves is represented as a traumatic experience of involuntary nonnormative sexuality” (143). Women give birth to their children knowing that they will see them forced into slavery and that their children will have no choice but to go on producing more stock for their masters. In Beloved, Baby Suggs explains to Denver, “Slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them. Still, they were not supposed to have pleasure deep down. She told me not to listen to all that. That I should always listen to my body and love it” (Morrison 247). “Sexuality” as a term of implied relationship and desire is unsubstantiated in its ability to define any of the familiar arrangements under a system of enslavement (Balon 221). Experiencing sexual pleasure means possessing at least a degree of sexual agency, which by association means human agency. The commodification of black bodies strips the slaves of their ability to have socially acceptable relationships with their sexual partners and with their families and therefore establishes kinlessness. Beloved is a casualty of this kinlessness. As Balon discusses, the lack of futurity—renewed or continuing existence—allows Sethe to murder her daughter. Morrison writes, “I’ll explain to her, even though I don’t have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her” (Morrison 236). The dynamic between the slave mother and child is at odds with the normal mother/child relationship because of their marginalized positionality.
After murdering her child, Sethe and her family are further othered in their new community after escaping slavery. The past is always looming over 124 because of Beloved’s ghostly presence, but that is a past that no one wants to remember. That is, seemingly, until Paul D arrived. Sethe’s daughter, Denver, witnesses as the narrator says, “They were a twosome, saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers… Only those who knew him (‘knew him well’) could claim his absence for themselves” (Morrison 15). Sethe is more resistant to this “memory” at first which, as she relays several times, is painful for her to address. When he arrives at 124, Paul D asks Sethe, “No man? You here by yourself?” (Morrison 11). Paul D requests that Sethe and Denver make room for him in the family, and he reminds Sethe of what life could be with a man to assume the role in a heteronormative family: “What she knew was that the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody else’s hands” (Morrison 21). The central conflict of the novel occurs between the patriarchal father figure and heterosexual husband, Paul D, and the nonnormative, overly-sexual spark or perverse desire, Beloved. She represents the failed imitations of kinship bonds created among slaves and their lasting destructiveness on the black psyche, while Paul D signifies reproductive futurity (Balon 143). Paul D, as a positive influence about Beloved, wages a battle against the ghost upon his arrival at 124, causing various physical destruction to the home: “‘God damn it! Hush up!’” Paul D was shouting, falling, reaching for anchor… ‘She got enough without you. She got enough!’ The quaking slowed to an occasional lurch, but Paul D did not stop whipping the table around until everything was rock quiet….It was gone…” (Morrison 22-23). It appears as though Paul D has won ownership of the house, and Denver miserably watches the fallout: “Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had” (Morrison 23).
In the silence left behind by Beloved, Denver, and Sethe begin to allow Paul D to infiltrate the space. In her work “Reconstructing Kin: Family, History, and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’,” Dana Heller discusses Sethe, Denver, and Paul D's assumption of a family form as they head towards the carnival, passing a fence where “Up and down . . . old roses were dying.... The closer the roses got to death, the louder their scent, and everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of the rotten roses” (Morrison 57). This association of the new family with decay and death serves to foreshadow Beloved’s resurrection. Heller asserts that Morrison evokes the fragile new freedom that Sethe experiences through the restoration of kinship (110). On the way into the carnival, Sethe notices the shadows of the three of them—Paul D, Denver, and Sethe—holding hands. Denver is pleased that Paul D’s presence seems to humanize her and her mother in the eyes of their community. People say hello to her, smile at her mother, and make conversation with Paul D. The narrator says, “Sethe returned the smiles she got. Denver was swaying with delight. And on the way home, although leading them now, the shadows of three people still held hands” (Morrison 59). As the family previously lived in the shadow of Beloved’s murder, they find light in Paul D’s ability to fill the missing patriarchal role in their family.
From the moment of her arrival, Beloved is enamored with Sethe. The narrator describes, “Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes” (Morrison 68). When she asks Sethe to tell her a story, the interaction is sexually charged. Sethe was “sliding into sleep when she felt Beloved touch her. A touch no heavier than a feather but loaded, nevertheless, with desire. Sethe stirred and looked around. First at Beloved’s soft new hand on her shoulder, then into her eyes. The longing she saw there was bottomless. Some plea barely in control” (Morrison 69). Morrison’s plot does not require this reading of homosexual interactions between the mother and daughter; however, as Balon points out, the suggestive language that describes their infatuations with each other incorporates homoeroticism to the nonnormative sexualities Beloved displays.
Interestingly, Balon also argues that Beloved’s nonnormative sexual influence on the other characters of the text represents the perversity of Sethe’s attraction to the trauma caused by kinlessness (143). It appears that Heller would agree with this, as she suggests that resistance to moving on from the past will result in the haunting by the spirits of that unresolved past (106). Beloved’s ghost is a repercussion of this unresolved past, the kinlessness caused by the nonnormative sexuality of slaves. The struggle between Paul D and Beloved is caused by his desire to re-establish heteronormative patriarchy by banishing her ghost. Beloved as a casualty of kinlessness reacts to the presence of the heteronormative patriarchal figure in a way that represents a queering force; she is nonnormative by existence and works in opposition to normativity. As Sethe is given the opportunity at a future, we see Beloved’s infatuation with the past, displaying her determination to not let her mother forget: “Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost” (Morrison 69). Heller argues Beloved will continue acting as the undoing of the kinship structure until she understands the structure, and the way she reaches it is by demanding that the past be remembered through stories (108). She has this need for stories that without which Sethe can never move on, take hold of her life, and establish true kinship.
Works Cited
- Balon, Rebecca. “Kinless or Queer: The Unthinkable Queer Slave in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ and Robert O’Hara’s ‘Insurrection: Holding History’.” African American Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2015, pp. 141-155, The Johns Hopkins University Press, www.jstor.org/stable/24589733. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
- Heller, Dana. “Reconstructing Kin: Family, History, and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’.” College Literature, vol. 21, no. 2, 1994, pp. 105-117, The Johns Hopkins University Press, www.jstor.org/stable/25112107. Accessed 10 Oct. 2019.
- Morrison, Toni. Beloved, Random House, 1987.
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