Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-5r2nc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-22T07:49:41.841Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jean Wyatt
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In Beloved, Toni Morrison expresses the dislocations and violence of slavery through disruptions in language. The novel tells the “unspeakable” story of Sethe, a slave mother whose act of infanticide leaves a gap in family narrative; bars her surviving daughter, Denver, from language use; and hinders her own ability to speak. Morrison's inclusion of voices previously left out of historical and literary narratives disturbs the language of the novel itself. The Africans piled on the slave ships, the preverbal child who comes back in the shape of the ghost Beloved, and a nursing mother who insists on the primacy of bodily connection: the expression of these subjects' heretofore unspoken experiences and desires distorts discursive structures, especially the demarcations that support normative language. Morrison's textual practice challenges Lacan's assumptions about language and language users, and her depiction of a social order that performs some of the functions of mothering challenges his vision of a paternal symbolic order based on a repudiation of maternal connection.

Type
Cluster: Readings of Narrative, 1937-87
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 3 , May 1993 , pp. 474 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth “Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions.” Conflicts in Feminism. Ed. Hirsch, Marianne and Keller, Evelyn Fox. New York: Routledge, 1990. 184–204.Google Scholar
Abraham, Nicolas “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud's Metapsychology.” The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Meltzer, Françoise. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. 75–80.Google Scholar
Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria “Introjection—Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia.” Psychoanalysis in France. Ed. Lebovici, Serge and Widlocher, Daniel. New York: International UP, 1980. 3–16.Google Scholar
Anderson, Linda “The Re-imagining of History in Contemporary Women's Fiction.” Plotting Change. Ed. Anderson. London: Arnold, 1990. 129–12.Google Scholar
Baker, Houston A. Jr “Autobiographical Acts and the Voice of the Southern Slave.” Davis and Gates 242–24.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Jessica “A Desire of One's Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space.” Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Ed. de Lauretis, Teresa. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. 78–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bronfen, Elisabeth Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Carby, Hazel Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Caruth, Cathy Introduction. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma: II. Spec. issue of American Imago 48 (1991): 417–41.Google Scholar
Christian, Barbara “‘Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something’: African-American Women's Historical Novels.” Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance. Ed. Braxton, Joanne M. and McLaughlin, Andrée Nicola. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. 326–32.Google Scholar
Cummings, Kate “Reclaiming the Mother('s) Tongue: Beloved, Ceremony, Mothers and Shadows.” College English 52 (1990): 552–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darling, Marsha “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Women's Review of Books Mar. 1988: 5–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Charles T., and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., eds The Slave's Narrative. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.Google Scholar
Delaney, Lucy From the Darkness Cometh the Light: or, Struggles for Freedom. C. 1891. Six Women's Slave Narratives. Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 1–64.Google Scholar
Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie “Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” African American Review 26.1 (1992): 51–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Rebecca “History, Memory and Language in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991. 109–10.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. Strachey, James. New York: Norton, 1961.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund “The Unconscious.” 1915. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. Vol. 14. London: Hogarth, 1953–74. 159–215. 24 vols.Google Scholar
Gates, Henry Louis Jr “Introduction: The Language of Slavery.” Davis and Gates xi-xxxiv.Google Scholar
Goldman, Anne “T Made the Ink': (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved.” Feminist Studies 16 (1990): 313–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Gayle “Feminist Fictions and the Uses of Memory.” Signs 16 (1990): 1–32.Google Scholar
Hayden, Robert “Middle Passage.” Collected Works. New York: Liveright, 1985. 48–54.Google Scholar
Henderson, Mae “Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-membering the Body as Historical Text.” Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Spillers, Hortense. London: Routledge, 1991. 62–86.Google Scholar
Hirsch, Marianne The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Holloway, Karla “Beloved: A Spiritual.” Callaloo 13 (1990): 516–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Homans, Margaret Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.Google Scholar
Horvitz, Deborah “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved.” Studies in American Fiction 17 (1989): 157–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Harriet Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Klein, Melanie “Some Theoretical Conclusions regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant.” Developments in Psycho-analysis. Ed. Klein et al. London: Hogarth, 1952. 198–236.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia Black Sun. Trans. Roudiez, Leon. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Kubitschek, Missy Dehn Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1991.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits A Selection. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: Norton, 1981.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques “Les formations de l'inconscient.” Bulletin de psychologie 2 (1957–58): 1–15.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. 1973. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis.” 1953. Lacan, Ecrits 30–113.Google Scholar
Lacan, Jacques “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I.” Lacan, Ecrits 1–7.Google Scholar
Mathieson, Barbara O “Memory and Mother Love in Morrison's Beloved.” American Imago 47 (1990): 1–21.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.Google Scholar
Muller, John “Language, Psychosis, and the Subject in Lacan.” Interpreting Lacan. Ed. Smith, Joseph and Kerrigan, William. New Haven: Yale UP, 1983. 21–32.Google Scholar
Page, Philip “Circularity in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” African American Review 26.1 (1992): 31–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline “Introduction II.” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Ed. Mitchell, Juliet and Rose, . New York: Norton, 1982. 27–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothstein, Mervyn “Toni Morrison, in Her New Novel, Defends Women.” New York Times 26 Aug. 1987: C17.Google Scholar
Sale, Maggie “Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved.” African American Review 26.1 (1992): 41–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schapiro, Barbara “The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” Contemporary Literature 32 (1991): 194–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverman, Kaja The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Sitter, Deborah Ayer “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved.” African American Review 26.1 (1992): 17–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spillers, Hortense “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17 (1987): 65–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tate, Claudia “Allegories of Black Female Desire; or, Rereading Nineteenth-Century Sentimental Narratives of Black Female Authority.” Changing Our Own Words. Ed. Wall, Cheryl A. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 98–126.Google Scholar
Winnicott, D. W “The Capacity to Be Alone.” The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International UP, 1965. 29–36.Google Scholar
Winnicott, D. W “Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development.” Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock, 1971. 111–11.Google Scholar
Wright, Richard Twelve Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1988.Google Scholar
Wyatt, Jean Reconstructing Desire: The Role of the Unconscious in Women's Reading and Writing. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.Google Scholar