In “Dislocating the Reader,” I use psychoanalytic theory to think about how the language of Toni Morrison’s Beloved works on readers. Placing the text of Beloved into dialogue with Jean Laplanche’s theory of the belated time of trauma enables me to think through the ethical and emotional effects of Beloved’s delayed narrative structure on readers. Visual images from the past lives of the characters intrude into the narrative, without explanation; in confusing the reader, these intrusions convey the distortions of time, thought, and memory that disturb these survivors of slavery’s traumas. The chapter centers on the main character, Sethe. I read the mothering practices of Sethe and of her own slave mother through the lens of historical research on actual slave mothers, who were torn between the demands of the master for their labor and the needs of their babies for their time. Throughout, the chapter attends to the difficulties of writing Beloved, as Morrison herself explained them in interviews: to capture the psychic damages inflicted by slavery on her ex-slave characters Morrison had to invent a new narrative language.

The image of the grieving black mother continues to haunt the American cultural imaginary. Black women’s loss and public grief are often expected to awaken the nation’s conscience; but at what cost to black women? In performing this emotional labor for their communities and nation, black women’s own pain often goes unheard, unacknowledged, and unattended. I propose an engaged and ethical reading practice that “handles warmly” the grief of black mothers. Returning to the wound of slavery, uncovering its psychic injuries, and attending to its emotional complexities in the literature of slavery, I argue that by simply grieving, refusing to be comforted, and refusing to tame their tears and shrieks for the comfort and peace of their tormentors, slave mothers privileged the integrity and validity of their emotions, an act that both resisted the disciplining of black emotions and enacted a radical ethic of self-care.