American Romanticism Sample Student Research Projects 2010

Kimberly Yancey

December 10, 2010

Slaves and Ghosts: Desire, Loss, and Gothic Styling in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Although Toni Morrison is considered to be a contemporary American author whose works are often representative of African-American traditions and culture, many of her novels are influenced by elements of Romanticism that may be less obvious at initially reading the texts. Beloved is a novel by Morrison that greatly embodies traditions and customs of African American slave-culture and possesses unintentional elements of gothic styling.  In fact, a part of Morrison’s motivation of composing the novel was to retell the true story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who escaped from a Kentucky plantation in 1856 to the free North and committed an act of infanticide to prevent her children from returning to slavery before she was captured in Ohio and returned back to Kentucky where she later died (“Margaret Garner”).  In this essay, I seek to reveal the influence of Romanticism within Morrison’s text, particularly establishing ways in which the characters experience desire and loss, express the need to escape the reality of their horrid past and dire present, and also unveil the gothic elements that tend to emerge at various moments within the text.

Beloved is the riveting tale of a runaway slave named Sethe whose relentless escape to freedom comes with a price.  Sethe, who like many African American slave women, experienced great loss throughout the course of her life.  Sethe’s tale reads much like a traditional slave narrative; she never knew much about her parents, and at a young age she witnessed the death of her mother.  Sethe married another slave named Halle on the Sweet Home plantation and took pride in the fact that Halle fathered all four of her children; something that was rare amongst most slave women since they were often raped by the slave masters.  As she escapes to freedom, Sethe sends her children ahead of her and is momentarily captured, raped and tortured by several white men.  Her husband, Halle, who is driven insane by having witnessed the rape of his wife, abandons Sethe

There is nothing pleasant or beautiful about the institution of slavery in America. Morrison’s awareness of such a truth ignites the darkness and graveness of Sethe’s experiences and contributes widely to the gothic aspects of the novel.    Morrison’s tale is not simply about slavery, rather it is about how the gruesome effects of slavery births loss and ignites the emotions and desires of her characters.  As a fugitive, Sethe’s desire is that she and her four children will remain free and in order to insure their freedom, Sethe attempts to murder her children so that her former slave master, School Teacher, cannot claim them as his property. She would rather her children be dead than endure the savagery of slavery.  In an ultimate attempt to release her children from inhumane bondage, Sethe commits a desperate and horrifically gruesome act of infanticide, killing her small baby girl by slitting her throat and wounding the others, although she had hoped and desired they would die as well.

Similarly, another important desire invoked by the horrid past of slavery is, Baby Suggs’ desire for color.  In the novel, Baby Suggs is Sethe’s mother-in-law and assumes the role as the noble elder.  She lives in the house at 124 Bluestone Road with Sethe and her children and is affectionately called Grandma Baby. Baby Suggs has a ‘keeping room’ where she keeps special things that bring color to her life; colorful fabrics, clothes, ribbons, and quilts.  Her desire for color stemmed from a need to compensate for years of loss.  She was the mother of eight children, all of which had been sold into slavery. The sadness of her life came at the fact that she could hardly remember the faces of her children. “Her past had been like her present---intolerable---and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color” (4).  Living in a house with a rageful baby ghost had taken its toll on Baby Suggs.  She often retreated to the keeping room to escape from reality where even an inkling of color brought her a moment of temporary solace.    

          Subsequently, before the death of Sethe’s baby girl, Baby Suggs would often gather a group of former slaves in an area just beyond the house referred to as the Clearing and celebrate life and freedom with them. The images that Morrison paints in this portion of the text appeal as Romantic undertones of the novel. The reader witnesses a brief reprieve from the dismal tone of the novel as Baby Suggs beckons the people to come near and celebrate loving themselves:

          “Then she shouted, ‘Let the children come!’ and they ran from the trees

          toward her. ‘Let your mothers hear you laugh,’ she told them, and the woods rang.

          The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then ‘Let the grown men

          come,’ she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.

          ‘Let your wives and your children see you dance,’ she told them, and groundlife

          shuddered under their feet” (103).

These images of celebration in the Clearing are nostalgic memories for Sethe of happier times although they also evoke sadness at the loss of Baby Suggs and cause her to also remember what life was like before the death of her baby girl.

 The people referred to her as Baby Suggs Holy, because her words were often sermon-like and inspired them to love themselves and provided them with the reality of:

          “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps,

          laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it. Love it hard.

          Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it.  They don’t love

          your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out… Love your hands! Love

          them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat

          them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that

          either.  You got to love it, you!” (103-104).

Here Morrison reveals the image of the noble elder encouraging a celebration of life amongst a people who have experienced nothing but hard times and oppression.  The reality is that nothing good may ever come of Baby Suggs’ sermons, but it gives the people an instance of momentary hope and whisks them away from their harrowing reality.  Such a scene of dance, laughter, and celebration in the midst of despair was common in African American slave culture and illustrates an instance of temporary escape.

In the essay entitled, “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Linda Krumholz offers a portrait of Baby Suggs as a “ritual guide” (Krumholz 397).  Sethe’s family is in need of healing not only due to the reality of her heinous act of desperation against her child, but due to the fact that the child has come back to punish her and that slavery has also left its bitter mark on the family as well as the whole of the black community.  By remembering the teachings and actions of Baby Suggs, Krumholz suggests that Suggs’ “rituals outdoors in the Clearing, signifies the necessity for a psychological cleansing from the past, a space to encounter painful memories safely and rest from them” (397). Krumholz further suggests that:

          Baby Suggs creates a ritual, out of her own heart and imagination,

          to heal former slaves and enable them to seek reconciliation with their memories,

          whose scares survive long (even generations) after the experience of slavery has

          ended (397).

The image of Baby Suggs holy appeals to the romantic element of the noble elder and is an active component to reading the text as a slave narrative. The healing that Krumholz mentions is used to elevate the lives of the former slaves in a way to suggests escape from the past.

The gothic aspect of the text quickly reveals itself in the opening lines of the novel, “124 WAS SPITEFUL.  Full of a baby’s venom” (Morrison, 3).  The ghost of Sethe’s dead infant torments the house so much to the point where her two sons, Howard and Buglar runaway as soon as they became old enough, never to return. Sethe and her surviving daughter Denver are left to endure the torment of the demonic ghost on their own and live in isolation from the rest of society as Sethe is often frowned upon and shunned by the black community for killing her baby. Sethe’s guilt at having murdered the infant also keeps her bound to the home, and although she tries to forget the harrowing past of slavery on the plantation and the killing of her child, the ghost is symbolic of that horror and torments Sethe to the point that she is forced to bear the yolk of her sins:

          Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one:

          the soul of her baby girl. Who would have thought that a little old baby could

          harbor so much rage? Rutting among the stones under her eyes of the engraver’s

          son was not enough.  Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied

          by the baby’s fury at having its throat cut, but those ten minutes  she pressed up against

          dawn-colored stone studded with star chips [headstone], her knees wide open as the

          grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked

          her fingers like oil (Morrison 6). 

No matter how hard she struggles to forget the darkness of her past, Sethe’s soul will not allow her to let go of the image of the dead baby; a baby she was unable to formally name; only able to afford a meager headstone with the word “Beloved” engraved on it. The reader learns from the passage that Sethe had to exchange a sexual favor be able to purchase the headstone.   The passage exhibits a state of inward and outward despair that Sethe experience not only at the hand of her horrific act, but a disassociation with the surrounding society, noting that even the engraver’s son frowned viewed her as an animal to use for his advantage. 

Cedric Gael Bryant examines the gothic aspects associated with Sethe’s character and actions in the article, “The Soul has Bandaged Moments.” Bryant offers that  Sethe is actually made “monstrous” by “thinking and doing the unspeakable, and by the intoxicating freedom of her act [of infanticide] which transforms, shapes shifts, her into  something ‘new’” (Bryant 147).  After committing her crimes, Sethe is no longer just a poor sympathetic slave, her characterization in society is transformed into a murderer.  Bryant suggests that this characterization is attributed to the way in which slavery “grossly perverts and violently disrupts the natural bond between mother and child and is the catalytic experience, for the black community that transforms Sethe into a monstrous mother” (Bryant 151).

Moreover, the color red is a recurring image throughout the novel and widely contributes to its gothic affect.  Red is not only symbolic of the blood and death of the infant, but also represents the looming evil associated with the baby ghost’s presence in Sethe’s home.  As Sethe ushers her old friend Paul D into the house at 124 Bluestone Road, the image of red is so real that a hellish light permeates over the threshold as Paul D enters:

          “Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed

          her through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that

          locked him where he stood.

          ‘You got company? He whispered, frowning.

          ‘Off and on,’ said Sethe.

          ‘Good God.’ He backed out the door onto the porch.

          ‘What kind of evil you got in here?’

          ‘It’s not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through.’” (Morrison 10).

Here, the red light represents the spirit of the dead child that has terrorized the house for years.  As Paul D crosses the threshold he immediately feels the presence of evil; however, Sethe only feels the sadness that she associates with the spirit of her dead baby girl, a sadness that weighs her down like a heavy burden, even after the yolk of slavery has been lifted from her shoulders.

The nature in which Beloved first appears in the novel as a woman is gothic in itself.  She simply emerges from the water fully clothed in all black attire.   Unaware of who Beloved actually is, Sethe sees her and immediately releases a gush of water as if she were in labor.  Later when Denver’s intuition ignites and she realizes that Beloved is her sister, Denver inquires about who Beloved is:

          “Why you call yourself Beloved?”

          Beloved closed her eyes. “In the dark my name is Beloved.”

          Denver scooted a little closer. “What’s it like over there, where you  were before?

          Can you tell me?”

          “Dark,” said Beloved. “I’m small in that place. I’m  like this here.” She raised her

          head off the bed, lay down on her side and curled up.

          Denver covered her lips with her fingers. “Were you cold?”

          Beloved curled tighter and shook her head. “Hot.” Nothing to breathe

          down there and no room to move in” (Morrison 88).

As Beloved explains to Denver how it felt being buried underground with other dead people piled on top of her, she mentions that there are several people down there; nameless people, some dead, and others alive.  Her description implies that some of the bodies that have been buried are not dead, at least their souls are not.  Morrison’s appeal to the gothic seems more evident in this dark, deathly description of restless souls.  Morrison later writes in the novel that the souls of people who died violently couldn’t rest well and somehow ended up haunting their loved ones on earth. 

We are first granted an image of Beloved as being beautiful, though warranting trepidation as she appears from nowhere.  She is infant-like in behavior, always tired in the beginning stages of her emergence, unable to balance herself properly, and even speaking in the voice of a child.  We are expected to feel a bit of sympathy for Beloved as Denver has to help her tie her shoes and clean her when she soils the bed.  However, the reader’s sympathy is quickly depleted as we become aware of Beloved’s ultimate agenda.  She progressively becomes more sinister in nature.  For instance, Beloved uses her conjuring abilities to seduce Paul D impregnating her.  Beloved realizes that if she can become pregnant she can reincarnate herself back into Sethe’s world where she can rule, act, and rage against her mother in the flesh. 

Furthermore, although Beloved is depicted as a sometimes evil, and sometimes sad spirit reincarnate of a woman with a childlike mind, she too possesses a desire. Beloved’s desires to integrate herself back into the family she never had.  Beloved’s desires are selfish in nature. She wishes to have Sethe all to herself; to seemingly enslave her as she frequently states throughout the novel, “I am Beloved and she is mine” (Morrison 248), and “I will not lose her again. She is mine” (Morrison 254).  First, Beloved  has partly achieved the feat of her desire as a baby ghost tormenting the house at 124 Bluestone Road, causing its inhabitants to be alienated from the outside world, living in between the walls of shame and disgrace and having them subject completely to her.  Secondly, Beloved’s desire has been accomplished by causing Sethe to feel a perpetual sense of guilt at having slit her throat as a baby.  It seems as if Beloved wants to slowly kill Sethe by admonishing guilt on her. When Beloved returns as a woman in the flesh and Sethe realizes that she is in fact her own daughter, Sethe immediately feels a sense of compunction for having committed such a savage act against her own child and nearly drives herself crazy at trying to please and indulge Beloved. 

Consequently, as Beloved’s demands on Sethe increase, Sethe’s role as mother diminishes in the household. Beloved has once again enslaved Sethe and the family nearly starves to death from giving in to Beloved’s desires.  She eats all of their food and Sethe exhausts all of her funds to appease her. The reader is steadily able to witness the deathly and draining effects associated with Beloved’s character.  However, it is Denver who will eventually come to Sethe’s rescue when she looks upon her mother and can hardly recognize her due to Sethe’s worn and emaciated appearance:

          Listless and sleepy with hunger Denver saw the flesh between her

          mother’s forefinger and thumb fade. Saw Sethe’s eyes bright but

          dead, alert but vacant, paying attention to everything about Beloved (Morrison 285).

At the moment the threat of losing her mother becomes a reality, Denver is motivated to act and emerge from her state of isolation.  She sojourns beyond the gates of her home to enlist the help of others to save her mother from Beloved. The reader begins to witness Denver’s character emerge as a fair implication of a heroine in the story.

Denver desires to belong to something; to experience life beyond the realms of the haunted house.   Even though Denver is still just a girl, she has lost her youth and the vivaciousness of life as a young girl, partly due to the burden of being a Negro in society and partly because of Sethe’s past that she struggles to accept and understand. Sethe’s past is very much a part of Denver’s own history. Denver has spent a great part of her life as a servant to the baby ghost, cast off from the outside world.   Her brothers, Howard and Buglar always had each other and ran away as soon as they were old enough to understand that life existed beyond the gated fence of 124 Bluestone Road.  Denver often found comfort in the stories told by Grandma Baby, but she never really had anyone her age to relate to.  Seldom would she interact with other children in the town because they always looked at her with an accusatory glare, as if she were just as guilty as Sethe at having committed such a heinous act.  A boy named Nelson Lord once asked her, “Didn’t your mother get locked away for murder? Wasn’t you in there with her when she went?” (123).

When Beloved returns as a woman, upon initially realizing her identity, Denver exercises great lengths to ‘keep’ Beloved and appease her although she seems to be fearful of this mysterious woman.  In the early interactions between Denver and Beloved Morrison illustrates how the art of storytelling is so relevant to the nature of the novel and customary of African American culture. In accordance, Denver tells stories to feed Beloved’s desire to know things about the past, and to know things particularly about their mother Sethe. When Beloved asks to hear the story about how Denver was born,  Morrison allows Denver to escape for a moment into retelling the past. 

Denver loves telling the story of her birth; of how her mother was running away to freedom  with cracked, bleeding feet and went into labor on a boat crossing the river to the North where a white girl named Amy helped deliver Denver.  The reader is aware that Denver has told Beloved this story before and that perhaps Denver is able to tell it so well because it had been told to her constantly. Denver is more than obliged to once again indulge her child-like older sister and retells the tale to both of their pleasure:

          Nothing was out there that this sister-girl did not provide in abundance:

          a racing heart, dreaminess, society, danger, beauty.  She swallowed twice

          to prepare for the telling, to construct out of the strings she had heard all

          her life a net to hold Beloved (Morrison 90).

Denver’s devotion to Beloved is sublime in nature.  She is intrigued by Beloved, she loves her and fears her all at once. The act of feeding Beloved through storytelling provides escape for both of the girls; Beloved is able to escape into a world that she never knew and longs for , and Denver is able to escape into an image of her mother birthing her in the wilderness that grants a moment of epic-like significance to her own existence.

          Once again, Morrison uses gothic styling at the end of the novel when the reader becomes truly aware that Beloved is demonic in nature: “The devil-child was clever…and beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant woman, naked and smiling” (Morrison 309).  The image of Beloved is somewhat sublime in nature, as she is describe as both monstrous, and beautiful.  Denver becomes desperate to save her mother from Beloved’s slow torture and calls upon several conjuring women to perform what seems to be an exorcist of Beloved’s soul.   As the story concludes and the women come praying and singing, the image of Beloved disappears in thin air and has remained a distant yet very real memory to Sethe, Denver, and Paul D who are now left with piecing together the lives that were once disrupted by slavery and again disrupted by the return of the dead.

American Romanticism in terms of literature gained much of its contents from European writers. A close reading of Morrison’s Beloved provides a great example of how influential Romanticism proves be in regards to African American and Minority literature.  Although Beloved is a laborious and distressing novel about the malicious impact of slavery, the novel is also sentimental literature to a specific culture of people and is highly recognized in the world of literature as a profoundly important story.  It is Morrison’s reflections on African American slavery that inspires the gothic aspects of the text and also examines the feelings of desire and loss that are all too frequently experienced by a select race of people.  Beloved embeds itself into our culture as Americans, leaving a mark of history, sentiment, and the darkly painful effects of slavery in our society. 

Works Cited

Bryant, Cedric Gael. “The Soul Has Bandaged Moments: Reading the African American Gothic     in Wright’s ‘Big Boy Leaves Home’, Morrison’s Beloved, and Gomez’s Gilda.”Richard     Wright 39.4 (2008): 137-154. Web. 11 December 2010.

“Margaret Garner.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Web. 26 November 2010.

          <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Garner>.        

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage International, 1987. Print.

Krumholz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”      African American Review 26.3 (1992): 395-408. Web. 12 October 2010.