Toni Morrison’s Beloved begins with “124 Was Spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children” (Morrison 3). This fragmented introduction introduces to the reader the reoccurring theme of the haunted house which will appear throughout the duration of the novel. In this post, I will argue that Morrison uses the house at 124 Bluestone Road to shape the various characters’ identities in relation to a historic and traumatic past.
The house pushes the characters in the novel to confront an “undead past in the context of the present” and in doing so, their identity is shaped and molded by a dark and traumatic history (Schmudde 409). Just like in many of the narratives we have read, the idea of home as a domestic space is flipped on its head, something traditionally safe and comforting turns haunted and evil. When Sethe suggest moving homes because of the hauntings, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, replies, “What’d be the point? Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby” (Morrison 6). Baby Suggs understands that there can be no such thing as a safe home; all houses are haunted by something as result of a traumatic history that proves impossible to fully come to terms with. The house reflects the internal conflicts and unprocessed trauma that the characters in the novel neglect to confront. The horrors of the house are rooted in the history of slavery and the memories that revel the harsh realities a traumatic past. Throughout the novel we see a common pattern of Sethe trying to avert her memory from her dark past, specifically the murder of her baby. Sethe cautions Denver about memory: It’s never going away…The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there –you who never was there –if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though its all over –over and done with –it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what. (Morrison 43-44) In this passage, Sethe is directly acknowledging the power that memory, really, traumatic memory, can have on the individual. She understand that memories defy borders, and fears that her daughter, even though she hasn’t lived through the trauma of slavery herself, has inherited it. The influence that the traumatic memory has on Sethe is identity shaping, she has seen the effects of trauma on herself thus, she wants nothing more than to save Denver from becoming a manifestation of traumatic of past (the condition which we find Beloved in now). The house has become a defining point of identity for Sethe and Denver. The other members in their community are unable to view them as anything other than the residents of the haunted house. Denver exclaims, “I can’t live here. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I can’t live here. Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don’t like me. Girls don’t either” (Morrison 17). Denver is confronted with the reality that her identity is found and shaped by through her residency of 124 Bluestone Road. The reader begins to see Denver is an inheritor of her families traumatic past. Her hauntings and her attitude towards the house represent her resistance against this socially constructed identity. In conclusion, I argue that by placing the haunted house at the center of the narrative, Morrison is able to illuminate the relationship between the home, the individual, and trauma. The characters in the novel find themselves with 124 Bluestone Road as the center of their world, and I would argue not by choice. They are stuck in this domestic purgatory space, unable to break lose or self-construct their identity due to their failure to confront and process the memories of a traumatic past. Until they succeed at doing this, they will remain as prisoners to their home, defined by its hauntings and shaped by its dark past. Work Cited Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage, 2016. Schmudde, Carol E. “The Haunting of 124.” African American Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1992, pp. 409–416. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3041913.
1 Comment
What does it mean for a haunting to be brought to life? Authors, through the use of personification, are able to take a construct as abstract as evilness and bring it to life within the narrative. Through the use of the literary device of personificaiton in their writings, authors can evoke a deep sense a fear and anxiety, not only in their characters, but in their readers as well. Authors Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Shirley Jackson demonstrate that through personification, the inanimate and the passive can take on the role of active participants in the narrative. In their works, they are able to bring anxieties and fears to the surface. The haunted house becomes much more than just a stage for the plot of the story to unveil. The house becomes a critical character of the story itself. The abnormality of what is traditionally seen as dormant taking on the role of an active participant in the narrative contributes to the fear and anxieties in characters and readers alike. Through the unusual personification of the upstairs room in her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman symbolizes the narrators mental and physical entrapment and confinement. The short story itself is written in the form of a personal diary or journal. The narrator, isolated from the world and confined to a small room covered in repulsive yellow wallpaper, progressively undergoes the physical experience of hauntings being brought to life in front of her very eyes. She writes in her personal account: I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move - and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. (Gilman 8) This disturbing and creepy passage describes the walls that surround her to be filled with movement and life, the wallpaper itself being a visual representation of the narrator’s fears and anxieties. The patterns and dark figures she becomes so fixated on slowly transform into symbolic representations of herself, a woman trapped. The wallpaper takes on an active roll as the antagonist of the story, torturing and tormenting her as an evil that has been brought to life through personification. In her novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson brings evil and hauntings to life with her personification of the mansion. She characterizing the home to have an “evil face,” that seemed “awake, with a watchfulness from the black windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice” (Jackson 24). By giving the house as having human-like features and capabilities, Jackson is able to frame the home as an active character in the narrative. We know from the beginning of the second chapter that the house will not only be the setting for the majority of the book but also a character in the novel, contributing to the conflict and plot of the narrative. We don't watch the house, the house watches us. This is true for both characters and readers alike. As demonstrated by both authors, personification can be used to bring evilness and hauntings to life in the narrative. Authors are able to frame traditionally passive and inanimate spaces and dwellings as active participants in their narratives. Both Gilman and Jackson take what is normal and comfortable and flip it on its head, evoking a sense of anxiety and fear in the various characters in the novel as well in the reader. Works Cited Jackson, Shirley, and Laura Miller. The Haunting of Hill House. Penguin Books, 2016. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. First Avenue Editions, a Division Of Lerner Publishing Group, 2017. In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s essay titled Monster Culture, he details his seven theses that work towards a further understanding of culture through the construction of monsters. For the purpose of my writing, I will focus specifically on his sixth thesis, “Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire” (Cohen 16). Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street” chillingly demonstrates Cohen’s argument, that the monster attracts, through the character of Bartleby himself. Cohen argues that there is a simultaneous repulsion and attraction at the core of the construction of the monster. He states, “We distrust and loathe the monster at the same time we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair.”
Bartleby can be read as a ghostly or monster figure in the narrative, not only packed with mystery but with something more, something supernatural. From the moment Bartleby first appears in the office, it is apparent that he has an unworldly hold over the narrator. The narrator states, “there was something about Bartleby that not only strangely disarmed me, but in a wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me” (Melville 8). As the reader, we can’t help but wonder why the narrator doesn’t and can’t fire Bartleby, even though he proves himself to be unfit for employment on the premise that he simply prefers not to perform his normal daily obligations and tasks. The hold that Bartleby has on the narrator is unexplainable. Cohen would argue that this simultaneity of anxiety and desire that is the character of Bartleby is the reason for his dangerous enticement of the narrator (Cohen 19). There is a large opportunity cost for the narrator to keep Bartleby around. The narrator is well aware that he is sacrificing money and productivity but he just cant’ seem to let his employee go. The narrator says in reference to his feeling towards Bartleby, “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity; but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion” (Melville 14). This evolution of emotions the narrator goes through further illustrates Cohen’s argument that we as a culture are drawn to what we are most terrified of. Our jealousies, anxieties, and fears become our personal monsters that we ultimately surrender ourselves to. To conclude his sixth thesis, Cohen poses the question “Do monsters really exist?” and then in answering himself, he states, “Surely they must, for if they did not, how could we?” (Cohen 20) Bartleby is the narrator’s personal construction of a monster. At the conclusion of the narrative, the narrators says, “I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of” (Melville 24). Since Bartleby exists as the narrator’s construction of a monster, the narrator feels a deeply personal attachment to him. It is almost painful for the narrator to finally let him go, even after all Bartleby has put him through. Even though Bartleby was a monster, he was the narrator’s monster, a personal construct of his fears and anxieties that takes root in desire and attraction. Works Cited Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, Edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print. Melville, Herman. "Bartelby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. Print. |
Meredith HoffmanArchives
November 2017
Categories |