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
Nina W
9/25/2017 02:15:51 pm
Thank you for drawing my attention back to what Baby Suggs says about all houses being "packed to the rafters with some dead Negro's grief". There are so many implications of this statement: that haunting is common; that Sethe's experience is not unusual, just more obvious; that our own homes may be haunted, packed with our own grief and experiences and those of the people who lived in that space before us--it's not as obvious as smashed mirrors and handprints in a cake, but it's there affecting our experience of that space today, just as the atrocities of slavery still affect us today.
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