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A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon could be viewed as paragons of trauma fiction. In the light of PTSD Studies, Sigmund Freud’s,

Cathy Caruth’s, and Robert Jay Lifton’s attitudes, three concepts of “traumatic past”, “rememory”, and “identity crisis” have been studied.

Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon are stories about traumatized people, victims of slavery, and the brutal history of the past, in which Morrison moves her readers throughout the non-linear memories of her traumatized characters. Since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, Morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery, and flashbacks. Accordingly, the readers are compelled to concoct the disjointed and fragmented memories in order to solve the riddle of the text, in which past, present, and future are intermingled.

Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon are bound up with psychoanalytic formulation. The figuration of trauma in the ghost extremely resembles Freud’s assertion about the return of the repressed traumatic past. Morrison’s narrative clearly depicts the belated experience of trauma by immersing the readers in an untimeliness, as if the readers get lost in character’s traumatic memories.

Through resurrecting the ghosts of slavery, Morrison tries to depict the inevitable belated intrusion and the haunting power of traumatic memories. The ghostly return of the past in both novels indicates the fact that what is absent is not necessarily gone or vanished. By giving the ghosts a renewed voice and life, Morrison claims that although the brutal system of slavery is over and already passed on, its after-effects, and consequences can never be fully passed on since the haunting remains, and the survivors are left to wrestle with what they have tried to forget and repress.

The ghostly return of the past has an aporetic role in both novels, which appears both as the pain and the cure and results in different consequences in each novel due to which Morrison tries to illustrate the life of slavery as an interminable challenge for the survivors who have been touched by it even after freedom. Accordingly she depicts survival as a great crisis and an everlasting contest which coerces the survivors into confronting their sordid repressed traumatic past and re-establishing their identity and integrity of self.

This thesis aims to trace the above mentioned notions in Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon to reveal the implicit potentiality and consequences of reading her works in the light of Trauma Studies.

Keyterms: Trauma, Rememory, Belatedness, Aporia, Survival

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

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A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

 

Table of Contents

Abstract

 

Acknowledgements                                                                         

 

۱٫ Introduction                                                                                   ۱

۱٫۱٫ General Overview                                                                                    ۲

۱٫۲٫ Statement of the Problem                                                                        ۴

۱٫۳٫ Significance of the Trauma Study                                                          ۹

۱٫۴٫ Delimitation                                                                                               ۱۱

۱٫۵٫ Approach and Methodology                                                                    ۱۲

۱٫۶٫ Literature Review                                                                                   ۱۴

۱٫۷٫ Thesis Outline                                                                                           ۱۸

۱٫۸٫ Definition of Key Terms                                                                          ۲۱

 

۲٫ Trauma: a Wound That Cries Out                                                   ۲۳

۲٫۱٫ Post-traumatic Stress Disorder                                                              ۲۴

۲٫۲٫ History of PTSD                                                                                       ۲۶

۲٫۳٫ Trauma in Psychology                                                                             ۲۷

۲٫۳٫۱٫ Freud and Trauma: Moses and Monotheism                     ۲۹

۲٫۳٫۲٫ Tancred and Clorinda                                                           ۳۱

۲٫۴٫ Cathy Caruth                                                                                           ۳۳

۲٫۴٫۱٫ Aporetic Nature of Trauma and History                             ۳۴

۲٫۴٫۲٫ Caruth’s Interpretation of Moses and Monotheism           ۳۵

۲٫۴٫۳٫ Caruth’s Interpretation of Tancred and Clorinda: Double

Wound                                                                                                ۳۶

۲٫۴٫۴٫ Traumatic Transmission                                                       ۳۸

۲٫۵٫ Robert Jay Lifton                                                                                     ۳۹

 

۳٫ Beloved and Song of Solomon: Paragons of Trauma Fiction            ۴۵

۳٫۱٫ Non-linear Narrative                                                                               ۴۹

۳٫۲٫ Figuration of Trauma in the Ghost                                                        ۵۳

۳٫۳٫ Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma                                        ۵۸

 

۴٫ Aporetic Nature of Trauma                                                             ۶۳

۴٫۱٫ Aporia; Enigmatic Nature of Trauma and History                              ۶۴

۴٫۲٫ Unlocatable Victimhood                                                                          ۷۹

۴٫۳٫ Haunting Power of Rememory: The Return of the Repressed            ۹۱

 

۵٫ Identity Crisis and Survival                                                            ۱۱۰

۵٫۱٫ Survival Crisis                                                                                          ۱۱۱

۵٫۲٫ Identity of the Dead                                                                                 ۱۲۲

۵٫۳٫ Identity Formation; Healing Process                                                     ۱۲۷

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies 

۶٫ Conclusion                                                                                     ۱۳۴

۶٫۱٫ Summing Up                                                                                             ۱۳۵

۶٫۲

. Findings                                                                                                     ۱۴۵

۶٫۳٫ Suggestions for Further Research                                                          ۱۵۰

 

Bibliography                                                                                     ۱۵۴

 

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

 

 

 

 

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

 

 

 

 

 

۱٫۱٫ General Overview

Toni Morrison, (Chloe Anthony Wofford, born in 1931), the contemporary African-American writer is undoubtedly one of the extremely renowned figures in the realm of African-American literature. As a mater of fact, Morrison is a combination of many things: novelist, editor, essayist, lecturer, children’s writer, storywriter, poet, and playwrite. Morrison became an outstanding literary figure through her masterpiece, Beloved, which brought her the 1998 Nobel Prize for fiction and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Although she focused mainly on black females in her works, she does not regard herself only as a feminist author, since her works are not mainly concentrated on some limited notions, but are open doors to endless horizons. Her works are characterized by rich and powerful language, fragmented and different narrative voices, close to consciousness, quick shifts between past and present, or a kind of untimeliness, and effective use of all these techniques.

Morrison’s first novel is the Bluest Eye (1970), which is about a black girl who wishes to have blue eyes. She wrote her second novel Sula in 1973, which revolves around a friendship between two adult black women, concerning notions such as good and bad, and social conventions. Her third work is Song of Solomon (1977) in which she mainly focuses on black male characters. It is a story about a male narrator (Milkman), in search of his identity through a discovery of his family history. Tar Baby (1982) is a novel about conflicts based on prejudices on different levels of race, sex, and class, in which Morrison depicts interactions between black and white characters. Beloved (1987) is her most well-known work, which was adapted for film in 1998. Beloved is written based on Margaret Garner’s inner life, a slave woman who escaped to Ohio from slavery but was recaptured by slavecatchers. Margaret murdered her two-year-old girl to save her from the miserable slavery. In Beloved, Sethe, a black woman in her 30’s, attempted at killing her children, and killed her two-year-old girl, rather than allowing them to be captured into slavery. Beloved (1987) is set after the end of the civil war, and during the period called Reconstruction, while the Novel is steeped in several flashbacks to the past miserable time, when slavery was still dominant in the South of America. It is a story about love, family, self possession, and the most prominent of all, the brutality and cruelty of slavery.

Beloved is written in prose that is rich, lyrical, colloquial, and to the point. Jazz (1992) is a historical novel in which a woman named Violet goes to the funeral of a dead eighteen-year-old girl who had been shot by her husband. The story is representative of a jazz performance with the musicians on the stage, because of the various stories and voices Morrison evoked in the work. In Paradise (1997), Morrison depicts conflicts between men of Ruby and a group of women live in a convent seventeen miles away. According to Morrison, Paradise completes a trilogy with Beloved and Jazz. Her 8th novel is named love (2003), which is about the lives of several women, and their relationships to Bill Cosey who had already passed away. A Mercy (2008) is her last novel in which she reveals what lies under the surface of slavery. The story is somehow similar to that of Beloved, since there is a mother who tries to save her daughter from slavery.

Morrison believes history is fictional, “always a representation”, and she tries to record and re-write African-American history, not only to be read as historical events, but also to affect the present reality. In Beloved Morrison depicts history as endless process, which is not over for African-Americans, who still try to “keep a historical consciousness alive” (Davis 1). Morrison tried not to depict all the whites as evils and all the blacks as angels in her novels, and this is another remarkable feature of her works. In the realm of children’s literature, Morrison wrote The Big Box (2002), and The Book of Mean People (2002), she also wrote a short fiction, Recitatif in 1983, and a play, Dreaming Emmett, which was performed in 1986. She has received the National Book Critic Circle Award for Song of Solomon in 1977, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Beloved in 1988. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and the National Humanities Medal in 2000.

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

۱٫۲٫ Statement of the Problem

Morrison delves into the past memories to reveal all historical causes and effects in order to bring them into the surface of the present time. For her, memories are always fresh, in spite of the fact that the object being remembered is done and past. The consequence of such idea is quite apparent in her work, specifically in Beloved, through all those flashbacks and re-memories of the past. Sethe, the main character, seems to be entrapped by the traumatic memories which still reminds her the miserable past and even hurts her. “the hurt was always there-like a tender pace in the corner of her mouth that the bit left (Beloved 58). For Sethe memories are not over:

I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some thing just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my memory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it , even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew or saw is still out there. Right in the places where it happened. (Beloved 36)

 

Sethe carries the burden of the past on her back all the time, just like that sign of tree on her back. She is a mother with all her love, devotion, and protection for her children. That’s why she murders her dear daughter, since a true mother finds her duty to save her child from any kind of danger in any fashion, and she pays for that. “As for Denver, the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered” (Beloved 42).

Under the light of Trauma Studies, Sethe’ miserable condition becomes more highlighted. The cluster of trauma fiction opens with Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), a novel which has exert a remarkably wide cultural influence. The events of the book are partly based on the case of a slave mother, Margaret Garner, who kills her two-year-old girl in order to save her from the evil of slavery. Beloved is replete with ghosts and ghostly memories of slavery which still haunt Sethe and the framehouse, 124. There are three aspects of Beloved that make it a true example of a trauma fiction: its disarticulation of linear narrative, its figuration of trauma in the ghost, and its complex adjustments communities and survivors need to make with such traumatic history.

Beloved is bound up with psychoanalysis formulation as Morrison asserts that “the narrative into which life seems to cast itself surfaces most forcefully in certain kinds of psychoanalysis ” (Luckhurst 97). The dialogues and relationship between mother and daughters in Beloved are based on Freudian models.

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

Freud’s theories in psychoanalysis is the foundation for Trauma Studies and undoubtedly the case for cultural studies. According to Freud, “traumatic memory is puzzling, completely absent from the patient’s memory when they are in a normal psychological state” (Luckhurst 8). He believed early traumas in childhood would be forgotten in latency, but re-emerge in adults. Freud’s assertion implicitly connotes the aporetic nature of childhood memories as well as traumatic past. By which Cathy Caruth, a key figure in Trauma Studies, means a paradoxical experience. Caruth claims that trauma is paradoxical in its nature because it is aporetic and occurs when   causation cannot be proved by physical evidence. The ghostly appearance of Beloved, as an intruder, could be representative of the traumatic past since no one, even Sethe, is not able to control her. Beloved hurts Sethe and the framehouse while she is absent but she is always there to remind the past; “I am Beloved and she is mine” (Beloved 210). It is as if she possesses Sethe. The ghost embodies the idea of the persistant existence of traumatic memory, the invasion of the past into the present. What Beloved embodies refuses the ghost story’s conventional ending since she cannot be laid to rest. Beloved’s remaining in the closing pages of the book suggests that overcoming the traumatic past is not possible by a simple process of forgetting. Sethe is unable to forget the traumatic past. She is doomed to go wherever the memories dictate. She is doomed to carry the tree traced on her back, which she cannot get rid of:

Boys scared. You asleep on my back. Denver sleep in my stomach. Felt like I was split in two. I told her to take you all: I had to go back. In case. She just looked at me. Said, woman? Bit a piece of my tongue off when they opened my back. It was hanging by shred. I didn’t mean to. Clamped down on it , it come right off. I thought Good God, I’m going to eat myself up. They dug a hole for my stomach so as not to hurt the baby. (Beloved 202)

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

Sethe is not the only scapegoat of the past memories, Beloved’s chin is marked by the scar made by the saw. The ribbon that Stamp Paid keeps in his pocket reminds him of “the people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons” (Beloved 181). Beloved’s ghost evokes traumatic force which splits the subject, obliged Sethe to live in different times rather than in present. She is the voice of ”sixty million and more” Negro sufferers and survivors.

Concerning Trauma Studies, Morrison’s Song of Solomon could also be viewed as a Trauma fiction. In this novel Ruth, Milkman’s mother, carries the burden of a traumatic loss. Ruth cannot accept her father’s death. The trace of this loss is quite flagrant in Ruth’s life, which is emerged in the shape of a water mark on the table, “the cloudy gray circle identified the place where the bowl filled everyday during the doctor’s life with fresh flowers had stood” (Song of Solomon 12). Even though Ruth tries to conceal or ignore this traumatic loss; at the same time she needs its presence in her life that suggests the aporetic nature of her trauma:

Ruth looked for the water mark several times during the day. She knew it was there , would always be there, but she needed to confirm its presence…. She regarded it a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was life and not a dream. (Song of Solomon 11)

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

Ruth is not the only one who is captured by traumatic memories; Macon Dead, Ruth’s husband, is another victim of the invasion of the past. Macon cannot forget the sight of Ruth’s mouth on her dead father’s fingers, “the image left him, but the odiousness never did” (Song of Solomon 17). However, the process of rememory in Song of Solomon seems to be more constructive rather than being destructive. The main character, Milkman Dead, tries to discover and build his identity and scattered self through rememory and digging of the past. Rememories and flashbacks result in self……………………………….

A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

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A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

 

 

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A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon, in the Light of Trauma Studies

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