Cannibalism as the Traumatic Loss of Self-Boundary

In Morrison’s fictional world, the system of bondage fractures the black family, human connectedness and black subjectivity. In Sula, defiled and disorganized by the ravages of slavery, Eva invests her sense of self in her children in an effort to identify herself as whole and integrated under the legacy of slavery. She holds fantasies of mystic oneness with her children, the unsullied, unstymied parts of herself, to detoxify her sense of shame and stigma. A large part of her life is marked by deprivation and privation. After being abandoned by her husband, she identifies with the maternal body: she has one of her legs cut off by the train for ten thousand dollars to tide her family over hardship, an act which contributes to her exalted position in the family. It is arguable that she maims herself in display of her greatness and power: mutilated and disabled, she decorates and displays the empty place to establish herself as well-equipped and invulnerable. Eva’s exhibi-tionism is suggestive of her faulty efforts at restoration of her grandiose fantasy.

Yet her defensive efforts extend to the traumatic past, reflecting her need to trans-cend the pain of being female and black in America.

After her return from an eighteen-month absence with one leg, Eva remains un-married and independent, inhabiting the Peace family together with her daughter Hannah, granddaughter Sula, and a whole mixture of stray boys. Though offering home and hearth for the members of the family, she scapegoats everyone, turning the family into a stage which reenacts her turbulent marital life with destructive effect. Preoccupied with the particular importance of her own autonomy rather than that of others, she sets fire to her adult son Plum, causes Hannah to become wanton and Sula unruly, silences Tar Baby, and bludgeons the deweys into

insip-id sameness. Whether defiant or submissive, children from the family have been wounded by the unempathetic, governing householder. Resisting being Othered by the white symbolic, Eva sacrifices Plum as he returns from the war shattered, debilitated, feeble-willed and vulnerable. Disappointed and disillusioned in him as her selfobject, she destroys him just as she mutilated herself many years ago.

Yet what she endeavors to escape is her own decline and death. To draw on Lifton’s theory of “perverse witness,” Eva “attaches the taint of death to [her son]

in order to reassert life’s power” (Caruth 1995a: 141). Underlying the abysmal violence is her desire to identify herself with a narcissistic image of grandeur and greatness. Accordingly, the murder of Plum reveals the extent to which she is physically and psychologically scarred by the devastating effect of the cultural trauma.

Like Eva, Sethe in Beloved is afflicted with a nebulous sense of self. Judith Lewis Herman asserts that a sense of safety is formed “in earliest life in the relationship with the first caretaker. Originating with life itself, this sense of trust sustains a person throughout the lifecycle. It forms the basis of all systems of relationship and faith” (1992: 51). Sethe’s undefined, flimsy self stems in large part from the dysfunctional caregiving she received during her infancy as well as in her forma-tive and vulnerable years. In her years in Sweet Home, she inclines to rely on outside objects to maintain her sense of relatedness and sustain her tentative ego.

For example, the narrator reveals, to validate her sense of belonging, she “had to bring a fistful of salsify into Mrs. Garner’s kitchen every day just to be able to work in it, feel like some part of it was hers” (1997: 22). Yet the bodily violation conducted by schoolteacher’s nephews annihilates all her fantasies of an integrat-ed self. When hearing schoolteacher balancing “her human characteristics” with

“her animal ones,” she “bumped up against a tree”; her “head itched like the devil.

Like somebody was sticking fine needles in [her] scalp” (1997: 193). The needles serve as mnemic symbols inscribed on her body. She is destined to repeat the de-cisive trauma in order to embed herself in the symbolic structure. Devalued and dehumanized, she defines herself in terms of maternity. In elaborating object rela-tions in psychoanalytic theory, Stephen A. Mitchell observes, “There is a power-ful need to preserve an abiding sense of oneself as associated with, positioned in terms of, related to, a matrix of other people, in terms of actual transactions as well as internal presences” (1988: 33). Accordingly, Sethe’s efforts are defensive, readable as her desire to restore an idealized merger with her children as her selfobject.

Sethe’s failure to fill the slavery-engendered fissure finally leads to her taking part in murder. Intrigued by the arrival of schoolteacher to reclaim her and her children, she kills one of her children, the literalization of her wrestling with her

own fate. Eventually, after the infanticide, life in 124 comes to an abrupt halt.

What is worse, Sethe is further traumatized by being rejected by the local com-munity: treating Sethe as a polluting person, the community shuns her house.

Even Baby Suggs, who has devoted her lifetime to teaching her people to love themselves, falls apart inwardly as a result of the betrayal of her fellow people:

to belong to a community of other free Negroes – to love and be loved by them, to counsel and be counseled, protect and be protected, feed and be fed – and then to have that community step back and hold itself at a distance – well, it could wear out even a Baby Suggs, holy. (1997: 177)

Arguably, Suggs has fallen victim to a paranoid-depressive state resulting from a life of deprivation: “‘Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed [. . .] and broken my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks’”

(1997: 89). Finally, she abandons the symbolic language she employs to instruct her people to love themselves.

Beloved is symptomatic of the aphasia, the death-in-life existence of 124-dwellers.

She returns to question a maternal love she can never bring herself to understand and to retrieve the preoedipal merger with her mother. It comes as natural that what can only be described as her relish for Sethe’s face gradually evolves into a kind of cannibalism: “Sethe was licked, tasted, eaten by Beloved’s eyes” (1997:

57). Beloved’s desiring gaze implies what she was deprived of many years ago – the sweetness of motherly love. In Nicholas Royle’s words, “there is [. . .] no cannibalism without love, no love without cannibalism” (2003: 208). Thus, Be-loved’s interest in her mother insinuates her desire to incorporate the latter and to annihilate the distance between them.

Beloved describes her quarters on the slave ship as claustrophobically constricting, devouring and death-oriented. It signified black females’ falling prey to white capitalist patriarchy. Moreover, in a perpetual cringe, Beloved’s situation recalls and corresponds to the traumatic experience of the Sixty-Million and more from the Middle Passage who succumbed to the stifling darkness and horror of their never-ending journey to the soul-death of slavery. Additionally, Beloved’s suffer-ings also speak to the crime of child abuse: “I am going to be in pieces he hurts where I sleep he puts his fingers there I drop the food and break into pieces”

(1997: 212, original spacing). The place where Beloved sleeps is both the physi-cal place in which she lies down and the site of her body itself – the place in which her innocence sleeps. She breaks into pieces because the man sexually penetrates her and her mother is unavailable or unable to rescue her from the man’s clutches: “she took my face away” (1997: 212). The face is, in fact, Sethe’s, which fails to empathize with Beloved in the traumatic event. Accordingly, this

passage can be interpreted as the historical rape of black American women as well as the accusation against the sexual assault of children whose mothers are at the same time debilitated under patriarchal slavery.

After Beloved’s return, mother and daughters gather together in the all-female household, oblivious to the outside world. In keeping with the role of a perfect mother, Sethe deviates from her ordinary life, becoming entangled with her two daughters in inventing and fulfilling their whimsical wishes:

At first they played together. A whole month and Denver loved it. From the night they ice-skated together under a star-loaded sky and drank sweet milk by the stove, to the string puzzles Sethe did for them in afternoon light, and shadow pictures in the gloaming. [. . .] [Sethe] played with Beloved’s hair, braiding, puffing, tying, oiling it until it made Denver nervous to watch her.

They changed beds and exchanged clothes. Walked arm in arm and smiled all the time. [. . .] The thirty-eight dollars of life savings went to feed them-selves with fancy food and decorate themthem-selves with ribbon and dress goods, which Sethe cut and sewed like they were going somewhere in a hurry.

(1997: 240)

The three mix together without tags of mother and daughter, taking their chances in making a new start in the symbolic order. Saturated with the joys of childhood, this passage shows Sethe’s language of mother love percolating through time to Beloved, emerging as a point where language fails and the imaginarized oneness triumphs. Mladen Dolar’s insight into the double is useful here in analyzing Be-loved’s function for both Sethe and Denver:

On the one hand, it [the double] enjoys at our expense, committing acts we would not otherwise (or rather would only ever) dream of. On the other, it does not simply enjoy but rather commands enjoyment, forcing us into a po-sition of servitude to our appetites [. . .] Its uncanniness, therefore, stems from the same compulsion to repeat which the subject is powerless to resist.

(qtd. in Parkin-Gounelas 2001: 110, original italics)

The emergence of the double reflects the subject’s attempt to compensate for the lack forced upon him/herself by the Other. Accordingly, Sethe’s enslavement to Beloved reflects her denial of her castrated status in the Other. Setting herself the task of excavating the site of Beloved’s desire, Sethe soon loses possession of herself. What she desires to fill is, in effect, the Other’s lack, which is implied by Beloved’s insatiability and inconsolability. On the other hand, Beloved clings to Sethe to such an extent that she can hardly be left alone: “She want[s] Sethe’s company for hours to watch the layer of brown leaves waving at them from the bottom of the creek” (1997: 240–241). Beloved’s escalating demand for company suggests her as suffering from neurotic difficulties. Similarly, Sethe’s interest in

fiddling with Beloved’s hair eerily evokes the maternal violence of the earlier beheading scene. Accordingly, both Beloved and Sethe are suffering from obses-sion, that is, compulsive repetition of maternal jouissance that fuses pleasure and pain, and life and death.

As a revenant, Beloved wishes to switch places with Sethe: “When once or twice Sethe tried to assert herself – be the unquestioned mother whose word was law and who knew what was best, Beloved slammed things, wiped the table clean of plates, threw salt on the floor, broke a windowpane” (1997: 242). Beloved’s proneness to aggressive and potentially violent behaviour could be analyzed in relation to Melanie Klein’s elaboration on aggressiveness manifested in child’s play: “Sometimes, he gives vent to his aggressiveness and resentment by being, in the role of parent, sadistic towards the child, represented by the analyst” (1985: 8).

In this light, Beloved’s violent behaviour resembles her mother’s predisposition towards violence in stressful and traumatic situations. Klein goes on to elaborate on the fear of retaliation after a child has damaged a toy:

He often puts aside such a toy, representing for instance a sibling or a parent, and ignores it for a time. This indicates dislike of the damaged object, due to the persecutory fear that the attacked person (represented by the toy) has become retaliatory and dangerous. (1985: 9–10)

By contrast, as a ghost intent on perforating symbolic bounds, Beloved is immune to death, let alone feelings of persecutory fear. What she desires is a total fusion with her mother: “Dressed in Sethe’s dresses, she stroked her skin with the palm of her hand. She imitated Sethe, talked the way she did, laughed her laugh and used her body the same way down to the walk” (1997: 241). In Knowledge as Desire, Furth reads such imitative gestures by children as their effort to establish societal relations. In Beloved’s case, instead of establishing contact through inter-personal and close interaction, she tries to colonize and cannibalize Sethe: she feeds off her mother, “getting bigger, plumper by the day” (1997: 239), while her mother becomes smaller; “Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur” (1997:

250). Correspondingly, Laura Di Prete reads Beloved’s cannibalism as speaking to her function as the “foreign body” of the repressed traumatic memories:

What we are witnessing is the direct consequence of the workings of trau-matic latency. As the “foreign body” expands, as in other words the weight of unassimilable traumatic memory increases, the “real” body of Sethe [. . .]

ceases to exist. Beloved swells as she feeds herself avidly with the stories of past traumas that, under her pressure, the inhabitants of 124 unwillingly share with her. (2006: 74)

In light of this, Beloved’s destructive consumption of Sethe suggests the extent to which the latter has succumbed to the aftershock of her past traumas.

Sethe clearly fails to control Beloved psychologically, and any failure by her to attend to the latter’s urgent need for mirroring triggers an immediate outburst of narcissistic rage. When Sethe, in the clearing, is able to make peace with Halle’s memory, looking forward to a new life (with Paul D and her two girls), Beloved tries to strangle her mother, mimicking the brutal violence Sethe displayed many years ago. Exploring the aftermath of longtime captivity, Herman points out:

Prolonged captivity undermines or destroys the ordinary sense of a relative-ly safe sphere of initiative, in which there is some tolerance for trial and er-ror. To the chronically traumatized person, any action has potentially dire consequences. There is no room for mistakes. (1992: 91)

In this connection, Beloved’s sense of safety has been destroyed by her claustro-phobic experience in the ship; angry and spiteful, she displays her inability to balance herself in relation to others, for all relationships are filtered through ex-tremity. Her matricide suggests her unconscious attempt at keeping away the anx-iety of reexperiencing fragmentation, because Sethe’s betrayal once again threat-ens her very effacement. At another level, her aggression is inextricably linked with her desire for maternal attention. As Julia Kristeva writes:

want and aggressivity are chronologically separable but logically conexten-sive. Aggressivity appears to us as a rejoinder to the original deprivation felt from the time of the mirage known as “primary narcissism”; it merely takes revenge on initial frustrations. (1982: 39, original italics)

Identifying herself with her mother, Beloved’s cannibalistic behaviour towards Sethe borders on self-extinction, speaking to her effort to detach or abject a psy-chic part (which is constituted by her mother) from herself to cope with the immi-nent threat of the maternal betrayal. At another level, knowing nothing about the inside/outside binary, Beloved figures uncannily as the Lacanian libido, refusing to be pinned down by the legacy of slavery. Thus, her recourse to death to deal with her mother’s betrayal suggests her desire for mastery and freedom in the white symbolic world.

With an emotionally unavailable mother, her sister Denver emerges as a fragile child enmeshed in the difficulties of love. The moment she sees Beloved sitting on a stump not far from the steps of 124, she wants her. At first sight, Beloved seems to be sick. As Sethe remarks, “‘Poor thing. And nothing in this house to give her for it. She’ll just have to ride it out. That’s hateful sickness if ever there was one’” (Morrison 1997: 53). However, Denver refutes her mother’s

observa-tion, saying, “‘She’s not sick!’” For four days, Beloved “slept, waking and sitting up only for water.” On the other hand, “Denver tended her, watched her sound sleep, listened to her labored breathing and, out of love and a breakneck posses-siveness that charged her, hid like a personal blemish Beloved’s incontinence”

(1997: 54). Tending Beloved like an injured part of herself, Denver wants more from this “sleepy beauty” (Morrison 1997: 53), which arouses her desire for the lost maternal jouissance. It is possible to understand Denver’s caregiving behav-iour as her unconscious attempt to serve a selfobject function for Beloved, there-by experiencing this function vicariously. Denver’s caretaking of Beloved is thus readable as her compensatory effort to amend the flaw in her mother. In “On Nar-cissism,” Freud suggests that sickness and the condition of sleep imply a “narcis-sistic withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject’s own self”

(2001e: 83). Accordingly, both Beloved and Denver uses Beloved’s sickness to express their discontent over the maternal inability to provide enough mirroring function in their formative years.

In this novel, Denver is traumatized by a deadly and murderous mother, suspend-ed in the preosuspend-edipal matrix and entombsuspend-ed in her mother’s body, as evidencsuspend-ed by a recurring nightmare:

She cut my head off every night. Buglar and Howard told me she would and she did. Her pretty eyes looking at me like I was a stranger. [. . .] Like she didn’t want to do it but she had to and it wasn’t going to hurt. [. . .] She looks over at Buglar and Howard – see if they all right. Then she comes over to my side. I know she’ll be good at it, careful. That when she cuts it off it’ll be done right; it won’t hurt. After she does it I lie there for a minute with just my head. Then she carries it downstairs to braid my hair. I try not to cry but it hurts so much to comb it. (Morrison 1997: 206)

Through this eerie dream, in which motherly tenderness is interwoven with vio-lence, Denver pronounces her anger over maternal silence and violence. Failing to master the motherly love, she compulsively repeats the dream. For her, in refer-ence to another murder, the act of survival figures as “the repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to [her] own life”

(Caruth 1996: 62). It is because Denver cannot grasp the unconscious meaning of death directly that “survival becomes for [her], paradoxically, an endless testimo-ny to the impossibility of living” (Caruth 1996: 62). Denver’s experiencing of the trauma of infanticide testifies, again, to the belated nature of trauma, since the infanticide is not experienced as it occurs: it is only registered in relation to an-other person (Denver qua Beloved’s double), in anan-other place and time. Eventual-ly, this nightmare can be construed as Denver’s faulty efforts to restore an ideal-ized merger with the maternal imago.