Reading for posthuman liminality in black women’s literature means that we must start simultaneously at the beginning and the end. Contemporary and even futuristic theories enhance our understanding of canonical texts, allowing us to revisit histories and ideas and interpret familiar stories in new ways. These types of border crossings pervade Toni Morrison’s neo–slave narratives, Beloved (1987) and A Mercy (2008), and come to the forefront at each novel’s conclusion, when the reader participates in the story’s creation.
Near the close of Beloved, Paul D asks Sethe to consider building a future with him as she continues the work of healing from her traumatic past. “Sethe,” Paul D states, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (Beloved 273). The bridge Paul D builds between yesterday’s experiences and tomorrow’s promises transforms in the final chapter of the novel into a type of mantra. Morrison compels her readers to consider the relationship of the past to the present and future through the repeated statement, “It was not a story to pass on” (Beloved 274–75). The reiteration of the words “to pass on” indicates both the finality of the past (“passing on” as the act of dying, of ceasing to exist in the present) and the movement of history into the future (“passing on” as the act of bequeathing knowledge or property to the next generation). As the mantra transitions from past to present tense, from “It was not a story to pass on” to “This is not a story to pass on” (Beloved 275), the links that connect past, present, and future become further intertwined. Despite the narrator’s insistence that the story not be passed on, it shifts, for the reader, from relic to reality, and the narrative’s continued trajectory into the future seems all but certain.
In her most recent neo–slave narrative, A Mercy, Morrison similarly situates her novel as an artifact that transports tales from the past into the present and future. Both Florens and her mother share stories that never make it to their intended audiences, yet these stories do not simply “talk to themselves,” as Florens fears (A Mercy 188). Instead, the historical narratives gain contemporary significance due to the reader’s interaction with the novel. The reader steps in to fill the role of the blacksmith, Florens’s lover and the desired recipient, despite his alleged illiteracy, of the narrative she carves into the walls and floorboards of Jacob Vaark’s house. Additionally, in the final chapter, the reader takes the place of Florens and hears the message that her mother “long[ed] to tell” on the day Jacob bought her daughter (A Mercy 195–96). The reader’s participation in each woman’s narrative ensures that the words move “beyond the eternal hemlocks”—beyond death or a forgotten history—and go on to “flavor the soil of the earth,” where they will find continued life in the growth of spring (A Mercy 188).
The sense of overlapping past, present, and future temporalities that Morrison offers in Beloved and A Mercy accords with posthumanist notions of liminality. Posthuman theory provides a useful framework through which to read Morrison’s neo–slave narratives and other historical narratives by black American writers, despite the seeming metachronism of studying black history through a theory that, in its name, focuses on that which is “post” human. According to posthuman theory, the subject exists within nexuses of power, knowledge, and discourse that continuously transform and are transformed by the subject. More than simply interconnected with the surrounding world, the posthuman being moves over and within the dividing lines that separate the individual from the governments, economies, technologies, communities, and people with which the individual interacts (Halberstam and Livingston 14). The problems and promise of posthuman culture stem from the multiplicity, fragmentation, and liminality of the temporalities, bodies, and subjectivities contained within—issues that, although new in terms of their relation to the posthuman subject’s existence in contemporary technoculture, have been addressed by black writers and theorists for more than a century (Eshun, “Further” 301; Yaszek, “Afrofuturism” 41–60; Gilroy, Small 178). If, as Kalí Tal argues, “the struggle of African-Americans is precisely the struggle to integrate identity and multiplicity,” then Morrison’s Beloved and A Mercy, novels that share stories from black history and dreams of black futurity, present through their multiplicities evidence of posthuman liminality.
In Beloved, Morrison blurs boundaries of time and subjectivity by having Sethe, her protagonist, revisit her childhood, which allows Sethe not only to reframe and revise her traumatic history but also to position her past experiences as future focused. Although often studied as a mother, Sethe must additionally be understood as a daughter who struggles with feelings of abandonment concerning the maternal care of which she never received quite enough. Sethe’s return to the position of child—a position rooted in the past yet future oriented because of the child’s continuous existence in a state of becoming—opens her to possibilities, identities, and connections from which she can access and exercise greater agency.
Posthumanist understandings of temporality and subjectivity allow for a new reading of Beloved. In the novel, Sethe’s past infiltrates her present, a temporal shift many critics have understood as immediately stifling but ultimately empowering. Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Andrea O’Reilly, and Caroline Rody find that although Sethe’s history at the Sweet Home plantation plagues her present life, her “painful reacquaintance with the past,” in Beaulieu’s words, allows her to develop more meaningful relationships with others (and with herself) in the present (Beaulieu 71). Reading Beloved through posthumanism adds a new layer of complexity to the critical study of time in the novel. Sethe does not simply reimagine or rewrite her past, as many critics assert. Nor does she return to the past to lay it to rest. Instead, Sethe understands her past, like her present and future, as existing in a state of continual development. Sethe brings her past— specifically, her childhood and mother—into her present and future, and she also brings her future into the past in order to take power from the liminal subjectivity these temporal shifts engender.
The power of posthuman liminality manifests itself most clearly in Sethe’s relationships with her mother and children. While critics typically conceive of the character Beloved as the return of Sethe’s daughter who was killed eighteen years prior to the action in the novel’s opening, Beloved’s identity extends beyond this single time and this single child: she embodies the “Sixty Million and more” captive Africans who died before they reached the shores of America (Clemons 75), as well as those who survived the Middle Passage to join the generations of the enslaved (O’Reilly 87; Horwitz 157; Bouson 152).1 In the realm of Morrison’s novel, Sethe’s mother, a woman who died a violent death on the plantation where she was enslaved, must be included in this number, which means that Beloved represents not only the unnamed millions who suffered because of slavery but, for Sethe, both child and mother. Sethe therefore uses her relationship with the mysterious Beloved to resuscitate her role as a mother and her identity as a daughter. Through her return to the position of daughter, Sethe discovers a strength and forward-looking vision that allow her to begin building a future.
Because the connections between mother and child in Beloved transcend time and space, these lasting bonds can be considered in terms of the posthuman “becoming-subject” (Halberstam and Livingston 14). Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of “becoming” to conceive of a posthuman being who experiences continual development due to a connection to surrounding elements:
Unlike the human subject-to-be (Lacan’s “l’hommelette”), who sees his own mirror image and fixed gender identity discrete and sovereign before him in a way that will forever exceed him, the posthuman becoming-subject vibrates across and among an assemblage of semi-autonomous collectivities it knows it can never either be coextensive with nor altogether separate from. The posthuman body is not driven, in the last instance, by a teleological desire for domination, death or stasis; or to become coherent and unitary; or even to explode into more disjointed multiplicities. Driven instead by the double impossibility and prerequisite to become other and to become itself, the posthuman body intrigues rather than desires[…].(14)
Halberstam and Livingston indicate that connectivity allows the posthuman becoming-subject to exist simultaneously as self and other in the past, present, and future. Thus, posthuman theory helps articulate Sethe’s dual positioning as mother and daughter as well as the potentiality of her nonlinear development. When read through posthumanism, Sethe’s multiple identities take form as part of the posthuman “impossibility and prerequisite to become other and to become itself” (Halberstam and Livingston 14), which gains specificity for Sethe as the yearning to become mother and to become self. By developing a dual self and mother identity, Sethe incorporates her dreams for the future into her understanding of her past.
The physical and emotional bonds shared by Sethe and her children evidence the liminal identities characteristic of and the liminal temporalities inhabited by posthuman becoming-subjects. Sethe’s intense connection with her children blurs the boundaries that exist between self and other, past and future. Jean Wyatt draws upon Lacan’s theory of the imaginary and symbolic orders in order to argue that rather than allowing Sethe’s children (or Sethe herself) to transition from the realm of imagined wholeness with the mother’s body to the symbolic order of (maternal) absence and loss, Morrison creates a system that, “like Lacan’s symbolic, locates subjects in relation to other subjects” but, unlike Lacan’s symbolic, refuses the paternalistic mandate for physical distance between mother and child (“Giving” 475). According to Wyatt, Morrison replaces Lacan’s understanding of the symbolic as a “move away from bodies touching to the compensations of abstract signifiers” with her view of a “maternal symbolic” that “makes physical contact the necessary support for Sethe’s full acceptance of the separate subjectivity required by language systems” (“Giving” 484). In other words, the lasting bonds between mothers and children in Morrison’s novel reveal that subjectivity depends on communal connections rather than separations. The notion of the individual developing through the community—the self forming alongside and even in conjunction with the other— corresponds with the paradox of the posthuman becoming-subject. The becoming-subject exists yet has not (and never will) fully come into being, given its impossible journey both “to become other and to become itself” (Halberstam and Livingston 14). This constant development defines posthuman subjectivity, which makes the becoming-subject an apt figure through which to study Morrison’s characters.
Reading Sethe as a becoming-subject additionally requires an understanding of her dual identity as daughter and mother. Sethe not only intertwines her sense of self with the identities of her children, but her real and imagined relationships with her mother additionally shape her past, present, and future. By mothering others, Sethe attempts to bring into her present reality the physically and emotionally fulfilling mother–child relationship she never experienced during her early life because of slavery. Sethe remembers her biological mother—known to her simply as “Ma’am”—as a stranger she saw “a few times out in the fields and once when she [Ma’am] was working indigo” (Beloved 60). When telling Beloved and Denver stories of her childhood, Sethe foregrounds her physical estrangement from her mother, stating, “She didn’t even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember” (Beloved 60–61). Although she believes her mother must have nursed her for “two or three weeks” or at least “a week or two” during her infancy (Beloved 60, 203), Sethe cannot recall receiving sustenance or comfort from her biological mother. She knows only that Nan, the woman who nursed her after Ma’am returned to the fields, nursed many children and “never had enough [milk] for all” (Beloved 203).
The deprivation of mother’s milk stands as a symbol of the maternal losses that shape Sethe’s childhood and inspire her in her adult life to mother others, including Beloved. Nancy Chodorow theorizes that the physical and emotional bonds that develop between mother and child during the feeding process are as significant as the actual sustenance a child receives. Although Freud and others have argued that the bond between mother and child comes from the physiological act of breastfeeding, Chodorow adds that the physical and emotional interaction of child and mother (or child and caregiver) creates positive feelings as well (65). According to Chodorow, time spent touching the mother while receiving food not only bonds mother and child during the child’s early life but also influences the child’s later life as an adult.
As Chodorow’s theory suggests, the absence of her mother’s milk affects Sethe during her adulthood. Specifically, Sethe’s early experiences with her mother shape her mothering. Sethe communicates her physical and emotional estrangement from her mother by stating that as a child she had “no nursing milk to call [her] own” (Beloved 200). However, as a mother, Sethe takes pride in her ability to care for her children, proclaiming that she has “milk enough for all” (Beloved 100).2 When Sethe arrives at 124 Bluestone Road, her home in the free state of Ohio, her body enables her to nurse her children and also to provide for their physical and emotional comfort. Sethe celebrates the feat of surviving her escape from Sweet Home by encircling all of her children with her arms: “I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide” (Beloved 162). Wyatt argues that Sethe’s body takes on “mythic dimensions”: her “monumental body and abundant milk give and sustain life” (“Giving” 476). The fantastical expansion Sethe envisions occurring to her body and maternal capabilities allows her to physically join with her children (they move “in between” her arms) and blur the boundaries that differentiate self and other.
Significantly, Sethe’s mythic mothering shifts from giving and physically sustaining life to fulfilling her children’s (especially Beloved’s) emotional needs. Morrison again presents Sethe’s devoted mothering in stark contrast to Ma’am’s maternal absence, a juxtaposition that highlights the permeable boundaries that exist in Beloved not only between self and other but also among past, present, and future. While Ma’am lived apart from Sethe and “never fixed [her] hair nor nothing” (Beloved 60), Sethe commits herself to meeting each of Beloved’s demands. Sethe feeds, clothes, and entertains Beloved by cooking and sewing with her, and she demonstrates her affection for Beloved by playing with “Beloved’s hair, braiding, puffing, tying, oiling it until it made Denver nervous to watch her” (Beloved 239–40). Sethe’s strategy of satisfying Beloved’s physical and emotional desires by attending to her body—specifically, sating her hunger with breast milk when she is an infant and demonstrating their closeness by playing with her hair when she is a young adult—emphasizes the lasting impact of the physical and emotional relationship (or lack thereof) that exists between mother and child. In temporal terms, Sethe’s negative past experiences with her mother shape her own mothering choices in the present. Ma’am’s absence and Sethe’s subsequent suffering inspire Sethe to protect her children from the same fate by fully—and as many critics have argued, excessively—devoting her body to her offspring.
While Sethe’s maternal body provides for her children, her own daughterly body still suffers from a want of care because of her mother’s absence. Sethe attempts through her mothering to heal her past and present daughterly suffering and ward off any future pain she or her children might experience. She dedicates her body to fulfilling Beloved’s needs, transferring her body’s power to Beloved: “The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became; the brighter Beloved’s eyes, the more those eyes that used never to look away became slits of sleeplessness. Sethe no longer combed her hair or splashed her face with water. She sat in the chair licking her lips like a chastised child while 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” (Beloved 250). Sethe seeks through her mothering to strengthen her children’s bodies in order to protect them—and their family link—from being appropriated by the white owner or, on a larger level, white culture.
In addition to furthering the goal of protecting her children, Sethe’s tending to others and her contentment with her relational identity can be understood to develop out of her personal need for nurturance. O’Reilly argues that Sethe’s mothering works to counter “the commodification of African Americans under slavery and the resulting disruption of the African American motherline,” the tradition of care that unites black mothers and children (139). In positioning Sethe’s mothering as a political act that empowers Sethe through the reconstitution of her motherline, O’Reilly departs from critics, including Wyatt and Demetrakopoulos, who argue that Sethe’s mothering reflects her willingness to efface her individual subjectivity in favor of a relational identity (Wyatt, “Giving” 476; Demetrakopoulos 52). Venetria K. Patton and Kubitschek likewise acknowledge that Sethe’s mothering is not completely self-effacing. Patton finds that “Sethe’s consuming love is based on a newfound selfishness once she is in a position to claim ownership of herself and her children” (128), and Kubitschek argues that Sethe’s self-interested desire to be mothered (rather than a selfish claim of ownership) motivates or contributes to her mothering of others.
Sethe seeks to assuage the pain of her past by assuming both the mother and child positions in her relationship with Beloved, which means that Beloved also exists as both mother and daughter. Morrison situates Sethe and Beloved in a mother–daughter relationship beginning the moment the childlike Beloved appears on the stump outside of 124 and Sethe feels the overwhelming urge to relieve herself, which she later understands as her water breaking (Beloved 51, 202). However, as their bond develops, Sethe begins to assume a daughterly role in relation to the maternal Beloved, a shift noticed by scholars including O’Reilly and Deborah Horwitz. Observing Beloved and her mother together, Denver notes, “Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother, Sethe the teething child” (Beloved 250). In addition to appearance, Sethe and Beloved’s behavior indicates a transformation in their relationship. Although Sethe repeatedly asserts that she believes her deceased daughter has returned in the form of Beloved, she relates to Beloved as if the young woman were a reincarnation of her mother, not her daughter. Sethe compares her relationship with Beloved to her relationship with her mother, stating that Beloved “came right on back like a good girl, like a daughter which is what I wanted to be and would have been if my ma’am had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her and let me be one” (Beloved 203). While Sethe initially views Beloved’s actions as a daughter’s departure from and subsequent return to her mother, as she continues to consider their situation, she focuses on maternal (rather than daughterly) absences: “I wonder what they [her mother and the other women] was doing when they was caught. Running, you think? No. Not that. Because she was my ma’am and nobody’s ma’am would run off and leave her daughter, would she?” (Beloved 203). Sethe’s turn toward memories of her mother’s absence indicates that Beloved becomes a stand-in not for the devoted daughter who returns to the mother but the good mother who refuses to abandon (and, hence, returns to) her daughter.
The interior monologues Morrison presents in part 2 of her novel support a reading of Beloved as Sethe’s mother and reinforce the existence of circular or liminal temporalities in Beloved. In Beloved’s monologue, readers bear witness to the movement of the past into the present and future (and vice versa) through Beloved’s descriptions of the mother’s return to the daughter and the daughter’s return to the mother during the Middle Passage. Morrison first introduces Sethe’s mother’s Middle Passage experience through Nan, who tells a young Sethe that “her mother and Nan were together from the sea” (Beloved 62). In her interior monologue, Beloved reveals additional details about the Middle Passage, particularly as it relates to the mother–daughter experience during slavery. Like Sethe, who throughout Morrison’s novel returns again and again to her memory of her lost mother, Beloved centers her monologue on a particular figure: the woman with “the face that is mine” (Beloved 211). Beloved describes the woman multiple times, focusing on her desire to be seen by the woman and her need to “join” with her in some way (Beloved 213): “I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too” (Beloved 210). Beloved’s insistence on her bodily connection to the woman as well as the very nature of her expression—her narrative is almost wholly absent of punctuation that would mark the end of one idea and the beginning of the next—indicate that the woman Beloved references is her mother, and the two exist in the realm of intense mother–child connection known as the imaginary or semiotic chora. Reading Beloved’s monologue through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the child’s pre-oedipal union with the mother, Claudine Raynaud argues that Beloved’s narrative “hints at a desire for fusion, for a world where mother and daughter can be together, reunited in an embrace that reproduces the oneness of pregnancy” (76). As Raynaud’s assessment of the Middle Passage scene indicates, Beloved joins Sethe in seeking the comfort of the mother–child connection, and this yearning only intensifies when the woman, her mother, “goes in the water” (presumably, she commits suicide), taking their shared face with her (Beloved 212).
The loss of her mother results for Beloved in the loss of her own identity—that is, until the mother returns. If Sethe mothers others in order to make up for the maternal absences she suffered as a child, this pattern of behavior can be understood to begin with her own mother. In her interior monologue, Beloved indicates that she reconnects to her mother by giving birth to Sethe, through whom she can once again “see her face which is mine” (Beloved 212). Upon Sethe’s birth, which Beloved understands as the rebirth of her own mother, Beloved revises history by giving a name to the woman on the ship; she states definitively, “Sethe went into the sea. She went there” (Beloved 214). Beloved expresses her maternal devotion to her daughter Sethe as well as her daughterly desire for the mother’s return: “the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost Sethe’s is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last” (Beloved 213). Just as Sethe mothers Beloved in the present in the hopes of reconnecting to her own mother in the future, Beloved mothers Sethe in an effort to finally “join” with the mother she lost during the Middle Passage, to both see and be the face she was so fond of in the past.
By mothering in order to make up for the daughterly deprivations they suffered in their youths, Beloved and Sethe participate, traditionally and nontraditionally, in the reproduction of mothering. According to Chodorow, social systems in which the mother is the primary parent produce female children who as adults desire to mother as a means of recreating a “relational triangle”: “As a result of being parented by a woman and growing up heterosexual, women have different and more complex relational needs in which an exclusive relationship with a man is not enough. […] [T]his is because women situate themselves psychologically as part of a relational triangle in which their father and men are emotionally secondary or, at most, equal to their mother and women” (199). Chodorow asserts that because of her relational identity, a woman cannot be emotionally fulfilled through a relationship with a man, but she can have her emotional needs met by having a child (200–01). Becoming a mother completes a woman’s triangular relational needs because the woman relates to her child as both a mother and a daughter (Chodorow 204). A woman with a child identifies with her mother, feeling a sense of responsibility to her child as well as a desire to either recreate positive pre-oedipal experiences or “get back at her mother for (fantasied) injuries done by her mother to her” (Chodorow 204, 90). Additionally, this woman experiences an “empathetic identification” with her child—that is, she sees herself in or as her child—due to her “unconscious investment in reactivating” her pre-oedipal relationship with her mother (Chodorow 204).
Beloved and other texts in which mother–child bonds are broken at a young age cannot easily be read according to Chodorow’s theory of the relational triangle, which assumes the mother’s presence in her child’s early life.3 O’Reilly asks, “If the ability to mother is developmentally built into the daughter’s personality through the mother–daughter bond—she acquires a relational self, which in turn becomes a maternal self—what happens when that crucial bond is denied, damaged, or destroyed as it was in slavery?” (88). In Morrison’s novel, slavery disrupts Sethe’s relationship with her mother and prevents her from forming affective bonds with her other caretakers. However, Sethe can still be understood to perceive the mother–child relationship as one in which mother and child are united—as one through which she can become self and other. Psychoanalytic theorist Jessica Benjamin asserts that the “vision of perfect oneness” associated with the early mother–child relationship “is an ideal—a symbolic expression of our longing—that we project onto the past” (173). Unlike Chodorow, who fails to consider “the sociohistorical displacement of the mother–child relationship” in her theory of relational identification (O’Reilly 88), Benjamin argues that broken mother–child bonds facilitate the child’s fantasy of connection to the mother: “This ideal [of mother–child unity] becomes enlarged in reaction to the experience of helplessness—in the face of circumstance, powerlessness, death—but also by the distance from mother’s help that repudiation of her [following the oedipal crisis] enforces” (173). Benjamin states that the imagined connection between mother and child ensures the child “the possibility of regaining”—or, as Morrison’s novel demonstrates, gaining for the first time—“the satisfactions of dependency,” including the confidence that the child’s needs can and will be fulfilled (174).
The convergence of past, present, and future in Benjamin’s theory of mother–child unity corresponds with an understanding of the posthuman becoming-subject’s existence within a liminal temporality. In addition to looking at the intersection of multiple time periods, posthuman theory explicates how the child might perceive a connection between self and mother despite the absence of evidence. While in their theorizing of the posthuman subject Halberstam and Livingston reject psychoanalytic metaphors of mother–child connection and triangular family structures, they assert that the posthuman being is necessarily linked to the surrounding world: “The dependence or interdependence of bodies on the material and discursive networks through which they operate means that the umbilical cords that supply us (without which we would die) are always multiple” (17). Rather than questioning the subject’s reliance on surrounding networks and beings, we must, Halberstam and Livingston argue, refuse to “distinguish absolutely or categorically between bodies and their material extensions” (17). Moved by the desire both “to become other and to become itself,” the posthuman being must be understood to embody multiple links to others.
Reading Beloved through the lens of posthumanism reveals that Sethe participates in the reproduction of mothering not because of a relational identity established during her infancy (as outlined by Chodorow) but rather because of the fantasy of mother–child unity—the expression of her desire to become self and other—that develops during her childhood, adolescence, and adult life. O’Reilly similarly argues that “the daughter’s eventual maternal subjectivity is determined less by the way she was mothered and more by how she perceived her own mother” (89). However, rather than asserting that the reproduction of mothering makes Sethe’s becoming-subjectivity possible, O’Reilly, like Barbara Schapiro, finds that Sethe learns from her mother not to understand herself as an independent subject (O’Reilly 90; Schapiro 197).
While Sethe’s perceived connection with her mother extends beyond her childhood, the bond functions as a past-, present-, and future-based source of power that allows Sethe to develop as a subject. Sethe believes that she has a profound connection to her biological mother, even if she did not recognize this connection during her early years. As Sethe makes her escape from Sweet Home, the movement of her child in her womb evokes her memory of men and women (including her Ma’am) on the plantation where she was born dancing “the antelope”: “They shifted shapes and became something other. Some unchained, demanding other whose feet knew her pulse better than she did. Just like the one in her stomach” (Beloved 31). Sethe associates the movements of the child in her womb (a symbol of her future) with her mother’s dancing (a memory of her past). Creating this liminal temporality allows her to see the family as united and mothering as a means by which she communes with her daughter as well as her mother.
Morrison further portrays liminal notions of temporality and subjectivity through Sethe’s imaginings of her mother’s unique love for her, a love Ma’am refused to share with the children who, unlike Sethe, were born out of the many sexual assaults she suffered (Beloved 62, 201). Although Sethe never had the opportunity to match her mother’s love with her own, she believes that she would have been a devoted daughter: “I would have tended my own mother if she needed me. If they had let her out of the rice field, because I was the one she didn’t throw away. I couldn’t have done more for [Mrs. Garner] than I would my own ma’am if she was to take sick and need me and I’d have stayed with her till she got well or died. And I would have stayed after that except Nan snatched me back” (Beloved 200–01). While Sethe associates her relationship with Nan, the community caregiver, as one rooted in the past—Sethe perceives Nan as snatching her “back,” taking her from a future-oriented position where she has the potential to develop a relationship with her mother to the position of loss she has experienced in the past—she views her connection with her mother as one that persists beyond death: she states that her plan to protect her children and herself from schoolteacher “was to take [them] all to the other side where [her] own ma’am is” (Beloved 203). Not only was she willing as a child to tend to her mother’s dead body, but as an adult Sethe desires to unite her mother and her children in the afterlife.
While scholars have investigated how the women of Beloved draw upon their experiences as “loved daughter[s]” in order to gain access to “empowering female models” (Kubitschek 172), these scholars typically situate the power Morrison’s mothers provide as historical. Kubitschek argues, for example, that the black women Morrison features in her novel draw upon “historical strength imaged as a mother” (177). According to Rody, this understanding of the mother–child bond as one through which women access historical power extends across the larger body of black women’s texts: “In the heroines of this literature, female desire stages a rendezvous with the hazard of history itself, daring to be overcome with history, to experience the self as the juncture of historical forces, to realize daughterhood in a kind of historical sublime” (16). While the focus on the past promoted in much of the existing scholarship concerning black women authors and their texts productively recovers previously unwritten histories of diasporic families and communities, understanding the mother–child bond as past, present, and future oriented allows diasporic daughters such as Sethe to connect not only to empowering histories but also energizing new futures from which they can gain personal and political power. Sethe’s past—namely, her connection to an historical and cultural motherline—may give her strength to reimagine her life and, as Kubitschek argues, emerge from the horrors she suffered (170). Yet this past, much like Sethe’s present and projected future, must be understood as mutable and, more importantly, contingent upon Sethe’s current and coming experiences. As a becoming-subject, Sethe lives within a nonlinear temporality, where her future changes her past in the same way her past shapes her future.
Certainly, reading Sethe’s state of daughterly development, her becoming-subjectivity, as advantageous can be difficult, considering the bodily toll this type of existence takes: Sethe nearly loses herself to Beloved’s destructive mothering. Lisa Yaszek points out that building a posthuman identity—in this case, embracing the liminality of past, present, and future temporalities and self and other subjectivities—always involves loss. She asserts that “subjects cannot expect to decolonize themselves and construct new forms of agency without widespread and sometimes unexpectedly painful results” (Yaszek, Self 93). In Beloved Sethe’s return to the position of daughter causes her to experience the pain Yaszek references, but Sethe also finds power in her new identity. Sethe’s rebirth—her existence as someone free from the confines of a repeating past in which she has no agency—allows her to blossom in ways she could not before. Specifically, her return to a childlike state enables her to see the world (and her own history) in a new light, both literally and figuratively. Before Beloved returned and Sethe reproduced herself as a child, Sethe found herself paralyzed by her past: “her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (Beloved 70). Yet once Sethe perceives the return of her mother in the form of Beloved, she grants herself permission to relive her childhood and experience a relationship with her mother. As she goes through this rebirth, Sethe imagines signs of regeneration in the world that surrounds her:
Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too. After the shed, I stopped. Now, in the morning, when I light the fire I mean to look out the window to see what the sun is doing to the day. Does it hit the pump handle first or the spigot? See if the grass is gray-green or brown or what. […] Think what spring will be for us! I’ll plant carrots just so she see them, and turnips. Have you ever seen one, baby? A prettier thing God never made. White and purple with a tender tail and a hard head. Feels good when you hold it in your hand and smells like the creek when it floods, bitter but happy. We’ll smell them together, Beloved. Beloved. (Beloved 201)
Sethe rewrites her history by imagining a future with her daughter/mother. The pleasure Sethe takes in the present from remembering experiences she had in the past (such as the pleasant smell of a turnip) and projecting the experiences she and Beloved will share in the coming spring reveals how temporality shifts when Sethe feels empowered (or, alternatively, how Sethe gains power from temporal shifts). Sethe’s desire to shape her life reconfigures her existence as an embodied subject: both she and Beloved exist in the past, present, and future as daughter and mother.
Although Sethe embraces her daughterly role and enjoys the possibility her future holds, Beloved’s mothering becomes threatening to her. Accordingly, the other mother figures who surround Sethe must help her navigate her new childhood and create (and take power in) a better past, present, and future. Denver, who early in the novel joins Sethe in participating in the reproduction of mothering by caring for Beloved, continues her maternal role in her relation to Sethe. Denver’s decision to become a mother can be understood as a strategy for having her own needs fulfilled. Like Sethe, Denver participates in the reproduction of mothering in an attempt to reconnect to her mother, who has become consumed by her care for Beloved. While at times Denver seems to reject Sethe to focus on Beloved, Denver’s actions can still be understood as a reproduction of mothering: she strives to become deeply connected to Beloved in order to have her own daughterly needs met. When Denver discovers that her mothering of Beloved does not satisfy her needs, she transitions to giving her maternal care directly to her own mother. Denver provides for her mother by working outside of the home and returning to 124 with food. She also reunites her mother with a community of women who can help fulfill Sethe’s need for nurturance.
With the aid of Denver and the women her daughter calls to action, Sethe gains the opportunity to reenact a specific moment from her past—school-teacher’s arrival at 124—and reconcile that experience with her new understanding of herself as both a daughter and a mother. When Sethe mistakes Edward Bodwin (who arrives at 124 to bring Denver to work) for school-teacher, she feels the fear and rage she felt when schoolteacher arrived eighteen years earlier. However, Sethe changes her behavior. Rather than repeating her past actions and turning the ice pick in her hand against Beloved, Sethe runs at Bodwin/schoolteacher. While the change in Sethe’s action is significant—it shows that Sethe has embraced her movement toward the future and can imagine different outcomes to schoolteacher’s arrival, thus attempting to recreate the past—even more important is the community’s reaction to Sethe. Denver and the women outside of the house on Bluestone Road act as protective mothers to Sethe, giving her the care she desired from her biological mother and which she provides for her children. Although Sethe does not willingly refrain from attacking Bodwin, the community forces her to submit to their mothering: they stop her from killing by physically directing her focus away from her history (as personified by Bodwin/ schoolteacher) and toward the present group of mothers gathered in her yard. Accordingly, Beloved—the mother of Sethe’s past—disappears, and Sethe finds herself surrounded by multiple “othermothers” who can continue ushering her into a new future (Collins 51).
Morrison further shows Sethe’s shift from being preoccupied by an unchanging past to showing concern for the coming future through her depiction of Sethe’s relationship with Paul D. Paul D joins Denver and the women who protect Sethe outside of 124 in acting as a mother to the childlike Sethe. He facilitates her development by attending to her bodily needs (offering to rub her feet) and emotional health (encouraging her to continue living after Beloved’s disappearance) (Morrison, Beloved 271–72; Wyatt, “Giving” 484). As Wyatt argues, Paul D occupies the “restorative maternal role”—the role of physical and spiritual healer—“once occupied by Baby Suggs” (“Giving” 484). Paul D does not simply fulfill Sethe’s needs, but, like Baby Suggs, he shows Sethe how to exercise her own subjectivity so that she can develop personal strength. With Paul D’s help, particularly his insistence that Sethe’s life is valuable and she is her own “best thing” (Beloved 273), Sethe begins the process of recovering from her oppressive history.
Moreover, Paul D aids Sethe in continuing her nonlinear development by urging her not only to rebuild her past but also to simultaneously construct a future. Like Baby Suggs—whose name emphasizes the mother’s role as a daughter or “Baby” (Rody 92)—Paul D confounds linear views of identity and time. He asserts that he and Sethe “got more yesterday than anybody” and “need some kind of tomorrow,” which conveys that the direction of Sethe’s new life need not be determined by her earlier existence (Beloved 273). Through the return to the position of child, Sethe connects to her past but moves forward, taking power in the potentiality of her future.
A posthumanist reading of the bonds that join mother and child in Morrison’s Beloved offers a new way of understanding the past, present, and future in black women’s literature: as linked temporalities through which agency can be accessed and empowered identities and communities can be created. Beloved ends, fittingly, with Sethe in a state of becoming: she has just begun to recognize herself as a person with value. The various readings available for her final spoken words, “Me? Me?”, speak to the possibility inherent in her new attitude. The repetition of “me,” significantly stated two times, can be understood to reference Sethe’s liminal or multiple identity: she is both daughter and mother, self and other. By forging these links across time and personhood, Sethe begins the work of healing from her past pains and creating a better present and future life.
In A Mercy, just as in Beloved, characters transcend the boundaries of time and subjectivity. In Beloved Morrison expresses liminality through Sethe’s return to her childhood, a return that enables Sethe to review her past pains and reconsider them in the context of an imagined future. While temporalities similarly commingle in A Mercy, Florens’s history initially appears to overwhelm rather than overlap her present experiences and future plans. Florens tells of her childhood separation from her mother, but she does not limit her mother to her past; instead, Florens projects her historical relationship with her mother into the present and future, reconstituting her role as scorned daughter in her memories of her mother, her interactions with Widow Ealing and Daughter Jane, and her connection to the blacksmith. Although Florens states that she desires to revise her childhood experience of rejection, she initially relives the rejection, which impedes her development of a relational and liminal subjectivity.
While A Mercy, even more so than Beloved, reveals the difficulty of embracing the future for those who have suffered broken bonds during slavery, Morrison’s ninth novel follows Beloved in reflecting posthuman conceptions of temporal and subjective liminality. Florens struggles throughout the narrative with the weight of her history, but she ultimately projects herself forward into an uncertain—but potentially more empowering—future. The overwhelming presence of history in the novel makes especially important the search for those places where Florens imagines coming events. By positioning herself as a subject who belongs not only to the past but also the present and future, Florens shows that a liminal view of temporality can extend to a liminal and, ultimately, relational, understanding of identity. Rather than existing as “a thing apart” (A Mercy 135), Florens moves throughout space and time along networks that join her even to those individuals, including her absent mother, by whom she once found herself rejected.
Reading Florens as the possessor of a relational identity proves difficult, considering that she constructs the narrative of her life as one defined by separation. Florens’s mother offers her daughter to Jacob Vaark, a Dutch trader and farmer, in the hopes that the girl will escape the sexual abuse that plagues the women enslaved by D’Ortega in Maryland. Only eight years old, Florens perceives her mother’s mercy as a rejection. According to Naomi Morgenstern, “There are profound echoes of Beloved” in the scenes of maternal separation featured in A Mercy, and like in Beloved, the broken bonds in A Mercy shape the subjectivity of Morrison’s characters: “it is not only that Florens tries to read a message”—her mother’s motivation for dismissing her—“from which she is cut off (both on the level of the realist plot and on the level of the narrative structure) but also that this message constitutes her as a subject” (16). Like Sethe, Florens believes herself to be abandoned by her mother, and this historical desertion shapes her present and future interactions with others.
Because her separation from her mother shapes her identity, Florens relives the past event again and again. Time, for Florens, does not operate linearly; instead, temporalities—and those who inhabit them—overlap and intersect. Florens tells others that her mother has died, yet she resurrects her mother throughout the narrative, questioning whether the woman and her son, Florens’s brother, will “ever decide to rest” and positing that the two live “many lives beyond” death and visit in the form of owls, dream figures, and ghosts (A Mercy 7, 127, 161–63). Since Florens’s mother materializes during the narrative’s present-situated events, Florens understands this figure and her history with her as continuous, part of an ongoing drama rather than relegated to the past.
As Florens carries her identity as daughter out of her history and into her present and future, she blurs the boundaries between her eight-year-old self (her age when separated from her mother) and her sixteen-year-old self (her age during the novel’s present setting). In blending these two versions of her identity, Florens demonstrates the characteristics of a posthuman becoming-subject motivated “by the double impossibility and prerequisite to become other and to become itself” (Halberstam and Livingston 14). While in Beloved Sethe manifests this liminality in her desire to become mother and to become self, in A Mercy Florens exhibits posthuman liminality—subjective and temporal—in her longing to become daughter and to become self: to bring into the present her desired future position as another’s daughter and also to bring into the present her past existence as her mother’s daughter.
By uniting these aspects of her personality, Florens expresses a liminal and, ultimately, relational identity that joins her, regardless of distance and time, to multiple mothers: she adopts the new position as daughter to several other mother figures in order to form a more fulfilling relational bond, and she also attempts to resuscitate her identity as daughter and reconstitute her original relationship with her mother. Considering the first aspect of this liminal identity—the wish to make real in the present her imagined future position as another’s daughter—Florens finds a surrogate mother in Lina, a Native American woman and slave on Vaark’s farm who gives Florens clothing, shelter, and love.4 Despite the differences in her perceptions of her birthmother and Lina, Florens obfuscates the borderlines that separate the women, shifting, for example, from the recollection of her mother criticizing her taste for high heels to the memory of Lina securing her boots (A Mercy 4). As Florens associates her birthmother and Lina, she makes connections between two versions of herself as daughter, one rejected and the other loved.
Florens acquires several additional mother figures in her search to become another’s daughter and fulfill the posthuman imperative to join the identity of other (loved child) with the identity of self (rejected child). During the early part of her stay with Widow Ealing and Daughter Jane, Florens exhibits a relational identity. Florens may not find the attentive mother she desires in Widow Ealing, considering that the Widow expresses suspicion regarding Florens’s dark skin and sudden appearance, but Widow Ealing and Jane do take on maternal roles relative to Florens’s daughterly position. Florens finds herself brought into the family as she, rather than the biological daughter, Jane, shares a meal with Widow Ealing. Additionally, Florens looks to Jane for guidance on how to behave in the widow’s presence (A Mercy 129–30). Florens links her role with the Ealings to her other networks of connection, including the community on Vaark’s farm (she carries a letter that certifies her belonging to the Vaarks) and her birth family in Maryland. Ensconced in networks that transcend spatial and temporal restrictions, Florens initially appears to be a posthuman subject who embraces a relational identity, though making links across space and time reminds her in the present of losses from her past.
Recollections of her painful history as well as repeated maternal dismissals in the present thwart Florens’s efforts to supplement in a sustainable way her historical role as denied daughter with any other identity. Accordingly, when taking shelter with Widow Ealing and Daughter Jane, Florens shifts from a multiple or liminal self—as evidenced by her blurring of subjective and temporal borderlines—to a purely historical personality. When a group of religious zealots arrives at Widow Ealing’s home, Florens relives the rejection she experienced at the moment of sale. Florens encounters among the villagers “a little girl” who, she states, “reminds me of myself when my mother sends me away” (A Mercy 130). Although Florens identifies with the child and, in doing so, situates herself as a member—a daughter—of the village, the child and accompanying adults reject her: “I am thinking how sweet she [the little girl] seems when she screams and hides behind the skirts of one of the women. Then each visitor turns to look at me. The women gasp. The man’s walking stick clatters to the floor causing the remaining hen to squawk and flutter. He retrieves his stick, points it at me saying who be this? One of the women covers her eyes saying God help us. The little girl wails and rocks back and forth” (A Mercy 130–31). Viewed by the white villagers as the devil’s “minion” because of her dark skin, Florens shifts her identity from a member of multiple communities to “a thing apart” (A Mercy 131, 135). Specifically, she loses her imagined association with the villagers, her potential friendship with Daughter Jane, and the physical record of connection (the letter) that links her to the Vaark farm when she flees the Ealings’ house. Florens’s three-part return to the position of rejected child dissolves her relational identity; truly, she becomes “a thing apart.”
As a result of losing her relational identity, Florens temporarily abandons her engagement with the present and future—two of the multiple temporalities to which she was previously linked—and assumes a purely historical position. She states that she sees herself as “a weak calf abandon by the herd, a turtle without shell, a minion with no telltale signs but a darkness [she is] born with” (A Mercy 135), characteristics she associates more with her past abandonment than her present dismissal. According to Wyatt, throughout A Mercy Florens views her present through the lens of the past, including during her interaction with the villagers: “For Florens, the message is again rejection; although on this second occasion it is a repudiation of her black body by strangers, the intensity of the experience is heightened by its repetition of the original maternal rejection” (“Failed” 135). While Florens enters the Ealing household with a liminal and relational identity, she feels overcome by her history after experiencing the villagers’ repudiation.
The most profound example of a repeated maternal rejection and the resulting severing of a relational identity occurs during Florens’s time at the blacksmith’s home. Following her stay with Widow Ealing and Daughter Jane, Florens commits herself to reconstituting her original mother–daughter relationship, and she abandons the posthumanist project of becoming another’s daughter as well. Although Florens takes the blacksmith as her lover, he also occupies the mother position in Florens’s resurrected relational triangle. Wyatt argues that Florens locates herself “within the maternal matrix of the blacksmith’s love,” given that her bond with the blacksmith exhibits “a symbiotic form reminiscent of a young child’s dependency on the mother” (“Failed” 136). Morgenstern likewise asserts that the blacksmith functions as “a substitute for that original maternal object” and reveals Florens’s preoccupation with the past, given that “the present-tense narrative of Florens’s journey to find the blacksmith performs a displacement and repetition of a return to the mother” (15). With the blacksmith standing in for her absent mother, Florens resumes her daughterly position from the past in an attempt to achieve emotional contentment.
The temporal liminality in Florens’s narrative of and to the blacksmith reveals that she, like Sethe, can revise her traumatic history by imagining a more fulfilling future. However, rather than reconfiguring the past—viewing her history from a present- or even future-oriented position—Florens revivifies it. While Sethe’s vision for the future allows her to recreate her childhood and experience a relationship with her mother, Florens’s preocupation with the past intrudes into her present life with the blacksmith. When considering their time together, Florens states, “I don’t say what I am thinking. That I will stay. That when you return from healing Mistress whether she is live or no I am here with you always. Never never without you. Here I am not the one to throw out. No one steals my warmth and shoes because I am small. No one handles my backside. No one whinnies like sheep or goat because I drop in fear and weakness. No one screams at the sight of me. No one watches my body for how it is unseemly. With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging” (A Mercy 161). Florens begins with an assertion of future plans (“I will stay”), but she moves quickly into memories of past events stated in the present tense (“With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging”). Her use of present tense reveals that, as Wyatt argues, Florens’s past “merges with the present,” causing her to experience her history “absolutely in her present” life (“Failed” 135, 138). Moreover, Florens’s use of negative constructions—for example, rather than saying, “Here I am chosen and loved,” she asserts, “Here I am not the one to throw out”—indicates that her present relationship has relevance because it stands in opposition to her mother’s past rejection. If Florens understands her current life in terms of the perceived dismissal from her past, then her present falls under the purview of this history.
In addition to pervading her present, Florens’s past infiltrates her future with her lover. Florens makes reference to the future when discussing her bond with the blacksmith, but she gives her past priority, imagining her future as either a revision or, more likely, reproduction of her history. After seeing that the blacksmith has taken a small boy, Malaik, into his care, Florens projects her fear of rejection—a product of her broken bond with her mother—into the future, stating, “I worry as the boy steps closer to you. How you offer and he owns your forefinger. As if he is your future. Not me” (A Mercy 160). In the presence of the boy, Florens’s thoughts about subsequent times interweave with her perception of the past, and she dreams that Malaik takes the place of her baby brother, holding not the blacksmith’s finger but her mother’s hand (A Mercy 162). Although she desires change and, specifically, a loving parent–child relationship for herself, Florens reveals through this dream that she views her future as under the assault of historical forces, and she “feel[s] the clutch inside” (A Mercy 162), a physical response to the rejection that she expects will plague her again.
According to Florens’s perception of Malaik, the boy fulfills the posthuman “double impossibility and prerequisite to become other and to become itself” (Halberstam and Livingston 14); specifically, he embodies brother and self. The liminality in Florens’s vision of Malaik indicates a potential opportunity for Florens to not revive but revise her understanding of her past—to consider her perspective as well as her brother’s and mother’s—but, instead, Florens allows her history to consume her. Although she declares, “This expel can never happen again,” which shows that she envisions a more positive future and sees her negative past experiences as malleable or at least not dictatorial, Florens preserves her position as “a thing apart” (A Mercy 162, 135). Faced with the threat of rejection, she chooses, first, to “hide [her] head” under the blacksmith’s blanket and, later, pull Malaik’s arm and attack the blacksmith with a hammer and tongs (A Mercy 163–67, 184–85). By either ignoring or attacking those who would cast her out, Florens remains outside the relational triangle in a position of difference first suggested by her mother (as Florens continues to perceive her) and later confirmed by Widow Ealing’s visitors as well as Malaik and the blacksmith. Rather than embracing a relational and, ultimately, liminal identity, Florens finds herself rooted in space and time as the rejected daughter, a figure that developed from a particular moment in her childhood.
The institution of slavery—which breaks mother–child bonds—bears responsibility for Florens’s inability to move beyond her historical experience of separation and to sustain a relational identity. As Maxine L. Montgomery acknowledges, Morrison asserts that the “anxiety of belonging” inscribed in “the central metaphors” of national and international discourses on power systems develop out of racial constructs (Morrison, “Home” 10; Montgomery 628). Morrison highlights the ongoing presence of racial oppression in these and other discourses through Florens’s historically situated and relationally separated subjectivity. According to Wyatt, “Florens cannot have a retroactive understanding of the mother’s seeming rejection because, irrevocably separated by sale, she cannot receive her mother’s explanatory message” (“Failed” 138). Nor can Florens revise her role in the relationship by gaining a new perspective due to her age and maturity, Wyatt asserts, since “her development was arrested at the time her mother cast her aside,” or, again, the moment of sale (“Failed” 138).
Florens’s stunted emotional growth explains why even in the liminal space of Vaark’s farm, a space occupied by figures who, Montgomery argues, “form a potentially unlimited set of communal configurations” (631), Florens cannot maintain a relational identity. The novel asserts that those on the Vaark farm “were not a family—not even a like-minded group. They were orphans, each and all” (A Mercy 69). However, Mina Karavanta states, the inhabitants operate as part of a network, “community,” or “commons shared by heterogeneous others and their risky acts of care and mercy” (736). The blurring of these “heterogeneous” individuals into a common network reveals their liminal movement between self and other identities. However, while Florens joins Lina, Sorrow, Will, Scully, Rebekka, and Vaark in their mutual pursuits, she positions herself outside of their network of connection, identifying instead as “bad,” “wild,” and “wilderness” (A Mercy 4, 189). Moreover, Florens fails to form a liminal identity in her relationship with the blacksmith, but rather than seeing herself as independent from her lover, she positions him as her “shaper,” “world,” and “own[er]” (A Mercy 83, 166). Florens’s separation from her mother and the experiences of rejection that follow foster in her either an independent or reliant personality rather than a relational identity.
While slavery’s perversion of family relationships causes Florens to reject community in favor of disconnection or dependency, the past does not determine black power (or the lack thereof) in the novel. A posthumanist reading of A Mercy reveals that despite her preoccupation with the past, Florens ultimately claims the temporal liminality—including a concern for the future—indicative of a becoming-subject. Florens brings her past into the present throughout her narrative to the blacksmith, but the conclusion of the novel indicates that she embraces the interplay of past, present, and future temporalities.
After being rejected by the blacksmith, Florens reassesses her understanding of her history. Her history is no longer stagnant: her views of the present shape the way she sees the past. Florens speaks in the present tense of her former feelings about the blacksmith—including what she once assumed would be her future relationship with her lover—when she states, “[M]y way is clear after losing you who I am thinking always as my life and my security from harm, from any who look closely at me only to throw me away” (A Mercy 184). She gives her history continued life by writing of her past feelings in the present tense, but her assessment of her history has changed: her statements now point to the invalidity of her past feelings. While her history shapes her existence in other temporalities—her “way,” or her path for the future, “is clear” based on the events that have occurred—this history does not rule her. Indeed, Florens acknowledges that her thoughts in the present shape the way she views her history. She asserts that her past beliefs shift from certainties to inaccuracies when viewed in the context of her present: “In the beginning when I come to this room I am certain the telling will give me the tears I never have. I am wrong” (A Mercy 185). Florens’s history may move into other temporalities, but because she acknowledges that her assertion of her history’s concreteness was incorrect, Florens presents both time and subjectivity as changeable.
By the end of A Mercy, Florens transitions from a fixation with the past to a broader engagement with multiple temporalities. The final three paragraphs of her narration contain eight occurrences of the auxiliary verb will, and these statements of what the future will hold mix with assertions about her past experiences and present actions. For example, when considering the coming days, Florens states, “I am near the door and at the closing now. What will I do with my nights when the telling stops? Dreaming will not come again. Sudden I am remembering” (A Mercy 188). Present-tense declarations transition into concerns about the future and memories of the past, revealing the overlapping nature of time in the narrative.
Florens’s concern for multiple temporalities demonstrates that she sees not only time but also her subjectivity as liminal. She brings her relationships with her mother; Lina; Widow Ealing, Daughter Jane, and the villagers; and the blacksmith together when making her final declarations about identity: “You are correct. A minha mãe too. I am become wilderness but I am also Florens. In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last” (A Mercy 189). According to Montgomery, who argues that Florens “evolves throughout her perilous journey in ways that encourage a rethinking of colonial inscriptions of time, space, and identity” (628), Florens occupies a liminal subject position—she becomes one with the “wilderness”—because she abandons her search for a relational identity: “Because she self-identifies with natural world, not the social conventions of Early American society, she no longer experiences the fragmentary split that once characterized her life. It is from this empowered, self-defined position that Florens addresses her story to the nameless blacksmith” (634). In addition to tying her to the natural world, however, Florens’s words on the final pages bring together her ties to multiple mother figures. Accordingly, she adopts both a liminal and relational identity. With her statement that she has “become wilderness,” Florens joins her birthmother and the blacksmith, who call her “wild,” with Lina, who once taught her “how to shelter in wilderness” (A Mercy 4, 166, 49). She also brings in her interaction with the villagers, since these men and women spurred her understanding of herself as a “small, feathered and toothy”—or wild—being (A Mercy 135).
While each of these interactions initially causes Florens to feel like she is “a thing apart” (A Mercy 135), her statements at the end of the novel reconcile her multiple selves and bring them in relation to others. Florens accepts her status as “wilderness,” the identity that so many have foisted upon her, but she also claims her position as “Florens. In full” (A Mercy 189). This broader identity extends forward and backward throughout time, as evidenced by Florens’s assertion, “I last.” Instead of using the future tense and asserting, “I will last,” Florens makes her statement of lasting identity—which has an historical origin but continues into the future—in the present tense. As Susmita Roye argues, Florens’s “final words unambiguously expres[s] her intention to ‘last,’ to survive in the face of all reproofs and rejections” (221). Temporality and subjectivity overlap in a new way at the conclusion of the novel, as Florens carries the future idea of her identity into the present, joining it with her past experiences.
Florens additionally expresses a relational identity in the way she speaks about her narrative. She states that her words—the story of her past, present, and future—“[n]eed to fly up then fall, fall like ash over acres of primrose and mallow. Over a turquoise lake, beyond the eternal hemlocks, through clouds cut by rainbow and flavor the soil of the earth” (A Mercy 188). Although Florens and her mother attempt, as Montgomery argues, “to bridge the psychic, geographic, and linguistic gulf between Africa and the New World” with their messages to each other (629), Florens knows that her mother, like the blacksmith, “won’t read her telling” (A Mercy 188). However, Florens does see her words as extending beyond death—her own and perhaps her mother’s as well—and moving into a place of renewal, the “soil of the earth.” In A Mercy, Morrison returns to the motif of the natural world’s regeneration that she introduces in The Bluest Eye and carries forward to Beloved and beyond. Florens’s statements about the soil echo, among other scenes, Sethe’s excited imagining of what the spring will bring for her and Beloved (Beloved 201). Accordingly, the novel itself must be understood to occupy a liminal position, making links across time and space.
Multiple temporalities and identities, including the identity of Morrison’s characters as well as the identity of her texts, converge as the reader takes responsibility for extending Florens’s story into the future. While the villagers cast Florens out, her final understanding of herself and her message shows that she is not separate; she has a relational identity, and the reader joins her network of connections. Karavanta argues that the border crossings in A Mercy reveal “the future of other hybrid and marginal communities that will continue to haunt the national one and require representation and rights” (739). These communities rely on various forms of communication—from narratives rooted in the natural world to electronic texts complete with hashtags—to bring attention to their causes and signal their participation in larger relational networks. With each message sent, history moves into the future, and the present connects to the past, revealing not only what Morgenstern calls “the timeless time of trauma” but also the infinitude of activism (11).