KLARINA PRIBORKIN 
KLARINA PRIBORKIN
Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores a triangular relationship between a mother (Sethe) traumatized by the horrors of slavery, her youngest daughter (Denver), and the ghostly figure of her deceased daughter (referred to as Beloved). The circumstances of Beloved’s death as well as the mother’s past experiences as a slave are the “unspoken secrets” that define the mother / daughter relationship in the novel. Growing up in a terrifying atmosphere, with the ghost of her dead sister haunting the house, Denver is unaware of the true reasons for the haunting. When she finds out that her mother killed Beloved to save her from slavery, she also notices the community’s hostility toward her family. Not only the community, but Sethe’s family and children, too, continuously misinterpret her intentions. Adopting the environment’s interpretation of her mother’s deed, Denver alienates herself emotionally, creating a demonic image of her mother. While Sethe understands the murder of her daughter as an act of love intended for that child’s protection, Denver, similarly to other members of her family and community, believes that something horrible in her mother “makes it all right to kill her own” (Beloved 205).
This paper will examine three incidents, two early in the narrative and one toward the end, in which Denver’s Theory of Mind (ToM) seems at first to fail, but finally succeeds in functioning. The change, I claim, is enabled by Beloved—the ghost of the murdered daughter—who facilitates Denver’s acquisition of mind-reading skills. Beloved’s mediation—the mediation of a ghost—is the narrative device that allows Denver’s development of ToM, and its consequent application to her mother’s stories. By encouraging Denver to visualize the details of her mother’s narrative, Beloved compels her to change perspectives, recreating what Sethe must have thought, felt, and experienced as a slave mother. Such cognitive exercises, as well as continuous paralinguistic interactions with Beloved, gradually improve Denver’s mind-reading skills. When Denver learns to retell her mother’s story from her mother’s perspective, rather than from her own, she learns to imagine Sethe’s mental and emotional states. This allows her to fill in the gaps in the narrative, retell her mother’s story, and eventually to succeed in interpreting her mother’s mental states empathically. I will first discuss the reasons for Denver’s difficulty in developing efficient ToM and then show the cognitive processes she undergoes as she learns to reinterpret her mother’s states of mind.
The atmosphere of secrecy produced by Sethe’s inability and unwillingness to share her traumatic memories with her daughter not only impedes mother / daughter communication, but also hampers Denver’s cognitive and personal development. In “Mother-Child Reminiscing and Children’s Understanding of Mind,” Elaine Reese and Emily Sutcliffe suggest that mothers who discuss mental and emotional states and memories with their children advance their children’s understanding of mind. These children relate richer and more elaborate autobiographical memories (18-19). Tragically, Sethe’s failure to discuss the horrors of slavery and her own traumatic past with her daughter prevents Denver from developing the skills necessary for successful mind reading.
According to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theory of trauma, “secret discourse” or “cryptonymy” (the practice of word hiding) is symptomatic of traumatized individuals who experience difficulty talking about their past. Abraham and Torok claim that family secrets are transmitted without words and it is the offspring’s suspicion that something has been left unsaid that impels the younger generation to listen for clues and hints in their parents’ speech.1 This is precisely what happens in Beloved. Although Denver subconsciously knows that her mother killed her sister, she does not know why she did it or what led her to do it. Since Denver cannot discuss her assumptions regarding the murder with her mother, Sethe cannot correct her daughter’s mistaken inferences regarding her original intentions.
Not only has no one ever corrected Denver’s mistaken understanding of her mother’s mind, but Denver’s brothers and grandmother, Sethe’s mother-in-law, and other members of the community2 also misinterpret Sethe’s intentions. The boys tell Denver “die-witch!” stories that teach her how to kill her mother “if [she] ever needed to” protect herself” (205). Although Denver loves her mother, she also fears her. In Denver’s words: “I love my mother but I know she killed one of her own daughters, and tender as she is with me, I’m scared of her because of it. She missed killing my brothers and they knew it” (205). When the brothers are old enough, they escape the haunted house without confronting their mother or talking with her about the murder.3 Denver, too, is secretly indulging the fantasy of leaving her mother; she is waiting for her father, who apparently failed to escape the slaveholders, believing that he will redeem her from her mother’s potential violence.4 The children’s inability to communicate with their mother is reinforced by their grandmother, who had been bought out of slavery by her son, and with whom Sethe and her children live on the outskirts of Cincinnati after they escape from the South.
Although Denver initially learns about the murder from her grandmother’s cryptic narratives, Baby Suggs’s stories conceal much more than they reveal. Denver remembers her grandmother telling her that she need not fear the ghost: “she said the ghost was after Ma’am and her, too, for not doing anything to stop it. But it would never hurt me. I just had to watch out for it because it was a greedy ghost and needed a lot of love, which was only natural, considering . . .” (209).5 Baby Suggs hints at but does not explain the murder to Denver. Indeed, she adds an additional layer of secrecy to the atmosphere of horror that already exists in the house. Instead of reducing Denver’s fear of her mother by explaining to her the sociocultural context of the murder, Baby Suggs transfers the unspeakable secret to the next generation, reinforcing the tradition of reticence and secrecy.
Denver, thus, participates in a community of interpreters or rather misinterpreters of Sethe’s intentions.6 Failing to react empathically to Sethe’s tragedy or to try to understand her intentions, Denver’s brothers, the grandmother, and the community of Cincinnati condemn Sethe’s violence. They establish a cognitive framework of reference that Denver instinctively assimilates as her own. The environment, thus, shapes Denver’s interpretation of her mother’s violent act, leading the daughter to develop a demonic image of her mother.
In “Intermental Thought in the Novel,” Alan Palmer defines intermental units as “groups [such as large organizations, as well as families, couples and friends] that regularly employ intermental thinking” (429). Palmer explains that this kind of thinking “is joint, group, shared, or collective, as opposed to intramental, individual, or private thought. It is also known as socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition, and as intersubjectivity” (427). Since all adult members of Sethe’s community share the traumatic experience of slavery, they usually succeed in understanding each other’s unspoken traumas and cryptic references to the past. This intermental communication is necessary for what Palmer refers to as an “intermental mind: these are intermental units that are so well defined and long lasting, and where so much successful intermental thought takes place, that they can be considered as group minds” (430). By attributing a common mind to a group of seemingly separate individuals, it is possible to analyze their social conventions in contrast to a single, private mind that may choose to rebel against a society.
Another vivid example of an intermental-group thought in the novel has to do with racial discrimination. According to the slaveholders, “slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them” (Beloved 209, emphasis mine). The words I marked belong to the white’s “group mind” that imposed its conceptions on the black community. The white people communicate this racist message of enslavement to the blacks, making them incorporate it as an integral part of their own culture. In Beloved, Baby Suggs tries to instill the opposite message, based on self-love and self-respect, thus attempting to reconstruct the black community and create a new group mind. As the spiritual leader of her community, Baby Suggs communicates with her people intermentally: “After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down” (87, emphasis mine). The communal mind reading constructed at the spiritual site creates an unspoken understanding between Baby Suggs and her community. Baby Suggs’s blessing and motivating speech that comes right after the ritual signifies intermental thinking, implying complete understanding between the leader and the group.
Binding the different characters in the novel into one intermental communal unit, Morrison exposes her readers to the cognitive processes of remembering and forgetting that the black community undergoes coming to terms with its past. According to Garciela Moreira-Slepoy, Toni Morrison’s Beloved provides an alternative to “the historical monolithic accounts dealing with slavery” (3) by integrating the scattered personal testimonies into a comprehensive account of these characters’ past. These “series of local or private narratives . . . need to be told and retold once and again in order to reconstruct and come to terms with the past in a liberating way” (3). As Christopher Powers suggests, “Morrison creates characters whose consciousness of time is in fact spatialized, because it is part of her innovation as a writer to show how people experience memory synchronically” (34). Unlike Moreira-Slepoy, Powers does not believe that Morrison’s main purpose is to undo “master narratives,” rather, he claims that Morrison “spatializes time” and “synchronizes narrative” in order to “simulate subjective experience” of self-construction (33-34).7 While Morrison’s focus on individual narratives indeed illuminates the characters’ personal development, it is the connection between these stories that makes an authentic recovery of the past possible. When the individual voices in Beloved are joined to tell a story, their personal testimonies confirm and legitimize each other, establishing a communal voice that reconstructs the white narratives about slavery.
According to Palmer a mind can “consist of more than one brain” (432). I suggest that the communal group mind constructed through Baby Suggs’s rituals, cooperative remembering, and storytelling can recover truths that remain inaccessible to an individual mind. When several minds work together they form an intermental unit that consists “of individual minds pooling their resources and producing better, or at least different, results” (430). It is therefore through the cooperation between the members of the community that the individual self can access and come to terms with the communal past that shapes individual experience.
Although this group mind in Beloved is initially determined to keep its past at a safe distance, Beloved’s murder brings the horrors of slavery back to the people’s lives. They attempt to repress it by ostracizing Sethe and her family. When Sethe challenges the cultural and moral presuppositions about the nature of motherhood and slavery, she becomes a rebel and an outsider in both white and black societies. By comparing Sethe’s interpretation of her own beliefs and behavior to the ways white and black communities perceive them, it is possible to explain the workings of these distinct yet interrelated groups. Sethe challenges the social codes of the white community, insisting on her natural rights as a mother in spite of her supposedly inferior race and social status.8 Furthermore, she challenges the black community’s moral standards. Sethe’s community does not justify infanticide in the face of slavery, yet she rebels against this cultural or intermental construction. Sethe reinterprets her act of violence as an act of love and protection. Yet since this view does not correlate with the others’ social codes, they create the intermental construct based on meaningful silence that everybody in the community understands. This silence defines Sethe as “the other,” a murderer who broke a basic moral law.
When Sethe saw the slaveholder, called Schoolteacher, approaching her home to take her and her children back to the farm where she had been a slave before escaping, she rushes with her children to the shed and slashes the throat of her “crawling already!” baby daughter. She intends to kill all her children and herself, but her mother-in-law stops her. Stunned by her act, the white men conclude that Sethe is far too rebellious, and perhaps even mad, and therefore cannot be enslaved again. The people of the community, equally shocked, observe Sethe as she is taken to prison by the sheriff. Yet Sethe
walked past them in their silence and hers. She climbed into a cart, her profile knife-clean against a cheery blue sky. A profile that shocked them with its clarity. Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once . . . some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her, like arms to hold and steady her on the way. (152, emphasis mine)
This compelling mind reading interchange between Sethe and her community is relayed by the third-person narrator who makes assumptions regarding both Sethe’s and the community’s mental states. The double mind reading, between the narrator and the characters, as well as between Sethe and her community, allows readers to participate in the creation of an intermental or group mind that observes and judges Sethe’s behavior.
Since the readers are provided with Sethe’s observable actions, such as holding her head too high or her back too straight, they understand, and perhaps participate in, the community’s misinterpretation of Sethe’s intentions. Showing no apparent or observable remorse through her body language, Sethe intentionally or unintentionally conveys her contempt and disrespect for the community, which simultaneously rejects her in return. Sethe later says that she could never explain why she killed her daughter “for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off—she could never explain” (163).9 Sethe refuses to communicate her motives to anyone but her reincarnated daughter Beloved, who, she believes, is the only one that can understand her motives without verbal explanation.10 This lack of linguistic or paralinguistic input makes Sethe rather opaque to her community and her family, leading them to draw incorrect assumptions regarding her mental states.11
In order to become conscious of the family secret, children of traumatized parents must decode the cryptic language of the adults. This is traumatic, especially when the ultimate revelation of the secret comes from a person that does not belong to the family. Although the atmosphere of secrecy oppresses Denver for years, it is only when she is directly asked about her mother’s deed that she realizes her secret. Misreading not only her mother’s, but also her peers’ paralinguistic signals, Denver does not notice that her classmates often make “excuses and alter their pace not to walk with her” (102). By communicating their contempt to Sethe and her family through body language, the children subtly reject the outsiders, thus participating in the construction of the communal group mind. When one of her classmates confronts Denver about her sister’s murder, she realizes her failure to read both her mother’s and other people’s minds. One of her fellow students asks Denver: “didn’t your mother get locked away for murder? Wasn’t you in there with her when she went?” Denver does not laugh the question off, because “something leap[s] up in her, when he asked; it was a thing that had been lying there all along” (102). The question brings Denver’s subconscious knowledge about the murder into her everyday reality, thus allowing the daughter to start attributing meaning to the hints she has heard all her life.
Denver’s realization that she has failed to understand her mother’s and her community’s intentions leads to her mistrust of language and communication. This is symbolized by her psychosomatic deafness and self-imposed isolation from social contact. She stops attending school and secludes herself in the house, concentrating on the ghostly presence of her dead sister. Although Denver’s hearing impairment symbolizes her detachment from the outside world, it brings her closer to familial secrets and the ghost. Denver is capable of playing with the ghost without using verbal language: “that’s how come me and Beloved could play together. Not talking. On the porch. By the creek. In the secret house” (206).
Assuming that Beloved’s ghostly figure is not real, but rather belongs to the realm of Denver’s imagination, the ghost can be thought of as Denver’s imaginary friend. According to developmental psychologists, interacting with imaginary friends plays a positive role in a child’s development both cognitively and emotionally, allowing children to practice managing social situations and handling conflict in a safe context. Cognitively it helps them to deal with abstract symbols and to start thinking about their own identity.12 Interacting with Beloved is indeed essential for Denver’s cognitive development. Their silent communication, within the context of Denver’s deafness, provides an essential learning experience; it trains her to read other people’s faces and to “learn how to figure out what people were thinking, so [she] did not need to hear what they said” (206).
While the cognitive psychologists suggest that development of mind-reading abilities depends both on successful language acquisition and social interaction (Garfield, Peterson, and Perry 494), in Beloved it is precisely Denver’s detachment from society and language that allow her to sharpen her mind-reading abilities. Even if Denver did acquire some basic mind-reading skills as a child, they proved insufficient for decoding her traumatized mother or the community’s paralinguistic signals. Denver learns the hard way that what people say does not necessarily correlate with what they think. However, although Denver rejects verbal communication, she hones her ToM skills to an exceptional degree. Mind reading becomes Denver’s survival strategy; it allows the daughter to interpret her mother’s facial expressions, watching out for murderous thoughts that she believes may be crossing her mother’s mind.
Although the ghost teaches Denver to decode people’s faces, it does not teach her to interpret her mother’s intentions on a more complex level. Still fearing that her mother might kill her, Denver does not ask Sethe to tell her about the murder. She chooses to repress the story, thus protecting herself from additional traumatic revelations. As the novel progresses, however, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered daughter establishes her physical presence in the house. This opens a new phase in Denver’s relationship with Beloved. If prior to Beloved’s reincarnation the sisters used to communicate in silence, Beloved’s embodied presence initiates verbal interaction. The ghostly figure influences Denver’s patterns of speech and storytelling, thus transforming the youngest daughter’s relationship with her mother.
Prior to Beloved’s intervention, the only story Denver is willing to hear from her mother is the story of her own birth. This can be interpreted as her refusal to accept Sethe as a separate individual with a personal history. Denver acknowledges only those parts of Sethe’s past that are relevant to her. Since Sethe’s function in Denver’s life is defined mostly through her role as a mother, the daughter does not perceive her as a separate individual and therefore blocks those parts of her mother’s story that define her as such.
In Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow claims that since mothers and daughters are of the same sex, their separation and individuation processes are more problematic and complicated than those of mothers and sons. While boys tend to define themselves in opposition to their mothers, girls experience themselves as contingent with them. For a girl there is no “absolute change of love object” and even her “libidinal turning to her father is not at the expense of, or a substitute for, her attachment for her mother” (125). Thus mothers and daughters maintain elements of their primary relationship throughout their lifetimes, and their ego boundaries remain unstable because they develop a relational, rather than an individualistic, sense of self.13
As Jessica Benjamin argues in The Bonds of Love, a healthy relationship between a mother and child is made possible through intersubjective connection and mutual recognition rather than through individuation and separation.14 Benjamin’s intersubjective view suggests that “we actually have a need to recognize the other as a separate person who is like us yet distinct. This means that the child has a need to see his mother . . . as an independent subject” (23). Thus, paradoxically, it is only by acknowledging each other as individuals that the mother and daughter’s identities can develop in relationship. In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Chodorow shows that although mother / daughter relationships are extremely close across cultures, in matrifocal and traditional societies these relationships are less problematic. This is because “the people surrounding a mother while a child is growing up become mediators between mother and daughter, by providing a daughter with alternative modes for personal identification and objects of attachment, which contribute to her differentiation from her mother” (62).
The intersubjective communication and subsequent mutual recognition is hampered in Sethe and Denver’s relationship, since the mother and daughter are ostracized by the community throughout most of Denver’s childhood. As a result, Denver has very little social interaction with potential mediating figures in the community. Therefore, it is through Beloved’s mediation that Denver is finally exposed to alternative modes of social interaction. Beloved’s verbal intervention in Denver’s storytelling practices facilitates the daughter’s retelling of her birth as her mother’s, and not only her own history. This rhetorical exercise develops Denver’s creativity and independence, enabling her to imagine her mother’s perspective as separate from her own, thus undermining the unhealthy patterns of dependence between the mother and daughter.
In “Explaining the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory in Early Childhood,” Katherine Nelson suggests that by learning to tell stories about themselves children develop their autobiographical memory and thus construct their personal identity.15 In order to learn the skill of self-narration children must learn to “tell a coherent story, to tell the truth, get the facts right,” and so on; “In doing all this, the child must become reasonably adept at taking the perspective of another, and of viewing events from a somewhat detached, meta-representational distance” (377). When Beloved teaches Denver to tell the story of her birth from her mother’s perspective, she both evokes the daughter’s empathy toward her mother and initiates the processes of the daughter’s self-construction.16 Paradoxically, by telling her mother’s story, Denver creates the necessary distance between Sethe and herself to recognize her own and her mother’s individuality. As Paul Eakin suggests in How Our Lives Become Stories, “mothers and daughters are so intimately bound in the process of identity formation that to tell the story of the one is necessarily to tell the story of the other” (179). By facilitating this relational storytelling, Beloved helps Denver to assert her individuality in relationship, rather than in opposition to her mother.
Moreover, by interacting with Beloved, Denver learns to read minds. This extensive exercise of her ToM enables Denver to apply her cognitive skills to her mother’s as well as to other people’s minds. At first Denver learns to understand the meaning behind Beloved’s gazes:
Beloved seldom looked right at her, or when she did, Denver could tell that her own face was just the place those eyes stopped, while the mind behind it walked on. But sometimes at moments Denver could neither anticipate nor create— Beloved rested cheek on knuckles and looked at Denver with attention. (118)
Denver differentiates between Beloved’s absentminded and meaningful gazes by employing the embodied ability of mind reading that, as Lisa Zunshine suggests, allows her to “ascribe to a person a certain mental state on the basis of her observable action” (6). Beloved thus uses paralinguistic communication in order to engage in an intersubjective relationship with Denver: “it was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other. Having her hair examined as a part of her self, not as material or a style” (118). Denver enjoys being a subject rather than an object of observation. Beloved’s recognition allows her to recognize herself as an independent individual in relationship, and later to apply this experience of self-assertion to her relationship with Sethe.
The changes in the narrative patterns between the two versions of Denver’s retelling of her birth, which I now consider, reflect the transformations in Denver’s perception of her mother. The first time Denver tells the story of her own birth, she basically repeats her mother’s words instead of engaging in a creative retelling. Since Denver is not experienced in the techniques of self-narration, she is not accustomed to using her own narrative voice or to creating imaginative strategies in order to tell her own story. Thus she first renders the story through her mother’s narrative voice, using reported speech: “she had good hands, she said. The whitegirl, she said, and then little arms but good hands. She saw that right away, she said” (76). Beloved, however, is not satisfied by Denver’s abrupt narration and therefore provokes more elaborate storytelling by “asking questions about the color of things and their size” (77). Since Sethe has not assisted her daughter in the development of remembering and retrieving processes, Denver’s storytelling techniques remain rather scant. Sethe’s inability to discuss her past hampers not only Denver’s cognitive abilities, but also the development of her autobiographical self-perception. Thus Beloved’s assistance in the creation and shaping of life stories is essential for Denver’s self-construction.
According to Reese and Sutcliffe, cooperative reflection on the past also enables parents to train children to shift perspectives. This serves as a powerful context for understanding minds (36). Indeed, when Denver, with Beloved’s help, learns to perceive her birth story from her mother’s perspective, she also becomes aware of her mother’s mental and emotional states. Beloved facilitates Denver’s storytelling by encouraging her sister to generate the visual details of Sethe’s story. By joining in imaginative constructions, the two sisters come to share their mother’s past, thus creating a mutual system of references that binds them both cognitively and emotionally into a new interpretive community.
In order to imagine her mother’s thoughts and emotions when running away from the slaveholders, Denver has to change the narrative’s perspective. This is conducted through the sisters’ cooperation, since as a dyad, Denver and Beloved possess more interpretive authority to add details and develop the emotional framework of Sethe’s story. Moreover, as mentioned above, Denver lacks the necessary interpretive background to engage in a complicated rhetorical enterprise. Although Beloved’s guidance is necessary for Denver’s cognitive and emotional development, the reincarnated sister does not overpower the narrative process.
On the contrary, Beloved refrains from imposing her own voice on Denver’s narration. Instead, she facilitates a dialogic, intersubjective narration in which Denver and Beloved have equal parts. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the intersection between voices, consciousnesses, or worldviews does not necessarily imply one voice overpowering another, but rather a “dialogic concordance of unmerged twos or multiples” (289). Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism suggests simultaneous interdependence and autonomy in relation to the other. Since language, according to Bakhtin, is fundamentally social, the process of our self-construction17 depends on interaction with others. This view corresponds with Jessica Benjamin’s concept of intersubjectivity that maintains that “the individual grows in and through the relationship to other subjects” which occurs through “mutual recognition” (20, 16). Both Bakhtin and Benjamin emphasize the possibility of individual development in relationship; interdependence need not negate personal freedom.
Indeed, in Beloved, constructive narration becomes possible as a duet rather than as a monologue. By serving as Denver’s audience, Beloved silently participates in the narration and encourages the storytelling process by creating an atmosphere of mutual support: “Denver spoke, Beloved listened and the two did the best they could in order to create what really happened” (78). By asking Denver to narrate the story: “‘Tell me,’ Beloved said. ‘Tell me how Sethe made you in the boat,’” (76) Beloved undermines the patterns of silence and secrecy in which Denver has been growing up. She asks Denver to narrate that which has been indirectly relayed to her by her mother, brothers, grandmother, and the community at different times and under different circumstances. Denver is asked to transform the implicit into explicit: “[Denver] swallowed twice to prepare for the telling, to construct out of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold Beloved” (76).
Beloved’s rhetorical guidance helps Denver to identify with Sethe to such a level that she can fill in the missing traumatic details Sethe was unable to narrate. By helping Denver to describe events she has not actually witnessed, Beloved impels her sister to imagine; that is “to see what she was saying and not just to hear it” (77, emphasis mine). At first, Denver recreates the mother’s story from the perspective of the observer. However, as she goes on, she identifies with her mother so much that she starts not only seeing but also feeling the story through Beloved: “feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked” (78). The change in perspective develops Denver’s mind-reading ability, enabling her to experience the story from her mother’s (i.e., the participant’s) perspective. While in Sethe’s storytelling about her own mother Beloved helps to transform visual, field memories into narrative memories, with Denver, Beloved initiates an opposite process, transforming the remembered story into visual images, which enhances Denver’s identification with her mother.
According to John A. Robinson, “remembering can be organized through various perspectives or points of view. Subjectively, the rememberer may reexperience the event as a participant or a spectator.” The participant’s perspective enables imaginative participation in the events as if experienced firsthand. The spectator’s point of view, on the contrary, registers “the self engaged in the event as an observer would,” that is, without particular emotional involvement (206). Robinson further claims that flashbacks associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other traumas tend to occur as participant memories (207). This may suggest that the participant’s perspective is more emotionally loaded than a spectator’s point of view. Since Denver’s initial imagination of her mother’s story occurred merely from a spectator’s perspective, it blunted her emotional involvement in the story. Beloved’s intervention allows Denver to develop an additional perspective. Although she maintains the initial observer’s stance to a certain degree, after shifting her point of view she can also participate in the story as if she was actually present when the events took place.
However, even though Denver becomes emotionally involved in the story, she is not as traumatized by the events as her mother. This is because she now possesses a double vision as both an observer and a participant; she can both identify with her mother and maintain her own separate self. The novel’s narrative strategy brings this out. Morrison narrates Denver’s second retelling in the third person, rather than in the first, which is more immediately associated with personal testimonies. The third person voice provides the necessary distance for Denver’s narration of her mother’s story: “there is this nineteen-year-old slave girl—a year older than herself—walking through the dark woods to get to her children who are far away. She is tired, scared maybe, and maybe even lost” (77-78). On the one hand, the observer’s perspective is maintained when Denver describes her mother, as if observing her from a distance. Yet, on the other hand, the daughter can relate to her mother’s situation and narrate her emotions. By mentioning that her mother was her age when running away, the daughter brings her mother’s past closer to her own present and can therefore understand how exhausted and scared her mother had been.18
When Sethe acknowledges Beloved as her daughter, she tries to amend their relationship. Beloved, however, refuses to forgive; instead, she attempts to avenge her own murder by killing Sethe. She makes Sethe quit her job and play with Denver and herself. Then, she drives Denver away from their play. Constantly asking for food and sweets, Beloved almost makes Sethe and Denver starve to death. Observing this deteriorating situation, Denver finally succeeds in drawing the right conclusions regarding the Sethe-Beloved relationship: she understood that Sethe “was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it.” Denver, however, also realizes “there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished, shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew that Sethe’s greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning—that Beloved might leave” (251). Denver understands her mother’s state of mind when comparing it to her own fear. By recognizing her own emotional connection and similarity to her mother, she establishes an intersubjective bond that allows her to read her mother’s mind.
Beloved’s intervention, despite its negative impact on Sethe’s mental and physical health, promotes changes in Denver’s assumptions. At first, Denver watches Sethe and Beloved’s interaction alert for “any sign that Beloved was in danger . . . her eye was on her mother, for a signal that the thing that was in her was out, and she would kill again. But it was Beloved who made demands” (240); “The job [Denver] started out with, protecting Beloved from Sethe, changed to protecting her mother from Beloved. Now it was obvious that her mother could die” (243). Denver thus takes the initiative into her hands and turns to the black community of Cincinnati for help.
Interestingly, the same community that ostracizes Sethe for her violence at the beginning of the novel embraces her at the end of the novel, exorcising Beloved through vocal collaboration. The community once again creates an intermental unit that shares a common goal and a common mind. When the black women gather to banish Beloved, they use no words: “in the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (259). The women’s collective memory of the right sound allows them to access the primary, prelinguistic experience that precedes speech in order to accept Sethe back into their community.19 The women’s collaboration during the exorcizing ritual reestablishes the intermental bond between the members of the community: “building voice upon voice,” the women search for the right key, and when it is found, they produce “a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees” (261).
The community’s silence, immediately after the murder juxtaposes with this later vocal attempt to help Sethe overcome her horrible past. In fact, after the women succeed in banishing Beloved physically, they begin the cognitive process of mental exorcising or—as Morrison puts it—“disremembering.”
Disremembered and unaccounted for, she [Beloved] cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? . . . They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made up their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch, quickly and deliberately forgot her. . . . Occasionally, however, the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper. Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative – looked at too long—shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face itself moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do. (274-75, emphasis mine)
The cognitive framework of stories the community constructs in order to disremember20 Beloved creates an intermental web that connects the community members into what Palmer refers to as a group mind. This mind is shown to have an uncanny experience of the ghostly presence that keeps haunting this group’s imagination. The haunting past becomes an integral part of the communal knowledge or the communal mind. It becomes their common knowledge that memory, even though it is recreated in the group’s mind, may reincarnate and change the present.21
After years of misunderstanding, mutual rejection, and loneliness, not only Denver, but the community, too, realizes their mistaken assumptions about Beloved’s murder. When it turns out that Sethe does not only feel guilty for her violent act, but may die immersing herself in her destructive remorse, Denver appeals to the community and receives help. In order to understand Sethe empathetically, Denver has to reject the community’s original conception of her mother. When this is achieved, the daughter can reenter the communal intermental unit and change it from within. The individual’s impact on the community is thus revealed—Denver explains her mother’s mental states to others, thus changing the group’s opinion about the murder.
When Denver must ask for help, she realizes that “nobody was going to help her unless she told it—told all of it” (253). The daughter makes amends for her mother’s silent pride through verbal communication. She tells part of the story about Beloved’s haunting to some women in the community, explaining her mother’s deteriorating mental and physical condition. Although Denver revises the story of the haunting, representing Beloved as a cousin who came to visit, got sick, and bothered her mother (254), the women of the community reinterpret the story in much more supernatural terms:
the news that Janey got hold of she spread among the other coloredwomen [sic]. Sethe’s dead daughter . . . had come back to fix her. She was worn down, speckled, dying, spinning, changing shapes and generally bedeviled. . . . It took them days to get the story properly blown up and themselves agitated and then to calm down and assess the situation. (255)
By revising Denver’s story and creating their own interpretation the women cognitively reprocess Sethe’s past and present and alter their communal mind.
Using her enhanced mind-reading skills Denver eventually understands her mother’s victimization; she empathizes with Sethe’s suffering as a slave-mother who is forced into violence against her own children by the system of slavery. While Beloved has been the victim of her mother’s violence, Sethe has been the victim of slavery and of her own ambiguous choice. Reinterpreting Sethe’s motivation through empathy, Denver finally effaces the demonic mother figure she has imaginatively constructed. Ironically, by using her imagination, the daughter finally succeeds in coming to terms with her real mother.
1 Developing Abraham and Torok’s argument, in Family Secrets, Esther Rushkin suggests that phantoms or ghosts are an unconscious, repressed formation, too horrible or shameful to be represented in words (28). The phantom image generated in the subconsciousness of the traumatized parent is indirectly transmitted to the child by means of cryptic discourses, thus becoming an integral part of the child’s subconscious worldview. According to Rushkin, the child that inherits the gap in her parent’s speech actually inherits parts of the parent’s subconsciousness (29).
2 After some members of Sethe’s community witness Beloved’s murder, they stop visiting Sethe’s house and treat the whole family as social outcasts. Stamp Paid seems to be the only character who succeeds in interpreting Sethe’s intentions empathically. In his words: “She love those children. She was trying to outhurt the hurter” (234). Even though, just like the rest of the community, Stamp Paid has been avoiding Sethe, toward the end of the novel he admits that unlike others he does not perceive Sethe as crazy, but rather as an extremely devoted mother who tried to overpower the system of slavery through the murder of her own child.
3 After the brothers leave Denver continuously has nightmares and fantasies about her mother’s violence. She dreams about her mother cutting her head off “her pretty eyes looking at me like I was a stranger. Not mean or anything, but like I was somebody she found and felt sorry for. Like she didn’t want to do it but she had to and it was not going to hurt. That it was just a thing grown-up people do” (206). Denver makes an attempt to understand her mother’s violence by attributing it to the inexplicable realm of the grown-up’s world. This, however, does not justify the mother’s deed, and therefore, just like the readers, Denver experiences continuous difficulties in understanding her mother’s motives and intentions.
4 While Sethe and her children mange to flee from the slaveholders, the father of the family, Halle, fails to escape. His fate remains a mystery for years until Paul D, who was enslaved on the same farm as Sethe and her family, arrives at her house. He tells Sethe that the last time he saw Halle on the farm, he was smearing butter over his face. Paul D assumes that “something broke” Halle, but it is only after Sethe tells him that prior to her escape she was violated and beaten by the slaveholders that he understands what happened to Sethe’s husband. Paul D concludes that Halle must have witnessed the horrible scene of his wife’s violation, and unable to protect her, he lost his mind.
5 It is possible that Sethe’s deed remains unnamed because the grandmother, as well as other people in the community, lack suitable words to express it. Stamp Paid, who witnessed Sethe’s offense, also experiences difficulty talking about the murder directly; he refers to it as “Sethe’s Misery,” thus expressing both the child’s and the mother’s victimization.
6 In Is There a Text in This Class? Stanley Fish argues that “meanings are the property neither of fixed and stable texts not of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible for the shape of a reader’s activities and for the texts those activities produce” (322). According to Fish, our “consciousnesses are constituted by a set of conventional notions” that we assimilate from our socio-cultural environment. Using these notions to interpret our reality, we produce the culturally accepted meanings that allow us to participate in the interpretive community set by our social environment. The concept of “interpreting communities” in relation to Beloved was initially brought to my attention by Rita Horvath, whose manuscript “Murdered Joy: A Reading of Henry James’s ‘The Figure in the Carpet’” discusses what it means to enter a reading community and what factors enable or prevent one to enter a community of interpreters / readers.
7 Powers claims that Morrison’s narrative manipulates time by “fastforwarding and rewinding of the temporal setting through flashbacks and stories of the past related by characters or through the meandering, history-purveying eye of an omniscient narrator. Rather than a chronological, diachronic storyline that weaves the evidence of the past into an ordered, de facto, meaningful narrative, time in Morrison synchronizes various pats into one level narrative space, which in turn is subjected more to the demands of characterization than to those of narration” (33).
8 The slaveholders perceive Sethe and her children as their commodity and therefore do not believe in Sethe’s right to mother her children. In these circumstances, the only motherly act Sethe can impose on the white society is the murder of her own child.
9 For Sethe the truth was simple: she had to protect her children from the School-teacher even if she had to kill them. As the narrator puts it: “she just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them” (163).
10 This, however, proves to be incorrect, since Beloved forces Sethe to explain her intentions again and again, draining Sethe’s emotional and physical strength.
11 The community’s stony silence after the murder contrasts with the silent mutuality between Baby Suggs and her congregation. Although both reactions involve paralinguistic communication and signify intermental thinking, the former silence testifies to utter misunderstanding between Sethe and her community, while the latter implies cooperation and understanding between the leader and the group.
12 Schwarz, Joel. “65% of school-age children have an imaginary companion by age 7,” Medical News Today 7 Dec. 2004, 21 Oct. 2007, http://www.medicalnewstoday. com/articles/17426.php. According to developmental psychologists, children who report having imaginary companions also have more developed ToM abilities. Research with 152 pre-schoolers found that having an imaginary companion or impersonating an imaginary character was positively correlated with ToM performance. School-age children who did not impersonate scored lower on emotion understanding (Taylor et al.)
13 The term “relational” or “collective identity” was developed in feminist criticism to describe the characteristics of female identity as different from a male individualistic, autonomous self. For a useful review of models of identity, see Paul Eakin’s How Our Lives Become Stories (46-53) .
14 Although Benjamin discusses the relationships between mothers and infants in general, her theory is particularly relevant to mother-daughter bonds. Since the daughters’ identification processes are more problematic than the sons’, they find alternative ways to relate to their mothers. Benjamin’s intersubjective view illuminates the processes of identification and construction of relational identity through mutual recognition.
15 As Kay Young and Jeffrey Saver argue in “Neurology of Narrative,” the ability to construct narrative is inseparable from personhood. Brain-injured individuals “who have lost the ability to construct narrative . . . have lost their selves” (780).
16 In “Narrative Empathy,” Suzanne Keen suggests that empathy is not only an emotional, but also a cognitive process: “empathy itself clearly involves both feeling and thinking. Memory, experience, and the capacity to take another person’s perspective (all matters traditionally considered cognitive) have roles in empathy” (213). Beloved’s intervention in Denver’s cognitive processes not only develops her ToM, but also her emotional capacities. By changing the narrative perspective of her birth story Denver empathizes with her mother. She begins to understand Sethe’s emotional and physical difficulties as a slave mother, struggling to protect her children and keep her family together. This emotional and cognitive process finally allows Denver to arrive at an understanding of why Sethe killed Beloved.
17 I can become “myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with help of another” . . . “I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and mutual acceptance)” (Bakhtin 287).
18 “Expressive writing has been shown as a powerful therapeutic tool for resolving the intense effects engendered by traumatic experiences” (Robinson 207). By adopting an observer’s perspective, at least while narrating the story, victims of trauma learn to reconstruct meaning and attain some sense of control over their experience. By splitting the narrating self from the experiencing self the traumatized person distances himself or herself from the past, transforming his or her participant perspective into a spectator’s perspective. Denver, however, has to go through an almost reversed process: to add a participant’s point of view, thus making her mother’s story more emotional and relevant to herself.
19 It is unclear where the women gain the experience or knowledge of the sound. It is possible that the community has been using this sound at the spiritual meetings they held when Baby Suggs, or Baby Suggs Holy as they referred to her, was alive. The memory of Sethe’s mother-in-law, to whom the community is spiritually indebted, also propels mutual forgiveness and reconciliation.
20 As opposed to forgetting, disremembering is a deliberate process of healing by putting the past behind. The horrors of slavery cannot be forgotten, but rather put aside in order to continue living.
21 According to psychological research, remembering is a creative, rather than a precise and unchanged retrieval of past events. As studies on flashbulb memories, Deese-Roediger-McDermott illusions, and eyewitness testimonies demonstrate, present recall may distort the original memories of past events. For further details see Roediger and McDermott as well as Schacter. However, as Daniel Schacter also demonstrates in Searching for Memory, emotional and especially traumatic memories influence the rememberer’s present and may even change this person’s character. The great majority of individuals who experienced traumatic events repeatedly recollect these events to the point where they cannot fully enjoy their present lives. The traumatic memories “impose” themselves on the individual “cast[ing] a shadow” over the victims’ lives (196, 203). Thus, past and present inform and shape each other. On the one hand, present events evoke the memories of the past, which may distort or change them, yet on the other hand, when the recall of the past occurs it may influence the present life of the remembering person.
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