Haunted House: The Trepidation Of Toni Morrison’s Novel Beloved

The objective of this paper is to explore the trepidation of Toni Morrison’s novel BELOVED. In other words, the paper will find out that the novel by Toni Morrison are the products of the wretched past of slavery. Toni Morrison has given vent to her feelings through her writings. Whatever she feels and experienced in her personal life, has gone into the making of her writings. Here an attempt is made to show that Toni Morrison and her novel are the products of horror. The novels Beloved, is based on the history of slavery that the Blacks were subjugated through the centuries. The paper is going to present the correlation of feeling, of horror and above with the history, at the backdrop of which these texts are produced.

Keywords: Trepidation, Horror, Slavery, Racism, Haunt, and the Great Migration.

Toni Morrison’s fifth novel Beloved is a heart-rending story, inspired by a real life incident in the life of an ex-slave, Margaret Garner, who killed her two children with a shovel in an attempt to run away from the bondage of her slave master. The story is not of a black woman or other black characters, but centers the astounding courage of a black mother, who hurts herself in her attempt to outhunt the master. The pivot of the novel is this spirit of a black woman who decides to kill her daughter to provide her a peaceful life in grave, rather than letting her suffer in the inferno of slavery if she is allowed to live. The protagonist is Sethe, an ex-slave, and the other main characters are her two daughters Beloved and Denver, her old slave companion Paul D., And her motherly mother-in-law- Baby Suggs. The strands of selfish love, courage, revenge, guilt, regrets, disassociations, confessions, unconditional love and communal bonds, all move through one another’s weave to design the fabric of the Beloved. Sethe’s love proves harmful when it possesses her mind in such a powerful grip that she restricts her vision of herself to her motherhood. Defined only as a mother, Sethe presents another dark side of the power of blackness, if loved and respected by black people. Her relations with her daughters prove that white forces can crush the body of slave women, but not their spirit, which always preserves the spark of maternity in them. This paper is a detailed study of the trauma of physical and psychic the abuse inflicted on the body and the soul of a slave woman, who determinedly lives for her children and is ready to kill and be killed to ensure their survival. The horrific descriptions of her abuse unearth those quiet corners of slave women’s history that are left unexplored by many writers till date.

The idea of a ghost story or horror story has long since been introduced into the world of American literature, starting in the late 18 th century. Simple meaning the gothic is when the supernatural encounters the natural. In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison this form of the gothic is used. The story involves Sethe, an ex-slave, whom the ghost of her dead daughter haunts. The ghost of this novel is a two year old who is young in age, yet strong in power. Sethe said in the following manner :

“ I see the dark face that is going to smile at me it is dark face that is going to smile at me the iron circle is around our neck she does not have sharp earrings in her ears or a round basket she goes in the water with my face”(212).

Beloved is about Sethe, an escaped slave living in a haunted house in 1873. Another slave from her old plantation, Paul D, arrives on her doorstep and chases the ghost out of the house. Things get calm, but a few days later a young appear. Ghost stories are about one thing, the past, even the language we use to talk about the past is the language of horror. The memories haunt us, we conjure up the past, we exorcise our demons. Beloved is a classic ghost, all Consuming, she is the sins of Sethe’s past coming not just to accuse her, but to destroy her. There has been an argument made that the beloved has been just a traumatized former slave that Sethe projects this ghostly identify onto, but Morrison is unambiguous about Sethe’s identity

I am not dead I sit the sun closes my eyes when I open them I see the face I lost sethe’s is the face that left me Sethes sees me 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 a hot thing now we can join”(213).

“You can’t get away from this bad memory, because she is here, sitting at the table, talking to you, no matter what anybody says we all know that there are ghosts”(245).

Literature is fun because everything is always open to multiple interpretations, but the most obvious interpretation of the Beloved is that she is a ghost. Add that to the fact that Sethe is living in a clearly haunted house at the beginning of the book and that the book is about the most feared and despaired figure in western civilization, the murdering mother, and that the ghost and brutal institution of slavery has over everything, and there is no other way to look at beloved. Beloved is straight, flat-out horror play. On the other hand, doesn’t engage in the subject matter that seems to be preoccupying horror right now. Horror these days look like a endless shuffling and reshuffling of genre tropes-vampire, zombies, witches, possessions, haunted houses- with novelty coming from new arrangements of the familiar pieces. Toni Morrison puts it, is make her characters experiences felt. Toni Morrison in her interview, says that “ I wanted to be truly felt. I wanted to translate the historian into the personal.”( Toni Morrison).

Making experiences visceral and immediacy is not considered the territory of honors, Toni Morrison’s Beloved so horrifying. On one hand its, an eerie and tragic ghost story. On the other a look at slavery that is far more brutal and honest that any history book. Beloved begins with Sethe and her daughter Denver, who lives in a house tormented by malicious specter. The rest of the family, Sethe’s two sons and her mother have Sethe in her late thirties, is living with her eighteen year old daughter, Denver. In her house that the neighbor avoid because it is haunted. The time is early 1870’s , light after the first wrenching dislocations of this civil war and its aftermath an Morrison, Beloved is set in the year 1873 in a small town near Cincinnati, ohio. Sethe the mother has escaped in Kentucky and long the way has given birth to Denver. Morrison states early on that Sethe’s two sons. Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old. Beloved is a ghost story , it needs to posses one major key element ,a ghost.

This ghost possesses the power to immobilize and terrorize an audience while tapping into the feelings of a primitive fear by somehow intensifying them. Beloved depicts a family not only a torn apart by slavery , but the mysterious occurrence that routinely ensure in the house at 124 Bluestone Road. Morrison has the astounding ability to illustrate the intense haunting of the house. Sethe and Denver live in an uneasy trace with the ghost until the arrival of the Paul D. One of the Sethe’s fellow slaves on her former plantation in Kentrucky. Paul D exorcises the ghost , but then a mysterious female stranger shows. She is twenty years old and strangely unmarked- she has no lines in her palms, for example, and her feet and clothing show no signs of hard travelling she calls herself ‘Beloved’ and Sethe and Denver are happy to take her age. Sethe, Denver, Paul D and every other characters in her novel live simultaneously in their present and in their history. The novel alternate between two stories- that of growing contest between Sethe and Beloved; and that of Sethe’s life on the plantation, her escape and the traumatic even that followed her crossing of Ohio’s river and her appearance at the home of her mother-in-law, baby son. A crucial, revealing and is some way impossible to assimilate even take place about halfway through the novel. Sethe former owner shows up with some officers to recapture the escapes and sethe attempts to kill her children. The two boys survive, but she succeed in slitting the throat of the two year old.

“124 was spiteful full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the sprite in his own way but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The Grand mother , baby Suggs, was dead and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old….as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake(1.1).

The rest of the family, Sethe’s two sons and her mother, have either died or fled. Their Isolated existence is interrupted when Sethe’s old lover, Paul D comes to visit –a reminder of the past that disrupt the fragile balance of Sethe’s mind. Traumas seep back into her consciousness, and a mysterious young woman arrives, upending the house with her presence. Surrounding all this is Sethe’s own history, and the story of her escape from slavery during the civil war. This is where the true nightmare lies.

Morrison uses several different brands of horror throughout her narrative. In the first few chapters , we Encounters a spirit who bathes the house in red- light , destroys objects in poltergeist like fits of anger , and drives family members away with its hovering , supernatural darkness. When this spirit materializes into the young woman, the horror becomes psychological, an unspoken was between Sethe and her physical guilt. The novel ‘s most chilling brand of horror is what occurred during the civil war and it rears its head gradually.

“we have a ghost in here “she said and it worked. They were not a two some anyone. Her mother left off swinging her feet and being girlish. Memory of Sweet Home dropped away from the eyes of the man she was being girlish for. He looked quickly up the lightning white stairs behind her”.( 103-107).

Morrison uses a ghost as a literary device. However , he focuses on the ghost representing the important element of distance from other characters in the novel. In conclusion that, of the ghost remained a spirit throughout the entire context of the novel , a ghost or spirit could be justified and ignored , just as the acknowledgement of slavery is often ignored . Not as an act of ignorance, but as a painful memory that people want to forget. When Morrison manifests the spirits she forces the readers and characters with in the text to address the situation. Beloved does posses enough of these characteristic to be classified as a ghost story. The haunting sprit is referred to as the deceased baby, there are tiny hand print appearing in a cake, a mirror does shatter, Denver does hear the baby ghost crawling up the stairs, furniture does mysteriously fly across the room, there is a red undulating light engulfing the doorway. However, there are two noticeable anomalies. First, the spirit dose not terrify the woman., they appear to find out comfort in the presence. This is clearly depicted when Paul D arrives states his uneasiness, and Sethe quickly dismiss his dramatics, secondly once the spirit incarnates into a full blown apparition.

Work cited

1. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1988. Print.
2. Beaulieu, Elizabeth Ann, ed. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia London: Greenwood Press, 2003. Print.
3. Fultz, Lucille. P. Toni Morrison: Playing With Difference. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Print.
4. Gillespie, Carmen. Critical Companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. New York: Facts on File, 2008., Print
5. Heller, Dana. “Reconstructing Kin: Family, History, and Narrative in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” College Literature 21.2 (June 1994): 105-117. Print.
6. Horvitz, Deborah. “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved.” Studies in American Fiction 17.2 (Autumn 1989): 157-167 Print.