Breeding in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: The physical and psychological affect empire left on the flesh of women

Kimberly Hallows

Professor Hurtado

English 3133

8 May 2012

Breeding in Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

The physical and psychological affect empire left on the flesh of women

Examination of Toni Morrison’s Beloved demonstrates how empire is written on the flesh of African American women that are enslaved. The slave owners psychologically and physically scar the African American women in this novel. The women’s bodies are marked by over breeding, physical scars left when the women are raped or resist rape, and the psychological scars caused by this abuse. The empire written on these women’s bodies causes them to lose their sense of self-worth and become numb to occurrences that many people are emotionally disturbed by, such as the murder of a child.

Research of Toni Morrison’s life and her personal feelings towards her novel gives insight to what influenced the birth of the novel, while sociohistorical information provides further evidence of the ill treatment of women in slavery. Enslaved women in America were treated just as Beloved exposes, with women having no choice when it comes to how their bodies are used. The psychological scarring caused by this ill treatment is uniquely examined by Kathleen Marks, who claims that the characters in Beloved, mainly Sethe, resist the evil they encounter by embodying evil themselves.

Toni Morrison was born, “in 1931 to parents who had migrated from sharecropping in Georgia and Alabama to Lorain, Ohio, and for whom pain, storytelling and magic were accepted elements of existence” (Kastor 56). In an interview with Elizabeth Kastor, Morrison describes the storytelling she overheard from the adults in her life during her youth. In another interview, Morrison claims, “my mother was nostalgic about the Alabama farm, yet she would talk in a language of fear about her family’s escape from the South. On the other hand, my father recounted vividly the violence that he had seen first-hand from White southerners, but he regularly returned” (Denard 178). Her mother seemed to have pleasant memories of the South, however the fear she expressed and the lack of desire she had to return implies that she may have had some repressed memories from the South. This storytelling by her parents impacted Morrison’s writing. Women throughout Beloved try to repress or project onto others those memories that have physically and psychologically scarred them.

Morrison provides examples of the use of African American women to breed throughout Beloved and the impact it leaves on those women. Their owners see them as “property that reproduced itself without cost” (Morrison 269). Slave owners in America force their female slaves to constantly reproduce so that they will have more slaves to either use on their own land, sell to other slave owners, or trade for merchandise. In Slave Women in the New World, Morrissey describes the abuse of women used for breeding in slavery, through a quote from Clinton. “In the U.S. South slave masters monitored pregnancies and punished women who aborted” (qtd in Morrissey 152). Women in slavery had absolutely no choice when it came to their flesh, which is reflected in Beloved. The author states, “They have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them” (Morrison 247).  The African women in this novel have multiple children against their own will.

Baby Suggs is one example of an African American women used for breeding in Beloved.  Morrissey claims that, “the likelihood of marriage and stable family life were slim” (112). Baby Suggs gives birth to eight children from different fathers and she is only able to keep one of them (Morrison 27-28). She, like most slaves, is not married and living with all the children she births. The rest of her children are traded or sold. Her pregnancies are not voluntary and she does not choose the fathers of these children. Her uterus, her vagina, her ovaries and her breasts are not her own, so she has no say in how they are used. In the novel, Suggs describes the use of the slaves’ bodies, claiming, “slave life had busted her legs, back, head, and eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue” (Morrison 102). The mentioning of the womb is a reference to the constant pregnancy these slaves endure in order to make more children for their owners to keep, sell or trade as property. In “Gloomy Melancholy,” Follet describes the impact fieldwork had on female slaves. He explains how their high workload and lack of nutrition from a poor diet caused them to give birth to children that were not fully developed. Follet states:

The disastrous combination of maternal overwork and undernourishment left a grim birthright for those children that were born into slavery; maternal malnutrition compromises the child’s immune system during fetal growth, still births are more frequent, and overworked and underfed mothers deliver offspring at least two hundred grams lighter than those of less active mothers. (69)

The African women’s bodies were greatly affected by all of the stress the numerous pregnancies place upon them, some of which were the result of rape.

Rape is another way that empire is printed on the flesh of African women in Beloved. Baby Suggs, Sethe and Ella are each raped in this novel. Ella, a character who helps Denver rescue Sethe from Beloved, gave birth to a child that was half white because her slave owner raped her for his own satisfaction, which resulted in a pregnancy: “She had delivered, but would not nurse, a hairy white thing, fathered by “the lowest yet” (Morrison 305).

Sethe, the novels’ protagonist, endures having her whole reproductive system taken as property by Schoolteacher, her slave master. Schoolteacher thinks that Sethe was his property so he refers to her as the “breeding one” and claims she has, “ten breeding years left” (Morrison 176, 267). He allows his sons to hold Sethe against her will, raping her and taking the milk from her breast (Morrison 18-20). When Sethe resists being raped, she is whipped, which leaves the scar on her back that resembles a cherry tree. Morrissey claims that, “slave owners and their agents abused pregnant women, meaning, it seems, to inflict special pain on women slaves by threatening the lives they carried,” (Morrissey 152). The whipping Sethe receives while pregnant leaves both physical and emotional scars. This is a strong representation of empire on the flesh of a woman in Beloved.

Sethe had experienced something similar as a child. While her mother was in the fields working, a woman named Nan had to nurse all of the children, including the whites. Sethe was the last to nurse because she was black so she “got what was left” (Morrison 236). Nan’s body was violated, just as Sethe’s eventually would be.

The narrator describes when Ella was raped by her slave owner. She describes her slave master as “the lowest yet”. He and his sons rape her for years (Morrison 301). This slave owner encourages his sons to rape Ella and she produces one of their children, yet she refuses to nurse the child. Ella, like Baby Suggs and Sethe, did not have a choice when it came to her body. Her body was not her own, it belonged to her slave owner. These women are not seen as human beings. They are commodities to the people that own them; therefore those people chose what their bodies are used for.

This treatment causes serious psychological scarring. Baby Suggs reaches a point where she does not even try to connect with her newborn children because she knows they are not hers to keep. Once they are born, they are traded away or sold the way that cattle or pigs are, so she decides it “wasn’t worth the trouble to try and learn new features you would never see change into adulthood anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own-fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere” (Morrison 163). The children she gave birth to are not hers. She does not get to keep and nurture her children as nature intended. She sees them when they are born and then does not see them again. She never is able to find out where they end up or what becomes of them. After a few children, she realizes the reality of not owning her children and her mother instincts become numb.

Kathleen Marks analyzes Sethe through apotropaic gestures, however I believe this idea can also be used to analyze Baby Suggs. Marks states, “apotropaic gestures anticipate, mirror, and put into effect that which they seek to avoid: one does what one finds horrible, so as to mitigate the horror” (2). Baby Suggs shows apotropaic behavior by anticipating that her children will be taken from her, mirroring the lack of sympathy shown by her owners towards those children, and avoiding any emotional attachment before they are physically taken from her. Suggs becomes detached from her children in the same way her slave owners are detached from the human beings they see as commodities.

Baby Suggs is scarred by her treatment, however, her compassion returns when she goes to 124. This place, “had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed” (Morrison 102). She helps other people to overcome their past lives as slaves but eventually her past catches up with her. When Sethe comes to 124 and murders her baby to keep her from the life of a slave, anguish returns to Baby Suggs and the narrator states that she, “dismissed her great heart and lay in the keeping-room bed,” until she dies (Morrison 104). Beloved’s death reminds her of the reality of what she has suffered through as a slave. This is the marking of the empire, psychological ruin. She cannot, like many African American slaves, escape these wounds.

Sethe’s psychological damage stems from both the way she is treated at sweet home and, as is implied by Morrison’s description of Sethe’s real life inspiration, her inability to protect her children. In Morrison’s interview with Kastor, Morrison describes the feelings of the woman who inspired Sethe’s character. She states, “Margaret Gardner had a very fierce and insistent love for her children when they were the best part of her. She was not permitted to be a mother, and that is such an elemental desire. Mother hunger” (Kastor 55). Sethe truly loves her children, but she is not free to nurture them in a way that is natural. When Schoolteacher finds Sethe and she is faced with the threat of him taking her children into the slavery she has escaped, she loses the ability to maintain her sanity. She chooses to nurture her children in the only way she sees possible in that moment.

Sethe is so greatly affected by the treatment she receives in slavery, that she murders her own child in order to protect her from going through the same torture that Sethe and so many other women had gone through. For Sethe to think that dying is less painful than returning to the plantation and living life with Schoolteacher, the reader is made aware of how terrible the treatment must have been. When Schoolteacher realizes Sethe has gone crazy, he does not acknowledge that it is caused by his treatment; however, it does keep him from taking her back to Sweet Home because he believes she is too crazy to reproduce. The narrator states, “now she’d gone wild” (Morrison 176). It is as though she is an animal with a disability that he does not want multiplied on his plantation. He permanently scars her.

Kathleen Marks analyzes “Sethe’s Apotropaic Imagination.” Apotropaic behavior is, “the phenomenon of warding off or frightening the horrible precisely by the use of the horrible itself” (Marks 7). This is demonstrated when Sethe murders her child. Schoolteacher is the horrible she is scaring away by murdering her child, which is a heinous act. Marks also states that Sethe becomes what Schoolteacher claims she is, an animal, by acting out an animalistic behavior. “It is resistance that Sethe develops, an apotropaic defense that rejects schoolteacher’s animalization precisely by taking on animalistic properties” (Marks 32) Marks states that Sethe’s rememory is another way she wards off evil.

Throughout the novel, Sethe constantly refers to her rememory, which is her memory of her past the way she chooses to remember it. According to Marks, Sethe justifies the murder of her child by replacing it with the sexual encounter between her and Beloved’s gravestone engraver. The sexual act is compensated with the engraving, which renames the past and the murder with Beloved, which Sethe names, “her baby and her violent action of preservation” (Marks 49).  This altered memory is what protects Sethe from the marking of Empire on her mind.

The treatment Ella received from “the lowest yet” keeps her from cringing when hearing the story of Beloved, Sethe’s murdered child, returning to 124 and torturing Sethe. Ella is not stunned by the return of Sethe’s murdered daughter to 124 because she has faced her own demons: “A killing, a kidnap, a rape-whatever, she listened and nodded. Nothing compared to “the lowest yet”” (Morrison 301). This excerpt provides proof of the atrocities Ella faced during the years she was a slave. Murder, kidnap and rape will not cause a human to flinch after they have seen and experienced these things and worse numerous times. Ella, like Sethe and Baby Suggs, becomes psychologically numb to these horrors.

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved indicates that women in slavery are used for sexual pleasure and breeding until the psychological impact causes them to become immune to events that are unbearable for others or until they take on the apotropaic imaginations Marks describes. Personal anecdotes inspired Morrison to write this novel, along with factual sociohistorical information. Baby Suggs expresses apotropaic gestures by learning not to love her children that are not truly hers and later lying in bed until she dies. Sethe is able to brutally murder her child to save her from the brutality of slavery and Ella is able to face that child’s ghost to rescue Sethe. Neither Sethe nor Ella hesitate because they have already seen so much during their enslaved years, that the markings of empire altered their normal psychological functioning as human beings. The use of their female parts against their will, are not the only things altered by the treatment. Their minds are changed forever.

 

Works Cited

Carolyn C. Denard. “Blacks, Modernism, and the American South: 

     An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Toni Morrison Conversations. Ed. 

     Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 

     178-195. Print.

Follet, Richard. “Gloomy Melancholy: Sexual Reproduction among 

     Louisiana Slave Women, 1840-60.” Women and Slavery: The Modern 

     Atlantic. Eds. Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller. 

     Athens, OH. : Ohio University Press, 2008. 54-75. Print.

Kastor, Elizabeth. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved Country: The Writer and Her 

     Haunting Tale of Slavery.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

     Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. 53-58. Print.

Marks, Kathleen. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination. 

     Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage International, 2004. Print.

Morrissey, Marietta. Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification 

     in the Caribbean.  Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1989. Print.