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26Вклад сообществ в психологическую эмансипацию чернокожих (комментарии к роману «Возлюбленной» Тони Моррисон)
Сюй Ян,
доцент кафедры английского языка института иностранных языков Шэньянского политехнического университета E-mail: [email protected]
Тони Моррисон - одна из самых известных современных американских писательниц. За роман «Возлюбленная» (1987) она стала первой афроамериканкой, получившей Нобелевскую премию по литературе. Детоубийство в романе основано на реальных исторических событиях, отражающих разрушение рабством идентичности черных. В романе рассказывается о физическом, эмоциональном и духовном угнетении черных в конкретной исторической среде, а также о их длительном процессе самоисследования и духовного исцеления. Вместо будущего Моррисон уделяла больше внимания истории. По ее мнению, проследить и раскопать прошлое было единственным способом раскрепостить свое внутреннее «я» и таким образом обрести настоящую свободу. Целью данной статьи является анализ роли сообществ в содействии психологическому освобождению главных героев. Сообщество черных, женское сообщество и мужское сообщество играют решающую роль в процессе их психологической эмансипации.
Ключевые слова: сообщество; психологическая эмансипация; реконструкция; отчуждение.
I. Introduction
Exploring the relationship between community and individual, Morrison suggested that her novels involved the reader and narrator in communal ties. In the worldview of her literature, "knowledge emerges from connection to rather than alienation from other people; wisdom arises within community, in spite of the flawed character of its constituents" [1].
Sethe first begins to develop her sense of self during her twenty-eight days of freedom, when she becomes a part of the Cincinnati community. The black community undoubtedly helps Sethe to gain her psychological emancipation. Her subjectivity is realized only when she truly becomes a member of the black community. Similarly, Denver discovers herself and grows up when she leaves 124 and becomes a part of society. It is the breakup of the female community of Sethe, Beloved and Denver that devotes to Denver's getting out of the closed world and goes her critical step in self healing. Paul D and his fellow prison inmates in Georgia are able to escape only by working together. They are literally chained to one another, and Paul D recalls that "if one lost, all lost" [2]. Paul D couldn't escape from Alfred, Georgia and begin his emancipating journey without the collective efforts of the male community. In each process, the communities devote great to the reconstruction of the wholeness of their identities.
II. Black Community's contribution to Sethe's Psychological Emancipation
One cannot erase community, which includes self, others, ancestors, and future born. Morrison's commentary on Beloved suggests that our ancestors are indispensable to community. To some extent, we recognize our ancestors, seeking their advice and spiritual power, and we even deepen our ability to grow in community with them. So the central characters in Beloved begin to define themselves and claim the subjectivity only with the support of others who also have experienced oppression. The lack of mutual trust between individuals or support from community will definitely lead to failure of self-liberation.
For Sethe, her subjectivity is realized only when she becomes a full member of the free black community to which she flees: Sethe had had twenty-eight days...of unslaved life.Days of healing, ease and teal-talk. [2]. Sethe lives an unslaved life for only twenty-eight days, although she never returns to literal slavery. Consequently, Morrison defines an unslaved life as life with the freedom to develop one's subjectivity. This process
is closely related to participation in one's community. Sethe frees herself, but she does not claim ownership of that freed self alone. The past loses the power to frustrate the growth of her subjectivity when facing a collective effort. The communal living and the continuous learning experience of constant communication with others help Sethe see herself as an empowered subject within a supportive community.
Morrison, however, does not form a simplistic perfect image of the black community. She writes instead about a collective desertion of Sethe when she most needs support. The generous invitation is the prelude to the abandonment of the community, the return of schoolteacher, and Sethe's consequent murder of her baby.
The conflict in Beloved steps further into the heart of the trauma of slavery: Sethe is the slave mother who dares to claim her children as her own property instead of the slaveholder's. Maybe the idea is her deeper motive to kill her baby that "the master could subject the slave children in bondage to a slow social death, the mother could release them through physical death" [3]. However, the infanticide runs against the slave community's response of resistance. They make every effort to keep family ties alive despite the master's attempt to break them. As a result, Sethe, the central protagonist of Beloved, incurs resentment from the black community because of her refusal to define herself as a breeder of slaves, which leads to her following abandonment by society.
To our surprise, it takes less than two pages to tell the scene of infanticide, but its brevity emphasizes Sethe's conflict with the community and of Baby Suggs' defeat. And it subtly but distinctly colors the murder, heightening the sorrow. The betrayal by the community haunts the scene and challenges readers' credulity. Schoolteacher's pursuit of Sethe and her children is no surprise, but her own people's withdrawal echoes throughout the text.
Paul D's initial driving of Beloved's spirit from the house is merely temporary. As a turning point of Sethe's emancipation, Beloved is finally exorcised not by individuals working in isolation but by a community of effort directed against her presence. And the community of effort comes from a group of women, women who call upon ancient and contemporary messages, murmuring incantations and singing songs, to control Beloved. Most of the women are certainly not "the image of stereotypically traditional churchgoing black women, and nor do they pursue the exorcism from altruistic motivation; they see in it tiny mirrors of the selves they have suppressed, and they want it extracted before it touches them too greatly or even has the potential to reclaim them, and they offended" [4].
Beloved is a threat to them as well as to Sethe in the psychological sphere. "Extending the philosophy from that novel, where the community is content 5 to recognize evil and let it run its course, the women 5 in Beloved cannot afford that detachment. Letting Be-£ loved exist may mean the destruction of them all" [4]. ° They must exorcise that part of themselves; therefore, ^ that is a threat to them. By exorcising the demonic part
of the self, all women are not judged to be demons-that is what the women are about in getting Beloved to leave 124.
The community of women does prevent Sethe from committing another murder. Weakened Sethe sees Edward Bodwin drive into her yard and imagines that Schoolteacher has returned for her best thing. She turns upon the unsuspecting Bodwin with an ice pick but before he is even aware of any danger, the women knock Sethe to the ground. This time they salvage Sethe from death and murder and "in so doing return to their natural function as a refuge and reservoir of knowledge for the individual" [5]. They understand, even if Sethe does not, the power of the evil, and they do not fear it. Their own collective will is greater. Sethe is reborn with the help of the community. The women's loving reminds her of the twenty-eight days of fellowship she had once know in their midst.
So Cincinnati's black community plays a key role in the events of 124. The community's failure to alert Sethe to schoolteacher's approach implicates it in the death of Sethe's daughter. Baby Suggs feels the slight as a grave betray from which she never fully recovers. But the black community makes up for its past misbehavior by gathering at 124 to collectively exorcise Beloved at the end of the novel. By driving Beloved away, the community secures Sethe's release from the past and her final psychological emancipation.
III. Female Community's contribution to Denver's Psychological Emancipation
Morrison kept her three main female characters-Sethe, Denver and Beloved-away from male influence and creates a female community. In the absence of Paul D, the house becomes a chaotic jungle.
All of the women emphasize possession-ownership over love. Denver asserts her claim to Beloved after Beloved almost chokes Sethe to death in Baby Suggs's Clearing. Sethe asserts her claim to her children by gathering them all together in an effort to save them from schoolteacher. Beloved asserts her claim to Sethe by virtue of having been killed. And they all assert their claims to each other "in the litany of passages that reverberate with ownership" [6].
The most tragic result of Sethe's crime is the damage of this important female community. "With Sethe's perennial sense of guilt, Denver's sense of alienation, and Beloved's need for retribution, their unity remains superficial, in spite of the external evidences to the contrary. Each response forms a wedge that widens the existing fissure in their superficial bond" [7]. In the end they have only the shadow of the suns together.
Because of exhaustion caused by the demands of Beloved, Sethe loses her job and starts to spend her time talking with her daughters in the comfortable nest 124 has become. In this dramatic recovery of her memory, the voices of the three narrators, Beloved, Sethe and Denver, construct one voice, "embracing each other as one self and restoring the solidarity of the matrilineal tie" [8].The horrible and devastating memory, expressed in sentences without punctuation,
shows the disturbed consciousness of Sethe. The act of telling her fragmented past functions as a remedy to her mental disorder.
As they tell this and other stories to each other in a small folk community, they all have their respective roles to play. Sethe as well as Denver quickly discovers how much Beloved appreciates stories, so she tells Beloved about her diamonds. Oral history is combined with fiction and rumor. Through repeated telling, the stories are modified and reshaped to suit the imagination and needs of the teller and her audience. The women become inseparable in their creation of the stories and are eager to perpetuate their existence. "Their family folklore binds them to a bone-chilling, destructive interaction that may have historical parallels at its most basic level but soon transcends the traditional" [4].
The process of storytelling as presented in most works is a pleasant communal affair. Narrators can create a tale individually or with participation and encouragement from their communities. Even a listener could actively contribute to the telling of the tale, for there can be no storytellers without audiences. The community of three women that Morrison creates in Beloved, therefore, is a dynamic storytelling one in which the tellers and their tales have a direct impact upon the lives of those around them. Denver estimates her value in the stories relates to her birth. Other stories about Sweet Home send her into periods of depression and loneliness that drive her to her secret place in the boxwood trees. Beloved enjoys all the stories that Sethe relates, no matter the topic. Storytelling in this context, therefore, is about power, "one sometimes sinister in its manifestations". Sethe weaves a story, but Beloved weaves "a web of tangled parental responsibility and morality form which Sethe is barely able to escape" [2].
Sethe is willing to satisfy her daughters' desire for information about themselves, but she stops when the past come back and live vividly again. Her whole life is about "beating back the past" [2]. The past can be kept at bay if the stories are untold, the memories sheathed. The paradox of Sethe's position is that both of her daughters desire the stories, but for different reasons. And they each have different powers to urge her to tell the tales. Beloved is hungry for the memories of Sweet Home, and later the guilt Sethe feels for having killed her. Denver also appeals to Sethe's more pleasant memories of Sweet Home as well as to Sethe's sense of guilt for excluding Denver from a history in which she clearly had a vital role. Thus for Sethe, Denver, and Beloved, "storytelling is an active rather than a passive art, for it has the power literally to heal or kill" [4].
Morrison endows the stories such power beyond the entertaining, psychological, and educational functions they usually serve. Beloved may be entertained by the stories, and she certainly learns a lot about her family history; they are creating a memory for her, filling in the gaps in her life that she cannot remember. For Denver, the stories enable her to fill in a history from which she had been excluded because of
her youth despite Sethe's vow to continue keeping the past at bay and beating back the past. The stories provide self-definition "in the way that legends, anecdotes, and personal experience narratives define their subjects" [2].
Denver's geographical location at the point of storytelling makes this idea clearer. She lives at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a house whose porch provides the boundary for the edge of the world. As a psychologically immature, and functionally illiterate person, Denver is afraid of stepping out of the house. She has to find means to place herself within her own life, within her own family. Denver thinks she lives in a difficult situation with Sethe, and imagines that one day her absent father will rescue her from it just like the passive princess in a tower. Denver's fantasy locates her at the center of value in her family portrait.
Her contacts with people during Baby Suggs' lifetime were not enough for her to develop a normal sense. She may well have grown up thinking that spending time in jail with her mother was not unusual if Nelson Lord had not asked the question that brought on her deafness. Certainly her becoming deaf is an indication that she believes what she heard. She has not previously thought that her situation was somehow wrong, that her mother's act was an immoral. Denver's learning about herself consequently leads to her growing into an adult human being. The consequence of Beloved learning about her self is much more destructive; it enables her to exert more control over the lives of those around her, and indeed the knowledge she gains through the information provided by storytelling enables her to become a murderer.
IV. Male Community' s contribution to Paul D's Psychological Emancipation
Besides the former experience at Sweet Home, Paul D's dehumanization, however, comes with yet another experience of enslavement: the eighty-six days of shackled existence he would spend on a chain gang in Alfred, Georgia. He had been sent after attempting to kill Brandywine, his new owner, and forms a temporary male community with other forty-five men. If his former life at Sweet Home with the Garners can be considered endemic in any way, a cradle, as he would later call it, then the opposite is true of his Alfred experience. Here he lives daily life in a wooden prison at the end of each day, and one that "drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind" [2].
While in Alfred, "Life was dead. Paul D beat her butt all day every day till there was no whimper in her". Nevertheless, one of the positive effects of the male community on Paul D is that "his determination to achieve self-affirmation is nether abated not destroyed but is in fact most visible, both in his continual effort to escape from slavery and in his symbolic resurrection and rebirth from his wooden grave" [7]. The opportunity to escape comes during a heavy rain that converts his wooden tomb in a watery grave, when the earth surrounding the trenches begins to dissolve
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into muddy waters that seep into the boxes: "The water was above ankles, flowing over the wooden plank he slept on...The mud was up to his thighs and he held on to the bars.. .One by one from Hi Man back on down the line, they dove. Down through the mud under the bars, blind, grouping." [2] Compared with the desperate comrades, Paul D shows both his resolution and determination at the critical moment to regain his life. In short, what we see is "Paul D acting here to will his own existence, to achieve being and essence in a world of absolute nothingness" [7].
The significance of a male community could be perceived in their efforts to survive. For the chains bond the men together, demanding both unity and uniformity in the escape. But it is the mechanism that originated from white power, in turn, could be used to escape that power. "They talked through that chain like Sam Morse and, Great God, they all came up." This talking is born out of the chaos-" All Georgia seemed to be sliding, melting away"-from which the human community is delivered. Each link sends the code that lets the men know when it time was come. Ironically, the "best hand-forged chain in Georgia" acts as a linguistic tool, which enables each one of them to survive the flood. Conversely, as Paul D reflects, if anyone had failed to hear the message, they all would have died. Paul D's success is dependent upon the solidarity of the entire group. There must be an element of trust maintained by members of the community.[2]
Moreover, although both mud and water convey images of death in Beloved, as in the frozen pond on which Sethe skates with her daughters, the dominant movement of the men is upward. They rise instead of falling, suggesting the physical resurrection. Later, sanctuary-offering Cherokees remove the men's chains and give them mush. The broken chains and the continuously falling rain that washes them in flight symbolize the final rebirth of the former gang members.
V. Conclusion
Individual survival is inseparable from the community one is in, and the reflection on one person is actually the reflection on the whole community. Although the black community fails to alert Sethe to Schoolteacher's approach, which indirectly leads to her infanticide and years of isolation, it makes up for the misbehavior
by gathering at 124 to collectively exorcise Beloved, releasing Sethe from the past and achieving her final genuine emancipation. The female community of Sethe, Beloved and Denver leads Denver to her final maturity. It is Paul's firm determination to regain his wholeness formed in the male community that lays the foundation of his journey to spiritual freedom. The great achievement of this novel lies in the author's exploration of the former slaves' psychological emancipation and the huge roles communities have played in this process. To reconstruct African Americans' self identities and inner wholeness are what we need to focus on in the future study of African American literature.
COMMUNITIES' DEVOTION TO THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EMANCIPATION OF BLACKS (COMMENT ON TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED)
Xu Yang
Shenyang Ligong University
Toni Morrison was one of the famous novelists in contemporary American fiction. With Beloved (1987), she became the first African American woman who won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The infanticide in this novel was based on a true historical story, and reflected the slavery's destruction of identity. Beloved involved the physical, emotional and spiritual oppression of the black under certain historical circumstances and the long process of their self-searching and spiritual healing. Instead of the future, Morrison paid more attention to the history. In her mind, to trace back to and excavate the past was the only way to emancipate one's inner self and thus to enjoy the genuine freedom. This thesis aims to analyze the devotion of the communities to the main characters' psychological emancipation. The black community, female community and male community play critical roles in the process of their respective psychological emancipation.
Keywords: community; psychological emancipation; reconstruction; alienation.
Reference
1. NaoMIZACK. Women of Color and Philosophy: A Critical Reader. New York: Black Well Publishers, 2000.
2. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2000.
3. Grewal, Gurleen. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle, The Novels of Toni Morrison. Atlanta: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
4. Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxuille: University of Tennessee Press, 1991
5. Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison's Fiction. Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
6. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and K.A. Appiah, ed. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.
7. Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayre Publishers, 1990.
8. Mori, Aoi. Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse. New York: Methuen Co. Ltd, 1999.
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