Return to Article Details The Maternal Body: Female (Inter)Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s novels

Introduction

Motherhood and the interdependent relationship of female characters are dominant themes in Toni Morrison’s novels. Imperfect mothers, abandoned children and the trauma of separation recur in these narratives. However, maternal trauma narratives do not stay on the verbal level, but they penetrate and become incarnated in the female bodies, and they are inherited through generations as common cores of the female subject. Bodies of women talk to each other, interact with and have an effect on others, they become stories, readable and discursive texts.

The trauma narratives of abandonment and the separation of mothers and children are embodied in specific characters of the novels, such as Beloved and Sethe in Beloved or Florens and her mother in A Mercy, moreover, in the form of scars engraved on the bodies as the tree on Sethe’s back. This way narratives become physical reality, the flesh and blood of black women stand for the history of a people.

In this essay I explore the discursivity of these bodies (mother and child) in Toni Morrison’s novels and reflect on the texts that these female bodies stand for. I focus on intersubjectivity in the main maternal narratives: pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding and separation, with Beloved, A Mercy, The Bluest Eye, Sula and God Help the Child as examples. I propose that patterns of dysfunctional motherhood are transmitted from generation to generation, resulting in either abandonment or emotional emptiness, or the reverse, a relationship which is too close, and thus the borderline between mother and child is not established. Thus, second and third generations struggle for self definition which can only be done by an intersubjective and embodied narrative self.

Pregnancy

The construction of the maternal narrative already contains the creation of another text by definition. Life starts with complete union: the body of the mother includes the body of the child. This is the original experience of humanity: a sense of wholeness and togetherness. In such a way pregnancy recreates the original unity that every human being derives from. This feeling of unity sometimes goes on even after giving birth: Sethe in Beloved feels that her children are parts of her own body, while her children feel that they belong to the same body as their mother.

There are several pregnant characters in Toni Morrison’s novels, bearing the marks of very different narratives. The small, fragile outcast, Pecola in The Bluest Eye, incarnates the grotesqueness of nature: she is hurt by the man who gave her life, her own father. This way painful life is given to her twice by the same person (just as Cholly was denied and refused by his father twice), though her child cannot stay alive. Her father feels sorry for Pecola before the rape and he wants to do something good to her (The Bluest Eye, 127). Her body is the narrative of a misused, misunderstood and refused subject. It is a body that is despised even by the woman that gave birth to her, a body that is unable to give birth to a healthy life; the narrative of abused adolescent girls, of outcast, vulnerable youth, the narrative of being left alone. She internalizes the gaze of the people around her: society and her family; she feels that there is something dirty and undesirable in her according to Schreiber (69). This feeling will become embodied in her dead child. The duality of birth and life is depicted in one body: beauty and ugliness, wonder and disgust. It shows how pregnancy can become a shame, a curse. Her body also shows the weakness and vulnerability of the young female body, being completely alone when giving birth; even if outsiders would like to help, they cannot, as the helplessness of her father and her friends shows. Her body also tells the transgenerational trauma of dysfunctional, unfinished sexual acts, or even the rape of the young body, inherited from her father: her father’s body was also raped by the white men who forced him into a sexual intercourse while they were watching. She cannot escape from the inheritance of the traumatic experience of the first sexual act and its destructive effects on her whole life.

Sethe is pregnant every year in Sweet Home (Beloved, 10). She is the one who embodies the devouring and altruist mother: she is unable to separate from her children and loves them so much that she forgets about her own existence. “Concerned as she was for the life of her children’s mother”(Beloved, 36)–Sethe defined herself a short time before giving birth, worrying not for her own life, but for the children’s mother’s. Another time she thought: “I believe this baby’s ma’am is gonna die”(37) and “maybe she wasn’t, after all, just a crawling graveyard for a six-months baby’s last hours” (42). She always thinks about herself in relation to her children, as a mother. Jean Wyatt calls our attention to the fact that there is no subjective centre of the maternal body, it is only defined in relation to her children (476). Sethe cannot let this feeling of togetherness loose. She treats her children as her own extensions, “all the parts of her that were precious” (192). She says, “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine” (236), “when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours. I wouldn’t draw breath without my children” (239-240). According to Paul D, “Sethe didn’t know where the world stopped and she began” (193). Toni Morrison states in an interview that it is often true about women that they displace self-love for love of something else (Joyner, 18).

Beloved feels the same way as Sethe: she wants to become one with her mother again. She thinks and says to Sethe, “Your face is mine”(254), “You are my face; you are me”(255). Her biggest fear is to lose this sense of wholeness and become incomplete, a fragment again: “Among the things she could remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces”(157). At a certain point in the novel the mother and her two daughters seem to join, reaching this sense of original unity. Their sentences are not separated by punctuation marks. They become interchangeable and one. Some recurring sentences supporting this fact are “You are mine” or “I have your milk” (256).

To sum up, Sethe, Denver and Beloved incarnate this condition of togetherness when the narratives of mother and child(ren) are inseparable, whereas Pecola is unable to recreate this sense of original unity.

The Core Narrative: Genesis

It is not easy to point at a specific moment in time as the genesis of the life story of an individual. Although it might sound sensible to assign birth as origin, we could just as well think about the moment when one is given a body. The body of the child already exists before it is separated from the mother. According to Dominik Ohrem, when subjects come to the world, there is a boundary that both separates them from “the outside” and establishes a connection between them and the world. Although they become vulnerable, without being affected and being able to affect, there is no possibility for agency (Bartosch, 61). During pregnancy, babies have a body, but this body is contained in their mothers’, they can only connect to her, not the outside world. This is a temporary state: the fetus only relates to its mother, not the whole world, or relates to the world only through its mother, by and through the mother’s skin, her boundaries. The baby only contacts the world directly after birth. Consequently, pregnancy and birth are closely connected (if not inseparable) narratives that appoint the construction and evolution of new texts, including the narrative of motherhood as well. Nonetheless, psychologists state that the process of self-awareness does not stop until the age of five (Rochat, 1), consequently, up to that point children might feel a certain kind of (bodily) unity with their mothers. Therefore, their bodies and narratives are both connected to and separated from the moment of birth.

The maternal body is a story which always includes another one by definition. This other body (and narrative) will always remain connected to, though differentiated from the maternal body and narrative. The ambivalence of the maternal body is that though originally it is a body containing another one, this other individual only comes into the world after the separation of the two. Thus, pregnancy and birth are unquestionably common, shared narratives, which connect mothers and their children – both physically and mentally (even metaphysically and transgenerationally).

Pecola’s child in The Bluest Eye, who is not even given a name, is the embodiment of the sexual failures of the family, the unprocessed and unintegrated traumatic narratives that were passed on from generation to generation–without words, without being told. This trauma involves being an outcast, being ugly and refused by others. Therefore, the baby is refused by the world; it is an unnamed story, an untold narrative, an unintegrated element somewhere in timelessness–trauma itself. It resembles Beloved, who could also be interpreted this way: a text that is not narrated, and, therefore, remains unintegrated.

On the other hand, Sorrow in A Mercy creates her own subjectivity by giving birth: “I am your mother”, she says. “My name is Complete”(A Mercy, 132)–Sorrow explains when she receives the positive gaze from her baby: she is loved by the whole self of another person. It is suggested that she was incomplete and helpless before giving birth, before becoming a mother, and she gained agency and subjectivity by this performative act: “she was convinced that this time she had done something, something important, by herself”(131). Florens says, “Sorrow is a mother. Nothing less nothing more”(157). Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber claims that “Sorrow has no self until her child is born” (174), although she adds that there were not too many possible roles for women in this situation. All in all, it is implied that Sorrow becomes a subject by the performative act of giving birth to a healthy child, thereby becoming a mother; renaming herself could be interpreted as a symbolic gesture to show this. Moreover, she does not exist, she does not perform anything outside the realm of motherhood.

Something similar happens to Sethe. She can only think about herself as a mother, in relation to her children, and even gives up her job to be able to spend all the time she has with her daughters. The only chance she has to escape being imprisoned in one role is her relationship with Paul D. However, Beloved interferes. The girl knows that a man would endanger the total union of mother and daughter(s) and the absorption of separate identities. In the end of the novel Sethe says, “She was my best thing” (Beloved, 321)–reflecting on Beloved’s disappearance. It is Paul D who makes her realize and recognize her own existence by saying “You your best thing, Sethe, You are” (322). The last words of the novel, except for a very last chapter including the comments of the narrator, are “Me? Me?” (322). Sethe realizes that she can exist and act alone, without being owned by and without owning others, that is, without complete union.

The birth of Denver is the story of a miracle, something metaphysical happening in mythical time and space. Jean Wyatt calls this a maternal quest (475). The story of her birth serves as a healing tale to be told again and again, a narrative that connects Sethe and her child, and establishes two subjects in one story. Sethe does something prominent when she is free, and Denver arrives into this world. As Wyatt rightly points out, this is a tale about togetherness (476) and intersubjectivity in the sense that Denver helps Sethe, and gives the baby her name, thereby creating a new identity, physically. It also shows how the mother used her own body to save and comfort the baby, “she could not, would not, stop, for when she did the little antelope rammed her with horns and pawed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves” (Beloved, 36). It appears to be the opposite of the story of Beloved’s death, when mother and daughter become separated by the borderline between two worlds.

Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding is a highly important and central performative act in Beloved, strengthening the relationship of mother and child as the most intimate contact between two people, besides sexual acts. It almost recreates the original unity of mother and child, establishing a bond between them, restating the existence of the maternal subject and the child. The fact that Sethe did not have her own mama to feed her, but a woman assigned for this job caring for all the babies, emphasizes the maternal narrative by deconstructing it, just as the two main trauma narratives in the novel, the milking and the flogging scene. Sethe had a mother, who was shown to her working on the fields. She remembers needing her, trying to connect to her many times throughout the novel. However, there was another woman who was assigned to nurse all the babies, therefore, breastfeeding lost its original function of connecting the newborn baby with its mother.

One of the recurring scenes in Beloved is when some white men take Sethe’s breast milk as if she was a cow. Here she is treated like an animal, and the whole narrative could be interpreted as the violation, even desecration, of motherhood and the unity of mother and child. This is a core trauma in the novel, which Sethe would like to forget, but she rather uses it to cover another one, that which is a result of this one, the murder. The milking scene breaks her belief in a possible family life at Sweet Home. She is driven by the fright that her children might be treated like this too when she kills Beloved. Throughout the novel she treats her milk as one of the most important things she has (after her children), saying, “when I got her I had milk enough for all”(233), “Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children”(236). The reason is that she strives for unity with her children, and breastfeeding is the performative act that connects babies and their mothers.

Separated Connectedness

When one is born, one is still connected to the mother by different rituals, the most evident of which is breastfeeding. These acts are stories that belong to the mother and the child as well. They share these narratives that are constructive parts of their subjectivities. It provides them with a continuous discourse between their life stories. This state after birth is a kind of connected separation or separated connectedness, because close physical and spiritual contact and the feeling of togetherness are needed. Separation of mother and child can only be gradual, including time and space. Abrupt changes can have detrimental effects on the child and the person as a mother (the maternal subject) as well.

The fear of being left alone (again) and the experience of abandonment and separation recur in Morrison’s novels. Sula, God Help the Child, Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and A Mercy might be the most prominent ones that show children left alone either spiritually or physically as well. This trauma is transgenerational, most of the time it is passed on from mothers to daughters, unknowingly.

A Mercy contains female characters who were abandoned when they were children, therefore, they are unable to establish healthy relationships. Florens, Sorrow, Rebekka and Lina were all left alone as young girls, and were separated from their families in different ways. They are all owned by Vaark, as Schreiber states, they are vulnerable without him (163). When he dies, they are unable to connect to each other. Sorrow is absorbed in motherhood and caring for her baby, which seems to heal her trauma partly, relationships heal the wound (of being left alone). It could work for the four of them if they could experience togetherness; nevertheless, they should realize it and communicate with each other honestly. Rebekka abandoned her family when she came to Jacob, and she also lost many children, involving a daughter. Hence, she lived through several separation traumas. Lina has also lost her family. Moreover, the whole novel revolves around Florens’ trauma of being refused by her mother, as Schreiber highlights, she “experiences erasure when her mother, while holding on to her nursing son, offers Florens to Vaark” (167). She does not understand that her mother asked Jacob to take her to save her from the slave owner’s sexual harassment. She suffers from this trauma of being left alone because she thinks her mother privileged or even chose her little brother, not her. This trauma is reactivated when she sees Malaik, a small boy in the house of her lover. This man is the one she wants to belong to, the one with whom she wants to (re)experience the original feeling of unity. Because of this omnipresent feeling of fear, her love relationship is also too tight, and so it does not work, she is misunderstood and left alone–again. This way she repeats the pattern of being used and refused, which is probably transgenerational, deriving from her mother. Schreiber states that sharing narratives can heal and dissolve transgenerational trauma (58), and this is exactly what Florens does by writing her story, which may result in her transformation (170).

Beloved contains transgenerational separation trauma too. Sethe recalls her memories about her mother: she did not have any close contact with her, probably the woman did not dare to love, or did not have any energy to express her feelings or to have them. Either way, Sethe remembers the feeling of both missing her mother while she was alive and losing her without ever having her. Beloved also experienced the feeling of being abandoned, saying, “She left me behind. By myself” (Beloved, 89), “Why did you leave me who am you?”(256), as she was left alone by Sethe, unconsciously.

The Bluest Eye demonstrates another line, Cholly Breedlove being abandoned by her mother and father (who refused him twice), rapes her own daughter, reenacting his own rape, making “Pecola literally absorb his sexual trauma” according to Schreiber (76), thereby isolating her totally from society, leaving her alone both literally and metaphorically. Pecola had already been spiritually alone as her mother contrived her real self as a maid in a white family’s home, but after being raped and left on the kitchen floor by her father, then beaten by her mother, and finally separated from her baby, she became encapsulated in her own impenetrable world.

The pattern goes on in Sula: Eva Peace leaves her children for months to get money to be able to care for them, causing attachment trauma for her children, as rightly pointed out by Schreiber (86). According to Joan Woodwar, weak maternal attachments leave children “unable to fully comprehend how others feel”(qtd in Schreiber, 89). This is demonstrated in this novel: Eva’s daughter, Hannah states that she has never loved her only child, Sula. Later Sula watches her mum burn alive. Neither of the women is able to establish strong relationships, their love affairs always stay on the physical level. Furthermore, Sula puts her grandma in a nursing home to take her house, and takes her best friend’s husband. She is unable to love, Schreiber says, she feels that it makes no difference if you are kind to someone or not (93). Her best friend was the only person with whom she had a mutually affective relationship. Nel thinks “talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself”, Sula “had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing” (Toni Morrison qtd in Schreiber, 88), but mostly when they were children. Sula does not have any children, thereby breaking the line of this transgenerational trauma of dysfunctional motherly love. This resembles Pecola’s story, there is no continuation of the pattern.

Bride in God Help the Child is despised by her mother because of her blackness: her parents are light brown and she has very dark skin. Her mother, whom she is told not to call mum but Sweetness, does not touch her and does not show any affection towards her, because she wants to prepare her for life, the toughness of the outside world. The novel ends with her words, suggesting that mothers do what they can, but it is not easy to be parents:

"Now she’s pregnant. Good move, Lula Ann. If you think mothering is all cooing, booties and diapers you’re in for a big shock. Big. You and your nameless boyfriend, husband, pickup—whoever—imagine OOOH! A baby! Kitchee kitchee koo!
Listen to me. You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works and how it changes when you are a parent.
Good luck and God help the child." (178)

Bride spent her whole life trying to prove that she is beautiful and lovable. It is not by accident that she started to work in the beauty industry. However, she failed to correct her mistakes without going back physically and mentally to her past. She is transformed to a child again, literally, until she becomes a storyteller of her own narrative and a listener to her lover’s life story. She both needs to tell her partner how and why she lied at the court against a white woman, and must become open and curious about the Other, thus establishing an intersubjective, narrative self, which becomes embodied after being bonded in a mutually honest and caring relationship.

The Skin, the Body and the Narrative Self

Toni Morrison uses black bodies as narratives of a traumatic past. Stories of black women become embodied in real flesh and scars to be translated into words again–as literary texts. Memory is written on and stored in the body, moreover, it is passed on from generation to generation, states Schreiber (161). Pecola’s fragile, bird-like body is the narrative of a girl who was left alone and isolated before being taught how to fight or escape from the insults of society. Cholly’s daughter might also embody his first love, who was innocent, but was punished and despised because of and by her sexuality. Bride’s skin is exceptional, stands out from the crowd: in the beginning it is looked down on, then it is adored for its beauty. Moreover, her body reflects her thinking: she becomes a young girl physically as well when she needs to travel back in time to make things clear and become beloved again–this time she does not search for the love of her mother, but her lover. It resembles Florens’ urgent need for someone to love and be loved by.

The most evident embodiment of trauma narratives takes place in Beloved. Beloved can be interpreted as the literal embodiment of the separation trauma of mother and child, the literal haunting and absorbing nature of the narrative of the murder when it is the mother who ends her baby’s life. The grotesque mixture of childlike and feminine behaviour, the unfitting body and spirit all suggest an unwanted, misguided story behind or inside the physical reality. It is this body that desperately and forcefully wants to be integrated into the world of the living again, though it does not belong or fit in there. The body behaves just like the trauma narrative: it wants to be integrated into the linear time dimension, in chronology, without sticking out, wants to become one with the narrative self, or even become a narrative self.

Sethe’s scars are lines engraved on the black female body by white male superiority, an embodiment of power. They tell us the story of her subordination, her abuse, the violation of her motherhood, her existence as a human being. The skin, or the boundary in Dominik Ohrem’s words (Bartosch, 63), that is, the means of communication between the self and the world, is destroyed, deconstructed. Any reaction of the dead flesh is impossible, those areas of the skin do not feel, they have lost their ability to sense the world. According to Ohrem, this way the subject cannot become an agent as she is unable to affect or be affected after her skin, her means of communication, is damaged. This tree-like wound can be interpreted as a family tree or the tree of life as well. Family was always the most important for Sethe, therefore, the sign or symbol being engraved on her back like a cross has a grotesque effect. She carries the burden of the family, however, that specific area of the skin is insensitive, unable to respond. Furthermore, this symbol was engraved on her skin after she spoke about the violation of her motherhood (the stealing of her breast milk) to Mrs Garner. By destroying the maternal body and family connections, the root and core of her life is shattered. Additionally, scars are also transgenerational patterns in this family line of women: Sethe’s mother and Beloved both have one.

Jean Wyatt suggests that Sethe’s inability to narrate her traumatic story can be connected to the physical, bodily presence of trauma, the scar, the baby ghost and the belief that the past is still present, “is still out there […] where it happened” (Beloved, 43). John Muller suggests that narration “destroys the immediacy of objects and gives distance from them” (John Muller qtd in Wyatt, 477). This way Sethe remains unable to own her experience, which remains a trauma, leaving her outside the domain of agency, but with the physical presence of scars, a ghost and her whole past.

Concusion

Many of Toni Morrison’s novels narrate stories about the maternal body. Most of them contain traumatic experiences, which become physical realities for the mother and child figures in these texts. Specific maternal narratives can be found in these books; namely pregnancy, giving birth, breastfeeding and separation (anxiety). Pregnancy restates the original sense of unity, and this feeling can be experienced for a time after birth as well. Some female characters, however, either cannot recreate this experience or they are unable to let it go. Some spend their whole lives in search of the lost feeling of unity or love, or the experience they had never had, but had always strived for. There is always either some outside intervention or transgenerational trauma that makes the maternal narrative impossible to be performed. The reasons and circumstances vary.

Beloved narrates the violation of motherhood on several levels. The transgenerational pattern of being abandoned is activated as a result of being a slave mother. Also, Sethe’s performative of a maternal subject is destructed by outside intervention: she is milked and treated like an animal, she does not own herself, nor her children, and a family tree is engraved on her back symbolizing the unintegratable experience of parentage. Her own family continues this discourse when she kills her beloved baby, and this baby comes back either to join her mother or to rewrite the past, changing roles in the family (Sethe shrinking and Beloved growing).

A Mercy presents four female characters, all of who have suffered their own separation traumas, “mother hunger–to be one or have one” (Morrison qtd in Schreiber, 171). Lina, Sorrow and Mistress are all female characters who have either lost their children or have never had one. Sorrow is the exception, who might find happiness after giving birth to a healthy child and changing her name to Complete. Florens is a young girl still suffering from the separation trauma resulting from the feeling of being refused and offered to a slavemaster by her mother. Florens still wants to be owned and guided, cared for and guarded. This striving has shifted from her affection towards her mother to her love relationship.

In Sula, the transgenerational pattern or knot that prevents women from performing motherhood is the lack of love or at least the lack of its expression, and dysfunctional communication. Eva sacrifices her leg (part of her own self, her own body) to be able to care for her children–and so self-mutilation becomes a transgenerational narrative as well: a strategy for survival for Sula when she cuts her fingertips (Schreiber, 90)–, but does not show any affection towards them; her daughter, Hannah, even asks if she loves her children (Sula, 67). Before that, Hanna herself states that she does not like her daughter, Sula (Sula, 57). Hannah might not and Sula does not feel any affection for anyone. Love is completely missing from their intersubjective experience. These women only treat men as sexual objects, bodies.

God Help the Child showcases what happens when a mother looks at her daughter through the lens of society. Even more so if society is less ruthless than the mother, and her way of parenting does not seem legitimate and right. In God Help the Child we can read about another emotionally neglecting mother, and how her daughter manages to build up a life out of compulsion to conform. However, even if she manages to prove that her body is beautiful, without telling her story to an empathetic listener, revealing all secrets, and becoming a listener herself, she cannot become an agent.

The Bluest Eye depicts the grotesqueness of being alone in pregnancy and in the experience of giving birth: both a terrific and a sublime experience. Pecola is a small, fragile girl resembling a bird who would want to fly but cannot, who would like to live and pass over this experience, but cannot, who would like to be beautiful. Her narrative is a body that could bear being raped by her own father, then left alone on the floor, being beaten by her mother, left alone by everyone, and then could not give birth to life, could not be elevated. Her motherhood is violated, deconstructed, she carries the wounds of transgenerational trauma narratives from her predecessors’ past. Being left alone and loaded by this burden, she can not become a subject (motherly or any), but remains a movement in the end of the story: a possibility reaching for the sky, repeating herself forever like a myth.

Toni Morrison’s novels offer a wide variety of models for women, however, most of these patterns are dysfunctional. They show how slavery, even after generations, has serious consequences on the selves of women and men alike. In my essay I focused on female figures in four novels: Beloved, A Mercy, The Bluest Eye, Sula and God Help the Child. In these books, readers can follow clearly drawn transgenerational patterns, most of them are formed by the wounds of history. The maternal narratives of pregnancy, giving birth or the abandonment of children are recurring in all of Morrison’s novels. These performatives imply the involvement of the body which, if distorted or appropriated, cannot be the place of an intersubjective act. Thus, as implied by the deficiency of the latter, these female characters struggle for maternal subjectivity.

 

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