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Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Cynthia S. Hamilton
Cynthia S. Hamilton
Affiliation:
Cynthia Hamilton is Subject Leader in American Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, Crewe and Alsager Faculty, Alsager ST7 2HL, England. She wishes to thank Manchester Metropolitan University and the British Academy for funding the research for this article.
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Extract

Beloved is a self-conscious examination of the possibilities and limitations of the story-making process, both for the individual and for the community. Because slavery is a highly emotive subject and because historical narratives of slavery are so controversial, the exercise is a particularly potent one. The basic problem of the novel concerns the need to transform facts of unspeakable horror into a life-giving story, for the individual, for the black community, and for the nation. It is a problem which encourages compulsive repetition and avoidance; hence the stories of slavery proliferate. On the individual level the stories are shaped by the points of view of a variety of characters; on a wider level, by the demands of different types of utterance and by the structuring power of different kinds of historical perspectives and linguistic formulations, including, most significantly, generic forms. This profusion of storytelling makes the statement at the end of the novel, that “this is not a story to pass on” exceedingly problematic, for there is no single referent for the pronoun “this”, and the article “ a ” seems singularly inappropriate in view of this profusion.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , December 1996 , pp. 429 - 445
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

1 See Levy, Andrew, “Telling Beloved,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991), 114–23Google Scholar for another view of the centrality of the storytelling process in Beloved. Levy focuses on the personal level of storytelling. See also Harris, Trudier, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 164–72Google Scholar.

2 Morrison, Toni, Beloved (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 275Google Scholar. Future references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

3 See also Rushdy, Ashraf H. A., “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved,” American Literature 64 (1992), 576–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Rushdy's analysis of Denver's personal reconstruction.

4 See Harris on the ritual significance of Baby Suggs's preaching in the clearing, 172–5.

5 See Mobley, Marilyn Sanders, “A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved” in Toni Morrison: Modern Critical Views, ed. Bloom, Harold (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), 189–93Google Scholar for Mobley's assessment of Morrison's debt to the slave narrative. Mobley concentrates on the different narrative technique.

6 For a good discussion of the historical background to the development of the slave narrative, see Starling, Marion Wilson, The Slave's Narrative: Its Place in American History, Second Edition (Washington: Howard University Press, 1988), 1–49Google Scholar. For a discussion of the textual politics of the emerging genre see Andrews, William L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1–31Google Scholar and Sekora, John, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 10 (1987), 482–515CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Weld, Theodore, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839; rpt., New York: Arno, 1968)Google Scholar. Weld does devote considerable space at the end of his treatise to what he sees as the endemic violence of the slaveholding states. This dueling and “ruffianism of the slaveholding spirit in the ‘hightest class of society’” (184) is, according to Weld, a natural by-product of slavery which demonstrates the deleterious effects of slavery on the society as a whole, master as well as slave: see Weld, 184–210. Nonetheless, this forms a small part of his argument, the great bulk of which is devoted to the victimization of the slave.

8 Morrison, Toni, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 17Google Scholar.

9 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, ed. Quarles, Benjamin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960)Google Scholar; Northup, Solomon, Twelve Years a Slave, eds. Eakin, Sue and Logsdon, Joseph (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968)Google Scholar; Brown, William Wells, “Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself” in Puttin' On Ole Massa, ed. Osofsky, Gilbert (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 175–223Google Scholar.

10 Northup, 100.

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15 Brown, 207–9.

16 Jacobs, Harriet A., Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, ed. Yellin, Jean Fagan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

17 Travis, Molly Abel, “ Speaking From the Silence of the Slave Narrative,” Texas Review 13 (1992), 73Google Scholar.

18 Grimes, William, “Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Brought Down to the Present Time. Written By Himself” in Five Black Lives, ed. Bontemps, Arna (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 62Google Scholar.

19 Bibb, Henry, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. Written by Himself” in Puttin' On Ole Massa, 80Google Scholar.

20 Jacobs, 3–4.

21 On the plot conventions of the slave narrative see Foster, Frances Smith, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), 85–7Google Scholar; Olney, “‘I Was Born,’” 153; and Mobley, 191–2.

22 There are very few extant slave narratives written and published by women during this period.

23 Haley, Alex, Roots (London: Picador, 1977), 396–7Google Scholar.

24 All these narratives are included in Andrews, William L.'s collection, Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. See Andrews's introduction, defining the genre and linking it with the slave narrative. See also Gilbert, Olive, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, ed. Washington, Margaret (New York: Vintage, 1993)Google Scholar. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is both slave narrative and spiritual biography.

25 It was Atwood, Margaret's review of Beloved, “Haunted by Their Nightmares,” New York Times Book Review, 13 09 1987, 1, 49–50Google Scholar, which first recognized that Morrison had made significant use of the gothic. See also Schmudde, Carol E., “The Haunting of 124,” African American Review 26 (1992), 409–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 For a fuller discussion of different levels of specificity in genre definition and the possibility of layering formulas, see Hamilton, Cynthia S., Western and Hard-boiled Detective Fiction in America: From High Noon to Midnight (London: Macmillan, 1987), 36–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for an indication of the wide range of possibilities within the gothic tradition see Hamilton, , “American Genre Fiction” in Modern American Culture: An Introduction, ed. Gidley, Mick (London: Longman, 1993), 314–16Google Scholar.

27 See also Harris, 151–64 for a discussion of the female as other.

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29 Yellin, Jean Fagan, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 126Google Scholar.

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32 Hawthorne, 140.

33 Hawthorne, 76.

34 Colacutcio, Michael J., “‘The Woman's Own Choice’: Sex, Metaphor, and the Puritan ‘Sources’ of The Scarlet Letter” in New Essays on The Scarlet Letter, ed. Colacurcio, Michael J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 101–35Google Scholar and “The Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson,” ELH 39 (1972): 459–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Colacurcio, “‘The Woman's Own Choice,’” 109.

36 See also Morrison, Toni, “Rediscovering Black History,” New York Times Magazine, 11 08 1974, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24Google Scholar and Smith, Amanda's interview with Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison,” Publishers Weekly, 21 08 1987, 50–51Google Scholar.