Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' as Lacan's gaze qua object

Style, Fall, 1996 by Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber

Like Sethe and Paul D, Denver, who has led a sheltered life, afraid of the world outside her door and those things that might cause her mother to murder again, gains her subjectivity at the end of the novel. Throughout most of the novel, Denver lives as an object smothered by the fear that her mother will take her life just as she had taken Beloved's. In order to preserve peace, she "disappears," loses her hearing, and takes her sister's ghost as her only companion. The "monstrous and unmanageable dreams about Sethe found release in the concentration Denver began to fix on the baby ghost" (103). She daily relives her sister's death, imagining that Sethe "cut my head off every night" (206). Denver struggles to achieve subjectivity through her mother's stories about her birth, and thus she "hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself, which is why Amy was all she ever asked about" (62). Beloved's appearance assists Denver's growth as subject: "It was lovely . . . being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other. . . . Needing nothing. Being what there was" (118). Denver's object status, created by her mother's heinous acts and her own fear of the white world, shifts as she perceives herself as subject through the eyes of others. She recalls her grandmother's words about whites: "Grandma Baby said there was no defense - they could prowl at will, change from one mind to another, and even when they thought they were behaving, it was a far cry from what real humans did" (244). Yet, as she becomes a subject, she imagines a conversation with her deceased grandmother:

But you said there was no defense.

"There ain't."

Then what do I do?

"Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on." (244)

Seeing herself as agent, through her grandmother's gaze, Denver acts so as to save herself and Sethe from the spell of Beloved. The more Denver asserts herself and her needs, the more reinforcement she receives from others. For instance, when she seeks aid from her former teacher, Mrs. Jones, Denver "did not know it then, but it was the word 'baby,' said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman" (248). Denver's new command creates a gaze that discomfits readers, who, like the rest of Denver's community, "were sorry for the years of their own disdain" (249). Subsequently, Denver's subjectivity produces an unsettling shift for the reader.

At the novel's close, when Denver realizes that Beloved has worn down her mother and that if Sethe dies, she herself might become the object of Beloved's rage, Denver comes into her own as a subject. When she finds the strength to conquer her fears, leave the house, and find food and work, she marvels, "[i]t was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve" (252). This new subjectivity is expanded through the words of Nelson Lord, the same boy who caused her to block her hearing eighteen years earlier when he defined her as object of a murderous mother. Now, when he says, "[t]ake care of yourself, Denver" (252), Denver perceives herself as worthy, and risks asking the Bodwins for a job. Although her new employers have a coin bowl in the shape of "a blackboy's mouth full of money . . . [with] the words 'At Yo Service'" (255), she maintains her new sense of agency.