Hiding fire and brimstone in lacy groves: the twinned trees of Beloved

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Lorie Watkins Fulton

Toni Morrison fills each of her novels with an abundance of natural imagery, but her fifth novel, Beloved, seems particularly grounded in metaphors drawn from the natural world. In an interview with Jane Bakerman in 1977, Morrison talked about the importance she attaches to the use of such metaphors:

   In language all you have are those 26 letters, some punctuation and
   some paper. So you have to do everything with just that. A metaphor
   is a way of seeing something, either familiar or unfamiliar, in a
   way that you can grasp it. If I get the right one, then I'm all
   right. But I can't just leap in with the words, I have to get a
   hook." (35)

In Beloved, Morrison frequently uses the natural image of the tree to "hook" her readers. The centrality of trees to the novel seems evident in that virtually every critic who has put pen to paper concerning Beloved offers some interpretation of the scar on Sethe's back, usually in connection with Paul D's favorite tree, Brother. These same critics have, however, paid scant attention to other trees in the novel; only Michele Bonnet has attempted such a comprehensive reading. She centers her analysis in the line that explains how a local sawyer planted roses in his lumberyard to "take the sin out of slicing trees for a living" (Beloved 47), and, from that line, develops a complex theory concerning what she terms "the law of the tree." To oversimplify Bonnet's argument (albeit only for the sake of expediency), this law basically contends that Morrison's novel defines "sin" as anything that violates humanity's natural environment (42). The "most salient" feature of the tree, Bonnet states, lies in its identification with life (42); indeed, she contends, "It is what the tree encloses, Life itself, that is sacred" (44-45).

Ultimately, Bonnet determines that Morrison uses trees as positive symbols, as evidence that "beyond transgression lies regeneration" (53). I would suggest that Morrison also further complicates her use of trees in the novel; regeneration may lie beyond transgression, but Morrison's tree imagery usually contradicts that regeneration somehow, and trees remain conflicted images throughout her work. (1) She balances every tree like the one that leads Paul D to freedom against another that took the chance for freedom from a dead man who swings from its branches. Even the quotation at the center of Bonnet's reading seems fundamentally conflicted because the roses that the sawyer plants do not expiate his guilt; rather than creating the "friendly feel" that he aimed for, the roses crawl over everything, and their scent sickens all who pass by them to attend the late summer carnival (Beloved 47). Morrison also adds complexity to the tree as a symbol by associating the key issues that each of her characters struggles against with a tree of some kind, and her characters even become tree-like themselves as they work through these respective issues.

Morrison spoke about her conflation of the human with the natural in an interview with Charles Ruas in 1981 when she described the world of her novels as "an animated world in which trees can be outraged and hurt, and in which the presence or absence of birds is meaningful. You have to be very still to understand these so-called signs, in addition to which they inform you about your own behavior" (100). Morrison's approach, then, seems to alter the ecofeminist belief that the domination of women directly connects to the devastation of the natural environment; rather, her method highlights such a relationship between the natural world and another oppressed group, the enslaved. Beloved accordingly blurs the line between humankind and the natural world that it inhabits; trees resemble people, people resemble trees, and the deepest desires and fears of Morrison's characters become entangled with these metaphors. If, as Morrison suggests, readers look for these signs carefully, they will realize that beyond the transgression and regeneration that Bonnet identifies in Morrison's trees lies a further complexity that sometimes leads back to the negativity implied by transgression, the positive nature of regeneration, or a curious mixture of both.

Although I want to focus on the more obscure tree images within the text, no discussion of trees in Beloved adequately begins without examining the infamous tree on Sethe's back. Critics have interpreted in wildly varying ways the scar that Amy Denver describes with tree-like terms. (2) The creativity and variety of readings concerning Sethe's scar testify to its mutability as a metaphor that can support dualistic, and even contradictory, interpretations. Characters within the novel even disagree about the scar's appearance. While Amy sees the scar as a "chokecherry tree" (Beloved 79), Paul D refutes that description and refers to the scar as both "the decorative work of an ironsmith" and a "revolting clump of scars" (17, 21). In spite of this basic ambiguity, Morrison's text supports one certainty about the scar: the deadened skin of Sethe's back clearly represents feelings about the past that she refuses to give free reign. When Paul D kisses the scar, Sethe "knew, but could not feel, that his cheek was pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree" (17). Sethe then speculates that perhaps because of Paul D's presence she can now "feel the hurt her back ought to. Trust things and remember things because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank" (18). Sethe's thought does not, as some have suggested, demonstrate that she represses memories of Sweet Home; the novel makes it painfully clear that she remembers everything, but she simply refuses to allow herself to react to those memories. (3) In fact, we see Sethe, after she learns of Halle's final insanity, become "resigned to her rebellious brain" as she questions, "Why was there nothing it [her brain] refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept?" (70)