Violence, home, and community in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved.'

African American Review, Summer, 1999 by Nancy Jesser

The terms home and community are frequently uttered with reverence by feminists, non-feminists, and anti-feminists alike. These terms and the spaces they conjure up are invoked as the cure to no end of social ills, from stress and malaise to crack addiction and corporate downsizing. Calls for the return to home and to community are both nostalgic and utopian. In "Coming Home," Carol Pearson discusses a feminist utopian narrative through which, ". . . upon discovering a sexually egalitarian society, the narrators have a sense of coming home to a nurturing, liberating environment" (63). Other feminist theorists of utopia, such as Lucy Sargisson, worry that such blueprints represent an "inappropriate closure" to feminist utopian imaginings. Because domestic spaces have worked out for many women as places to be domesticated and/or to be a domestic, it is not surprising that most have mixed feelings about a structure that contains the often unfulfilled dream of possession and the lived experience of servitude. Beloved, a novel published during the domestic retrenchments and anti-feminist "backlash" of the 1980s, shows both the dystopian and utopian properties of the space named "home" and the people named "community." Morrison, through a complex interweaving of peopled spaces, shows how homes and communities serve as places to gather strength, formulate strategy, and rest, even as they are insufficient to the task of "solving" institutional and social ills.

In a process of personal and social transformation, Beloved's spaces and times change through geographical and structural movement and through storytelling. Narrative processes are linked to spatial formations and communal configurations. Morrison's simultaneous working through of history and memory by describing bodies and social structures makes the novel useful not only for projects of remembrance and revision, but also for building new social configurations of family and kin. The role the ghost-daughter's body plays as a site for memory, desire, and history has been discussed in depth by many critics, but she/it is not the only embodied site in the novel at which memory and desire meet. The dwellings and places the characters move through and escape to become at times fixed containers of memory and desire, and at times spaces where boundaries between selves are softened, making possible the gatherings and joinings necessary for emancipatory struggles. When softer, they provide emotional and physical sustenance and can be built onto, accommodating gatherings.

Because the novel is a meditation on transformations of body and soul, it is necessary to mark the process of how spaces become hardened as well as how they may be softened again. Places in Beloved are made hard discursively and architecturally, marked off by the law, by walls, or by armed guards. They can also be open or be made open: fluid, dynamic, and partially or temporarily invisible to the law. What is important, however, is not recognizing or describing a space, or categorizing it, but charting the interactions between spaces and charting the processes of their hardening or softening.

The demands of self-protection and home make it impossible to rely entirely on "open" spaces, for they carry their own vulnerabilities. The rented house 124 Bluestone plays a crucial role in marking the possibilities and limits of transformations of spaces Morrison's characters inhabit. Possibilities, and the shutting down of possibilities, develop through interactions and processes. For example, the pre-apocalyptic 124 Bluestone (before Sethe takes the handsaw to her children) is a softened space in which the African-American community of Cincinnati meets and exchanges information and food. The post-apocalyptic 124 (after "the Misery") has become hardened, albeit ironically more "alive" in its resentment of intrusion and change. Through Denver's going out into the community and the exchange of food, she and the home become open to change and community intervention. The story contained in Beloved unfolds this process of memorialization and change, a process too complex to be easily diagramed or mapped. The story itself, as complex and unavoidable as weather, embodies a system and process by which houses, which are born out of violence and (repeated) trauma, which preserve memory and history, can be transformed into homes where violence need not be the only source of connection. Against and alongside the relations annealed by violence and domination, new affinities emerge, held together through exchanged material and spiritual sustenance.

Furthermore, when the home or the community becomes so hardened that passing from one to the other is difficult, if not impossible, then these spaces lose some of their power as catalysts for larger social transformations. Because chattel slavery, colonization, and racism penetrated every moment in U.S. history, there is a sense in which all homes are haunted by violence and trauma. To paraphrase Baby Suggs, there isn't a home in the U.S. (and perhaps America proper) not haunted by a "Negro's grief." It is Morrison's insistence on this widespread haunting that makes Beloved a useful place to investigate the troubled history of domestic spaces. The home is a place where horror becomes embodied, and where sustaining human connections can be found. The very walls and doors of the house can stymie interventions by the community, or facilitate them.