Revolutionary Suicide in Toni Morrison's Fiction - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by Katy Ryan

Denver knowingly suspects that Beloved--a murdered daughter, a raped girl, an African loaded onto a slaveship--is more than a sister or daughter (266). This shifting subject who does not "fit" [12] into any story completely is an appropriate conduit into the incomplete history of Africans who chose to kill themselves rather than endure further torture, degradation, and brutal uncertainty. In her early response to the novel, Deborah Horvitz suggests that the girl on the ship is Sethe's mother and that Beloved acts as the ghostly fulcrum between generations, occupying the position of Sethe's mother and daughter; Beloved is then abandoned by one mother, killed by the other. Elizabeth House closely examines Beloved's monologue and the misrecognitions that occur throughout the novel. She offers a compelling reading of Beloved, not as Sethe's murdered daughter, but as the child of a suicide who has been living with a white man; he abused her sexually and recently died, which explains her escape and arrival at 124 Bluestone. House writes, "The lonely girl sees the creek, remembers the water under the ship's bridge where she last glimpsed her mother, and concludes that her lost loved ones are beneath the creek's surface" (20). House assumes that "the woman with my face" is Beloved's mother ("in the girl's eyes, her mother willingly abandoned her" [18]) and then argues that Sethe and Denver misread Beloved as their lost daughter/sister while Beloved misreads Sethe as her lost mother. The epigraph to the novel from Romans 9:25, according to House, anticipates these misidentifications: "I will call them my people, which were not my people."

These problems of identification accord with the communal alterity of suicide and with the dislocating effects of the Middle Passage that make any attempt to identify one's ancestors difficult, if not impossible. Beloved describes the woman on the ship only as "the woman with my face," consistently avoiding the word mother. Earlier she asks Sethe, "'Your woman she never fix up your hair?'" (60). "'My woman? You mean my mother?'" Sethe provides an answer without waiting for clarification from Beloved. The later monologues continue this ambiguity. Sethe's monologue begins, "Beloved, she my daughter," and Denver's opens, "Beloved is my sister," but the third and fourth refuse familial markers, "I am Beloved and she is mine." Beloved's speech consists of rhythmic, simple sentences without conventional syntax--"I am not big" (210); "I am small" (211) [13]--and is distinguished by the repetition of the word face and the conspicuous absence of the word mother, especially in an overall narrative preoccupied with a m other-daughter relationship. Horvitz builds a wonderfully clear and evocative interpretation of the monologues, highlighting the fluidity of identities in this section: For her, the suicidal moment constitutes "perhaps the most heart-breaking" image in the novel (164). [14] But Horvitz, like most critics, assigns a privilege to the mother-daughter relationship. [15] She writes, "The loss of 'the underwater face' represents not only the death of a woman, but the death of a mother and therefore the rupture of the mother-daughter bond, probably the strongest, most important relationship women can have" (163).