The roots of the body in Toni Morrison: A Mater of "Ancient Properties"

African American Review, Winter, 1995 by Karin Luisa Badt

This incessant literary return to the mother, I argue, is both an expression of a psychological desire to recover the repressed - the lost object of desire - and an expression of a political desire to recover the past. Laura Mulvey has claimed that the "lost memory of the mother's body is similar to other metaphors of a buried past or a lost history that contribute to the rhetoric of oppressed people" (167). Morrison's novels demonstrate the political potential of the mother's body. By charting a discourse of maternal desire, Morrison challenges her readers - in particular, her African-American readers, to whom, in her words, she writes - to reinvestigate their sense of self, and their relation to that which has been lost (see "Rootedness" 340).

"Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field ...."

Sula opens with the distorted and phantasmagoric body of Shadrack, an unfortunate war veteran. After a horrific battle experience, Shadrack lies in a hospital bed, watching his hands "grow in higgledy-piggledy fashion like Jack's beanstalk all over the tray and the bed" (9). His body grows out of bounds, as does his sense of self. He cannot connect his face with an identity: "... he didn't even know who he was or what he was .... he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands" (12).

Morrison introduces bodies that are similarly disoriented - shellshocked, drowned, burned, or mutilated - in almost all of her works. Her novels break down proper body boundaries, thrusting the characters into a primordial chaos in which the experience of identity founders. Reading one of Morrison's novels is like entering the warm, sensuous, and overpowering ambience of a womb. Over and over again, we have characters who regress, in psychoanalytic terms, to the undifferentiated sense of self characteristic of an infant.

Margaret Mahler's seminal work The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant describes the process of separation-individuation requisite "for the development and maintenance of the 'sense of identity'" (11). The infant learns to view the mother's face as other, and himself or herself as a distinct self. Critical to this process of separation is the experience of body boundaries. Since the infant's earliest perceptions are bodily sensations, it follows that the ego is "first and foremost a 'body ego'" (220). Therefore, the first step toward ego development for the infant involves bodily differentiation from the mother (65).

Morrison's works track a reversal of this process; each orchestrates a return to the "symbiotic origin of the human condition" (Mahler 227). Whether we look at Shadrack retreating from society to live in his womb-like hut over the river, Son in Tar Baby allowing himself to be swallowed in Caribbean womb-water, Joe crawling back into his mother's "cave" in Jazz, or Sethe and Paul regressing to a bewildered and helpless infantile state in Beloved, we find that the womb exercises an eerie and ineluctable power over Morrison's heroes and heroines.

Despite the uneasiness of these uterine encounters, Morrison makes clear throughout her corpus that the traumatic loss of boundaries, the return to the maternal, is necessary in order to restore "authentic" identity. All of Morrison's novels begin with individuals who have an unsatisfactory relation to themselves and others. They lack a true sense of centeredness - a core self - and they are drawn to the body of the (m)other in order to restore the integrity of their own. Boundaries must be blurred before they can be remade. In Beloved, for example, the violent fragmentation of the sense of self experienced by the characters is a process which initiates their rebirth. Sethe, Paul D., and Denver re-enter the womb, succumbing to Beloved's embraces, only to emerge "baptized" with a clearer sense of who they are.

It would be a mistake, however, to read Morrison's works merely as original meditations on a classic psychoanalytic model of the self. The narcissistic wound that repeatedly impels Morrison's characters to return to the mother should be seen in its political and cultural context. In an essay on Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Barbara Johnson shows how the main character, Helga, is driven throughout her adult life in a way similar to Morrison's characters - to seek parental figures to mirror and validate her. Johnson begins her analysis by showing how this search has its origins in what Kohut has termed an inadequate mirroring by the mother. Johnson concludes her argument, however, by pointing to the way in which the novel ultimately shows the limitations of the Kohutian model. For Kohut, the narcissistic wound is the mother's fault. He ignores the political and cultural factors which might lead the mother herself to be de-valued, and thus render her "incapable of sustaining the role of self-object" which the child needs to form his or her self (Johnson 193). Johnson urges us to remember that the narcissistic injury might result from factors outside the nuclear family. In other words, it is not, as Kohut would have it, just the fault of the mother. That this desire to return to the mirror stage may be a common theme in African-American writing may have something to do with the "narcissistic injury resulting from the insertion of a black child into a hostile white environment" (Johnson 195).