I’d like to start off by saying that I find Beloved entirely mesmerizing, and this week when I was listening to NPR on the way to work, I was reminded that Patrick Henry gave his speech to the Virginia Convention two hundred and thirty-four years ago this week (March 23, 1775)– I just realized I originally posted this with a miscalculation. If you’ll recall, the last few lines of his speech seem awfully ironic, considering the practice of slavery by the colonists themselves:
Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
That said, one of the most moving motifs for me as I read Beloved was the characters’ discussion of what freedom meant for them. Toward the beginning of the story, Baby Suggs discusses how she gives up loving her children because “men and woman were moved around like checkers” (27). The narrator explains, “What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers because the pieces included her children,” and then goes on, saying that after her third child was taken from her, “That child she could not love and the rest she would not. ‘God take what He would,’ she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing” (28).
Then when Seth and Paul D are talking about what Sethe did to her children, she tells him, “Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon– there wasn’t nobody int he world I couldn’t love if I wanted to” (190-1). Paul D doesn’t respond aloud, but the narrator explains that he understands what Sethe means: “So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to ownl lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Grass blades, salmanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn’t do. A woman, a child, a brother–a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. He knew exactly what [Sethe] meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you choose–not to need permission for desire– well now, that was freedom” (191).”
The reason I felt so moved by these particular passages is because Morrison very successfully recovers a part of history that all of the American literary movements before postmodernism just gloss over:
What is freedom, not just for certain privileged Americans, but for those who have actually been enslaved and silenced?
Freedom, according to these excerpts from Beloved, means not having to ask anyone if it is okay to love one’s own children. The most natural and uncontrollable love, the love of a parent for his/her child, had to be controlled in order for people in our American history to survive.
Now, before I start to sound like I am on an Oprah show, I want to say that I think this conversation is relevant to whether Morrison’s novel ought to be considered Postmodern or not. I have to agree with Alana that there seems to be something inherently wrong with suggesting that Morrison is a postmodern writer, even when she claims she is not; it seems to be adding salt to the wound that she is writing about in her books. Then again, her book does challenge history. Davis points out the metaphor of the newspapers (which have been considered to contain evidence of “what really happened” in history) in the woodshed where Sethe killed her child and where Paul D sleeps with Beloved, and Davis suggests, “This metaphor allows Morrison simultaneously to point out the gap between representation and reality and to suggest that we can only know the past through discourse. She seems to concur with the poststructuralist view that reality is a function of discourse, yet does not let this point pacify her into accepting the representations that already exist-the voyeuristic news accounts and the constrained slave narratives” (248).
In effect, Morrison’s message about freedom, as Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Paul D all explain, meaning being allowed to love your own children–that is a postmodern element in this text. I suppose that’s as far as I would like to go–I feel uncomfortable classifying Morrison into a category she does not embrace herself–but I will say that there are various postmodern themes and motifs in Beloved, particularly that of the ultimate freedom to love. Unfortunately, it is that very freedom to love which leads to the terrible haunting that occurs in this story, particularly for Sethe– because Sethe finally allows herself to love her children, she tries to kill them and succeeds in killing the one who is quite overtly named Beloved.
As for Patrick Henry, I think perhaps he would understand Sethe’s choice given the last line of his rather ironic speech, only I am fairly certain that he and most of his fellow colonists were unable to see past their own feelings of “slavery” to see the reality of the slavery which they themselves perpetuated and deemed acceptable.