Supernatural As an Instrument of Effective Retelling of History of the Marginalized, In Toni Morrison’S Beloved

to make him come to terms with his past except for Beloved. Thus the supernatural once again serves the purpose of exorcising the painful past in people unable to come to terms with it: Ironically the lid is prised open by something supernatural, the ghost of Beloved in the form of a young woman. As she seduces him he does not hear the flakes of rust fall from the seams and the lid eventually gives. (96 Peach) The novel thus unravels its plot only with the coming in of Beloved. The long closed lids are reopened. The denouement is seen when Denver suffering from the loneliness that she had at one imposed upon herself finds companionship in her resurrected sister. However at one point in time parts of Beloved’s body seem to be falling off: Beloved has mental and physical peculiarities parts of her body threaten to fall out. She has a scar on her throat, her infrequent speech is childish. Though apparently a stranger she knows intimate things about Sethe, including the lullaby that Sethe sang for her babies. (118 Kubitschek) Denver is the close companion of Beloved and being so is able to notice all these peculiarities. However, arising out of a long time loneliness she refuses to let Beloved go, inspite of knowing that it is Sethe that Beloved loves the most and Denver’s help to retain herself in the household is the only thing she desires of her, Denver keeps her company. Her only fear is her losing Beloved. This is metaphorical of the fact that Denver’s redeeming of herself from the loneliness that she had imposed just to keep a barrier between herself and her past is slowly coming to terms with her. Her introduction to her past is relative, her past is defined by the deeds of her family, chiefly her mother; thus her escape from the past as well as her coming to terms with it are relatively easier. The comraderie she seeks from Beloved is but the initiation that would ultimately lead to her acceptance of the past and thus she is the one endowed by the plot to break away from Beloved’s fix and get help for her mother, whom she realizes she will soon lose: Denver identifies the woman as the returned ghost and welcomes her as a sister. Soon however she is frightened to discover that the spirit is covertly attacking Sethe. For example, while pretending to massage Sethe’s back, Beloved tries to choke her. (118 kubitschek) The end, of the novel when the realization of Denver had already taken place and she had sought help from Lady Jones in terms of sustenance we find Sethe in pitiable state, there seems to be a competition between Beloved and Sethe in terms of deriving nutrition. The jobless Sethe is berated constantly by Beloved for having left her. The guilt that seemed to have always been a major component of Sethe’s mind malnutrition whereas Beloved grows. The symbolism in it is apparent. The guilt that survives in the heart of Sethe is long present, it was temporarily suppressed or its suppression was aimed at as Beloved was never erased from her memory neither the act that she had performed to save herself in her child from the hands of the tyrannous schoolteacher: Simple, she just flew collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried pushed and dragged them through the veil, out, away over there where no one could hurt them. Over there, outside this place, where they would be safe. And the Hummingbird wings beat on. (163 Morrison) It is but a fact that though she had never accepted in the eyes of law that she had committed a crime for which she was released after a short sentence; the guilt of losing a child by her own hands, by inflicting upon it a painful death might not be restricted to her impulse to spare her own part the horror it had so long witnessed in life; there might as well be a sado-masochist tendency that had resulted in her a stimulus to out-hurt the hurter. Whatever might be the case the aspect of guilt in her is something that is yet to be dealt with and in this comes the supernatural in Beloved. The duality of meaning; the play between the real and the unreal that Morrison engages in comes to show the intended impact at this point of the novel when the previous portrayal where the “narrator describes first meeting with Beloved in terms that suggest birth: Sethe’s body gushes water, a parallel to the breaking of water just before labour.”(118 Kubitschek) The coming out of Beloved with water dripping from her garments seemed to be the representation of the dead who as according to the biblical doctrine is thought to wear new clothes especially new shoes much like beloved. It is here that Morrison seems to have stretched her fantastical creation too far. Her intention to incorporate the supernatural as the metaphorical seems to be crossing the boundaries of the subtle to an emphatic portrayal almost over the mark, at the hands of the author. The reference to new clothes and new shoes seem to be the evidence of this very fact which in turn is aggravated when at the end of the novel when she leaves, “a boy reports to have seen a woman with fish in her hair walking toward the creek from which Beloved had emerged months before”(120 Kubitschek). However, it is to be noted that the importance of the image is the presence of water; if mind is the canvass for reflection and the nature of water is to reflect as well, then Beloved’ s coming out of water is symbolic of the memory coming to existence. pattern. However, in this case Morrison has utilised this realistic unreal in a sensible way: Because she personifies the past, and no one can change past events, Beloved cannot change or develop. Beloved always remains a two-year old, with a two year old understanding. Amoral, she has no consciousness of doing wrong in trying to fulfil her own needs. She remains unaware of other’s needs.”(125 Kubitcshek) This falls in place as the childlike intensity gives to the readers a belief of the fact that the dead child in its resurrection has come with the unadulterated innocence; Passages are left unpunctuated and Beloved herself uses words out of order while omitting words important to the sense all together: for example, ‘where your diamonds?’; “tell me your earrings”: The coherence and chaos of the sections involving Beloved which at one point become poetry, are manifestations of the divinity and isolation which she represents. (109 Peach) The divinity, as mentioned is truly because of the fact that this will be an experience to be turned to by the witnesses a moment of realization of the intensity of the past scars. But on the other hand this apparent innocence makes Sethe correspond this image of Beloved with the one retained in her mind that acts as a catalyst in intensifying her guilt. The pregnancy of Beloved is yet another question to be answered. Considering the fact that the supernatural in Beloved is metaphorical in usage yet the pregnancy metaphor lies unanswered. If Beloved is the materialization of the past, then the possibility of the past coming to the present and attempting to create the future, is but a dangerous possibility. Beloved’s pregnancy can be interpreted at multiple levels. In consideration of Beloved as a supernatural being the myth of the succubus and incubus comes to play: Beloved who plays the succubus and incubus, collects the sperm from Paul D to impregnate herself, then uses the life force of her mother’s body to sustain her spawn. (422 Barnett) Thus Morrison once again uses the dyad of the unreal reality to cast the myth of the succubus and incubus to fit the dimension of her novel. Yet the practical implication of the incident might be considered as the motif in which the coming to terms with the guilt ridden memory of Sethe being the most difficult, her failure to accept the past would have the possibility of her creating a renewed painful past for her successors, including Denver: Beloved is – the past creates the present, but it cannot give birth in the present. Birth would change Beloved (the past) and the present. The past is past: it has created the present but cannot change the future.(125 Kubitschek) This fear it might with her own past as she relives it. In viewing Denver’s employer Mr. Bodwin riding up , Sethe replaces his figure with that of the schoolteacher’s who had one day rode up in similar fashion to disrupt the newly introduced peaceful life that Sethe was living. She goes on to attack Mr. Bodwin and in the process rids herself of the past itself: Physically frozen in time since she killed Beloved, Sethe cannot distinguish between Mr. Bodwin in the present and schoolteacher in the past. She sees only that a man is riding into her yard. Determined to do now what she could not do before, she protects her children by attacking the man with an ice pick. Fortunately, the women pull her away before she damages him. Misunderstanding, Beloved thinks that her mother has once again abandoned her.(120 Peach) This is the climactic moment when the truth of Sethe confronts her once again. Her life that had been a bundle of contradictions before this moment has its knots cleared at once. The repetition of the same action as what she had performed ages before clearly refers to the fact that her protective instincts overpower her at the moment of crisis. The guilt that had been arising in her silently and which had dwelled in her for so long; owing to which she had begged forgiveness and tried to reason out herself with beloved stands cleared. The determining fact is that the sadomasochistic impulses that had lied in close correspondence to her elemental urge of saving her children from the hands of abominable slavery is done away with. Now though not portrayed explicitly, the urge to attack Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick is not the result of any sado-masochist impulse but the purest drive to save her children and keep them away from harm’s way. The previous action that she had performed had given her the hardest time of her life and the present action might be considered as the proper channelization of the same impulses that in the past had given her the chance to doubt her own intentions in killing her child. If in case it was due to pure sado-masochist impulses because of which she had harmed her child then it would but be a selfish act and the dignity of the deed would be forever denied putting her on the grounds of a selfish mother. However, that possibility is done away with as Morrison metaphorically makes Beloved move away. Even though here once again Morrison’s extraneousness is seen as the action of Beloved’s leave is portrayed as Beloved seems to be dejected by her mother’s reaction which seems to her to be the repetition of the same action that had drove Beloved from Sethe forever. The metaphor, signifies that with the clearance of the guilt that Sethe had been living in, the domain of the past that had emerged from its suppression have found its acceptance both with

Morrison’s skill lies in the fact that she makes brilliant use of one element to encompass all possible shades of meaning. The use of supernatural in her work is one element. The most famous statement one knows about the novel Beloved is that it is a slave narrative. This infact is true: “Beloved is the story of sixty million and more.” Here, Beloved once again implies both the events that happen in the course of the novel as well as the character Beloved, who embodies the same. while in the novel the individual characters are stressed upon, there lies hidden the implication of the failed grand narratives. Not only is the failure brought to the front but the deconstructive usage of these grand narratives are also implied: The Bible read from a particular historicised, cultural, perspective, was one of the means by which colonial authorities tried to inculcate Western values and introduce European or Anglo- European notions of culture to Africa. Indeed its apparent dualism – ‘Black Satan’ and ‘The snow white Lamb of God’ – appeared not only to justify slavery as a particular text, as it were.(110 Peach) This implies the presence of Bible as a multilayered narrative. The deconstructive mechanisms once used by the whites may be counter used by The African American’s as well: Through its delineation of the history of the Jewish nation, the Bible expounded the trials and miseries of slavery. It offered slaves a source of communal strength through notions of faith, grace and the holy spirit, even a means of achieving healing.(100 Peach) Beloved in its own way carves the path to trot this deconstructive journey. It won’t be an overtly outrageous statement to say that Morrison’s series of novels contain in them religious themes that are of similar pattern as In Dante’s The Divine Comedy: The title of the third novel Paradise, suggests the scope of Morrison’s project by recalling the work of the fourteenth century Italian poet, Dante. In three volumes of his Divine Comedy, Dante recounts his spiritual journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. The Divine Comedy contains many details about the politics of Dante’s own time and place, the fourteenth century city-state of Florence.”(117 Kubitschek) Beloved presents in itself similar themes. The function of the supernatural in beloved with respect to this deconstructive notion of the Bible is apparent in the possessiveness of Beloved towards her mother as she says: “I am Beloved and she is mine” as also the possessiveness of Sethe towards her resurrected daughter,” Beloved, she mine”. These have their source in The Song of Solomon, which had inspired the title and in part the concern with ancestral wisdom, apparently the worst fortune for Sethe and Denver thus using the apparently holy signification in an unholy fashion. However the principle of reversal is once again at its play in considering the duality in the presence of beloved: the spirit that seems to be wrecking havocs with the life of people in 124 has a purgatory role to play as well. Thus the unholy becomes the holy. This seems to be the repetition of the holy Bible in a way that corresponds with it and yet goes against its white interpretation and follows the Biblical story in which Hosea calls one of her three children ‘ not beloved’, a representative of the Israelites who had been temporarily rejected as punishment for their own betrayal. After a period of retribution God reclaims the lost people: I will claim them my people Which were not my people And her beloved, Which was not beloved. (100 Peach) The subversion that Morrison had represented thus makes use of the supernatural to achieve its purpose. Beloved being the supernatural in the novel also resurrects along with itself the African supernatural fables that had seemingly gotten suppressed and lost under the foreign domination thus: As a character then, Beloved is commensurate with the fantastical in African literature which is traceable back to concrete, social historical events. But Beloved moves from one plane of reference to another, literally destabilising the novel which also moves from the plane of reference to another. This destabilising is central to the novel because just as Morrison’s creative use of the Bible in the epigraph exemplifies how African American writers find an ’African’ text in the white man’s religious book, Beloved reminds us of other texts inside the narrative of slavery which have come down to us by white male chroniclers.(102-102 Peach) Thus the story of Beloved ends with the similar note of subversion regarding the nature of the ‘pass on’ that the author hints at. The phrase ‘pass on’ itself has dual meaning, the ‘passing away’ or deletion of the event from the memory of the later generations or something that is to be carried onto them as a lesson. In doing so Morrison ends her novel doing a dual job: of bringing deconstruction to a level of understanding that leaves interpretation at the hands of the realistic future; meaning ‘beloved’s story will pass on if it has to, else not’ thus the writer presents an “As You Like it” of her text of multiple meanings, one of which is definitely to subvert the known parameters in favour all sides of the individual characters in their dealing with their tragic past, imparting a three dimensional reality to the novel. While at the same time the fact of suppression is resurrected in the modes more than one and in this case through the memory presented as a supernatural stalker, that demands purgation.

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