defined above. The free black community in the nineteenth century represents a borderland between
two more established cultures: the black slave culture and the free white slave-owning culture. Like
Anzaldua’s borderland, the free black community in Beloved has no fixed, institutionalized,
organized moral and social codes of behavior and thought. It can be defined as an “unnatural
boundary” because it is a relatively new community with no social precedents, whose vulnerable
existence is compounded by unrelenting white hatred and disrespect. Living “in between” two
conflicting cultures results in the tension, ambivalence, and unrest that Anzaldua describes.
Anzaldua also describes how “[t]ribal rights over those of the individual insured the survival of the
tribe…. The welfare of the family, the community, and the tribe is more important than the welfare of
the individual. The individual exists first as kin–a sister, a father, a padrino–and last as self” (18).
Beloved’s free black community can be compared to Anzaldua’s tribe, to a culture that needs to
protect itself from, while existing within, a dominant colonial culture. Compounding this problem is
the fact that the colonial culture legitimizes only the selfless state of slavery for blacks. The
community, therefore, struggles constantly for the right, the opportunity, and the freedom to exist.
Paradoxically, it must continue the process that the dominant culture has begun–the suppression of
black individual subjectivity–in order to validate its position in society and the choices it has made.
Thus, as I will argue below, Sethe is punished severely for trying to assert her own and her
daughter’s rights to subjectivity by a community still operating within a ruling ideology that
commodifies black personhood.
Morrison articulates another motivation behind the communal ostracism of Sethe in the
following excerpt:
Whitepeople believed that … under every dark skin was a jungle…. In a
way … they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying
to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human …
the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the
jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable)
place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. (198-99)
The continued internalization of being labeled “other” leads to the denial of black individual voice
and subjectivity, thereby twisting the free black community’s moral code to the point where it will
turn on one of its own. Internalization of white fear and hate intensifies the tension and ambivalence
that Anzaldua describes as part of a border culture. Because of the internalization of a white colonial
morality and the constant ambivalence of a border culture, the free black community
self-destructively measures and judges Sethe by a morality that denies subjectivity.
The fact that Sethe’s community operates under an internalized system oppressive to black identity
informs her motivations for killing her child. Because her community chooses to withdraw its
support, it denies Sethe the opportunity to escape from the schoolteacher as he rides to 124 with the
sheriff. The community’s inaction forces Sethe to try to save her children from a life of imposed
silence and denied selfhood by some other means. Sethe “flew, snatching up her children like a
hawk on the wing … her face beaked … her hands worked like claws … she collected them every
which way … into the woodshed” (157) where she tries “to kill her children” (158). When Paul D
learns about Sethe’s act, he is repulsed. He cannot understand that infanticide is the only possibility,
the only course of action open to Sethe within a colonial discourse. Her internalization of the
lessons of commodification encourages Sethe to act, in a highly problematic attempt to save her
children from commodification, as if they are not only extensions of herself, but also her
possessions. In an internal dialogue with Beloved, Sethe thinks,
Some other way, he said. Let schoolteacher haul us away, I guess, to
measure your behind before he tore it up? I have felt what it felt like and
nobody … is going to make you feel it too. Not you, not none of mine, and
when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours. I wouldn’t draw breath
without my children…. My plan was to take us all to the other side where
my own ma’am is. (203)
By killing Beloved, Sethe refuses to allow her daughter to be objectified and commodified by a
colonialist culture. To Sethe, killing her child saves her not only from the physical suffering of
slavery but also from its “measuring,” which signifies an appropriation of discourse and an
oppression of black identity.
Despite its protective motivation, however, Sethe’s act effectively denies her daughter the chance to
live. It signifies her appropriation of the potential of her daughter’s yet unrealized subjectivity.
Bhabha’s theory of the colonial subject defines Sethe’s act as limited by its reaction to a
commodifying ideology. “It is always in relation to the place of the Other that colonial desire is
articulated: the phantasmic space of possession that no one subject can singly or fixedly occupy,
and therefore permits the dream of the inversion of roles” (44). Through his theorization of the
colonial subject, representing both the colonized and the colonizer, Bhabha defines the colonial
subject position as shifting rather than fixed. In the creation of a colonial subjecthood, colonial
discourse forms a space in which the positionalities of master and slave not only define each other,
but can shift into an inversion of roles. Such an inversion of roles cannot be subversive because it
remains within and therefore defined by a colonialist paradigm of domination and commodification.
Although several critics read Sethe’s act as resistive,(10) Bhabha’s concept of the colonial subject,
which enables a colonial contextualization of her act, defines her resistance as limited by the
isolationist ideologies of a Western colonialism. Bhabha’s definition of a shifting colonial subject
positionality allows a reading of Sethe’s identity in relation to the ruling colonial paradigm by
foregrounding Sethe’s changing position within a colonially constructed value system. In a reading
of Beloved as postcolonial, Sethe’s act becomes a desperate attempt at liberation within a context of
limited choices because of her community’s re-enactment of a colonial system’s power relations.
In murdering her daughter, Sethe attempts, in Anzaldua’s terms, a “counterstance”(11) against
the colonial forces that coercively have defined her as property and that threaten to do the same
to her children. Her counterstance exemplifies her attempt to subvert the oppressive system by
a kind of inversion of roles. In this case, Sethe tries to control her children’s fate by killing
them, thus occupying the colonizer’s commodifying role. Subsequently, the community’s
manifestation of collective internalization of an objectifying ideology (the ostracism of Sethe)
creates a “domino effect” which leads to Sethe’s reinscription within the ideological confines of a
colonial discourse. As Morrison writes, “Those twenty-eight happy days were followed by
eighteen years of disapproval and a solitary life” (173). Sethe’s “solitary life” is static; there
is no potential for personal growth. Sethe describes her life in those eighteen years as
“unlivable” (173). Because of her decision to kill her child and thus protect her from the
“unlivable” life of denied subjectivity in slavery, she herself returns to a life in which she is
unable to continue learning to “claim her freed self.”
The redundant cyclicity of “eighteen years of solitary life” cannot end, and Sethe cannot break
through the stasis of her existence, until she can step outside the confines of the dominant
colonial discourse. She cannot do so without finding resolution to her relationship with her
daughter. Beloved returns to 124 for the same reason she has haunted Sethe, to force her
mother to confront her past. The act that ends her life, her mother denying Beloved her own
identity, begins a cycle from which neither mother nor daughter can escape without some
movement towards resolution. When Beloved returns as a visible and tangible presence, Sethe
no longer can ignore and deny her painful past. Sethe is incapable of personal growth for many
years because she refuses to face her own commodification and its internalization. Instead,
Sethe’s denial of the colonial forces in her life continues to block the development of her
subjectivity. Within the narrative, Beloved’s physical presence and the ensuing interactive
relationship it begins between mother and daughter eventually force Sethe to acknowledge the
internalized colonization that she has hitherto ignored.
The first month Sethe and Beloved spend together seems idyllic (240). Soon, however, the
unresolved tension dominates the atmosphere: “it was Beloved who made demands. Anything she
wanted she got, and when Sethe ran out of things to give her, Beloved invented desire…. the mood
changed and the arguments began…. She took the best of everything–first” (240-41). Beloved
knows only desire; she knows only what she lacks. But she cannot be satisfied; her unbalanced
self, consisting only of desire, is inexhaustibly hungry. Sethe responds by trying to satisfy
Beloved’s desire: “Sethe played all the harder with Beloved, who never got enough of anything”
(240). Sethe is driven by the guilt of the past, by the memory of what she did to her daughter,
which causes her to focus obsessively on Beloved and neglect all other aspects of her personality
and her life:
Sethe pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her
reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own
life. That she would trade places any day. Give up her life, every minute
and hour of it, to take back just one of Beloved’s tears. (241-42)
Sethe’s obsessive focus is as unbalanced as Beloved’s desire. In trying to erase a past that cannot be
erased by wanting to exchange her life for Beloved’s pain, she succeeds only in re-emphasizing the
limitation of her own subjectivity. Her obsession cannot lead to a positive resolution between
herself and Beloved because it mimics the binary paradigms of a colonial discourse of
commodification.
While Sethe must deal with her past, she cannot deal with it at the expense of her present existence
and through the continued denial of her own internalization of a commodifying ideology. Sethe and
Beloved are “locked in a love that wore everybody out” (243). The desperate emotional interaction
between Sethe and Beloved intensifies as they continue trapped in a cycle with no relief. Sethe “sat
in the chair licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up
with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur” (250). Sethe still
attempts to erase the past, this time by taking the place of Beloved herself. The past and the
objectifying appropriation it represents, however, cannot be erased; Sethe must acknowledge her
own complicity in colonial appropriations within a binary system of violent possession and only
thus be enabled to create an alternate discourse of self-empowerment.