By Marcello Corbanese
At the center of Beloved rests the horrifying question in the back of every mind except Sethe’s: why would a mother kill her own daughter? Toni Morrison’s sprawling narrative provides a simple, confrontational answer, constructing in Sethe a mother who not only can kill her own daughter but, in fact, sees no other option. On the Sweet Home plantation, Sethe is both object and abject. Sethe’s slave master, his nephews, and even the Sweet Home men relegate her to the status of an animal—a cow to fuck or a goat to milk. Dehumanization alone does not render Sethe the subject of the abject, but it is what traps her in tension between human and animal. It makes Sethe the “ambiguous, the composite […] that disturbs identity, system, order” (Kristeva 4). To investigate her abjection, I seek to unite Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject with Frantz Fanon’s concept of muscular tension. Fanon observes that the native is permanently poised on the edge of an attack, thwarted only by his total subjugation; that “the native’s muscles are always tensed” for revolt, but that his tension paradoxically affords him humanity from within the systems which enslave him (Fanon 53). I argue that Beloved redefines Black “motherlove,” asserting its legitimacy outside traditional Western cognition and demonstrating that abject Black motherhood can become a method of self-humanization under slavery. By weaponizing her abjection, Sethe successfully protects her children and reclaims her humanity, as she radically embodies her freedom through the violence she enacts.
- Fanon and the Iron-Eyed Girl: Muscle into Metal
When Sethe arrives at Sweet Home, she is “already iron-eyed”—but despite being no stranger to the violence of chattel slavery, her time there turns her into the mother that kills Beloved (Morrison 12). Sweet Home is where Sethe becomes abject, her flesh mutable with that of cows or goats. Her abjection violates her womanhood, her motherhood, and her humanity. It is the violence of abjection which gives renewed power to the anger and fear that winds her muscles so tight their release precipitates murder.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon gives language to the power of repressed anger, metaphorizing the native’s muscular tension as “a reservoir of resistance to the colonizer’s acts” (Scott 65). Darieck Scott adds that the native’s tension is only intelligible through the “inherited toolbox [of] defeat,” and that these “bodily tensions express a particularly black abjection” (67). Aptly, Sweet Home utterly defeats and abjects Sethe. Raped for her milk while nine months pregnant and then whipped for reporting it, her eyes lose their “glittering iron” and become instead “two open wells that [do] not reflect firelight” (Morrison 11). In the moment of rape, Sethe is at the bottom of Sweet Home’s proverbial hierarchy. While Sethe’s slave master, Schoolteacher, remains firmly at the top, the Sweet Home men preside over Sethe as well. The enslaved men are workhorses—Paul D wears a bit in his mouth, and two others are chained in the stables—but Sethe is “too nasty to stay in with the horses” (McWeeny 273, Morrison 237). No, Sethe is “[a] goat” (237). Even her milk, which she prizes so dearly, is second-rate to the cow’s. Empowered by the depth of Sethe’s subjugation, Schoolteacher’s nephews gorge themselves while simultaneously starving her child. The terror of sexual violation melds with another, more terrifying violation: that of her motherhood.
The rape violates breastfeeding as one of the most intimate rituals of motherhood, and in so doing, reveals the depth of Sethe’s abjection. One of Schoolteacher’s nephews “suck[s] on [her] breast” while the other holds her down, perverting an act of love and care into one of horror and depravity (83). In Powers of Horror, Kristeva defines the abject as that which exists “in-between,” the “ambiguous” or “composite” which “[do] not respect borders” (Kristeva 4). As such, when a mother’s milk is forcibly extracted from her breasts for the perverse gratification of her slave owners, the mother and her milk become abject: it is both the goat’s milk and the mother’s milk. For all the emphasis Morrison places on Sethe’s breasts, what is left unwritten is the humanity visible in her swollen belly—a disturbing tableau that depicts the ‘composite’ of the abject with incredible clarity. In milking a mother like a goat, the rape neglects and annihilates the inherent power in pregnancy. Sethe’s pregnant body becomes animal data as Schoolteacher “watch[es] and writ[es] it up” from afar (Morrison 83). In the violence of Sethe’s abjection from her pregnant body, Morrison asserts that Black motherhood exists on slavery’s bottom rung.
Even the Sweet Home men, subjugated under the same system, are active agents in Sethe’s abjection. When Sethe, thirteen, arrives on the plantation, the enslaved men are “so sick with the absence of women [that] they [have] taken to calves,” raping the animal instead of the girl (12). Sethe’s body, which nurtures and carries precious life, becomes mutable with that of a cow’s. Unlike Schoolteacher, Sweet Home’s ‘workhorse’ men enact their violence against Sethe under the veil of abjection themselves. What they perceive as chivalry is actually further subjugation, placing Sethe under the umbrella of bestiality rather than privileging her outside of it. Between cow, goat, and mother, it is the violence of the abject that “punche[s] out” Sethe’s eyes and hardens the unreflective iron in them (11). Sweet Home, and particularly the rape of her milk, instills in Sethe “an anger which [the settler] deprives of outlet” (Fanon 54). It inflicts an intersectional abjection on her Blackness, her womanhood, and her motherhood that aggravates her muscular tension to the point of unbearable stress. Portentously, it funnels that tension toward her identity as a mother, concentrating inward; it ferments and grows stronger, waiting to be unleashed.
- Fly High, Free Bird: Sethe’s Release and Reclamation
In Extravagant Abjection, Darieck Scott cites Fanon’s suggestion that the black body, and indeed black consciousness, “‘knows’ how to defend itself even when the tools of organized politics or revolutionary theory […] are not available, or as yet unformed” (Scott 70). While Sethe does not have the language for rebellion, the muscular tension generated by her abjection is released involuntarily at key moments as a powerful internal defense system. Morrison signals these releases with the auditory and tactile imagery of hummingbirds pricking at Sethe’s scalp in warning. The hummingbird is Morrison’s symbol for the part of Sethe’s consciousness formed through the abjection of slavery. While the cow and the goat are herd animals—slow, heavy, and passive—the hummingbird is small yet “highly territorial” and will defend its grounds “vigorously, whether or not the intruder is of their own family, and quite regardless of size” (González 82). Sethe is still abject–caught between animal and human–but Morrison literally elevates her above her past subjugation when she associates Sethe with the freedom of a bird rather than the utility of livestock. As a cow or goat on the Sweet Home plantation, Sethe was reduced to her sexual anatomy: her breasts and her vagina. The hummingbirds, however, needle her head and hair, leaving her body untouched. They, like Sethe, are vicious defenders who prioritize safety above all, even at the cost of their own children. When Morrison places the hummingbird at the heart of each release, she asserts Sethe’s reclamation of her abjection. The composite of the goat and the mother is one that drives her to intense anger and fear, but the composite of the bird and the mother is what turns that fear into abject Black motherlove.
Sethe’s scalp is first needled as she overhears Schoolteacher instructing his pupils to “put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right” (Morrison 228). In Playing in the Dark, Morrison posits that the “Africanist” persona is “reflexive”; it is the vehicle through which the white American self knows that it is “not repulsive, but desirable […] not damned, but innocent” (17; 52). The monstrosity of slavery condemns its enactors to the former by default, but Schoolteacher, who operates his violent regime on the pretext of scientific inquiry, must displace his own monstrosity onto Sethe to absolve himself of it. The reflexivity of the “Africanist” persona is why he whips her in punishment after the rape of her milk—she suffers for his sins in his stead. As such, when Sethe reckons with the clinical separation of the constituent parts of her abjection, she also reckons with a monstrosity that was never hers to begin with. That confrontation is what first pushes her muscular tension to the point of release. Her body moves automatically: she “just ke[eps] lifting [her] feet and pushing back,” walking blindly until she bumps into a tree and feels “fine needles in [her] scalp” (228). It is the first moment of involuntary release, but it is not complete. While later, the needles will be further defined as the needle beaks of hummingbirds, at Sweet Home, they are divorced of their animal characteristics and reduced to simple tactile imagery: Sethe has yet to reclaim her abjection. She does not grasp the totality of his word, in particular, the word ‘characteristics,’ and remains abject as defined by Schoolteacher’s regime. Sethe’s first yoked release is pain that cannot rebel since her children have, at that point, already left the plantation. With nothing to protect but herself, she can only furtively plan her own escape.
Contrast this with the mother who confronts Schoolteacher in the shed. As the hummingbirds stick their beaks into her hair, they are reunited with their animal characteristics—so too is Sethe reunited with the children onto which her abjection focused the complete power of her muscular tension. Schoolteacher’s presence at 124 Bluestone is a tripartite threat: of a return to slavery for Sethe, of an entrance into slavery for her children, but most importantly, of further violation of her motherhood. Schoolteacher is the living reminder that she has “at least ten breeding years left” to give to Sweet Home and that somebody could “list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper” (176; 296). It is also the return of Schoolteacher outside the bounds of the American South which urges her to reclaim her abjection as protection. In Sartre’s words:
Hardly has the second generation opened their eyes than from then on they’ve seen their fathers being flogged. In psychiatric terms, they are “traumatized” for life. But these constantly renewed aggressions, far from bringing them to submission, thrust them into an unbearable contradiction which the European will pay for sooner or later. […] Make no mistake about it; by this mad fury, by this bitterness and spleen, by their ever-present desire to kill us, by the permanent tensing of powerful muscles which are afraid to relax, they have become men: men because of the settler, who wants to make beasts of burden of them—because of him, and against him (Fanon 17).
Sethe’s mode of protection does not conform to Western tradition because there exists no actor in Beloved—nor under chattel slavery—whose dehumanization is more absolute than that of the Black slave mother. To become a woman, then, she finds an alternative avenue for self-determination, one informed by the particular status of the Black slave mother as abject. Threatened with a return to Sweet Home, her “psyche shrinks back, obliterates itself and finds outlet in muscular demonstrations which have caused certain very wise men to say that [she] is a hysterical type” (Fanon 56). Sethe’s reaction may seem unreasonable for Schoolteacher and his nephews, but an expression of a psyche which knows it is not safe at the surface; a psyche which instead resides behind a wall of muscle that remains flexed for defense. The hummingbird-itch she feels in her hair signals an encroachment of her past abjection, a “rapid expansion of thought” that encompasses her entire violent history (Terrill 134). It is the moment that her psyche must find a physical outlet because it cannot bear the violence once more. It is the moment that a mother protects her daughter the only way she knows how: through the flexing of muscles powered by a now reclaimed abjection. She kills her daughter, “and the hummingbird wings beat on” (Morrison 192).
The bird is an extension of Sethe’s consciousness—her involuntary animal instinct meted out from her corporeal form for her own sanity and survival. Contrary to Sartre’s claim, Sweet Home does not make Sethe a woman through ‘mad fury’ alone, but through a filtration of that mad fury into love. The nephew who drank Sethe’s milk while his brother assaulted her is “shaking” at the scene in the woodshed: “the phobic has no other object than the abject” (Morrison 176; Kristeva 6). Morrison asserts Sethe’s newfound power through the nephew’s fear. He is not scared of Sethe; he is scared of his own reflection, of the abjection he displaced onto Sethe. Sethe’s perceived mental illness of a mother “gone wild” is yet another expression of the reflexive “Africanist” persona (176). Confronted with renewed intensity, Beloved’s murder awards Schoolteacher and his nephews the opportunity for further absolution and displacement of the severity of their crimes. Initially displaced onto her body via abjection, it is now displaced onto her mind via insanity. Morrison’s hummingbird thus becomes the antithesis of Schoolteacher’s goat. Whereas the goat represents a violence that radically suppresses love and humanity, the hummingbird radically reasserts love and humanity through violence.
By the end of the novel, Sethe’s reclaimed abjection not only protects, but it heals. She relives that fateful moment at 124 Bluestone surrounded by a village of Black mothers and daughters. It is a safe release of her muscular tension, wherein she “hears wings” and feels the full extent of the violence of her past, finally exorcizing Beloved’s ghost (308). Sartre claims that “anguish is the mode of being of freedom as consciousness of being,” and that consciousness is body (Sartre 29). Therefore, Sethe’s hummingbird wings—her reclaimed abjection—confirm her freedom from the system which impressed it upon her. Morrison provides that confirmation by making her flesh mutable with a weapon. The ice pick “is not in her hand; it is her hand” (Morrison 309, emphasis added). If anguish is freedom as consciousness of being, and consciousness is body, then as Sethe becomes violence, she also becomes freedom. In her deep anguish, her community surrounds her: the trauma of her abjection brought Beloved to 124 Bluestone, but it also reunites Baby Suggs’ disciples to exorcize her of it. Morrison asserts thus that abject Black motherhood, as it exists on slavery’s bottom rung, must find alternative avenues for healing. Indeed, it may turn back up the same path it came from, weaponizing what has beaten it down in order to lift itself back up again.
Beloved works to recontextualize Sethe’s abject Black motherhood as not just a product of slavery, but also as the precise vehicle through which Sethe may radically reclaim her humanity and her community. Morrison’s hummingbirds are a reminder of the incredible strength necessary to turn abjection into love—they are a symbol of female resistance that is abject only because its rebellion crosses the border between life and death. Kristeva’s concept of the abject explains the ‘iron’ of an abject Black mother’s eyes; Fanon’s concept of muscular tension explains the power that sits dormant behind them. Together, they provide the theoretical framework for understanding Morrison’s hummingbird as the literalization of the extraordinary energy Sethe expends in turning her violence outward rather than allowing its continued focus inward. In transforming the violence of Sethe’s abjection into a force for healing, Morrison makes the most important assertion of all: abject Black mothers not only deserve love and understanding but are also invaluable and powerful agents in healing the collective trauma of slavery.
Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004.
González, Susana Vega. “Broken Wings of Freedom: Bird Imagery in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, no. 7, 2000, pp. 75-94. Universidad de Oviedo. Accessed 20 April 2024.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1993.
McWeeny, Jennifer. “Topographies of Flesh: Women, Nonhuman Animals, and the Embodiment of Connection and Difference.” Hypatia, vol. 29, no. 2, 2014, pp. 269–86. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542034. Accessed 20 Apr. 2024.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Pocket Books, 1972.
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. NYU Press, 2010.
Terrill, William. “Sacred Groves and the “Jungle Whitefolks Planted”: The Dynamic Symbolism of Trees in Beloved.” Monmouth College, pp. 126-145. https://research.monm.edu/mjur/files/2019/02/MJUR-i05-2015-7-Terrill.pdf. Accessed 20 Apr. 2024.