From Clouds to Caskets: Matrilineal Violence in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Trauma is a contagion. Once exposed, there’s a multiplicity of effects on several planes of existence: physiological trauma, psychological trauma, and metaphysical trauma—the kind that reaches out and infects time and space. In Beloved, Toni Morrison ingeniously inhabits this third dimension of trauma as she explores the nature of traumatic violence that spreads across generations. Towards the end of the novel she marks the shocking beginning of matrilineal violence for African slaves with a stilted, yet haunting gestalt of the collective and transient experience of enslavement through the eyes of a young African girl, who both is and is not Beloved. This tableau connects matrilineal violence to violence against oppressed African women—both of which are symptoms of an even greater disease: a racist patriarchy that robs women of their right to create healthy bonds with their daughters, which in turn damages the daughter’s ability to have a healthy and transformative experience within black girlhood.
On the slave ship, the African girl says the enslaved man’s singing was that “of the place where the woman takes flowers away from their leaves and puts them in a round basket” (Morrison, p. 250). Throughout the novel, baskets are described as holding objects that represent life—flowers, food, and babies. Later, Morrison writes that Sethe is also the woman with the flowers in the basket, where Beloved—or the unnamed African girl—watched her from above the clouds. Despite having not been born (or only being an infant), Sethe’s also the woman on the ship with the iron circle around her neck—the woman who threw herself to fatal freedom rather than smile at the girl. This detail signifies the cycle of black women’s enslavement: enslaved while she waited in heaven to be born, enslaved as a young girl desperate for her mother to love her, enslaved as a young girl never granted the opportunity to grow into a woman ultimately destined for death. This narrative challenges readers to see the spacio-temporal condition of violence against black women. Morrison creates space for the absent woman or child, the ones who don’t get stories written about them, and expands the narrator’s experience with violence to all slaves. With that expansion she acknowledges the existence of generational trauma.
The very first instance of matrilineal violence depicted is that of Sethe’s murder of Beloved. However, in the timeline of Beloved, it’s not the first time a mother has taken the life of her child. When she was a young girl, Sethe’s Nan, the slave woman who was positioned to raise Sethe once Sethe’s mother was ordered back to work in the rice fields, told her she and her mother were repeatedly raped on the voyage from Africa to America, and Sethe’s mother became pregnant many times as a result. Out of rebellion or spite, she murdered the children she birthed from the white men who raped her and kept only Sethe—the African child she conceived consensually with a black man (p. 73).
The second instance of matrilineal violence is also at the hands of Sethe’s mother. When she showed the brand her owner burned into her skin, young Sethe said she wanted to be branded too so that her mother recognized her if she were murdered. Sethe’s mother, knowing that to be branded is to be forcefully owned which is nothing to be proud, smacked the ignorance out of Sethe (p. 74). In this instance, Sethe’s mother’s violence was meant to teach Sethe something about agency and the role a racist patriarchy plays in denying black women the right to it.
That was one of the few interactions Sethe had with her mother. Raised by Nan, Sethe rarely spent time with her mother—although she continued to love the idea of her. When Sethe’s mother was hung, she refused to believe it was in retaliation for an attempt to escape slavery. Sethe didn’t want to believe her mother would try to escape without her, because Sethe “wouldn’t draw breathe without [her children]” (pp. 239-240). Later, Paul D told Sethe her love was “too thick,” but Sethe’s response that “love is or it ain’t” was all the evidence she needed to know her mother shouldn’t have left her behind if she had, in fact, been hung because she tried to escape (pp. 193-4).
When Sethe attempted to escape Sweet Home with her three children, she sacrificed her freedom for theirs. Her punishment for trying to escape was a whipping so brutal she was left with scars that resembled a tree, a “chokecherry tree” Amy Denver would later clarify (p. 93), a symbol not only of lynching, but also of the generational trauma endured by black women. Before she was whipped, Sethe’s swollen belly was placed in a hole in the ground as she was beaten by the white men, an overt reference to the future of enslaved motherhood—doomed to perish. After her beating, Sethe was robbed of the milk her pregnant body had produced, further symbolizing a slave woman’s lack of freedom in regards to motherhood. Sethe was bereft over being robbed of the milk meant for an unborn Denver, because motherhood was something Sethe cherished ever since she was denied the love of her own mother, a mother that wasn’t allowed the freedom to love Sethe untethered.
Once free and shrouded in the perceived safety of 124 Bluestone Road, Sethe was immersed in Baby Sugg’s positive self-love: ‘ “And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them’ ” (p. 104). It’s this encouragement, I believe, that further validated the kind of “deep and wide” love that led Sethe to assault her sons and murder Beloved (p. 190). Unfortunately, this act severely traumatized Baby Suggs as much as it did the rest of 124 Bluestone Road, and she lost the will to preach affirmations of self-love as a result.
When Sethe saw Schoolteacher traveling down the road toward their home, she doesn’t stop to think about what she’s going to do. The love she refused to abandon as an enslaved woman catapulted her toward the same actions as her mother—albeit with different motives. Perhaps this is why Sethe changed her reactions from “unimpressed” as a child to “angry, but not certain at what” upon learning about the infanticide of her siblings at the hands of her mother (p. 74). The “at what” Sethe wasn’t sure about was registered here as she flew toward her daughter’s murder—Sethe’s mother murdered her children with hate in her heart, while Sethe’s motives were based in love.
The nature of motherhood as an enslaved mother, even once freed, was one of unrest and uncertainty. Sethe’s mother couldn’t control how she became a mother, neither could Ella, a woman from town who was also brutally raped by her masters and then committed infanticide by refusing to feed the child. Even Baby Suggs chose not to love her children after her first child was sold, leaving her heartbroken. Sethe, on the other hand, refused not to love her children, and as a result, she didn’t suffer the way those who came before her did—leaving her children to suffer in her stead. In order to keep her children from the clutches of Schoolteacher and his sons, Sethe chose mercy and tried to remove all of them from a world where white men reign supreme.
This trauma infected all of Sethe’s children, just as it did 124 Bluestone Rd. Once Beloved is slain, she haunted her home. “124 was spiteful,” Morrison writes, “Full of a baby’s venom” (p. 3). These are the very first words written in Beloved and the first sign that Beloved refused to accept her denied girlhood. Denver, the surviving daughter, was also robbed of the opportunity to explore her world as she grew into a young woman. The town’s rejection of Sethe after Beloved’s murder contributed to the reclusive nature of Sethe and Denver, but most of their problems stem from Beloved’s ghost—both its physical and metaphysical representations. Without the freedom of experience, Denver was emotionally stunted and largely identified herself through her mother and her dead sister. She hadn’t really known the love or company of anyone else after her grandmother, Baby Suggs, died: “Ever since I was little [Beloved] was my company and she helped me wait for my daddy [. . .] I love my mother but I know she killed one of her own daughters, and tender as she is with me, I’m scared of her because of it” (p. 242).
While Denver relied on her “emerald closet” for solace (p. 45), Beloved was forced to haunt the home where she precociously climbed steps as baby. Her trauma was made physical, seeping into every fiber and grain of wood as it tried to convince Sethe to examine Beloved’s murder and acknowledge the resulting trauma. Morrison writes, “124 was so full of strong feelings perhaps [Sethe] was oblivious to the loss of anything at all” (p. 47). It isn’t until Sethe relived her past and confronted the consequences of unprocessed trauma (and the community of women that abandoned her collectively resolves their prejudice against Sethe and comes to her defense), that Beloved can be exercised from both Sethe and 124 Bluestone Road.
Beloved made her last stand on the porch of 124, naked, pregnant, and “dazzling” onlookers with her smile (p. 308). She held an ice pick, a tool and symbol of all the violence she embodied, but Sethe took it from her when she heard wings as Mr. Bodwin’s approached, she flew like she did after Schoolteacher came for her and her children—but this time, she was stopped before she could kill her target. Given a second opportunity, the community stepped in and saved Sethe from herself, but her choice to go after the source of her threatened motherhood signified the transition of Sethe’s perception of motherhood. Before, when a white man came for her and her children, Sethe targeted her children because killing them was showing them mercy—it was better to be dead than to be a slave. The second time, Sethe chose to attack the one she believed would be responsible for their enslavement. This shift signified Sethe’s differing prioritization in the moments before she and her children were potentially taken captive again. Rather than exercise the only power she knew, the only power that was bred into her, Sethe rose above her oppression and targeted the source of it. Sethe chose to fight the white man rather than subvert him.
As Sethe’s attempt to kill Mr. Bodwin is thwarted, Beloved’s claim to Sethe dissolved. This denial of violence within motherhood could potentially complete the cycle of violence as it relates to Beloved and her journey, and her disappearance certainly suggests that, but I think it could be interpreted a different way too. When Denver and the town stopped Sethe from attacking Mr. Bodwin, Beloved may have simply become a victim again—a victim of the trauma that twice birthed, bred, and murdered her—and now her unborn child too. She’s the mother and the daughter, the perpetrator and the victim. She’s trauma personified and given purpose, but she’s not a girl or a woman of her own. Matrilineal violence robbed Beloved of her right to birth and bond with the child in her belly, just as it robbed her of a living girlhood and relationship with her mother.
The relationship between mother and daughter is transient—constantly changing as mother and daughter relate to one another. However, if this relationship is denied, whether through vicarious or merciful violence or through forced abandonment, the relationship between mother and daughter becomes stagnant. Beloved and Sethe are mostly able to mend the bond that Sethe broke when she murdered Beloved, but that’s only because Morrison employed a supernatural narrative. In reality, a relationship that doesn’t move can never flourish. The abandoned daughter must fill in the blanks of what her mother would have, or could have, offered her, and Morrison doesn’t often fill the void of motherhood with healthy alternatives.
Violence is ultimately about control, and violence committed by women within a patriarchal society is, ironically, most often felt by other women. Much of this violence occurs between mothers and daughters—as a daughter can represent the robbed girlhood of many black mothers. Violence of this kind significantly damages a daughter’s ability to build a healthy bond with their mother and therefore form a cohesive, independent identity away from the trauma their mothers imposed on them. Acting as the centripetal force that keeps the cycle going, racist, patriarchal oppression operates as a form of metaphysical trauma that can be experienced for generations. The mothers and daughters of Beloved suffered different degrees of trauma, but they were all at the mercy of the matrilineal violence that dictated each of their future relationships with black girlhood.
