Race and the American Novel Project Part II: Critical Commentary

In her article, Hearing Reading and Being “Read” by Beloved, one point that the author Angela KM Gourdine makes is an argument about what the character Beloved is. Not so much as to what she is physically, but more in regards as to what she represents. In the view of Gourdine, Beloved represents, what she calls “disremembered”. The reason that Beloved returns is to once again be remembered.

Essentially the argument that Gourdine makes is that Sethe repressed or “dismembered” Beloved after her death and that in anger, Beloved returns in order to once again be remembered by her mother. “...I am suggesting that Beloved is repressed memory resurfaced and the consequence of attempts to repress and ignore painful and explosive memories,” (Gourdine, 15.) Beloved is not simply content with Sethe remembering her, but wants to change the present. She wants to be connected again with Sethe and be one with her. This is why she begins to drain the life from Sethe, because she is Beloved’s sustenance. “To resist her own devouring, Beloved sustains herself on her mother, and by reattaching the umbilical cord, her lifeline, she drains Sethe,” (Gourdine, 23).

Gourdine points out that Sethe not only represses the memory of killing her daughter, but also those memories of Sweet Home and her time as a slave. She points out that this repression takes place not only in the mind of Sethe, but in all black women in some way. Gourdine goes even further and connects this repression to society as a whole. “Beloved reminders the readers, and those she encounters in the world of the text, that slavery, though repealed, is still with us; every dark body is haunted by it, marked by it,” (Gourdine, 18). Try as we might as a society to repress memories of slavery and try to escape it, we still feel its effects today, and repressing it will do no good.

This take, I feel, is a very profound one. I agree with this assessment, and this makes enhances the theme of letting go of the past. Viewing the story in this light, it is much easier to see that the novel is a story of a woman who has to forgive herself for what she has done. Sethe’s inability to forgive herself and simply repress the memory only makes it worse. She is filled with regret yet cannot fully bring herself to let go of her dead daughter. She thinks of what she had to do and the memory of what she had to endure, and it drags her down. She lives in the house with the ghost, and Beloved’s arrival symbolizes her repressed memories incarnate. Her memories come to the surface and begin to suck the life out of her (i.e. the umbilical cord). It is only when she faces her terrible memories and learns to live in the present that she can fully be free. I think one of the last lines in the book sums up this point perfectly, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow,” (Morrison, 322).

This article was a difficult one to decipher, and there were multiple themes in it, so zeroing in on one was difficult. However, I found this interpretation very interesting and insightful. I thought it was helpful that the author brought in other sources than just the book to support her various theories, and this enhanced the credibility of her arguments. This article definitely helped me understand just one of the main themes of the novel, as I am sure one could come up with dozens and dozens of themes present in this highly complex book.

Works Cited:

Gourdine, Angeletta KM. “Hearing Reading and Being ‘Read’ by Beloved”. NWSA Journal. Vol. 10. No. 2. (Summer 1998): pp. 13-31. JSTOR. Web. 14 May 2015.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Random House, Inc., 1987. Print.