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摘 要

《宠儿》的作者托妮 • 莫里森是当今文坛上的佼佼者。本论文从佛洛依德精神分析视角对《宠儿》的女主角赛斯的救赎之路进行解读，着眼于赛斯的精神创伤和治愈过程：赛斯对身体的创伤性记忆、童年时期对母亲的创伤性记忆、在甜蜜之家的伤痛经历、以及最后的弑婴行为导致其出现癔症症状。在保罗D、宠儿和丹佛的帮助下赛斯完成了自我救赎。本文试图揭示莫里森坚持写作《宠儿》的原因：对黑人而言，重建、直面、还原过去的伤痛历史是极其重要的，只有这样，这些被奴役的心灵才能得以解放，才能得以追寻失去的自我。

关键词：《宠儿》；创伤；治愈；救赎

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. A Brief Introduction to Freudian Psychoanalysis 2

4. A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Sethe’s Redemption 3

4.1 The Origin of Sethe’s Trauma 3

4.2 The Healing Process of Sethe 9

5. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

Toni Morrison, the author of Beloved, is the first black woman to receive Nobel Prize in Literature. She is proud of the black people’s heritage, which is prominently important in her novels. “To Morrison, it is her deep rootedness in black culture and her ability to present what is vital to her people that contribute to her success as a writer.” (Hu Jun, 2007: 3) She has published The Bluest Eye(1970), Sula(1973), Song of Solomon(1977), Tar Baby(1981), Beloved(1987), Jazz(1993), Paradise(1998), Love(2003), A Mercy(2008) and her latest novel Home(2012). In all her novels she pays much attention to the life of ordinary black people, especially caring about African American women.

Beloved, published in 1987 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, is her fifth novel, and is viewed as one of her best novels. Beloved is based on a true event in 1856. A slave woman named Margret Carner killed her two-year old daughter when she was confronted with her slave owners. She was thrown into hell for her killing. Though it is too painful to tell, Morrison chooses to write it despite its cruelty. In Beloved Morrison touches the original trauma of the black people and tries to find a way for healing. With Sethe as Margret Carner and Beloved the girl Margret killed Morrison creates Beloved on the basis of the event, trying to bring back and heal the mother’s trauma.

This paper focuses on the analysis of Sethe’s traumatic experiences, including her traumatic memory of body, childhood memory about her mother’s slave mark, her horrible experiences in Sweet Home and her ultimate act of killing Beloved, which all planted traumatic seeds for her hysteria. With the help of Paul D, Beloved and Denver, Sethe’s healing process began. At last, with the exorcism held by the whole black community, Beloved got away and Sethe finally achieved her redemption.

2. Literature Review

After Morrison got Nobel Prize in Literature, her novels began to attract national and even global recognition. “In 1985, the very first book devoted entirely to Morrison was published: Bessie W. Jones and Audrey L. Vinson’s The World of Toni Morrison: Exploration in Literary Criticism.” (Wang Langlang, 2010: 10) In china, there are some extremely excellent studies about Morrison. One of them is “Wang Shouren and Wu Xinyun’s monograph Gender, Race and Culture: A Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels”. (Wang Langlang, 2010: 16) The book is based on specific studies of all Morrison’s published novels and overall examination related to social, political contexts, and it mainly explores Morrison’s ideas on gender, race and culture.

Since its publication, Beloved has attracted so many readers and critics. The American literature world has a high praise for this novel. Elizabeth B. House says that, “throughout Beloved, Morrison’s theme is that remembering yesterday, while not being consumed by them, gives people the tomorrows with which to make real lives.”(Zhao Na, 2006: 3) William L. Andrews believes that, “Her theme in Beloved revolves around the wish to forget and the necessity to remember, to reject and to reclaim, and to elide the boundaries between past and present.”(Zhao Na, 2006: 3) A large quantity of scholars have studied this novel from various perspectives, including feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial, cultural, theme, language, narrative strategy studies, etc.

Many scholars have studied Beloved from the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. However, at home only professor Tian Yaman has studied Morrison’s novel from this perspective. This paper tries to interpret Beloved in the light of trauma and healing by the employment of Freudian psychoanalysis.

3. A Brief Introduction to Freudian Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic method of psychiatry, is considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconsciousness and the defense mechanism of repression, and he is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life.

In Greek the word “trauma” is related to the word “wound”. It originates from a verb which means pierce. In the earlier stages of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, trauma is basically seen as excessive influx of excitations. Freud views that trauma is a deep thorn in unconsciousness, which can make people do something strange and hysteric. Meanwhile ego will act as defense, protecting consciousness from the hurt of external stimuli. However, when the defense is broken, the ego will collapse and at that time those external stimuli swarm into, which will hurt people’s perception of happiness. This is the basics of the traumatic theory. Freud considers “trauma as a triggering factor in neurosis…as essentially sexual terms; overflow of the libidinal energy that the organism cannot bear […] something happens for sure but the real trauma is inside the psyche.”(2001: 180)

The term “hysteria” is also a word from Greek, and it means “womb” in Greek. At first, hysteria was viewed as a nervous disorder related to women, because it is a disease that is linked to women’s reproductive organs. And it is the hysteria theory that asserts the direct link between pathology symptoms and women’s reproductive organs. Later, Freud published Studies on Hysteria, in which he holds that “Hysteria is a product of traumatic events that is subsequently excluded from consciousness.” (2006: 132) So those repressed memories which unsolved traumas have caused turn into body symptoms very easily. In the book Freud also makes his remarkable opinion, “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.” (2006: 83) Because the main character Sethe suffers mainly from reminiscence, the hysteria theory can be a useful concept to analyze this character.

4. A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Sethe’s Redemption

4.1 The Origin of Sethe’s Trauma

4.1.1 Sethe’s Traumatic Memory of the Body

It is well known that “psychoanalysis is connected to the body because it deals with sexuality”. (Zhao Na, 2006: 12) In Beloved, African American bodies are seen as tools which are used to satisfy the needs of white owners.

At the beginning of Beloved, after the sudden appearance of Paul D, Sethe and he immediately had sex. Furthermore, both of them seemed to remember the similar sense which occurred in the past. Through this way, the protagonist in Beloved reestablishes a connection with the past.

It was over before they could get their clothes off. Half-dressed and short of breath, they lay side by side resentful of one another and the skylight above them...Her deprivation had been not having any dreams of her own at all. Avow they were sorry and too shy to make talk. (Morrison, 2007: 61)

After the first unsatisfied coitus between Sethe and Paul D, they recalled the past events that had happened in Sweet Home. Sethe was viewed as an animal in the whites’ eyes, taken milk by the white boys and whipped by the Schoolteacher with a big scar left forever on her back. The other blacks were treated the same as her or worse than her. Then Sethe remembered her husband, Halle. They two spent six years together, with all her children having one father. When they decided to marry they couldn’t hold a formal wedding. But Sethe managed to make a dress to wear in the wedding to celebrate one of the most precious moments in her life. These descriptions seem quite souring and miserable but also a clear expression of her former happiness. Eighteen years later, the appearance of Paul D seemed to indicate a new life to Sethe.

4.1.2. Sethe’s Traumatic Memory of her Mother

When Beloved appeared, Sethe started to recall her childhood memory of her mother. A few weeks after her arrival, Beloved asked Sethe, “Your woman she never fix up your hair?”（Morrison, 2007: 60) Sethe recalled the memories about her mother she had repressed on purpose, “something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind right behind the circled cross” (Morrison, 2007: 61)

In fact, the time Sethe spent with her mother is miserable little. She recognized her mother by her mark on her chest. At that time, she didn’t know the mark was a symbol of repression. The mark gave little Sethe an extremely strong impression so she wanted to have the same mark of her mother. However, Sethe’s mother said “I am the only one got this mark now. The rest dead. If something happens to me and you can’t tell by my face, you can know me by this mark.” (Morrison, 2007: 61) Of course, she didn’t want her children to be enslaved again. As a mother, she still imagined that maybe her daughter could escape from the evil slavery and lived as a free man. Therefore, “her mother slaps her face. And Sethe didn’t understand then. Not till she had a mark of her own.”(Morrison, 2007: 61) The “slap” implies a complicated emotion. On one hand, it represents her mother’s shame to be a slave. On the other hand, it is evident that her mother didn’t want her daughter to be slaved again. Therefore, the “slap” represents a mother’s care and love.

In fact, the mark and the “slap” of her mother have planted the faith of pursuing freedom in her. Especially, her mother would rather choose to flee with the consequence of being hanged than live as a slave. Her mother’s strong faith that she would rather die without freedom has left a profound impression on Sethe. So when confronting the similar choice between death and freedom, Sethe follows her mother and even attempts to kill all her children and herself. What Sethe has done is that she tries her best not letting her children be marked and return to the slave life again. The cruel memory of marking prompts Sethe to protect her children from being marked slaves.

In Sethe’s childhood, Nan, a one-armed slave, took care of her instead of her mother. As Sethe folded and refolded damp laundry, the memory of Nan became clearer:

She told Sethe that her mother and Nan were together from the sea. Both were taken up many times by the crew. ‘she throw them all away but you. The one from the crew she throw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around. (Morrison, 2007: 62)

From Nan’s words Sethe got to know that she was the crystal of love of her mother rather than a burden. On the Middle Passage, Sethe’ mother suffered rape again and again, she felt so disgusting that she threw all the babies she had with white crews. The decision of her mother’s abandoning babies who were related to white crews is actually a kind of killing. This killing represents her mother’s strong resentment and resistance to those white oppressors. It is no doubt that when Sethe was confronted with the similar situation to die or to be free, she chose to kill her children and herself to peruse the freedom. “It is well known that people do not have to directly experience an event to be traumatized by it, and the research has shown that trauma can affect several generations.” (Zhao Na, 2006: 18) Though Sethe herself didn’t suffer form sexual violation in her childhood, her mother’s experiences on the Middle Passage have influenced her a lot in her sub-consciousness. Freud holds that the hysteric does not have to experience the traumatic sexual event in person but may be influenced a lot by the person involved. So the traumatic experiences her mother got through can be viewed as part of the origin of Sethe’s traumatic memory.

4.1.3 Sethe’s Traumatic Experiences in Sweet Home

Freud explains the theory of hysteria, “Instead of single, major trauma, a number of partial traumas forming a group of provoking causes which have only been able to exercise traumatic effect by summation may be the crucial aetiological factor.” (2006: 103)

In the beginning, it is Mr. Carner that was in charge of Sweet Home and at that time Sweet Home enjoyed a relatively comfortable atmosphere. In Sweet Home, Sethe herself chose her husband, and she was not forced to have sex with other men who she was not willing to. Especially, Halle, her husband, bought his mother’s freedom through his hard labor. This gave Sethe confidence that someday they and their children could buy their freedom as well and live as a free man. “Sethe had the amazing luck of six whole years of marriage to that ‘somebody’ son who had fathered every one of her children. A blessing she was reckless enough to take for granted, lean on, as though Sweet Home really one.”(Morrison, 2007: 23) Sethe lived in a beautiful lie without realizing that basically Mr. Carner is the same as other slave owners. Later, after the death of Mr. Carner, Schoolteacher took over his position. Sethe asked Halle what was the difference between Mr. Carner and Schoolteacher. Halle told Sethe, “It don’t matter, Sethe. What they say is same. Loud or soft”. (Morrison, 2007: 195) What Halle said is the cruel essence of white slave owners: the difference is only the gentle or cruel measures they choose. Mr. Carner also saw these blacks as his properties, which could be used of and exploited, though the men in Sweet Home were “allowed, encouraged to correct Carner, even defy him. To invent ways of doing things; to see what was needed and attack it without permission. To buy a mother, choose a horse or a wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to”. (Morrison, 2007: 125) They could do these because Mr. Carner allowed them to do, and they were allowed to do these only as the property of Mr. Carner. The real nature of their different management is represented in Sixo’s argument for stealing the shoat:

“And you telling me that’s not stealing?”

“No, sir. It ain’t.”

“What is it then?”

“Improving your property, sir.”

“What?”

“Sixo plant rye to give the high price a better chance. Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work.” (Morrison, 2007: 191)

Schoolteacher thought Sixo’s answer was clever, but that is insignificant. What matters is that Sixo defies the owner’s authority. So Schoolteacher beat him anyway to warn him that the owners’ authority could not be challenged. Obviously, Schoolteacher viewed black slaves inferior to animals. However, did Mr. Carner see his black slaves as the same as him? Absolutely not, he just defined these black slaves in his own definition. In fact, there is no absolute distinction between Mr. Carner and Schoolteacher and their difference only lies in the degree of controlling and exploitation.

It is two cruel events of violation in Sweet Home that make Sethe realize her acute position in the slavery system.

One is the Schoolteacher’s definition of the animality of blacks. One day, Sethe was working in the grape arbor with her crawling-already girl, when she went to fetch a piece of muslin to protect her baby girl from being disturbed by flies. She overheared something Schoolteacher taught his pupils about her that astonisheed her so much. “‘No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up.’” (Morrison, 2007: 193) As soon as Sethe overheared what Schoolteacher said, she was scared and she walked backward instinctively and forgot her purpose. The conversation between Schoolteacher and his pupils makes Sethe begin to wake up. Afterwards, she turned to Mrs. Carner to seek help. Out of her expectation, Mrs. Carner was very indifferent and she had no desire to know Sethe’s horror and feeling. All of these force Sethe to realize her position in white slave owner’s eyes. In order to deny such kind of inhuman humiliation and seek for her freedom, Sethe agreed with Sixo’s proposal to escape from Sweet Home without hesitation. When Schoolteacher found her and her children, Sethe finally fulfilled the final resistance through the killing of her own daughter.

The other thing is that Sethe suffered from a humiliated sexual violation as well in Sweet Home. When Paul D arrived at 124, Sethe told him the story immediately. “I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other hold me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that …I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love”. (Morrison, 2007: 70) Schoolteacher had watched the whole process of Sethe’s being humiliated, which was an extremely insult to Sethe. This strengthened Sethe’s determination to flee from Sweet Home where she had been treated inhumanly and she never wanted her children to suffer again. Especially, when she wanted to seek help from Mrs. Carnrer by telling her the story, Mrs. Carner just shed tears and showed her sympathy, which was no use at all because she wouldn’t free Sethe and stop to exploit her. Later, Schoolteacher knew that Sethe had told Mrs. Carner what he had done, so Schoolteacher gave a whipping to Sethe as a punishment. The whipping left a scar forever on her back. A white girl named the scar as a chokecherry tree, even though “none of which Sethe could feel because her back skin had been dead for years” (Morrison, 2007: 18) eighteen years later. The tree-shaped scar grew there forever.

4.1.4 Sethe’s Ultimate Trauma from the Killing of Beloved

After all the painful torment and traumatic events Sethe determined to flee from Sweet Home to protect her children in her own way. 28 days after Sethe’s successful escape, Schoolteacher, with one of his nephews, the sheriff, a slave catcher, found Sethe and attempted to take her and her children back to Sweet Home. What was haunted on her mind is just “No notebook for my babies and no measuring string neither.” (Morrison, 2007: 198) Therefore, when Schoolteacher showed up again and attempted to bring her and her babies back to slavery, Sethe chose the most violent but the last resistance to the recapture. She recounted this event to Beloved “my plan was to take us all to the other side where my own ma’ma is.” (Morrison, 2007: 203) She explained to Beloved that she chose to kill her out of love because she must protect Beloved from the white because “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that come to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.” (Morrison, 2007: 251) From Sethe’s confession we can see that the fear of her children’s possible suffering from what she had got through drove her hysteria, and thus she killed her baby.

On the other hand, Sethe’s violent act of killing is also a symbol of rebellion to the cruel slavery. Under the slave system slaves and their children belong to the white owner, killing the property of slave owners is a kind of revenge and is also a mother’s claim for her children. This ultimate resistance can be viewed as a hysteric release.

However, the community’s refusal to warn Sethe and Baby Suggs of the arriving of Schoolteacher and slave catchers indirectly leads to Beloved’s death. “[…]the party too, because that explained why nobody ran on ahead; why nobody sent a fleet-footed son to cut ‘cross a field soon as they saw the four horses in town hitched for watering while the riders asked questions.”(Morrison, 2007: 157) It is not only the evil white slave owners, but also her black people who turned their backs against her when she needed help that led to the tragedy. Sethe couldn’t forgive her people’s indifference, so she chose to ignore them and live like an isolated island. Therefore, the isolation from the black community is also an element that contributes to her hysteria.

4.2 The Healing Process of Sethe

In Beloved, there are three characters playing an important role in the healing process of Sethe: one is Paul D, who represents the trigger of the past and the hope of the future; another is Beloved, who stands for the past traumatic memory; the last is Denver, who acts as the link between Sethe and the community. With the appearance of Paul D and Beloved, Sethe is forced to confront the haunting past, which itself is a therapeutic element in her process of healing. With Denver’s help, Sethe comes back to the black community and finally achieves her redemption.

4.2.1 Paul D: the Trigger for Sehte’s Traumatic Memory

After Sethe had sex with Paul D, these two lied together and narrated their painful past. Sethe could feel “Paul D behind her and his hands under her breasts. She straightened up and knew, but could not feel, that his cheek was pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree.”(Morrison, 2007: 17) Paul D relieved Sethe’s burdensome pain. And gradually Sethe became to rely on Paul D more. Especially, when Paul D, Sethe, and Denver went to the carnival, “they were not holding hands, but their shadows were.”(Morrison, 2007: 47) It also indicates a reconnection of Sethe’s isolated life with the community, so Paul D seems to give Sethe a promising future, acting as a healing element.

However, when Paul D got to know the killing event of Sethe, Paul D chose to leave. Paul D said to her “You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” which made Sethe to confront her most deep traumatic memory of the killing of Beloved. Later, Sethe paid all her attention to returned Beloved to compensate her murdered daughter.

4.2.2 Beloved: the Healer of Sethe

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