Morrison's Beloved: Allegorically Othering "White" Christianity

"I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." --Song of Solomon (6:3) "I AM BELOVED and she is mine." --Toni Morrison, Beloved "... love is as strong as death; jealousy is as cruel as the grave; ... many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it" --Song of Solomon (8:6-7) At least three recent critical works recognize Toni Morrison's reference to and revision of Biblical passages in her 1987 novel Beloved.(1) To date, however, no one has mentioned the most developed of her Scriptural allusions, namely her revisionist narration involving Old Testament texts, especially the Song of Solomon. Although Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, drew upon a Biblical passage for the title to her 1977 novel Song of Solomon, she waited for ten years to develop, in Beloved, the deeper implications of a reference to Solomon's Song. Allusions to this most poignant and erotic passage of the Old Testament not only inform the relationships between Morrison's characters, but also contribute to her consideration of the relationship between black and white communities in the mid-nineteenth century United States. I will argue that Morrison's allegorical revision of the Song of Solomon and other Biblical passages constitutes what Stephen A. Barney, in Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, terms "other-speech," a type of minority discourse related to, but not symptomatic of, the dynamics of religious and/or cultural "othering." The dynamics of religious "othering," especially those which conflate Christianity and "the white man's burden," closely parallel and are often intertwined with what Edward Said terms "Orientalism," a process whereby powerful Western nations for centuries defined the terms of interaction with their African and Asian colonies, and even with other non-Western nations, as a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and bad, enlightened self and irreconcilable "other." This "othering" process applies equally to relationships in the United States between dominant culture and those groups and individuals who have at various times been defined as other than the American ideal, an ideal historically characterized as WASP--white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.(2) As Said observes in Orientalism, "Since the White Man, like the Orientalist, lived very close to the line of tension keeping the coloreds at bay, he felt it incumbent on him readily to define and redefine the domain he surveyed" (228). In keeping with this dominating strategy, the white slaveholder "schoolteacher" in Morrison's Beloved instructs his nephews to study the black slaves on the ironically named Sweet Home plantation in order to catalog their "animal" and "human" characteristics. Moreover, he severely beats Sixo, a slave who dares to challenge the slaveholder's authority, not so much for stealing and eating a pig, but more "to show him that definitions belonged to the definers--not the defined" (190). From Sixo's treatment, we can see that the political power to use physical force with impunity against another person is inherently linked to the power to determine what individuals and groups get defined as "other" in the first place. Given Sixo's initial treatment and his ultimate death at the hands of the slaveholders, it would appear that the "other" is often, if not always, powerless in the face of those with the power to define; however, I will suggest that the very nature of "otherness," as the term applies to both groups and the discourse of alterity, bestows hidden powers in the form of "other-speech." The physical and psychological pain that forces marginalized persons to recognize themselves as "other," also provides entry into a minority discourse community.(3) Although minority discourse has historically been dismissed as irrelevant by those with the power to choose which narratives get published and circulated as authoritative, that very dismissal may allow an unpoliced space in which "other-speech" can develop relatively unchecked into what becomes--in effect--subversive language. …