"Nobody Could Make It Alone": Fathers and Boundaries in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Everybody remembers the first time they were taught that part of the human race was Other. That's a trauma. It's as though I told you that your left hand is not part of your body. --Toni Morrison, "The Pain of Being Black" (258) Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) explores the psychologically shattering effects of slavery by exposing the societally sanctioned terror tactics used by white slave owners to rob black women and men of subjectivity and agency. As the novel begins, the ex-slave Sethe and her daughter, Denver, continue to experience the psychological trauma inflicted by slavery years after slavery has been abolished. Sethe and Denver live isolated from the community at 124 Bluestone Road, a house that is haunted by what appears to be the ghost of the baby daughter Sethe killed eighteen years earlier. Mother and daughter seem to be on the edge of madness. In the words of Barbara Schapiro, they are experiencing "'psychic death, the denial of one's being as a human subject" (156). The novel charts the process by which Sethe, Denver, and other African Americans recover from the effects of slavery and "claim ownership of [a] freed self" (95). To become autonomous, Sethe, Denver, and others who experience the aftereffects of slavery must make their way back into the community and become part of a prevailing social order. As Teresa de Lauretis explains, identity is socially constructed through "a process whereby a social representation is accepted and absorbed by an individual as her (or his) own representation" (12). The need for relationships with others for the development of a social self is the dilemma ex-slaves face. How do they risk engagement in a white-dominant social order that systemically works to appropriate them? Morrison's fiction points out that the problem of domination cannot be avoided even by excluding whites and forming an allblack community. Within the African American communities in Song of Solomon, Paradise, Love, and other Morrison novels, blacks often reproduce the marginalizing power structures of white culture. Morrison's novels engage with the contemporary debate about the need for and risks of identification within a community. The notion that identification with others promotes a separate identity is paradoxical. On the surface, a collective identity seems at odds with individuation. Accordingly, the central premise of identification theory is that bonding with others is both constitutive of a self and dangerous to the self, because joining with others involves the risk of being co-opted by the other. This happens at the conclusion of Beloved, when Sethe and Beloved become "locked in a love that wore everybody out" (286) and "it was difficult for Denver to tell who was who" (283). The novel thus poses a paradox: How can an individual maintain intact gender, ethnic, and other boundaries while at the same time eliding these boundaries to ally with others? How, for example, can a person of color both protect a black identity and have solidarity with whites? The large body of scholarship on community in Morrison's texts reflects precisely these questions. For example, while some Morrison scholars agree that "assuming identity ... is a community gesture" (Smith 283) and that her novels "reimagin[e] community and coalition building within the context of an increasingly multicultural and multiracial America" (Michael 2), Roberta Rubenstein and Barbara Christian counter that we must not overlook the sometimes destructive effects of community on the individual. To resolve this seeming double bind, a number of scholars have sought out a theory of identity that allows for relationships without colonizing another. Magali Cornier Michael argues that "the notion of constructing a 'we'... does not negate the individual subject ... rather, it depends on a conception of the subject as involving a continuous interchange and interdependency between the individual and various communities" (12). …