A Laying on of Hands: Toni Morrison and the Materiality of Love

It is almost impossible not to read Love, Toni Morrison's most recent novel, intertextually with Beloved, as Love/love, linguistically and thematically, are part of Beloved/beloved. While a dead baby's ghost may be at the center of Beloved, it is the depth of mother love and its manifestation that haunts the novel. Beloved challenges the reader to consider the ethics of love. Does love play by different rules at different times or in different situations? How do we ensure the safety of our beloved? Is it possible that Paul D is right--Sethe's love is too thick? Or does the novel ultimately redeem Sethe's position: "thin love ain't love at all" (Beloved 164)? Morrison's commentary on the novel is likewise cryptic as she holds that Sethe did the right thing, but questions whether she had the right to do it. Even a cursory reading of Morrison's canon reveals that she is as fascinated with love as she is with death, exposing them as close allies. As she works, Morrison reframes, problematizes, and plumbs the depths of love not merely in what she has labeled her love trilogy--Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise--but beginning with her first novel, The Bluest Eye (Matus 155-56). (1) The Bluest Eye concludes with a treatise on love: "Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover's inward eye" (206). While love is described as a "gift," it is not one bestowed on the beloved. Indeed, the beloved is bereft: "shorn," "frozen," and "neutralized." The power, then, rests with the lover, who is active, choosing the expression of love. The beloved are static, incapacitated if not immobilized, by the love itself. Heeding Morrison's words in her debut novel, it is worth remembering that love is not beautiful or inherently good; it is, instead, no better than the lover. In fact, it is only hatred, "so pure, so solemn," that is described in Love as "beautiful, almost holy" (177). In Love, Morrison continues her exploration of this topic by literalizing love not merely as an emotion, not what one purportedly feels towards another; rather, she portrays love as an act, leading to the question: how does one "do" love? (2) Morrison's repeated use of hands as a leitmotif in Love foregrounds the action of love, the materiality of love, love as verb, not as noun. Of all Morrison's work, Beloved best illuminates the practice of love, its power to heal, save, redeem, as well as devastate. Baby Suggs, holy, preaches that love, which had been denied to the enslaved, must be reclaimed in order to actualize freedom: "Here," she said, "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you!" (Beloved 88) Not only does Baby Suggs exhort the members of the community to cherish their flesh, but she reminds them to use their hands for intimacy, support, care, and praise. Throughout Beloved, it is the actions of the hands that materialize love. Literalizing her sermon, Baby Suggs puts her hands on Sethe: Sethe remembered the touch of those fingers that she knew better than her own. They had bathed her in sections, wrapped her womb, combed her hair, oiled her nipples, stitched her clothes, cleaned her feet, greased her back and dropped just about anything they were doing to massage Sethe's nape when, especially in the early days, her spirits fell down under the weight of the things she remembered and those she did not. …