'Beloved': How Trauma Shapes Actions

(The essay is a part of NYU's COREUA-400: "Making Sense of Doubles and Masks" by Prof. Judith Miller)

In “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History", Cathy Caruth drew a comment on the nature of trauma upon reviewing “Gerusalemme Liberata": “The story of trauma...attests to its endless impact on a life.” (p.7) Trauma never truly disappears if we do not address it; it asks to be fully recognized after having been pushed down to the unconscious, still ever-present and looming ominously over our day-to-day life.

Just as this sentence alludes to trauma’s irremovable spectre, so too does Toni Morrison's “Beloved" explore the concept through two aspects which encompasses Sethe's trauma: the cycle of maternal disillusionment and her violent past under slavery.

A question Caruth proposes pertains to this past: “Is the trauma the encounter with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it?” (Caruth p.7) Having survived and escaped slavery, the mental and physical torture of the past arguably became the underlying subtext to Sethe's current trauma and actions. Sethe's trauma starts from a young age when Nan spoke of how Sethe's mother would throw away her children: “She threw them all away but you… Without names, she threw them.” (Morrison p.62). In Caruth's words, “... the story of trauma is inescapably bound to a referential return” (Caruth p.7).: In being unimpressed by the story, or not recognizing this trauma, the action imprinted itself as an acceptable behavior on Sethe, eventually returning when she murdered her child out of protection from slavery. A clearer instance of trauma returning in the story is the reincarnated Beloved, which brings Sethe's details of her time as a slave to the conscious, and forces her to address events she had long suppressed, such as her mother's death; In this sense, Sethe is given a pathway to readdress the past and immediately attaches herself to Beloved; however, trauma, as Caruth remarked, “resists simple comprehension,” (Caruth p.6) similar to how Sethe, with Beloved's presence, has simply overlooked and revelled in traumatic non-existence, presenting a toxic motherhood governed by repressed guilt and overbearing fears of becoming enslaved again.

Illustrations by Joe Morse from The Folio Society edition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Another notion Caruth puts forth is “the voice of the other", where a person carries two voices, one of which “retains the memory of the “unwitting” traumatic events of one's past” (p.8). This is specifically seen through Morrison's descriptions of Sethe and Denver towards Beloved: Sethe sees Beloved as a physical daughter living in the house and simultaneously refuses to acknowledge Beloved as a product of her tortured, enslaved mind; Denver, as Sethe’s other voice, understands this, and see Beloved as an intrusion of the horrific past into this unreal and unreliable present. Beloved, in her sudden appearance just like how an event would occur to create trauma, is simply a manifestation of Sethe's trauma and of Denver's overcoming of her mother's actions. Once Beloved is addressed and is gone (and by the end of the book she will have been), only then can the trauma be fully resolved in the conscious, and relieve itself from “its endless impact on life.”

By Chi Tran

Work cited:

[1] Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage International. Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., 2019.

[2] Caruth, Cathy. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.” Amazon, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016, www.amazon.com/Unclaimed-Experience-Trauma-Narrative-History/dp/1421421658.