Toni Morrison's Beloved: Origins (review)

Justine Tally attempts to push the limits of Morrison scholarship by taking a number of risks in her monograph Toni Morrison's Beloved: Origins. She begins her work by grounding it more traditionally in Foucaultian theory but soon thereafter moves on to mythology, both Greek and Malian, passing through a spattering of numerology on the way. As Tally acknowledges, there is "a seemingly endless palimpsest" (xiii) surrounding Morrison's work, as indeed a cursory search of the MLA bibliography shows to date 667 publications on Beloved alone. However, Origins still manages to not be your standard fare. Tally immediately sets herself apart by using an inclusive framework which is far more apt to embrace the idea of and rather than limiting itself to simple either/or constructions. There is no impervious dichotomous thinking here; rather, Tally utilizes ideas about working memory to press her reader to consider multiple, sometimes competing, ideas at once. In this way her text attempts to mirror how memory is recovered in Beloved. Like Sethe implores the reader, Tally wants us to know "all of it is now…" (Morrison 210). One prime example of this occurs in chapter 2, "Memory Work," where Tally argues that the character Beloved is "both revenant of the murdered child and violated mistreated young woman, a survivor of the Middle Passage" (41). This is a departure from many critics' positions, including among them Homi Bhabha, Ashraf Rushdy, and Rafael Perez-Torres. In freeing herself from the constraints of either/or logic, Tally encourages the reader to do the same when reading the novel.

"Literary Archeology," the first chapter, argues that Morrison writes Beloved as a specific challenge to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. "'Humanity' is here redefined by victims of the 'Enlightened Age'"(18), as Sethe does not satisfy the classic ideas about humanity and yet she claims motherhood as her right. Tally then takes the reader through what she considers to be the three stages of Foucault, arguing ultimately that Beloved is a perspectivist novel written as the "narrative enactment of theory" (xv). Morrison isn't just writing a neo-slave narrative collected from news clippings but challenging the way critical theory informs the way texts are read. In doing so, her narrative enters into the fray of "academic repartee" (114). Beloved, the story, postulates that African Americans were, in fact, human.

The third chapter is where Tally's careful unpacking of the text really shines. Amy Denver, a clear difficulty in most critics' discussion of the novel, is generally either neglected or marginalized. There is but a single article length treatment of the character, Nicole Coonradt's "To Be Loved: Amy Denver and Human Need—Bridges to Understanding in Toni Morrison's Beloved." Coonradt's essay is deeply problematic in that it argues that Amy represents a suggestion on Morrison's part that hope and love can exist between Blacks and whites in America's slave past. This seems in direct opposition to what race relations actually look like in the text, and in this way Tally's treatment of Amy reveals novel acuity. Tally makes two interesting and original suggestions about Amy's appearance in the forest. First, she suggests that Amy may be a ghost summoned by her supernatural future namesake. And in a move which serves as one of the frames of the nature of Tally's inquiry, that is asking her readers to consider two competing ideas at once, she also posits that Amy may not be white at all but rather a pale-skinned biracial woman easily misread by the distracted Sethe. Citing The Black Book, one of the known sources of Beloved, Tally provides evidence which suggests Amy could be the product of an indentured servant and a person of African descent thus explaining more satisfactorily her desire to flee, the lengthiness of her service, and above all her presence in the forest. It is far more likely, and more in line with the racial politics of the novel, for a biracial to come to Sethe's aid...