Reading Red: The Troping of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

A staggering amount of research has been conducted on Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. More than a decade ago Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu claimed that “a virtual industry of Beloved (and, by extension, Morrisonian) scholarship has evolved” (59). While the text’s thematic and formal range has elicited an exceptionally heterogeneous body of scholarship, most researchers—within their respective theoretical approaches—have focused or at least touched on the text’s portrayal of physical and emotional trauma and the characters’ struggles to survive it. Linda Koolish, for example, comments on the continuous “struggle for psychic wholeness” in Beloved “which requires access to painful memories” (169). Kristin Boudreau contends that the novel’s very opening lines “announc[e] the prominent place of pain in the lives of these ex-slaves” (447). Anne Koenen reads the character Beloved as the return of the repressed, “the ghost of slavery” (117), and Claudine Raynaud specifically analyzes Morrison’s approach to memory and likens it to “the work of mourning” (43). Roger Luckhurst, finally, affirms Beloved’s status as “a formative text in literary trauma studies” (The Trauma Question 90).

An aspect which has been largely overlooked, particularly in this context, is the text’s use of color to portray the consequences of slavery. Certainly, some scholars have remarked on the importance of color in Beloved. Cheryl Hall, for example, identifies its use as part of a “sophisticated system of repeated motifs [which] is at work in Beloved” (93), yet does not elaborate on this particular aspect of the system. Indeed, Morrison herself has claimed that “[t]here is practically no color whatsoever in its pages, and when there is, it is so stark and remarked upon, it is virtually raw” (Morrison, “Unspeakable” 397). However, no attempt at establishing a coherent analysis of the use of even one color has of yet been made.¹ In spite of Morrison’s statement to the contrary, even a cursory reading of the novel quickly affirms the amount of energy the text expends in portraying different colors. Beloved repeatedly evokes comprehensive palettes of color: the multicolored ribbons, clothes, and flowers that Sethe buys during the last weeks in which Beloved is in the house, the quilt with the two orange patches as well as the “quilt of merry colors” in which Paul D finds Sethe in the novel’s last scene (Morrison, Beloved 319),² and the many different colors that Baby Suggs ponders in the last years before her death can serve as examples.³

Among this elaborate use of colors, it is the color red which is employed most conspicuously, and it is this color which is intricately connected to the novel’s portrayal of trauma.⁴ It appears in some of the central tropes of the novel, such as Paul D’s red heart, Stamp Paid’s red ribbon, and Beloved’s pink tombstone. Additionally, the novel contains a multitude of bloody images due to its frequent scenes of bodily harm.⁵ Generally, red serves as an amplifier: within Western culture, red is most commonly associated with danger, blood, fire, or romantic love, and thus it always marks some notion of intensity. However, in Morrison’s novel its use is more specific. Red is more than just a universal amplifier. Even given the highly diverse connotations associated with its respective occurrences, red is traceable to a single source: the evils of slavery.⁶ More precisely, the text negotiates issues of trauma using the color red. This study’s central argument is that red is a complex and potent trope in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: it constitutes a text in and of itself, as it is through the characters’ interaction with the color that the novel narrates their processing of trauma.

Trauma Theory and Beloved

Cathy Caruth, in her seminal study Unclaimed Experience, has defined trauma as an event which is not experienced but simply registered, as it overwhelms the person to whom it happens (4).⁷ Among the typical reactions to this phenomenon is a repetition compulsion, an urge to continually return to the traumatic event, which is...