Drawing the Line: The Father Reimagined in Faulkner, Wright, O'Connor, and Morrison

4. “Nobody Could Make It Alone”

4 “Nobody Could Make It Alone” Fathers and Boundaries in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Without someone on this threshold . . . then every speaker would be led to conceive its Being in relation to some void. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language Toni Morrison’s Beloved exposes the societally sanctioned, institutionalized 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, are still experiencing the psychological wreckage inflicted by slavery some years after slavery has been abolished. Sethe and Denver are living isolated from the community in a house haunted by what appears to be the ghost of the baby daughter whom 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 work of the novel is to chart the process by which Sethe, Denver, and other African Americans recover from the effects of slavery and “claim ownership of [a] freed self” (95).1 To become an autonomous self, Sethe, Denver, and others who experience the after-effects of slavery must make their way back into the community because, 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 that the ex-slaves face. How do these ex-slaves dare risk engagement in a white-dominant social order that systemically worked to appropriate them? For that matter, Morrison’s fiction points out that the problem of domination is not even escaped by excluding whites and formFowler , final pages.indd 93 Fowler, final pages.indd 93 2/21/13 10:31 AM 2/21/13 10:31 AM 94 Drawing the Line ing an all-black 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. The large body of scholarship on community in Morrison’s texts re- flects the contemporary debate about the need for and risks of identification within a community.2 For example, while most Morrison scholars agree that “assuming identity . . . is a communal gesture” (Smith 283) and that her novels “reimagine community within an increasingly multicultural and multi-racial America” (Michael 2), others, such as Roberta Rubenstein and Barbara Christian, counter that we must not overlook the sometimes destructive effects of community on the individual. Elizabeth Abel even cautions that white feminist interpretations that find alliances between white and black women in Morrison’s fiction have the potential to reproduce “the structures of dominance” that the feminist critic “wants to subvert” (837).3 To resolve this seeming double bind, scholars such as Magali Cornier Michael, Jean Wyatt, Kevin Everod Quashie, and Barbara Schapiro have sought out a theory of identity that allows for relationships without colonizing another.4 My contribution to this discussion is to point to the critical role of the father in Beloved in helping to form boundaries that both distinguish an autonomous subject and allow for alliances with others. Two feminist thinkers who focus on the paternal function are Jessica Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, and, for both theorists, a father figure or third party—not necessarily the biological father or even a male, but someone different from the mother—introduces defining boundaries not by severing relatedness but by transforming it so as to introduce a new and different relationship , which is a double for an original mother-child unity.5 How does this model of fatherhood serve to introduce to a child a recognition of a gendered or raced identity? Raced and gendered identities are defined by a balance of likeness and difference. In Beloved, the father figure models precisely this balance of difference within relationship to induct a child into a world of socially defined identities. For example, when Paul D “put[s] his story next to [Sethe’s]” (273), he risks his male difference and, when Amy Denver crosses racial boundaries to help deliver Sethe’s child, she risks her white difference; and by blurring alterity , Paul D and Amy Denver model a mix of difference within sameness that is the key to becoming an individuated self within a racially...