Beloved Form and Structure
• Toni Morrison is a female writer and an African American writer. She therefore faces two levels of oppression. • In the past, women were not allowed to write (or were limited in what they were allowed to write), and literature was mainly written by men and focusing on male experiences. • In America, the black slaves were not able to write so they passed on their stories orally. Literature was written by white men. There were Education Acts which banned the slave owners teaching their slaves to read and write as they believed it would lessen their dependency on their owners.
• The experiences of women and black people were therefore ignored in literature in the past (or stereotyped) “Man must be pleased; but him to please Is woman's pleasure” ‘The Angel in the House’, Coventry Patmore
• In Beloved, Morrison tries to come up with a new kind of writing, one that allows her to write about both the female experience and the black experience. She wants to avoid using traditional male, white structures (often labelled the master narrative), so she has to find a different way of writing. “Pen is Power” • “Killing the ‘Angel in the House’ was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” (Virginia Woolf)
L’écriture féminine or women’s writing ‘Language and literature developed in a patriarchal society reflect and maintain a sexist ideology … Female experiences, desires and knowledge have been negated, rendered invisible, deemed unimportant’. (Dale Spender, Man-Made Language, 1980) Task (1)in pairs, come up with different words used to describe (a) a man who has sex with lots of people and (b) a woman who has sex with lots of people. (2)Can you think of any examples of gendered language?
In order to explore female experience, “the pools, the depths, the dark places” (Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, 1931)
feminists argued that language had to be used in new ways – the “mother tongue” had to be rediscovered.
Hélène Cixous first used the term l’écriture féminine in her essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) in which she argues: Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. Écriture féminine places experience before language, and privileges the anti-linear, cyclical writing so often frowned upon by patriarchal society.
•Écriture féminine often includes non-linear structures; shifting narrative viewpoints; poetic language and streams of consciousness. The idea is to open up meaning instead of closing it down. •Can you remember any other features from last year? •The shifting identity of Beloved is an excellent example of this.
‘I wanted...the books...to have an effortlessness and an artlessness, and a non-book quality, so that they would have a sound ... And the closest I came, I think, to finding it was in some books written by Africans, novels that were loose...the kind that people could call unstructured because they were circular, and because they sounded like somebody was telling you a story. Yet you knew it was nothing simple, as simple as that - it was intricate.... I wanted the sound to be something I felt was spoken and more oral and less print’ (Morrison in Hall, 1994).
Therefore, as well as drawing on elements of écriture feminine, Morrison also draws on African oral traditions – she can be viewed as challenging the ‘master narrative’ (traditional white, male writing).
Who is Beloved? ‘[Beloved] is a spirit on one hand, literally she is what Sethe thinks she is, her child returned to her from the dead [but the age she would be if she had lived]’ (Morrison in Plasa, 1998)
‘[Beloved] is also another kind of dead ... a survivor from a true, factual slave ship. She speaks the language, a traumatised language, of her own experience’ (Morrison in Plasa, 1998).
the men without skin are making loud noises colored
I am too hungry to eat it
I am not dead
the sun closes my eyes
a pile I cannot find my man the one whose teeth I have loved of dead people
a hot thing
those able to die are in a hot thing the little hill
the men without skin push them through with poles
the woman is there with the face I want which is the color of the bread
the bread is sea-
the face that is mine
she has nothing in her ears
they fall into the sea if I had the teeth of the
man who died on my face I would bite the circle around her neck
bite it away
I
know she does not like it ... they push my own man through they do not push the woman with my face through
she goes in
they do not push her
little hill is gone she was going to smile at me she was going to in the rain falling watch him eat
the others are taken
I am not taken
she goes in
the
a hot thing ... I am standing
I am falling like the rain is
I
inside I am crouching to keep from falling with the rain I am going to be in
pieces
he hurts where I sleep
pieces
she took my face away...I see the face I lost Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe
sees me see her and I see the smile
he puts his finger there I drop the food and break into her smiling face is the place for me
it is the face I lost
she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing