"Beloved" Criticism: Psychoanalysis and Trauma Theory
Author(s): Linda Krumholz
Source: African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fiction Issue (Autumn, 1992), pp. 395-408
Published by: Indiana State University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3041912
Keywords: Historicism, Trauma, Historical recovery, W.E.B. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk
Main Claim: "In Beloved Morrison, like Du Bois in Souls [of Black Folk], negotiates the legacy of slavery as a national trauma, and as an intensely personal trauma as well. Both works challenge the notion that the end of institutional slavery brings about freedom by depicting the emotional and psychological scars of slavery as well as the persistence of racism. And both Morrison and Du Bois delve into the stories and souls of black folk to tap the resources of memory and imagination as tools of strength and healing."
Key Citations in Works Cited:
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1967.
Freud, Sigmund. IntroductoryLectures on Psychoanalysis. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Nor-ton, 1966.
Henderson, Mae G. "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text." Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991. 62-86.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.
"To Be Loved and Cry Shame": A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
Author(s): Lynda Koolish
Source: MELUS, Vol. 26, No. 4, African American Literature (Winter, 2001), pp. 169-195
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3185546
Keywords: Psychoanalysis, Multiple Personality Disorder, Schizophrenia, R.D. Laing, Julia Kristeva, Doppelganger
Main claim: "All four of these characters, and, to some extent, every black character in the novel who believes he or she has seen Beloved (as well as Bodwin, the one white character who also sees Beloved), experiences Beloved either as a fractured aspect of Sethe's psyche or as a kind of doppleganger for his or her own feelings of loss, grief, confusion, and rage, and, in the case of Bodwin, feelings of accountability, culpability, and guilt. The story not to be passed on, the story not told in traditional slave narratives, is that of psychosis, dissociation, of climbing out of one's body to forget 'that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up' (251)."
Key Citations in Works Cited:
Christian, Barbara. "Fixing Methodologies: Beloved." Cultural Critique 24 .1 (1993): 5-15.
Henderson, Mae G. "Toni Morrison's Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text." Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense J. Spillers. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1991. 62-86.
Holloway, Karla F.G. "Revision and (Re)membrance: A Theory of Literary Structures in Literature by African American Women Writers." Black American Literature Forum 24.4 (1990): 6
Kristeva, Julia. "Women's Time." Trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs 7.1 (1981): 5-35.
Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Random House, 1967.
The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
Author(s): Barbara Schapiro
Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 194-210
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208361
Keywords: Psychoanalysis, Object relations theory, Feminist psychoanalytic theory, Intersubjectivity, Recognition by the Other,
Main claim: "A free, autonomous self, as Jessica Benjamin argues in The Bonds of Love, is still an essentially relational self and is dependent on the recognizing response of an other. Beloved powerfully dramatizes the fact that, in Benjamin's words, "In order to exist for oneself, one has
to exist for an other" (53); in so doing, it enacts the complex interrelationship of social and intrapsychic reality. For Morrison's characters, African-Americans in a racist, slave society, there is no reliable other to recognize and affirm their existence. The mother, the child's first vital other, is made unreliable or unavailable by a slave system which either separates her from her child or so enervates and depletes her that she has no self with which to confer recognition. The consequences on the inner life of the child - the emotional hunger, the obsessive and terrifying narcissistic fantasies- constitute the underlying psychological drama of the novel."
Key Citations in Works Cited:
Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963. New York: Dell, 1975.
Miner, Madonne M. "Lady No Longer Sings the Blues: Rape, Madness, and Silence in The Bluest Eye." Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 176-91.
Skerrett, Joseph T. "Recitation to the Griot: Storytelling and Learning in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon." Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Ed. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 192-202.
Wessling, Joseph. "Narcissism in Toni Morrison's Sula." College Language Association Journal 31 (1988): 281-98.
Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.
Winnicott, D. W. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities P, 1965.