Abstract
This article discusses the representation of law in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of legal philosophy. Beloved’s contribution to the legal humanities has been described in terms of the contrast Morrison dramatizes between two visions of law: the violence of human chattel slavery embodied by the titular ghost, Beloved, and the communal act of solidarity that exorcizes her from her mother’s house. Yet this characterization neglects the associations Morrison draws in Beloved and in her metacommentary between the ghost and other juridical forms, including personality and property. This article proposes an interpretation of Beloved that reads the ghost as a metaphor for the modern, metaphysicalized sense of the legal person for whom self-possession has become a prerequisite for action. Through a reading of Beloved that considers the final version of the novel against an unpublished earlier ending revealed by Morrison’s papers, I argue that Beloved challenges the reducibility of modern personhood to reflexive ownership.
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Notes
‘[A]s a ‘person,’ I have [habe ich] my life and body, as I have other things only insofar as they express my will’ (§47) ‘Als Person bin Ich selbst unmittelbar Einzelner,—dies heißt in seiner weiteren Bestimmung zunächst: Ich bin lebendig in diesem organischen Körper, welcher mein dem Inhalte nach allgemeines ungeteiltes äußeres Dasein, die reale Möglichkeit alles weiter bestimmten Daseins it. Aber als Person habe ich zugleich mein Leben und Körper, wie andere Sachen, nur insofern es mein Wille ist.’ Hegel, Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse (Leipzig: Meiner, [1820] 1911), 55–56 §47.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, [1987] 2004), 111–112. Subsequent references refer to this edition and are cited parenthetically as ‘B’ followed by page number.
Morrison introduced the phrase in a lecture delivered in 1992 in Portland, Oregon titled ‘The Source of Self-Regard’ in The Source of Self-Regard (New York: Knopf, 2019), 304–321.
See for instance Elizabeth S. Anker, ‘The ‘scent of ink’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the semiotics of rights,’ The Critical Quarterly vol. 56, no. 4 (2014): 29–45 and Mae G. Henderson, ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Re-Membering the Body as Historical Text’ in Beloved; A Case Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 94. The passages indicated can be found in Toni Morrison, Beloved, 174–180; 302–309.
Figure 1. Toni Morrison, Beloved Draft 6. Princeton University Library. Thanks to Brianna Cregle for making this document available to me.
For two critical discussions of the frequent appeal to Morrison’s essays, speeches, and extra-textual writing by Beloved critics, see Namwali Serpell, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 119–152; and Yung-Sing Wu, ‘Doing Things with Ethics: Beloved, Sula, and the Reading of Judgement,’ Modern Fiction Studies 49 (2003), 780.
Patterson draws here on the work of anthropologist Florestan Fernandez among the Tuinamba peoples, the same community Montaigne discusses in ‘Of Cannibals.’ See Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Cannibals,’ 1965.
Plato, Gorgias 469b-c.
‘You know, don’t you,’ Stamp Paid says to Paul D while recounting the scene, ‘he’s the main one kept Sethe from the gallows in the first place’ (B 312).
For a contemporary defense of this view, see Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Robert McKay parses the two senses of ‘representation’ mentioned in a lucid short essay of the same name. See Chapter 21 of Lori Gruen, Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 307-19.
For Freud’s first mention of ‘ordinary unhappiness,’ see Freud, ‘Studies on Hysteria’ (1895): ‘…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness [gemeines Unglück].’ See Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, ‘Studies on Hysteria,’ The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth: [1895] 1953), 306.
Morrison has invited the comparison: ‘[I]t was important to me as a writer to try to make the work irrevocably black. It required me to use the folklore as points of departure.’ Toni Morrison, ‘Faulkner and Women,’ Faulkner and Women, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), 295–302, 299. For a summary of the concept of the abiku in Yoruba mythology, see Timothy Mobolade, ‘The Concept of Abiku.’ African Arts, vol. 7, no. 1 (1973), 62–64. For discussions of the abiku’s relevance to Beloved, see Niyi Osundare, ‘The Poem as a Mytho-Linguistic Event: A Study of Soyinka’s ‘Abiku,’’ African Literature Today 16 (1988): 91–102; and Chickwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 66, note 19.
I use this term with reference to Genette’s typology of narrative focalization. See Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), Chapter 4.
Here I invoke Peter Brooks’ formulation of Propp and Shklovsky’s distinction in Brooks and Gewirtz (eds.), Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 17.
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I gratefully acknowledge the John F. Enders Fund at Yale University for supporting this project.
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Stern, L.O. Own Yourself! Reflexive Possession and Its Discontents in Beloved (1987). Law Critique 35, 73–91 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09348-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-023-09348-3