The slave mother's absence also greatly impairs the development of the child's subjectivity. Sethe "didn't see her [own mother] but a few times out in the fields and once when she was working indigo." What she seems to remember most about her mother is her absence. Without directly saying so, Sethe indicates that she feels unloved by her missing mother: "She never fixed my hair nor nothing, she didn't even sleep in the same cabin most nights I remember." Sethe tells Denver and Beloved. Sethe "guess[es]" that her mother had to sleep closer to the "line-up"; however, she suspects that her mother had wanted to sleep elsewhere and intentionally deserted her daughter at night (60-61). While Sethe understands the conditions of slavery, she cannot help but resent her mother's unavailability.
When Denver asks Sethe about what had happened to her mother, Sethe exhibits a kind of “rememory” by recalling "something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit in her mind" (61). John Bowlby defines a form of repression in which "certain information of significance to the individual being [is] systematically excluded from further processing" as "'defensive exclusion'" (45). Sethe repressed the memory of her mother’s death almost as a defense mechanism. "When fragments of the information defensively excluded seep through, fragments of the behavior defensively deactivated become visible" (Bowlby 65).
Because of her mother's daily inaccessibility and eventual death, Sethe is denied daughterhood. If her "ma'am had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her," Sethe would have been a "daughter[,] which is what [she] wanted to be" (203). Deprived of a mother, however, Sethe can never hope to be a daughter and thus never achieve subjectivity through daughterhood. Furthermore, the absence of the maternal look as a child continues to deprive Sethe of subjectivity as an adult. After trying ice-skating in the frozen creek with Denver and Beloved, Sethe falls into laughter, then tears. As Shapiro argues, "Her weeping . . . suggests a child's aching sense of loss or absence, specifically the absence of the confirming, legitimizing gaze of the other" (203-04). The "other" in this case is clearly Sethe's mother.
The look of the mother plays a critical role in the development of the child's identity. Silverman explains the importance of the mother's look in Lacan's account of the mirror stage: "What Lacan designates the 'gaze' also manifests itself initially within a space external to the subject, first through the mother's look as it facilitates the 'join' of infant and mirror image, and later through all of the many 'actual' looks with which it is confused" (56). Recalling that "the gaze [of the other] is that which confirms identity," the loss or denial of the mother's gaze (which is here conflated with the look) leads to the child's loss of identity.(2) As a child, Sethe is denied access to this “maternal look”. In giving birth to her own children, she attempts to achieve subjectivity through motherhood. However, maternal subjectivity for Sethe is complicated by "a social order that systematically denied the subject position to those it defined as objects of exchange" (Wyatt 478). In other words, how could Sethe assert motherhood within a social system that denied her that right? How could she even hope to be a subject when "anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you?" (251). Sethe realizes that as a slave her children would never belong to her but, as a free woman, her children would finally be her own "to love" (162).
In discussing motherhood in slavery, Barbara Christian reveals that "the African emphasis on woman as mother was drastically affected by the institution of slavery, since slave women and men were denied their natural right to their children" (219). She goes on to explain that "some slave women were so disturbed by the prospect of bearing children who could only be slaves that they did whatever they could to remain childless" (220). When faced with the decision of whether to kill her children or relinquish them to a life of slavery, Sethe races her children into the shed and quickly slices open her two-year-old's throat with a handsaw. According to Wyatt, Sethe's maternal subjectivity "is so embedded in her children that it . . . allows her to take the life of one of them" (476). In killing her own child, Sethe seems to attempt to declare a sovereign subjectivity.
For Sethe, Beloved's disappearance means the dissolution of her own subjectivity. When Paul D. finally comes to see her, he finds her in Baby Suggs's bed awaiting her death. He offers to bathe and massage Sethe’s feet, and she thinks to herself: "There's nothing to rub now and no reason to. Nothing left to bathe, assuming he even knows how" (272). Without Beloved, Sethe believes that her body, like her self, no longer exists. Only Paul D. can begin to convince her that she may be able to begin to claim her own subjectivity outside of the maternal, when he insists, "'You your best thing, Sethe. You are.'" (273)
While Beloved never attains subjectivity and Sethe only approaches it, Denver firmly asserts her subjectivity near the end of Beloved. Denver knew that the only way to protect her mother from Beloved was "to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help" (243). However, she cannot find the strength to leave 124 without the encouragement of her deceased grandmother. Baby Suggs had once told Denver that "there was no defense" against white people. Now, she tells her granddaughter to" 'know it, and go on out the yard. Go on'" (244). Realizing that not only Sethe's but her own well-being depended on her finding a job, Denver begins to regard herself as having a self: "It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve" (252). Denver's assertion of subjectivity is shown again when Paul D. offers her his opinion on Beloved and she abruptly defines, saying," 'I have my own'" opinion (267). She acknowledges her own self and requires neither the look of her mother nor Beloved to attain subjectivity.
Through Beloved, Morrison reveals how slavery and the period of Reconstruction failed to grant subjectivity to many African Americans. Those who did gain subjectivity did so by their own assertion, as American society was reluctant socially and legally to acknowledge African Americans as valid citizens. For the characters in the novel, the transition from object to subject presents many obstacles; however, with the support and encouragement from voices of the past, subjectivity becomes attainable.
Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth. "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions." Conflicts in Feminism. Ed. Marianne Hirsh. New York: Routledge, 1990. 184-204.
Atwood, Margaret. "Haunted by Their Nightmares." New York Times Book Review 13 Sep. 1987: 1-3.
Bowlby, John. Loss: Sadness and Depression. New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon P, 1985.
