Course Blog

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of the motifs that stood out to me is that of liquid. In numerous instances, bodies of water, such as streams and rivers, not only serve as the primary locations in which characters undergo significant experiences, but also function as entities whose attributes are used to describe and convey the characters themselves. While this theme of liquidity is pervasive throughout the text, its symbolism shifts between light and darkness, life and death. It is through recognizing the differing uses of water and liquid within Beloved that one is able to better understand the novel’s various characters and the ways in which components of their lives are as seemingly uncontrollable as the water used to describe them.

For Sethe and Beloved, water represents the concepts of birth, renewal, and clarity. Upon being first introduced in the novel, Beloved is directly connected to the water. She does not possess a personal history or familial relations, but is a woman with aquatic origins whose existence is predicated on having merely “walked out of the water” (60). Although Beloved is a young adult and makes it clear that she has undertaken a journey, she is described as having “emerged” from the water with “new skin, lineless and smooth,” as if her true birthplace is the water instead of the womb (60, 61). Similarly, water also serves as a symbol of birth and new life for Sethe because it is in a flooding canoe that she delivers her daughter, Denver. Although Denver is not described as a water-nymph like Beloved, her birth is made synonymous with the water because it appears as though Sethe’s “own water broke loose to join it [the river]” (98). In this way, not only do the water and Sethe’s womb collectively encourage the birth of Denver, but Denver’s birth and the river are eternally ‘joined.’ Furthermore, even though the water serves as the birthplace of both Beloved and Denver, it also exists as a place of renewed life for Sethe. When experiencing mental anguish, Sethe relies on an imagined riverside to ease her suffering. Referring to her mental defense against painful, resurfacing memories as “heavy knives” that protect her from “misery, regret, gall, and hurt,” Sethe determines that the only way to find peace and achieve a renewed sense of self is to place these ‘knives’ “one by one on a bank where clear water rushed” (102). In this way, water and liquid are not only emblematic of birth, but also serve as sources of renewal that help to wash away the cruelties of reality.

Conversely, for Denver and Paul D, liquid is synonymous with loneliness and death. When walking through Sethe’s house for the first time, Paul is consumed by the sadness and evil of Sethe’s dead child and experiences a “wave of grief [that] soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry” (11). In this instance, grief and sadness are emotions that act like water; They wash over one’s entire body like a ‘wave,’ leaving them overwhelmed by negative feelings as if the emotions have ‘soaked’ through their clothes and left their body cold and heavy. Similarly, when Denver fears that Beloved has permanently abandoned her, her experience and emotions are connected to water. For Denver, the thought of being left alone makes her feel “breakable, meltable, and cold,” as if she is an “ice cake torn away from the solid surface of the stream, floating on darkness” (145). In this instance, water signifies human fragility and the ways in which one’s loneliness is as destructive and uncontrollable as being a ‘breakable’ piece of ice floating in ‘darkness.’ In this way, for Denver and Paul D, negative emotions are directly connected to the characteristics of moving water because they limit one’s sense of control, emit a sense of coldness or darkness, and have the ability to make one feel submerged.

Although the motif of liquid varies in its relation to different characters, its overall usage seems to symbolize the larger theme of movement. For all four characters, the concept of liquid is utilized to express a swift, uncontrollable change that takes place in their lives or emotional states. This seems to emphasize the notion that the lives of the characters are fluid, causing change and movement to often be involuntary and inevitable.

A pattern that occurs in the literature and the criticism of it I am interested in for my thesis and in Beloved usually occurs in women’s writing an the critical debate between different genders. This is the critique of black male presence in the patriarchy and their reinforcement of it within the black community. In her response to Henry Louis Gates’ piece called “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” Ann duCille wrote “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical ‘I.’” Her response addresses this very pattern of women authors’ treatment of black men in their writing and the dual critical response these works receive. Black women’s work has been routinely critiqued by men as “literary gender bating and male bashing” (duCille 559). The phenomenon might be responsible for some of the rejection of women in the Harlem Renaissance that I am interested in. DuCille and other women have begun to reexamine these texts with a female lens.

In Nella Larsen’s Passing, the main character Irene’s husband is portrayed as the ideal black man on the surface, but in the narrator’s descriptions of him, his shallowness and repression of Irene are visible. The novel deals with the struggle of a black woman to define her identity while interacting with a world that does not slot her into one racial identifier, as well as her interaction with another woman who chose a very different path. Throughout the narrative, Irene and her husband disagree, but Irene usually silences herself in order to maintain the marriage, at least as it appears to the world around her.

One such interaction takes place later in the novel when they disagree about how best to parent their son. The disagreement ends when Brian states his position and “Irene didn’t answer” (Larsen 60). When she leaves the car and Irene is alone, she thinks, “If she had been able to present her plan, and he had accepted it, as she was sure that he would have done, with other more favourable opening methods, he would have had that to look forward to as a break in the easy monotony that seemed, for some reason she was wholly unable to grasp, so hateful to him. She was even more vexed with her own explosion of anger. What could have got her to give way to it in such a moment?” (60-1).

This passage reveals the dynamic in their relationship where Brian holds all of the power to enact Irene’s ideals, but Irene must engineer every attempt to employ that power with “favourable opening methods” that do not threaten his believed supremacy in their relationship. After meeting resistance, Irene silences herself, thus not getting what she wants and repressing her feelings that she, as Larsen puts it, allowed herself to “give way to.” Her husband leaves that encounter having expressed his full opinion and anger, while Irene must retreat and dissect their interaction for her mistake. This assumes that Irene is the only one who could have erred and acts out the pattern throughout this novel of her pushing true emotions down in order to pretend that her life is what she wants and that she cannot imagine why Brian is dissatisfied as she claims.

Black love as male critics and some of the male Harlem Renaissance authors see it cannot exist as the goal for characters or writers who are women because it exists within the established system of patriarchy. Women will not be enamored with that supposed ideal, and their rejection of it in their writing is not an expression of hate for black men but a call for reform and equality in these relationships within the black community as opposed to just between races. Larsen shows that both partners are unhappy in their relationship and responsible for that unhappiness. Rather than blaming Brian for all of it as male critics argued, Larsen shows how the expected power dynamic within the black couple hurts both of them.

Irene’s silence in this scene could stand in for black women’s silence in the remembered Harlem Renaissance canon. The talented women of that movement were often moved behind the scenes because like Irene, they hoped that their machinations there would be an easier method by which to access what they wanted. Their black male contemporaries and subsequent critics wanted female authors to feel like Irene and avoid a record of their objections just as Brian voices his while Irene’s could be denied because they remain within.

This blog post will discuss imperialism and colonialism of the American New World through a bibliographical lens, through examining the lives of two explorers: Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus. A critical race theory might be most apt for studying colonialism, but I wanted to see if anything interesting or revealing could be gleaned from a bibliographic close reading of “The Allure of the Sea: Africa and Beyond”, and Christopher Columbus’ own travel logs, “The Four Voyages”. I wanted to identify any differences in the obvious overarching pattern: white man sailing on behalf of a European nation “discovers” new land, claims it as their own, or in broader terms, “white people taking things that belong to people of color”.

Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese nobleman charged with the command of a mission to explore the Indies. Christopher Columbus was the poor son of a weaver who had a big plan for exploration in mind. These two men are simultaneously very similar and very different, but ultimately, they are two of history and North America’s most important people. Their story also demonstrates the importance or necessity of social station when it comes to writing history. I believe that da Gama’s background: the fortune and social class he inherited at birth, led him to behave in a specific way in interactions with the indigenous Americans. Columbus, while by no means respectful to the Native Americans he met, behaved in a fashion that showed careful planning and foresight. He was not born with the advantages of da Gama, who came from Portuguese lower nobility and was part of the respected religious order the Order of Santiago. Da Gama is described as having a “solid physique and constitution and a steely resolve; he was exceedingly loyal in friendship, terrible in enmity” (Allure of the Sea, pg 6). Da Gama becomes known for his ruthlessness and discipline, although not a professional sailor. Da Gama, only around twenty-two years old, already had the respect and confidence of the king “with respect to his maritime skills, his ability to lead men, and his willingness to take decisive action” (Allure of the Sea, pg 8). Da Gama was known for being ruthless, authoritative, and so high up in the social hierarchy that he’s almost untouchable.

Christopher Columbus was born to weavers in 1451 in Genoa. Having none of the hereditary advantages of da Gama, he was faced with a lot more adversity than da Gama. He came up with a proposal to explore the Indies and pitched his plan to five monarchs before anyone would fund it. His actual voyage was tougher than da Gama’s as well. His crew had to go three months without land, and half of them died.

Da Gama, coming from a noble family and equipped with a multitude of advantages, faced his project with a conqueror’s mindset. He conceptualized the population of the New World as needing his help, help from Portugal. Columbus, while still a conqueror, focused more on a two-way relationship than did da Gama. Some of this can be shown from his logs, where he described the people he met as being “friendly”, their countenance more open and curious than savage-like and barbaric.  Columbus writes that the natives are godless but friendly, well-built but easy to enslave. Da Gama sees them more as barbaric, primitive sub-humans that he has a divine right from the Order of Santiago to subdue. Two competing nations, with similar motivations for exploration, employed likewise similar techniques in taming the (supposedly) untamed. Additionally, da Gama had his position as the commander of the fleet handed to him, while Columbus made a huge effort to develop a plan and then get that plan funded. This is a huge difference between two seemingly similar events.

A strong similarity is that both men brought small gifts, or trinkets, for the native people. Da Gama brought striped cloth, sugar, glass beads, honey, red hats, hand basins, trousers, tin jewelry, and bells (da Gama, pg 20). Columbus also brought presents for the people he encountered, although his log shows that these gifts were not worth much, and he seemed to take advantage of the people in trade as well. Columbus wanted the natives to think he was benevolent and diplomatic. He says, “It was to create this impression that I had set him free and gave him presents. I was anxious that they should think well of us so that they may not be unfriendly when your Majesties send a second expedition here. All I gave him was worth less than four maravedis” (Columbus’ log-book, pg 61). On his first visit, Columbus was already thinking ahead to the future visits, so he wanted to keep up a façade of diplomacy.

The lives of Vasco da Gama and Christopher Columbus show how two seemingly similar events, with nearly identical outcomes (the colonization of the New World), in fact have glaring differences that may have contributed to the course of history.

After furthering my research and honing in on the type of work I want to investigate and under what lens, I was able to locate a distinct binary that continues to pop up in my research, and in my own thinking about my research. That binary is composed of the words “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)” and “trauma theory”, which both deal with the effects and aftermath on a person after experiencing a traumatic event in their lives, but they also embody some distinct differences as well.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a disorder coined in the mid-20^th century to describe “a serious condition that can develop after a person has experienced or witnessed a traumatic or terrifying event in which serious physical harm occurred or was threatened” (WebMD). PTSD is experienced by the first-hand victim of the event and is a chronic disorder that pops up on different occasions or under different circumstances throughout the victim’s life. The general concern of PTSD patients is with “personal safety” (Stein 1) and it can reoccur at any point in one’s life. It does not transcend beyond the initial victim of the traumatic event, but rather, only affects the person who experienced the event on a first-hand basis. It deals with linear time rather than monumental time, and is physically and emotionally present and visible through outward and explicit expressions of stress. Much like trauma theory, the responses and memories of trauma “are unreliable and influenced by mood […] therefore questioning the accuracy” (Stein 9).

In direct contrast, trauma theory arose around the same time period and stemmed from the research behind “traumatic amnesia”, which is a condition when someone “has an inability to remember an intensely painful experience” (Pederson 334). This theory says that victims may be unable to communicate their trauma verbally, if at all, and may use literature or other forms of writing to attempt to describe their trauma in a clearer way, which was discovered under “the first wave of literary trauma theorist, among them Geoffrey Hartman, Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth” (Pederson 334). This trauma transcends linear time and deals with monumental time, as this type of traumatic experience can affect not only the victim, but also lasting generations of people who have contact with the victim – such as family and close friends who have extended contact with the victim.

These two remarkably similar, yet still very different theories, bring up some questions that point to more obvious differences between the two, so that I can hone in on which term would be more applicable for my research and why. Such questions include asking if PTSD is a respondent term for trauma theory, which begs the question around which term came first, and how did one term affect the other term? Another question I have is regarding the concrete things that mark the difference between PTSD and trauma theory, and how are these units of measurement are determined. To determine how accurate this binary is, and if this is a solid binary to continue researching, I would like to further question if there is a real difference between the two terms, or if one spawned from the other. Similarly, did one particular event or case study cause these terms to be developed – and how similar were these instances? If these two terms are distinctly different, are they different enough to the point where I can distance them from each other and focus in on one that would be more applicable to my study of POW literature and literature as a therapy for trauma.

I’ve realized that there might be a danger in assuming that all victims of trauma consequentially experience PTSD, or vice versa, because that would disqualify much of the research that justifies why people are plagued with PTSD and the symptoms that are specific to PTSD. Because of this, I understand that it would be more accurate to take into account the chronology of when these two terms were coined, and how one term may have influenced the other. By answering the questions I posed above and establishing the differences between PTSD and trauma theory, and how they are both related and different, I will be able to focus in on how I want to put these terms in conversation, both with one another and with my primary sources that deal with POW literature and therapy literature.

Sources:

Pederson, Joshua. “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory.” Narrative vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 333-353.

Stein, Dan J. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. John Wiley and Sons, 2011.

In Jonathan Culler’s book Literary Theory: A very Short Introduction Culler specifically uses personal and relatable examples of his terminologies such as interpretation and Narratology to allow the reader to have a better understanding of his chapters and points. Before using an example, Culler always sets up the reader with some brief knowledge about the example and how it is going to add more detail into his overall argument. Not only do his examples reinforce and back up his points but it also allows the reader to personally visualize or understand his examples and so that way they can grasp his concepts. Two examples when Culler does this is in chapter four when he uses a poem by Robert Frost “We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows” (Culler, 55). In this poem he explains to the reader that there is a difference between interpreting meaning from a specific word or from the poem itself. Culler says, “We have different kinds of meaning, but one thing we can say in general is that meaning is based on difference” (Culler, 56). Through this personal example Culler wants the audience to understand that there is going to be differences based on the text because people interpret words and writing differently than others.

Another personal example that Culler uses in chapter 6 about Narratology is when he discusses a clock. Culler says, “Frank Kermode notes that when we say a ticking clock goes ‘tick-tock’, we give the noise a fictional structure, differentiating between two physically identical sounds, to make tick a beginning and tock an end. ‘The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form” (Culler 83). Using a clock is a simple and straightforward concept to understand, when Culler wants the reader to comprehend that the clock represents time through his usage of saying that time was once started and it will one day be finished. When Culler uses this relatable example it helped me as the reader understand that the point that he was trying to make was that the ticking of a clock symbolizes the beginning and ending of something. The larger issue that this motif speaks to is understanding and grasping his concepts.

One last personal example that Culler uses that helped me grasp the concept of time in a story was when he discussed how the prince became a king. “The grateful Monarch gave the Prince his daughter’s hand in marriage, and when the King died, the Prince succeeded to the throne and reigned happily for many years” (Culler, 89). When Culler uses this example he is showing the reader that over an extended period of time he summarized how a prince was able to become king. For me I was quickly able to grasp the concept that even though the narrator made this plot line seem like it was a couple short events it probably took a period of time for the prince to become the new king. I was also able to understand that the narrator plays an important role in the readers perception of time in the story. The narrator has the ability to control time within the writing. Through examples and relatable objects the reader can visualize and grasp certain foreign concepts better through Culler’s usage of everyday objects. In my opinion, I do not think I would have had the same interpretation of Robert Frost’s poem if I did not understand that there is a difference between understanding the meaning of a poem and specifically the meaning of a word within the poem as well. Through examples I was able to comprehend Culler’s specific points about understanding a text better.

Beloved presents a binary between flashback and the present moment, thus creating a recursive, revisiting, almost swirling sphere of time in the novel. This perception of time is almost exclusively expressed through Sethe’s perspective, which further suggests that the novel’s treatment of time acts as an allusion to Sethe’s mental state – her mind reels from past traumas that daily life invokes. But Morrison complicates this binary (embedded in linear time) by writing Sethe’s conscious and continuous resistance to the past’s, or memories’, shaping of her actions in the present moment. “Nothing better than to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past,” Sethe reflects (73). As Kristeva argues in “Women’s Time,” time can exist on linear, circular, and monumental dimensions. Because our society measures time linearly, we would say that Sethe’s traumatic memories occurred “in the past,” in a certain year and month. But they have not: Sethe’s memories are present for her and bleed into her conversations with Beloved, Denver, and Paul D; she is never free of their infliction on the decisions she makes or reactions she exhibits. These memories reoccur every time Sethe remembers: though they do not physically occur when she remembers them, they elicit fresh trauma that Sethe had not developed until she mentally relived them. Sethe’s remembering of her past shapes her present, morphing personality.

Morrison formally constructs Sethe’s involuntary urge to remember. Morrison writes the novel in fragments that provide the reader with background plot necessary to understand the sometimes cryptic prose that refers to Sethe’s past, but that also dissolve the boundaries between Sethe’s memory and her reality. For instance, the chapter in which Sethe gives birth to Denver begins, “Upstairs Beloved was dancing…Denver sat on the bed smiling and providing the music” (74); this is the present moment, featuring grown Denver. By the chapter’s end, Sethe has given birth to Denver and has just decided on the child’s name (“Sethe felt herself falling into a sleep…On the lip of it…she thought, ‘That’s pretty. Denver. Real pretty’” (85)). The reader has already seen this name for seventy pages, a familiarity Morrison relies on to suggest that past moments and the present overlap in Beloved. Adult Denver and newborn Denver exist simultaneously, as do Sethe’s living and disappeared sons, and Baby Suggs as commander of 124 and as a physically minor figure in the house yet a monumental one in the residents’ imaginations. This collapsing of the past and present is displayed again when Sethe, Denver, and Beloved walk into the woods and the physical experience of being surrounded by nature plunges Sethe into a “rememory” of crossing the river to freedom. “Followed by the two girls…Sethe began to sweat a sweat just like the other one when she woke, mud-caked, on the banks of the Ohio” (90). Again, by the end of this sentence the reader is in a different year from where we were when the sentence began. Morrison follows this sentence with, “Amy was gone. Sethe was alone and weak, but alive, and so was her baby” (90). Here Sethe exhibits vulnerability and easy emotional undoing; the book’s treatment of time aims to convey this internal tussle of Sethe’s through its flashback-flash-forward form.

So the binary of past and present, flashback and current, memory and reality is not conveniently literal in Beloved. I would argue that “past” does not exist for Sethe, nor does present. Every moment she experiences, whether it is in linear time’s terms “happening now” or “has happened,” is wearing on her.