PROCEEDINGS TOO TERRIBLE [NOT TO] RELATE

Although Beloved is frequently recalled as a novel that centers on an act of child murder it is also and inextricably one that thematizes and puts into representation the pervasive sexualized violence that enslaved African women endured We can signal that two events in the life of Morrison’s heroine structure the larger story told here: a brutal sexual assault by the plantation owner and his nephews and Sethe’s ‘‘mad’’ act of murdering one child and attempting the lives of her other children Both events, significantly take place in similar barn-like buildings before white men entrusted with varying forms of authority: in the first instance the authority of ownership over lands and people in the second the authority of the state, a posse acting under the Fugitive Slave Law Neither event can be told straightforwardly as part of a linear narrative nor throughout the novel these scenes emerge in fragmentary form as bits of what Sethe terms ‘‘rememory” and from other witnesses’ viewpoints These are events which can never recede into a pash becoming part of a safely distant historical record; like the ghost named in the title of the novel, the occult temporality of these events and others which they evoke fractures any pretense at time’s linearity or progression

These two events are associated in multiple ways; they are indeed causally connected for the sexual violence and the brutal beating that ensues after Sethe attempts to appeal to the wife of the former plantation owner strengthen her resolution to escape the plantation where she has been all her life and the murder of her child is evidently connected to her momentarily successful escape But the causal association is superceded in importance by the proliferation of metonymic linkages that the events call forth A sexual assault and a desperate act of infanticide condense the pervasive violence against the African female body that is intrinsically a part of the slave economy; at the same time the very nature of both acts underscores the precise ways in which African women’s bodies are inscribed in that economy - and in which that economy is literally inscribed on the flesh The enslaved woman is forced to reproduce the system that enslaves her; for not only do statutes dating from the 17th century proclaim that a slave ‘‘follows the condition’’ of her mother but the pervasive sexual violence of white men against enslaved women underscores the intimate violence of the property relation as it re-shapes paternity as a form of speculation and dematerializes African mens’ paternity Morrison’s linkages of these two particular instances of violence resume the traumatic history of the Middle Passage, and the years of slavery by articulating them as the destruction of kinship ties a destruction that is both reiterated upon and proceeds through the bodies of women These female bodies are precisely not part of the socially sanctioned system of exchange upheld by the dominant white culture

Thus the precipitating event in Sethe’s life is her sexual assault at the hands of nephews of the man who has taken over the plantation on which she is a slave after the death of its comparatively more liberal owner While Sethe is pregnant with one child and nursing another the two brothers pin her down in a barn and suck from her breasts while their uncle who is called ‘‘Schoolteacher’’ takes notes in an attempt to calculate whether Sethe has more human or animal characteristics Early in the novel, Sethe sums up the devastating force of this attack when reunited with Paul D, an old friend from the plantation ‘‘Sweet Home” whom she has not seen for years Paul D is disturbed to learn that after telling the cancer-stricken widow of her former master what has happened to her she was whipped ‘‘They used cowhide on you?” he asks ‘‘And they took my milk” she replies It is the second time she has made this statement but Paul D does not seem to grasp its importance to her He continues: ‘‘They beat you and you was pregnant?” And for the third time Sethe says ‘‘And they took my milk!” (Morrison 1988a,b, ₽· 17) In this passage Sethe whose major effort at this early point in the novel is not to remember insists upon bringing the central detail of a sequence of violent assaults to representation ‘‘They took my milk” More than a theft, more even than the bodily assault that leaves marks readily visible 18 years later this violence that sought to enforce her animal status in the eyes of these white men contains something so excessive, so extreme that Sethe can only repeat those few words It is traumatic utterance marking language’s inadequacy before an experience that exceeds all simple referentiality

Sethe was nursing the daughter whom she will later murder to save from being enslaved Yeh as the novel will make clear it is not only an assault upon Sethe’s maternal relation to her child but upon her humanity; the gruesome attack in the barn invokes all the ways in which familial relations among slaves are denied broken refused crushed In Beloved, these relations - and slavery’s destruction of them - are represented in the terms of a negative maternal genealogy Sethe’s mother-in-law Baby Suggs like Sethe has suffered from the decimation of familial bonds that is inextricable from the system of slavery: ‘‘Anybody Baby Suggs knew let alone loved who hadn’t run off or been hanged got rented out loaned out bought up brought back stored up mortgaged won stolen or seized....

The assault in the barn on Sethe’s body like so much in this novel is not only a story of one woman It is integrally and necessarily that and therefore resists reading in terms of simple allegory This is a novel that constantly works to disrupt any simple opposition of the figurative and literal; evoking in its title a gravestone a child and a ghost it is also the story of the ‘‘sixty million or more’’ to whom Morrison dedicates the novel. The system of slavery worked toward the eradication of the subjectivity of the Africans by positing them as ontologically storyless construing them - as does Schoolteacher on the far border of the human

Precisely in its explicitness and detail, the scene of sexual violence in Beloved operates then to link the destruction of African kinship ties - and the assertion of white male patriarchal ones - to a meticulous and systematic dehumanization of the female slave Morrison’s narrative goes yet further in specifying that in the perverse nature of the assault on Sethe, US slavery is associated with the cultural authority of 19th-century race science The violence and perversions of individual subjects are not simply rationalized via slavery; the domain of science legitimates individual perversions An entire socio-symbolic field is concentrated in this scene of sexual violence: a field that has as one of its central agendas the production of ‘‘the human” through the marking of its separation from the animal.

The representation of sexual violence here is central to the narrative and remarkable in several regards It brings to representation that which 19th- century rhetoric of violence particularly as concerns slavery bathed in circumlocution and more recent antirape discourses have written as damage to an individual, if gendered subject.⁶ Discussing the rhetorical position of the authors of slave narratives Morrison (1998) has noted that ‘‘in shaping the experience to make it palatable to those who were in a position to alleviate it, they were silent about many things and they ‘forgot’ many things My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings to terrible to relate’’’ (1998, pp.

In critical analyses of sexual violence and cultural representation it has been noted that the scene of sexual violence is often erased Lynn Higgins and Brenda Silver (1991) have described a ‘‘configuration where sexual violence against women is an origin of social relations and narratives in which the event itself is subsequently elided’’ (1991 pp 2-3); this is a configuration that recurs in the dominant texts of Western culture from the story of Lucretia’s rape by Tarquin to Freud’s Totem and Taboo. What these narratives share is that they attempt to trace a moment of origin in which social relations between and among men are constituted; a new order is founded over the violated bodies of women Yet, in so far as sexual violence has functioned in cultural texts as a signifier for illegitimate political or social authority we might make the following observation: in order to function as such a signifier the scene of violence itself must exist in an aporetic relation to representation It cannot be understood as part of a structure because in fact it is prior to and enabling of that structure

It is this configuration that Beloved addresses precisely by bringing sexual violence to representation at the same time as it examines the conditions under which it is committed and those under which it is representable The novel exposes a version of what Slavoj Zizek terms ‘‘the obscene underside of the Law:” a murky zone of illicit activity that functions as a supplement, and actually operates to uphold the symbolic - and here social - law For if technically the perverse assault upon Sethe would be looked upon by the gentlemen and ladies of the south as an affront to convention if not morality and if not determinate legality - Sethe in fact, runs to tell the widow of her former master assuming that this kind of behavior will not be tolerated at least on the ‘‘Sweet Home” plantation - the specificity of Morrison’s representation of the assault makes clear that the sexual violence against slave women has an enormous role in upholding and delineating the rule of southern plantation life not least in establishing male hierarchy and articulating a boundary of the human that enables slavery to continue The thesis that I read Morrison as positing here in literary form is one with radical implications: sexual violence against African women under slavery was not simply a matter of opportunity and enjoyment, or was it only a matter of reproducing labor at cheap cost although the historical record tells us that both are true The thesis would be that these institutionalized forms of sexual violence were part of a process of white masculine subject constitution

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