First of all, before entering the discussion of the resistance of Morrison’s heroines to the definitions given by ruling class, it is necessary to inquire into how absolute they are in Beloved. The following quotation shows that there is no way to resist the slave holders as definers. Sixo, one of the male slaves at Sweet Home, talks back to his owner, schoolteacher, when he eats a shoat. He takes advantage of the fact that he himself is one of the owner’s possessions, only to fail:
“You stole that shoat, didn’t you?”
“No. Sir.” Said Sixo, but he had the decency to keep his eyes on the meat.
“You telling me you didn’t steal it, and I’m looking right at you?”
“No, sir. I didn’t steal it.” . . . “What is it then?”
“Improving your property, sir.”
“What?”
“Sixo plant rye to give the high piece a better chance. Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work.”
Clever, but schoolteacher beat him [Sixo] anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers―not the defined.
(Beloved 190)
Here, we see, Sixo outwits his master by using tact to expose a contradiction of
slavery in which a human owns another human. Schoolteacher has to employ violence against Sixo’s witty comment, which disregards his master’s authority as a definer. This quotation shows that slavery is a system in which a master provides a definition and a slave is supposed to fit this definition perfectly. In the extract above, only a careful reader can see into the secret background of the slave system in Beloved : the system in which the white people are the definers and the black people are the defined. Another example to show the defining nature of slavery is Paul D’s doubt that his manhood lies not in himself but in his master:
“Garner called and announced them men―but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? . . . . Oh, he [Paul D] did manly things, but was that Garner’s gift or his own will?” (220). Here, we see, Paul D finally finds out that his master is a definer who is able to decide that Paul D is a man or not. Under this system of slavery, Paul D, a slave, cannot have a sense of self because there is no way to judge whatever he does depends on his free will or his master’s.
Through the definitive mechanism of slavery, “blackness” is given the same meaning as “barbaric” and black people are categorized into groups of animals, in contrast to human white people. It is apparent that the division between a black and a white is made according to a stereotypical idea about race.
Furthermore, black people’s animal nature is regarded as an evil characteristic that is inherent in their barbaric race. Needless to say, I use the word “animal” in the sense of a negative characteristic of “uncivilized” people, which is defined in the dominant value system. In view of the prejudice about this wildness, let us now consider an ex-slave Stamp Paid’s refutation. He insists that brutal nature does not originate in black people themselves, but rather has been implanted by
white people:
Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it.
(198-99)
There is a suggestion here that slave owners, who treat their slaves as if they are animals, are in fact animals themselves, because of their barbaric behavior. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that white people, who abuse black slaves inhumanly, project their own brutality on the abused slaves. It is clear that a wild nature, which is depicted as “screaming baboons” or “sleeping snakes” is thought to be a negative characteristic which is imposed by others.
It seems reasonable to suppose that the theory about the transplanted wilderness accounts for other examples from Beloved. For one thing, a bit, which is an instrument of torture, “put[s] a wildness where before there wasn’t any” (71).
Another, more elaborate, example is the scene in which Sethe shows her brutality by wanting to attack the white boy in front of her. Her violent impulse is expressed in peculiar words such as “a something came up out of the earth into her―like a freezing, but moving too, like jaws inside” (31). Considering that Sethe is raped and whipped by white boys right before the event, perhaps it is correct to say that Sethe’s “jaws inside” or “a something” is not her inherent nature, but a jungle which has been planted by white people. We see that, in Beloved, Morrison expresses an idea of implanted wilderness in order to blame inhuman abuse of black people under slavery.
However, we should notice that Sethe’s infanticide cannot be easily reduced to a brutal act which is committed because of an implanted jungle.
Although Sethe does not have a chance to show her animal-like strength to a white boy (the person whom Sethe tries to attack is not a white boy, but a white girl helping Sethe), she has a second chance to put her ferocity into action. Stamp Paid thinks back to how quickly Sethe moves, as if she were a hawk, when she snatches her children in order to kill them:
So Stamp Paid did not tell him [Paul D] how she [Sethe] flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way: one on her shoulder, one under her arm, one by the hand, the other shouted forward into the woodshed filled with just sunlight and shavings now because there wasn’t any wood.
(157, emphasis mine)
It is difficult to interpret the metaphor of a hawk, because what it means depends on how one understands Sethe’s infanticide. While a sympathy for her makes the hawk a symbol of motherly love, a careful reader will notice that the vicious image of the hawk in the extract is too ominous to represent a loving mother. Judging from the examples which we have dealt with above, it is tempting to say that the image of a predatory bird comes from the jungle, which is planted in Sethe by inhuman abuse from slave holders.6
However, Sethe’s wings do not have to signify the brutal nature as a negative characteristic of black people that is transplanted through slavery. In short, her flight as a mother bird is an attempt to cross the border between an animal and a human, by flying into the wilderness inside herself, as Florens does in A Mercy. In fact, it is apparent that Sethe’s humiliating experience in which her animal characteristics were listed inevitably leads to infanticide. The main reason for this connection is that we find the same descriptions of hummingbirds in those two scenes: when she finds out that schoolteacher tells his pupils to write down her animal characteristics, Sethe’s disturbance is depicted as follows: “[m]y [Sethe’s] head itched like the devil. Like somebody was sticking fine needles in my scalp” (193); on the other hand, when she tries to kill her children, her violent impulse is expressed in the same metaphor of the beaks of hummingbirds: “she [Sethe] heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings”(163). If we consider the connection between the two events, we will find the same meaning in Sethe’s infanticide and Florens’ killing her lover: a resistance against dominant values which regard them as an animal by showing an “animal” characteristic in order to fight for freedom. The crucial difference between the two heroines, however, is
that Sethe, an arrogant mother, fails to achieve freedom unlike Florens by committing a serious error, internalizing the notorious system of slavery: in thinking that she owns her children as a slaveholder does his slaves. Although Sethe as a hawk fails to fly into the wilderness inside herself, that is, “a place outside the dominant culture,” Florens succeeds in subverting the definitions by attacking “the blacksmith,” who stands as a symbol of the power of the definer.