【연구논문】 Resentment Sanctioned: Reading Sethe’s Anger in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Hyeon Jeong Lee (Independent Scholar) As Barbara Schapiro has suggested, Morrison’s Beloved dramatizes “the unconscious emotional and psychic consequences of slavery” on African and African‐American slaves (194). The novel renders the “interior life,”1) the unrecognized emotional life of the “Sixty Million and more,” visible through the depiction of the life and struggle of 1) In “The Site of Memory,” Morrison observes two deficiencies about the nineteenth‐ century slave narratives. On the one hand, they are usually silent about the “more sordid details of” the violence of slavery; on the other hand, for Morrison, “there was no mention of their [slaves’] interior life” in slave narratives (109‐10). Patterson also recognizes the absence of the written record of slaves’ emotional life. He says, “Certainly we know next to nothing about the individual personalities of slaves, or of the way they felt about one another. The data are just not there, and it is the height of arrogance, not to mention intellectual irresponsibility, to generalize about the inner psychology of any group” (11). For sociological approaches, any attempt to generalize the interior life of individual slaves may be unthinkable “arrogance.” Yet, in the imaginary work of fiction, as Morrison’s work proves, it is an important achievement that adds to the recovery of the reality of slaves. 188 Hyeon Jeong Lee Sethe and other ex‐slave characters in and around 124 Bluestone Road (Beloved 3).2) In this emotional drama, black anger is the governing impetus.3) In the course of dramatizing sufferings and conflicts among the black people in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1873, the novel makes it clear that the anger penetrates both the slavery past and the present life of ex‐slaves. The novel plots black anger in two layers. One is Beloved’s anger, which overtly appears on the surface of the narrative and defines the mother/daughter relationship as complicating as it is affected by slavery. The other is Sethe’s anger that she feels regarding her abusive slavemaster Schoolteacher. As an undercurrent that runs throughout the narrative, Sethe’s anger colors the motivations of her actions under slavery and in the aftermath. The novel’s main plot consists of depicting how Sethe’s anger about the white slavemaster leads to Beloved’s rage at her mother and whether or not the mother will be able to be forgiven by the outraged daughter as well. Put it another way, black (female) anger is the key to understanding the drama about how the black woman 2) Hereafter quotes from Morrison’s Beloved will be marked within the text without the author’s name and the title of the book. 3) Anger, rage, and resentment are similar, but distinct: anger is the most general term to indicate the unpleasant emotional state which occurs when one experiences harm or injury afflicted on oneself. Rage denotes the “ferocity” and “violence” of the emotion. Etymologically, rage implies “insanity” (OED). While anger does not necessarily recognize the cause, resentment is accompanied by rational (or even moral) judgment about the cause. For instance, Sethe “was angry, but not certain at what” (76); she felt “right resentment at what could have been his [Halle’s] cowardice, or stupidity or bad luck” (113). Resentment also conveys an element of volition in it. The OED defines resentment as “(a feeling) of ill will against a person or thing,” and the Merriam‐Webster Dictionary as “a feeling of indignant displeasure or persistent ill will at something regarded as a wrong, insult, or injury” (Italics added). Resentment Sanctioned 189 Sethe will be able to reinstitute herself as self and mother. Yet, interestingly, in comparison with Beloved’s anger, which overtly asserts within the narrative and, combined with her enigmatic characteristics and role in the novel, proves its valence as the object of critical responses, Sethe’s anger has not been well recognized so far. Is it because it is too “natural” to imply that the black woman Sethe gets angry at the injustice of slavery and at the abusive slavemaster? Or is the moral complexity of the infanticide a more attractive issue than the emotional basis of the act for critical analysis?4) Marianne Hirsch is probably the only scholar who has mentioned “anger” in connection with Sethe: When Sethe tries to explain to Beloved why she cut her throat, she is explaining an anger handed down through generations of mothers who could have no control over their children’s lives, no voice in their upbringing. Beloved suggests why that anger may have to remain unspeakable, and how it might nevertheless be spoken. (Mother/Daughter Plot 198; italics added) In these brief remarks on the novel, Hirsch intuitively notices that the frustrated mother feels anger under the dehumanizing conditions of slavery, which especially distorts and destroys motherhood. However, more remarkable about Hirsch’s comment is that she recognizes Sethe’s anger in its repressed form. In other words, Hirsch notices that Sethe does not explicitly speak about her anger in 4) Notably, for example, speaking of Sethe’s infanticide of Beloved as an “unhomely moment,” Bhabha focuses on the significance of the representation of the incident. He says, “[a]s we reconstruct the narrative of child murder through Sethe ... the very historical basis of our ethical judgments undergoes a radical revision” (144). 190 Hyeon Jeong Lee relation to the white violence and the perpetrators and at the same time that, nevertheless, Sethe’s anger is discernible in the text. In fact, I argue, Sethe herself does not recognize her anger, let alone direct it at Schoolteacher until Beloved returns from “[o]ver there” and makes her remember things that are “unspeakable” (190, 71). In other words, most of the time, Sethe’s anger is repressed until Beloved returns and has her remember the past and confront the white master. In this article, referring to what literary critics and philosophers have discussed about the relationship between the emotion of anger and the sense of self, I will explore the subtle change in Sethe’s affective state from grief to resentment in relation to her self‐ understanding. In due course, I will argue that Morrison’s novel affirms Sethe’s black female anger as an expression of her self‐ understanding which asserts herself against the racial other of the white master. 1. Relating Anger and Sense of Self In The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820‐1860, Linda M. Grasso historicizes women’s anger by claiming that the nineteenth‐century’s “gendered ideologies have historically precluded anger from women’s emotional repertoire” (5). In the era of the “grand republican experiment” after the revolutionary war, according to Grasso, “[f]or women to express unwomanly feelings” such as anger “would mean undermining the basis of their Resentment Sanctioned 191 authority, for then they would be acting like men in the marketplace” (23, 24). In spite of and against the cultural constraints, however, “women create an art form to express publicly the angered discontent that is culturally prohibited,” Grasso observes (5). Included in Grasso’s discussion are Lydia Maria Child, Maria W. Stewart, Fanny Fern, and Harriet Wilson. According to Grasso, these women writers are able to recognize and express the gendered and racialized anger “[t]hrough a sophisticated invention of masking techniques” (16). Considering that women, both black and white, were denied of the right to feel anger in the nineteenth‐century America, it is not surprising that Sethe, who is a “mere” ex‐slave woman, does not recognize anger in her relations with Schoolteacher. Being illiterate and still internalizing slavery ideologies, Sethe is not fortunate enough to understand her “angered discontent” let alone invent any language or art forms to express her anger. Nonetheless, Morrison’s novel has what Grasso calls “textual signs” (7), which allow us to observe Sethe’s unconscious anger: “Attacking, blaming, whining, nagging, crying, and self‐imposed silence may all be signs of an unidentified discontent that is being ineffectively addressed and expressed” (15). Maybe Sethe’s anger is repressed, and thus “ineffectively addressed and expressed”; nevertheless, in the form of “attacking,” “nagging,” and “self‐imposed silence,” it is there to be recognized. Recognizing Sethe’s suppressed anger is important, for the emotion of anger is in close relationship with the sense of self. Philosopher Jeffrie G. Murphy argues that resentment, an angry emotion that is accompanied by the judgment of wrong‐doing, is a manifestation of 192 Hyeon Jeong Lee “self‐respect” when a person is morally injured: “[R]esentment (in its range from righteous anger to righteous hatred) functions primarily in defense, not of all moral values and norms, but rather of certain values of the self, ... the primary value defended by the passion of resentment is self‐respect” (16; italics original). Grasso also highlights the link between the emotion of anger and the sense of self: “[T]he expression of anger and the creation of an autonomous self are integrally linked” (13). In both Murphy’s and Grasso’s formulations, “an autonomous self” is a precondition for a person to be able to feel and express anger. “Before a woman can recognize her anger,” Grasso observes, “she has to recognize that she is entitled to a self” (13). However, Morrison’s novel renders the process in reverse. In the novel, Sethe recognizes her being a self only after she has recognized her resentment about the injustice of slavery and has directed it toward Schoolteacher. According to Hirsch, Sethe’s final words, “Me? Me?” (314), is a “double assertion of herself” and heralds the coming of “a subject” that is “constructed in question and in relation” (Hirsch, “Maternity and Rememory” 103). For Sethe, getting angry at the white master is followed by her recognition of her being a self, which is affirmed in relation to the others. Recent scholarly responses to the novel, informed by trauma studies in particular, have considered Sethe’s insistence on the past being “unspeakable” as a symptom of victimhood of traumatic experience and fixated Sethe as a passive victim of the trauma of slavery (71).5) When we recognize Sethe’s anger in its repressed state 5) Ramadanovic is exceptional. Identifying Beloved as a trauma narrative, which is, according to him, one of the “variations on the modern Western narrative in the Resentment Sanctioned 193 and note her gradual change in terms of her recognition of anger, we can understand her “silence” in a different way than those scholars. Two critics who misread her silence are Florian Bast and Roger Luckhurst. The ex‐slave characters’ “voicelessness,” Bast argues, is “marked by a significant loss of the characters’ ability to express themselves and their trauma” (1072). In Bast’s reading, Sethe and other ex‐slave characters remain as the victims of slavery since their inability to tell their own stories forestalls any meaningful agency for the black subjects. Likewise, interpreting the scene where Sethe tries to explain the infanticide to Paul D only to “circl[e] him the way she was circling the subject” (187), Luckhurst identifies Sethe’s bodily and narrative “circling” as an analogy of the symptom of traumatic experience. For him, “circling” is a sign that indicates that Sethe is unable to confront or break out of the definition imposed by the slave master (91). Certainly there are textual evidences that affirm approaching the novel from the perspectives of trauma studies and allow us to interpret the characters’ inability to tell their own stories as an aspect of their traumatic symptom. However, there are other, to borrow Grasso’s term, “textual gestures” that help us understand “silence” as a sign of anger (7). Earlier in the novel when Paul D asks about the “tree” on her back, Sethe, for the first time, discloses one of the instances of her traumatic experience of slavery, that is, the sexual abuse of her body, the “milking” by the whiteboys and Schoolteacher. As Paul D shows more concern about very basic sense that [it is a story] of becoming an autonomous subject (nation and person),” Ramadanovic considers Sethe’s silence to be what he calls a “narcissistic, self‐defining phase” (178, 181). I will talk more about Sethe’s “narcissistic phase” later. 194 Hyeon Jeong Lee the fact that they “used cowhide on [her],” who was “pregnant” at the moment, she flares up with anger and exclaims, “And they took my milk!” (24‐25). Eighteen years of silence about her extreme humiliation is not so much a result of inability to speak as a way of suppressing her anger that does not find a proper outlet. Reading the novel from the perspective of trauma studies risks the African‐American character’s subjectivity. As it focuses on Sethe’s fragmental and incomplete story‐telling, often times trauma paradigm suggests that the subject of trauma cannot fully recover her subjectivity to the extent that she is able to own and tell her own story. When anger paradigm converges with trauma paradigm, however, it opens a space where we can think of a different mode of subjectivity in between passive victimhood and autonomous self, both in political and narrative terms. That is, if we consider how Sethe gradually recognizes her anger and finally comes to enact it, we will be able to affirm that she is an active subject although she may not be an articulating one. Indeed, although Sethe does not rationalize her angered discontent, she reacts to the cause toward the end of the novel. The novel’s end has Sethe “feel anger, and then recognize, accept, and direct it at the real enemy,” Schoolteacher, after her interaction with the returned‐from‐the‐dead daughter (Grasso 4). If we can understand Sethe’s violent attack on Edward Bodwin toward the end of the novel as an instance of her expression of the resentment toward the white master, then the significance of the occasion is well explained by J. Giles Milhaven’s notion of “vindictive anger.” “Vindictive anger is good,” Milhaven argues, “because it is an elemental lunge of our self to be with others as Resentment Sanctioned 195 their equal in power and will. Our wanting to make others suffer for making us suffer is our wanting to make ourselves equal to them in personal power and freedom. However blind be our rage and however brutal and inhuman be the act we in our rage strain to do, we are straining to be by that act, with the other person as equal persons” (176‐77). With Milhaven, if we directly express our anger at a person who has overpowered us to suffer, by doing unjust harm to us, it is nothing but our struggle to assert ourselves as equal with the person. Acting out her anger, Sethe is asserting herself as a subject who is “equal to [the slavemaster] in personal power and freedom.” 2. Anger, Grief, and Slavery From the very beginning of Beloved, Sethe’s angry feeling, coupled with the “spiteful” baby ghost’s “powerful spell,” saturates the novel about Sethe’s “powerful love” in its repressed form (9, 11). As the novel begins, we find Sethe remembering an instance of her powerful and sacrificial love. After the funeral of the crawling already? baby and after her return from the jail, Sethe goes to purchase a tombstone for her daughter who died without a name. She wants to have “Dearly Beloved” on the tombstone. But she barely has the “money” to engrave even the lone word “Beloved”; she has to pay the engraver by having sex with him for ten minutes. “This act, which is recounted early in the novel,” Margaret Atwood remarks, “is a keynote for the whole book.” For Atwood, this scene epitomizes 196 Hyeon Jeong Lee the reality of African‐Americans’ life “in the world of slavery and poverty, where human beings are merchandise, everything has its price, and price is tyrannical” (49). I add, this scene sets an emotional keynote of anger for the entire novel, which Sethe is unconscious of or repressing, so Beloved returns to make Sethe feel, recognize, and accept it. In her memory of the incident, “those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn‐colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (11). At this moment, Sethe certainly feels mortification and anger to the extent that she thinks of death, “the grave.”6) But she fails to recognize her anger as it is; instead, she projects it onto the engraver’s son: “She thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old” (11; italics added). From our twenty‐first century’s point of view, Sethe’s “prostitution” testifies that slavery permeates the “free” territory in disguise. This scene where Sethe barters her body to pay the engraver is the microcosm of the “free” North where ex‐slaves are nothing but the prey of the capitalist market. In this “free” market, the black female body is “voluntarily” enslaved. The ruthlessness of the “contracted” sexual violence is more acutely registered because of the semblance of voluntariness. In fact, Sethe’s “barter[ing]” is in continuation of the violation of African and African‐American women that not only 6) “Death” is one of the “telltale signs,” Grasso observes, “of women’s forbidden angry expression.” The other signs include “illness, acts of sacrifice, supplicating tones, captivity motifs, hunger, and emaciated bodies” (7).