Slave Narrative Retention In African-American Women

SLAVE NARRATIVE RETENTIONS IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN’S WRITINGS ABOUT MADNESS

Jeanne Phoenix Laurel
…[T]he genre of the psychiatric memoir or fictionalized account of madness by women authors bifurcates along lines of race. As I will show by using Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Nettie Jones's Fish Tales (1983), and Carolivia Herron's Thereafter Johnnie (1991), the dynamics of the slave narrative influence African-American women's writings about madness. (A similar kind of historical genre influence can be seen in the way slave narrators made use of the conventions of the Christian conversion narrative, the colonial American captivity narrative, and the sentimental romance.) Here, I am interested in the way the narrative voice is able or willing to articulate the speaking subject's relationship to madness, and the influence of the slave narrative in shaping that relationship. Rather than beginning from a state of wellness, descending into behavior and ideation which are abnormal, and then returning to a state of wellness, the narrative voice in these three texts blurs the lines between the mental-emotional states of wellness and madness.
… [I]n the works by Morrison, Jones, and Herron, readers are not allowed an orientation to such a set of specific sympathies and interpretations.
The narrative voice in these three works cannot or will not delineate the boundaries between "mad" and "sane." As a consequence, the question of fact -- of what really happened -- remains vague and contradictory. Because the facts are indiscernible, it is impossible to make an informed judgment about whether or not the consciousness that provides these facts is, indeed, "mad." As I will show, the disjuncture of facts, coupled with a convoluted, sometimes unchartable cause-and-effect sequence and with often ambiguous characterizations, is not so much a function of the madness within the text as it is of the slave narrative as an informing
genre.

Beloved’s “Mad” Narrative Structure

If, indeed, African-American literature as a whole is to present a truthful, recuperative vision of black people, then surely the crazy-making circumstances and consequences of black life in America need to be represented. This is the overt purpose of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer-Prize winning Beloved. Beloved literally draws upon the slave narrative, as well as the gothic novel, in its retelling of the actions of an escaped slave who attempted to murder her children rather than be returned with them into slavery. Although Morrison is clearly focused on the lingering trauma this act has caused Sethe, the protagonist, her family, and others in her community, the novel's segmentation into separate parts suggests the taboo against speaking truth directly and immediately.
Beloved is divided into three parts, each increasingly disjointed or "mad." The first section is told from the narrative present, 1874. Past events are distant and fragmented (albeit intrusive) memories, related in enough detail only to limn that something once happened, that strange behaviors and events in the narrative present are sufficiently motivated by the past. Not until the end of the first section, halfway through the novel, is the pivotal event recounted recognizably: Rather than return to slavery, Sethe takes a saw to her children's throats, killing the "crawling-already" baby girl. The vivid retelling of this murder is confirmed and captured in an old newspaper clipping shown by Stamp Paid, the runaways' ferryman, to Sethe's lover Paul D. With the newspaper clipping, the “mad” narrative voice seems to shore itself up by adding a sane counterpart: objective reportage. The clipping's existence authenticates the oral text, much as white abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips appended their imprimaturs to Frederick Douglass's 1845 narrative. Among other uses, an authenticating text's function was to attest to the narrator's veracity -- and thereby, to his or her sanity.
The second section of Beloved becomes more and more absorbed in what Sethe ambivalently describes as "rememory," and in what Paul D metonymically calls a tobacco tin rusted shut in his chest. The novel's narrative structure remains grounded in 1874, the narrative present, but this present becomes progressively more swamped in obsessive, intrusive memories of the past. Paul D's presence in an 1874 storefront church, for example, prompts vivid memories of his last days at Sweet Home. Sethe's nurturing promises to the adult woman Beloved in this year serve as backdrop to Sethe's memories of her own mother. Memory and present-time juxtapositions are within the boundaries of sane, rational reflection and reflexivity, but they are also so doubled-over and enfolded in such radiant, enduring pain that the characters cannot pay more than nominal attention to their mundane struggles for a living in post-Reconstruction Ohio.
Coming as it does toward the end of the section, Beloved's disjointed, stream-of-consciousness narrative makes the other characters' sense of chronological disorientation seem merely an attenuated version of her own. Her prose-poem/free verse images, apparently of a slave-ship capture, her mother's suicide, and her sexual captivity aboard-ship, are more difficult to piece together than those of other characters, since the staccato images contain fewer attempts at sequential narrative structure. In other words, this initially seems a mad piece of writing. But on closer inspection, the structure resolves into a fun-house mirror, more compressed, perhaps, but similarly proportioned to the narrative's progress up to this point. That is, while Beloved's narrative at first seems startlingly different from anything the text has yet presented, it is highly congruent in its fixation on past events, and in its memory-repression sequences from other narrative points of view.
As the third section of the novel opens, past and present briefly merge. Sethe, Beloved, and Denver barricade themselves inside their home, running out of food and money as winter sets in. Boundaries between past and present, between the "crawling-already" baby girl and the adult woman Beloved, even between separate characters, seem to collapse from Sethe's perspective. Yet the narrative voice here truncates description of this madness, as if it is still too painful to talk about. Sethe's blissful, unreasoning conflation of past and present, self and other, lasts a mere five pages. Further, this section of the text is narrated from a sane and reasonable third person perspective. Verb tenses indicate relative time frames; people are correctly identified by their given names; cause-and-effect sequences are described or sufficiently implied. The consciousness of Sethe within this brief section of the novel may be mad by some standards, but the narrative voice makes no effort to mimic that state of consciousness.
A more puzzling lacuna is the question of Beloved's identity, one never fully accounted for in terms of literal narrative. Although the conventions of the gothic genre may dictate that the adult woman Beloved's comings and goings remain mysterious, as if draped in chiaroscuro, we ask: Was there a ghost? Was Beloved, the woman, the same person as the spiteful baby poltergeist whose antics open the novel? To read a return of the repressed into the dual characterization of Beloved makes satisfying sense as a symbolic construction. But to perform this reading, we must locate ourselves outside the literal plot in the position of analysts, making sen se of disconnected story parts by rendering them signifiers within an enclosed psychic economy. The story is doggedly literal. Was there a ghost? Sethe, of course, sees it. Her daughter Denver sees it. But if the ghost functions as a return of their repressed trauma, then why does Paul D, too, witness this ghost at the novel's beginning, when he has been separated from Sethe for eighteen years, and when at this point he is unaware of the reason for there to be a ghost?
On this, the novel is silent. No other portion of the plot confirms or denies the literal presence of occult spirits within this narrative world. Were the text to confirm ghostly presences as real, and Beloved (or some portion of that amalgamated character) as a ghost, then Sethe, Paul D, and Denver would be identifiably sane. Were the text to deny ghosts as real -- even if it did not account further for Beloved -- then the sane characters would be mad, at least in respect to their belief in her existence. But the issue of Beloved is not addressed again except as a metaphor for the angry dead of slavery. Either narrative choice would provide a degree of closure which the novel's anteceding genre, the slave narrative, cannot allow.
http://www.uga.edu/~womanist/1996/laurel.html