Xander Wallace
20 October 2015
“The psychoanalytic lens focuses on internal and emotional conflict. It is focused on the subconscious of the characters -- the things that are going on INSIDE their minds that they might not be expressing outwardly. It explores why characters act they way they do” (Macho 3).
Reading a text through the psychoanalytic lens requires the reader to analyze the thoughts and feelings of the characters, both through direct quotations as well as the subtext garnered from them. By doing so, the reader is able to discern the subconscious and/or conscious motives of the characters, thus better understanding the text and its story.
In chapter three of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Denver, the daughter of the protagonist Sethe, spies her mother praying in the bedroom of her late mother-in-law. Through the window, Denver observes what appears to be a disembodied white dress kneeling next to Sethe, an arm placed around her waist. When Sethe emerges from the room unaccompanied, Denver confronts her and explains what she saw. When Denver can garner no explanation from her mother, she asks her what she was praying for. Sethe responds that she no longer prays, rather she simply talks in a room alone. When Denver asks her what she was talking about, Sethe imparts her current sentiments on time and memories. Through the use of tone, neologism, and symbolism, Sethe conveys the permanence of the psychological scars given to her by slavery, and her inability to consciously repress them.
“What were you praying for, Ma’am?”
“Not for anything. I don’t pray anymore. I just talk.”
“What were you talking about?”
“You won’t understand, baby.”
“Yes, I will.”
"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it.
Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened" (43).
By starkly stating “I don’t pray anymore. I just talk”, Sethe reveals that the trauma she has experienced at the hand of slavery has left her consciously devoid of faith, and unable to ask for anything because she knows her pleas will not be answered. Having faced tragedy after brutality, Sethe now finds prayer an irrational solution for her problems. Through the nonchalant and utterly transparent tone with which she denounces her belief in a higher power, Sethe reveals that she regards hope with indifference, if not resigned skepticism. After what she has endured, she finds to “just talk” is the only way to sort out her troubles--turning her back to the god that had turned a blind eye to her devastating plight.
Having faced innumerable misery in her younger years, it is clear from the text that Sethe consciously desires to move forward with her life, although she is subconsciously unable to do so. With a hint of resignation in her voice, Sethe tells Denver that she was “talking about time”, and how “it’s so hard for [her] to believe in it”. Sethe’s metaphorical disbelief in time tells the reader that it is a result of time’s inability to heal her wounds--both physical and psychological. Having escaped from slavery and established a life for herself and her children, Sethe hoped that time would erase from her memory the horrors of slavery. Now, with her past haunting her (literally in one case), Sethe finds it nearly impossible to believe in the most steadfast and ever-present element of existence--time. Both her abstinence to prayer and newfound disbelief in time reveal that Sethe is unable to repress the dark memories that haunt her consciousness.
In this passage, Sethe uses the neologism “rememory” to refer to recollections of of her dark past, as as both a slave and fugitive. The addition of the re prefix to memory indicates repetition, and allows Sethe to communicate the long-lasting nature of her dark memories. Rather than fading like other memories do, Sethe’s “rememories” are unable to leave her ego--playing over and over again in her consciousness. Just as the scars on Sethe’s back are permanent to her body, it is made clear that these “rememories” are permanent to her psyche.
Sethe insists that although a memory may vanish, “places are still there”. Sethe uses the symbol of “places” to compare her irrepressible memories to the immutability of a physical location. A house may burn down, but the ground that house once stood on will always exist. Even if Sethe represses a “rememory”, the trauma in her life occurred nonetheless--and can never be erased. Sethe adds that “the picture of it...stays...out there, in the world” which conveys that while traumatic, her suffering is not separate from the larger issue of Slavery--an issue she has to deal with on a daily basis. Slavery had ended years before this passage takes place, but Sethe implies that the broad and resonant racial divide it created stays stronger than ever. Although the house of slavery had since been burned down, its “picture” continues to torment the lives of all freed blacks, and the foundation of racism on which that house stood remains firmly lodged in America’s soil.
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Psychoanalysis definition courtesy of Activate Instruction © 2014.
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ReplyDeleteI really appreciated your insight and analysis into the psychoanalytic lens and it's relevance to your quote from the text.
ReplyDeleteWow. You broke down the quote you used very well and used it bit by bit to support just how traumatized Sethe truly is as a person for enduring slavery. I would've like to have seen more on how this traumatic state of mind--that Sethe is in--rationalizes with why she needed to kill Beloved in the first place.
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