For today's Beloved meal: Psychoanalysis with Feminism on the side

For this blogpost, I decided on the article Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved by Pamela E. Barnett. "Toni Morrison's Beloved is haunted by history, memory, and a specter that embodies both; yet it would be accurate to say that Beloved is haunted by the history and memory of rape specifically"(418). One of the first main points that Barnett addresses is the idea of how hard it is for someone to get over their past. The main event that she talks about is having sex or the act of rape. For example, she talks about several of Sethe's experiences, like how she had sex with the tomb engraver to able to engrave the word Beloved into the tombstone, and how that could be portrayed as a form of prostitution. The second point that Barnett addresses is that of Beloved, and how she is both there spiritually at the beginning, and physically for almost the rest of the book.  She also touches on how she attacked in both forms. Her next point is of "Sexual violence, Sucking, and Sustenance"(422). In this point she goes in depth to the several ways that rape and sexual intercourse is portrayed and seen throughout the book. After that, she is still exploring some ways that rape is portrayed, but focuses more on how many of the prisoners were taken advantaged of and how that affected them.
Finally, near the end of the article she constructs a relationship between male and female and how gender is important in the book in rape, but also how there could be a relationship between races.


Throughout the article, Barnett focuses on many points of the story.

One of her points that she makes a lot of emphasis on, and that she often refers to is that of the power that rape has in the book, and how Beloved, the physical character, is a representation of a "succubus"(418). What a succubus is is "a female demon and nightmare figure that sexually assaults male sleepers and drains them of semen". Another of her points that she emphasizes in her article is the idea of being stuck in the past, that is seen usually through the different memories of some form of rape that most characters experience in their past. The last point that I felt was really important to talk about that Barnett emphasizes in her article I the idea of "conflation of sexual and racial domination"(423). What that means is when two things, in this case, the concepts of sexual and racial domination, sort of merge together and people can't tell them apart.

When first reading the book, I never really imagined the possibility of Beloved as a symbol as a succubus because of events that occur in the book. She also goes on to say that it is in comparison to a vampire as well. Barnett says that this is seen in multiple occasions. One of the people that she mainly focuses on is Paul D. Throughout the book Beloved and Paul D never really had a strong relationship, from the moment where he originally exorcises her "ghost spirit" from 124(22). Later on in the story, it is implied that she forced Paul D into a sexual relation with her. I agree with the idea that it could be a form of Beloved "draining" him of his semen and how it was for her benefit because she does gain some form of strength over Paul D after this(137). We also know that it really affected Paul D, because he felt powerless, and he remembers it as something that happened in the dark which often has the connotation of evil or bad, versus the idea of it happening in the light which has the connotation power and ability. Barnett also goes on to say that although a succubus usually only feeds off of men, Beloved also feeds off of Sethe and her "vitality"(418). This is seen throughout the book when Beloved first came into the book(as her physical self, not her spiritual herself) and how Beloved had no power over Sethe but as the chapters went on, we, as the readers saw, how Beloved's presence was putting Sethe into this situation where she was losing control and that power. I think that overall this idea of Beloved being a Succubus could definitely be a possible thing on account that definitely at the end of the story, she was big and pregnant. The pregnancy could have come from the semen that she had stolen from Paul D, and the physically trait of her being big was the vitality that she had stolen from Sethe.

The way the book was setup and written was that there was constant flashbacks to the past. Barnett compares the book Beloved as a trauma story, which she goes on to say that trauma stories "[oscillate] between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival"(420). I understand that one of the big messages in Beloved is the idea of how the past can affect the future, that when you think about it is a denotation of what a trauma is, a deeply distressing or disturbing experience. I also agree with her on this.

One of the last points that I agree with Barnett is her idea of the conflation between sexual and racial domination. This takes place when Paul D is at the prison, and the white officers are taking advantage of the black inmates. Barnett goes on to say "the prisoners are emasculated by passive homosexuality - they are forced to 'go down' (54), to express their social subordination as desire for penetration, and to assume the 'faggot' identity (56)"(423). It is obvious that the officers feel as though they are the ones with power and that they are generally better than the prisoners. This is an ongoing theme that is in the story about racial dominance, but Morrison plays a new twist of having it mix with sexual domination. Through the psychoanalytical lens, you can see this of them believing that they are so powerful over the inmates, that they are forcing them to do something that at the time when the book takes place, was seen as a sin. This made the prisoners feel "emasculated" because they are doing something that they believe is wrong against their will.

Article that is mentioned Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved by Pamela E. Barnett