Dara Miller

ENG 615

Dr. Laura Dawkins

21 March 2011

Not Even Past: The Scars of History in Morrison’s Beloved and Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea

According to Southern author William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. In fact, it’s not

even past.” Although Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea deal with

vastly different story lines -- Beloved chronicles the heartache of a broken family in the

aftermath of American slavery, while Rhys’ work expounds on the unfortunate history of Jane

Eyre’s Bertha Rochester -- the concept of the ever-present past haunts the pages of both. In both

works, the effects of the collective oppression of the past figures directly in the personal

tragedies of the present. For Morrison’s characters, the shadow of slavery and its atrocities

manifests itself in a venomous ghost so powerful it is able to take on human form. For Rhys’

Antoinette, her inadvertent association with the hated colonialists in post-colonial Jamaica

alienates her from any true sense of identity or home. The damages from the past seep almost

continuously through the lives of the main characters in both novels; it is only through final

acknowledgement of their traumas that the primary characters manage to grasp a tremulous hold

over their own identities. In both Beloved and Wide Sargasso Sea, the final confrontations with

the sorrows of the past serve as a catalyst for growth.

In Beloved, the characters are plagued not only by personal trauma, but by the

unmanageable weight of the collective trauma of the American slave. The mysterious character

of Beloved holds within her perhaps-ghostly form all the multiplicities of past traumas for the

characters in the novel. Her interactions with the different serve as the impetus for the

“rememory” that takes place not only for Sethe, but also for Paul D., Denver, and Beloved

herself, and it is only through this process of remembering their fragments pasts that the

characters are finally able to work towards a sense of closure and growth. Her manifestation,

even though it is “not a story to pass on,” becomes the only way the others can find to move past

their own and their collective history. Beloved therefore becomes a figure upon which almost

any tragedy can be projected. For Sethe, she is the second-chance daughter, back for both

revenge and reconciliation; for Paul D., she is the unnerving force that pries open a tobacco-tin

heart; for Denver, she is the rival that forces her to finally take on adult responsibility; for

herself, she is all of these and more. Beloved’s complex existence embodies not only the

reflection of her family’s personal traumas, but perhaps most importantly the reflection of the

collective experience of slavery.

At Beloved’s appearance, the community initially speculates that she could possibly have

escaped from white men who had kept her in a cruel captivity, deprived of any real chance of

developing communication or social skills. With this interpretation in mind, Beloved herself

could be seen as a victim of racism; however, her supernatural presence in the novel cannot be

completely rationalized away. In Beloved’s own stream of consciousness narration of her

personal history, the readers catch a fragmented glimpse of the history of slavery’s brutality

through the description of a nightmare-like state of suspension Beloved describes as her previous

existence:

...there will never be a time when I am not crouching too I am always crouchingthe

man on my face is dead...some who eat nasty themselves I do not eat...small rats

do not wait for us to sleep someone is thrashing but there is no room to do it inif

we had more water we could make tears...we are all trying to leave our bodies

behind... (Morrison 210)

This narration of a collective experience is reminiscent of the chronicles of traumatic slave ship

voyages across the Middle Passage. According to Dennis Childs in his article “‘You Ain’t Seen

Nothin’ Yet”: Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the Middle Passage Remix, ” Beloved’s

internal dialogue directly parallels the 1788 testimony of Reverend John Newton, who described

the deplorable conditions of slaves stacked on top of one another -- even among the dead -- and

often driven to eating their own excrement (7).

Beloved’s symbolic function as a representation of collective trauma is evident not only

through this reflection of actual practices, but also through the broken syntax of this passage.

After her initial statement, “I am Beloved and she is mine,” her thoughts flow forth in a

continuous chain, broken only by pauses of white space. The effect of this shift in style forces

the reader to listen to Beloved’s own “rememory” in gasps, as if she was gulping for air or the

strength to continue. The fact that the passage lacks the conclusive end of punctuation creates the

vision of her nightmare as a never-ending repetition in her mind - “a hot thing” that must be

endured by not only her, but by anyone connected to the African slavery experience.

Similarly, Antoinette’s character in Wide Sargasso Sea also stands as a symbol of

historical trauma. However, her trauma does not stem from a history as one of the oppressed, but

rather as one of the oppressors. Antoinette’s family, as a decaying representation of white

colonialism in aftermath wake of Afro-Caribbean emancipation, suffers from a confused sense of

identity in the new order of the island. After the death of Mr. Cosway, Antoinette and her mother

are left with little more than the stinging remembrance of how things used to be; with their

wealth stripped away, they become the new victims of the colonialist system. Where they were

once (even if resentfully) respected, they are now reviled, and the pejorative burn of being

labeled a “white cockroach” follows Antoinette throughout the novel. This reconstruction of the

social norm also involved a “rhetorical exercise in reconfiguring black-white relations...the term

“white nigger” [is used as an] insult that conveys the Jamaican Black Creole community’s

disapproval of a...character’s behavior” (Halloran 89). The strained relationships between the

islanders and Antoinette and her family ultimately lead to the tragedy that bereaves her of both

her mother and her sense of identity.

Antoinette’s struggle to reclaim her racial and personal identity is perhaps best illustrated

through her relationship with Tia. Initially, she identifies with Tia, and views them as both equals

and friends; however, the racial prejudices of the adult generation soon seep into their friendship,

with Tia’s realization that “Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black

nigger better than white nigger,” (Rhys 24). Despite Tia’s ultimate rejection of their friendship,

Antoinette continues to identify with her throughout the novel, as she sees in Tia a reflection of

the island persona she feels that she embodies. Her association with the wildness of nature and

close ties to the reality of the island alienates her from her husband, while her heritage alienates

her from ever truly belonging to the island, leaving her to wonder “who I am and where is my

country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all,” (Rhys 102). This void of identity

leads her to identify with the only concept she can grasp on to - the love of her husband. With his

eventual rejection, her last grasp for her identity is shattered, and she is left wandering, ghost-

like, in the “cardboard house...[that is] not England” (Rhys 181). Her fatal jump is prompted, not

by a suicidal tendency, but by the memory of Tia, lighthearted and free in the pool at Coulibri. In

her choice to merge her identity with the memory of Tia’s, she abandons any connection with the

English world and finds a tragic redemption for her past trauma.

In both Beloved and Wide Sargasso Sea, the protagonists struggle against personal

traumas that are created by the historical contexts of their settings. The immense tragedies of

American slavery are present throughout the personal histories intertwined in Beloved, from the

characterization of Beloved as a representative for the collective slave experience to the very

personal trauma of Sethe’s choice to murder her daughter to save her from life as a slave. Wide

Sargasso Sea, though set in a vastly different world, still also explored the complexities of race

relations and the damage that it can inflict. Throughout both novels, the scars of the collective

identity directly correlate to the identities of the characters; although in a sense both of these are

stories “not to be told,” it is their telling that brings to light the struggles of personal crisis in the

scheme of historical upheaval.

Works Cited

Childs, Dennis. “‘You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet”: Beloved, the American Chain Gang, and the

Middle Passage Remix.” American Quarterly 61.2 (2009): 7

Halloran, Vivian Nun. “Race, Creole, and National Identity in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and

Phillips’s Cambridge.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 21 (2006): 89

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1982.