Home > Papers & Prizes > Elizabeth O'Brien, "Toni Morrison's Beloved: The Empathic Connection and the Restoration of the Self"

Toni Morrison's Beloved:
The Empathic Connection and the Restoration of the Self

By Elizabeth O'Brien, PhD

Heinz Kohut Memorial Fund Paper Prize
1998 Prize Winner
"Toni Morrison's Beloved:
The Empathic Connection and the Restoration of the Self"
By Elizabeth O'Brien, PhD
Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Assistant Director of Educational Services
Drew University

One focus throughout all of Toni Morrison's novels is the development of the female sense of self. Morrison constantly explores how the girl child must battle the effects of racism and the brutal history of slavery that have had such a negative impact on the family and kinship groups that originally nurtured the budding self. Despite the psychological damage created by slavery and omnipresent racism, each novel carefully traces the psychological strengths that have ensured African-American survival. Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved presents the pinnacle of Morrison's examination of this experience, as it reconstructs the intricate interplay of psychological and cultural forces that shape each character's sense of self. Beloved demonstrates Morrison's profound understanding of both the psychological traumas and strengths that must be acknowledged by our culture at large, if we are to heal the deep wounds of our communal history.

Throughout the novel, Sethe models a many-faceted process of restoring the various losses she had sustained throughout her life. The way she heals her fragmented sense of self closely mirrors self-psychologist Heinz Kohut's therapeutic process in two significant areas. First, through her "rememories", Sethe carefully rebuilds her sense of self as a caring, passionate, powerful female. Kohut emphasizes the importance of this return to the early incidents of childhood in order to reclaim her past strengths, confront the losses, and locate her own "self" on an historical continuum, as a way of moving into the future (Kohut Restoration 184). Secondly, Morrison presents us with countless moments of empathic connection that help Sethe heal, illustrating the basis of Kohut's therapeutic process - the empathic connection between patient and therapist that enables the recreation of a more cohesive sense of self. Empathy - the heartfelt, deep understanding of someone else's feelings and the communication of that understanding - serves as a cornerstone for the theories of self psychologists like Kohut who describe the crucial role empathy plays both in infant development and in therapeutic recovery.

In describing her work with women, psychologist Alexandra Kaplan augments Kohut's approach by defining very specific boundary issues that help maintain each participant's own sense of self in the act of empathic connection. She divides the empathetic response into two areas: "the affective response occurs in a deep connectedness and interpenetration of feelings between two people. . . .[and] the cognitive component of empathy. . .[helps]identity remain[s] differentiated" (46-7). Thus, true empathic listening and behavior require that one knows herself well-enough to listen fully to the other person and respond from within her own self, without interfering with the integrity of the other's personhood. In turn, these empathic connections have the potential to form not only an initial sense of self in early life, but serve to transform selves that have been battered by life experiences. Throughout the novel, Morrison shows transformative moments that are a result of true, empathic responsiveness, both for her characters and her readers.

SETHE'S JOURNEY BEGINS

Sethe's story describes the labyrinth of feelings and events that shaped African-American female selfhood in slavery (and, subsequently in freedom) and expresses an extensive range of intimate feelings about herself and her life. In essence, she stands for every slave woman's experience, representing the female self as it is raped, beaten, humiliated, threatened, abandoned, orphaned, but surviving. Through her eyes, her ears, her body and her story, we see, hear and feel the anguish of being an owned woman, yet a woman with the same feelings and desires as one who is free. Hers is a story about being a daughter, a lover, a wife, a daughter-in-law, a widow, and, most importantly, a mother.

One of the first tasks Sethe must accomplish on her journey toward the restoration of her core self that has been fragmented by her various experiences and relationships is finding the courage to "go back." Morrison herself discusses the difficulty in wanting to remember or to face the loss. She says she, too, tried to forget: "One can't remember; you couldn't get up in the morning and go to work if you did." Yet Morrison was also guided to write this novel because she wanted to find out what was "untold or unsaid," to uncover the "deliberate survivalist intent to forget certain things"(BBC Interview).

In the discussions between Sethe and Baby Suggs (Sethe's mother-in-law), Morrison sets up a dialogic tension between the need to explore or confront the difficult past and the need to repress painful memories. Their dialogues show the various means of survival available to slave women and the differing psychological and emotional impact. Baby Suggs supported and encouraged deliberate forgetfulness as a way of coping with loss. She urged Sethe and others to "lay it all down" (86). Through Baby Suggs, Morrison describes the "survivalist" who had to repress her memories in order to "get out of bed each morning." Her approach to the pain of the past was to forget it and to place trust only in oneself (88-89). However, Sethe must confront the reality of Baby Suggs' history as a way of getting in touch with her own. Thus, Sethe's relationship with Baby Suggs provides the first psychological and dialogic connection that prepares Sethe for her own journey toward restoration and healing.

As the novel opens, we find Sethe on the threshold of journeying back and confronting the pain of the past. Perhaps, since her life had not been so brutal as Baby Suggs', she unconsciously senses the inner strength needed for the journey back. Also, she once had a strong taste of autonomy, even within the confines of slavery, so she knows what she has lost and seeks to reclaim that former autonomy. Even more importantly, she is vaguely aware of powerful feelings that mask her deeper sense of loss. She admits to Paul D: "124 was so full of strong feeling, perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all" (39).

PAUL D'S EMPATHIC PRESENCE

Because the journey back is so painful, Morrison provides a companion for Sethe in the person of Paul D. Sethe's and Paul D's relationship and interactions model the intricate physical and psychological journey toward restoration and healing; their conversations show the importance of the articulation of feeling; their sharing of memories and of historical facts aid in the restoration of self by showing the strengths that lay in past action and past human connection; their storytelling gives them back their stories, and therefore, their lives.

Key to their relationship is an unfolding empathic connection like the one described earlier. In their book Toni Morrison, Wilfrid Samuels and Clenna Weems detail the nurturing, "mothering" qualities of Paul D, thereby underscoring the primal power of his empathy (123-134). In his warm, safe presence Sethe asks herself: "Would it be all right to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?" (38). In response, Paul D. offers his empathic presence when he states: "Sethe, if I'm here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, 'cause I'll catch you girl. . . . Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. . . ." (46).

This relationship is even more primal since Paul D's presence, both physically and psychologically, reproduces what British psychologist D.W. Winnicott calls "the holding environment." This holding environment provides for an infant those same qualities that, according to Kohut and others, the adult Sethe needs in order to restore her sense of self. Winnicott writes:

In this phase the ego changes over from an unintegrated state to a structured integration, and so the infant becomes able to experience anxiety associated with disintegration. . . . In healthy development at this stage, the infant retains the capacity for re-experiencing unintegrated states, but this depends on the continuation of reliable maternal care or on the build-up in the infant of memories of maternal care beginning to be perceived as such. The result of healthy progress in the infant's development during this stage is that he attains what might be called 'unit status.' The infant becomes a person, an individual in his own right (44). [Italics mine]

According to Winnicott, in the environment Paul D provides, Sethe can experience safely painful feelings and "the possible disintegration" she will encounter as she journeys back to her moments of loss. Like an infant, Sethe is seeking "unit status" in order to become, once again, "an individual in her own right". Thus, Paul D serves as mother, as well as friend, lover, fellow victim and survivor. His therapeutic presence also parallels Kohut's concept of the therapist as "participant observer" (Bouson 22), the therapist who is able to give what Kaplan describes as the "affective response," as well as keeping his "identity differentiated." Paul D's listening to Sethe and his asking questions are as important as any other human intervention described in the novel, since they help Sethe reclaim her sense of worth and power. His therapeutic presence directs Sethe's restoration of self because "[b]eing understood results in a consolidation of the self [which] appears to enable patients to experience and explore affects they could not tolerate previously . . ." (Baker and Baker 7).

In turn, Paul D rekindles Sethe's own dormant empathy as she begins to feel his pain. She observes: "Trust and rememory, yes, the way she believed it could be. . . . The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well - to tell, to refine and tell again" (99). With this intimate connection, Paul D slowly and lovingly encourages Sethe to talk about Sweet Home and her early days in Cincinnati, helping her in the first act of restoration: the retrieval of early memories and personal history.

Although the reader must put the events in chronological order, Sethe traces her life from infancy, revealing aspects of her personal history that account for her physical and psychological strengths. When we view Sethe's history from the perspective of Kohut's theory of infant development, we see that she is able to develop some aspects of self cohesion - even in the most abject of circumstances - through the care and interaction of several caretakers. Kohut and other object relations theorists describe the process of self-formation through the infant's interactions with such caretakers. He states: "The self, the core of our personality, has various constituents which we acquire in the interplay with those persons in our earliest childhood environment whom we experience as self-objects" (Disorders 177) [Italics mine]. Kohut then defines two primary self-objects that the infant interacts with in order to form and internalize a cohesive self structure or nuclear self: ". . . those who respond to and confirm the child's innate sense of vigour, greatness and perfection" or the mirroring self-object, and ". . . those to whom the child can look up to and with whom he can merge as an image of calmness, infallibility and omnipotence" or the idealized self-object (Disorders 177). In most instances, Kohut assigns the role of "mirroring object" to the child's mother. He adds: "We may thus conclude that the mother's exultant response to the total child . . . Supports, at the appropriate phase, the development . . .from the state of the fragmented self . . .to the state of the cohesive self - i.e. the growth of the self experience as a physical and mental unit which has cohesiveness in space and continuity in time" (Analysis 118). In turn, the empathic connection between mother and child is created through the mother's "responsiveness" which communicates valuing, joy and support. As Kohut explains: "The nuclear self in particular is not formed via conscious encouragement and praise and via conscious discouragement and rebuke, but by the deeply anchored responsiveness of the self-objects which, in the last analysis, is a function of the self-objects' own nuclear selves" (Restoration 100) [Italics mine]. This cohesiveness is imperative for the development of a sense of self which can both actively create an individual life and withstand the forces - like those in slavery or racism - that constantly attack self-esteem.

Morrison carefully details Sethe's early years and shows the care that existed, despite the constraints of slave life. Although separated daily from her mother, Sethe actually maintained some contact with her until she was eight; her mother nursed her "two or three times a week;" she showed Sethe the mark the slaver made under her breast. Despite these limited interactions, Sethe was able to develop a self system and create a strong identification with her mother. Even more importantly, she felt valued. As Nan (one of Sethe's caretakers) relates to her: "She threw them [children] all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around" (62).

Through these memories, Morrison is showing the unconscious, but powerful, influence that having a mother who chose her and a father for whom she was named plays in Sethe's sense of self and identity. Although critic Barbara Rigney suggests that the relationship between Sethe and her mother was distant since her mother was just a faceless, nameless woman in the field (Carpenter and Kolmar 230), both the memories of her mother and the attachment established when her mother nursed her or spoke with her created a strong connection and sense of support that Sethe was able to reclaim throughout the course of the novel.

Yet those moments with her mother were not constant enough to create a sustained sense of self for an infant and growing child. Thus, Morrison also describes the care and nurture that the slave community provided through Nan, who cared for young Sethe when her mother was in the fields. Nan's care highlights the importance of "othermothers" who gave infants like Sethe the nurture needed to survive and grow.[1] From a Kohutian point of view, Nan's caretaking helped shape Sethe's self in two ways. First, Sethe's loss of connection with her mother (through no fault of her own) creates what Kohut calls "failures of empathy" on the part of the mirroring object. When this failure occurs, the idealized object (often the father) can help the child form a sense of power and ability to act by empathically channeling and accepting age-appropriate, grandiose and exhibitionistic behavior, as well as serving as a role model (Restoration 185). However, other caretakers like Nan can make up this "failure" in their relationships with the child by serving as the idealized self object. Secondly, Nan, along with relatives and friends who cared for Sethe can also be seen as Kohut's compensatory structures, or those people in the child's environment who support and provide both nurture and direction that help build the child's sense of self and self esteem.[2] Throughout all of her novels, Morrison examines the importance of the African-American community as caretaker of its children - sometimes criticizing its lack of care - but more often showing its positive, restorative power, especially in the final scenes of Beloved.

For some scholars or social critics, Kohut's perspective is problematic because he bases his theories on a family unit consisting of two co-operative parents that augment each other's strengths or make up for each other's weaknesses in their relationship with their child. However, his theory strongly suggests that the roles are more important than the person who plays them, further underscoring the importance of consistent nurture and empathic connections. In Sethe's case, these nurturers seemed to have offset the "early failures of empathy" and aided in shaping her fairly cohesive self structure.

We see the evidence of Sethe's early nurture most markedly in the mothering of her own children. Not only does Sethe act responsibly as a mother, she acts empathically. She observes: "Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn't know it. Nobody knew that she couldn't pass her air if you held her up to your shoulder, only if she was lying on my knees" (16). Since empathy can develop only through moments of empathic responsiveness early in life, Sethe and Paul D are radical characters who reflect an unspoken history of care and nurture, even in the abyss of slavery. Sethe must once again recover these empathic connections so that she can heal both her own fragmented sense of self, as well as repair her broken relationships with her daughters Beloved and Denver.

Another powerful moment of restoration for Sethe that she must remember and acknowledge is her escape and eventual arrival at 124 Bluestone, an example of the way action supports - even creates - selfhood. Battered but alive, with a newborn baby in her arms, Sethe represents all escaped slaves and their harrowing journey to freedom. More importantly, her arrival represents the triumphant self whose strengths enabled the successful escape. Sethe acknowledges this sense of self when relating the story to Paul D:

I did it. I got us all out. . . . and it came off right, like it was supposed to. We was here. Each and every one of my babies and me too. I birthed them and I got em out and it wasn't no accident. I did that. I had help, of course, lots of that, but still it was me doing it; me saying, Go on, and Now. It was a kind of selfishness. I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right. I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide and when I stretched out my arms all my children could get in between. I was that wide. Look like I love em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon - there wasn't nobody in the world I couldn't love if I wanted to. (162)

In this passage, Sethe acknowledges her self and her capacity to love. She shows the restriction of feelings slavery brought ("maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love") and the release of being on free soil. But she also joyfully describes and claims the inner strength and sense of self that enabled her to make the journey north and to express her deepest feelings of love and jubilation, especially for her children.

This scene reflects another aspect of Kohut's theory that is especially relevant to both Morrison's individual characters and her concern for the African-American community at large: his emphasis on action and process, rather than hardened, inflexible boundaries of identity and self. He stresses both the importance of infant nurture and the interplay of action, choice and innate strengths of the developing child to use the compensatory structures available to her. Kohut thus suggests that, even though a child needs early mirroring and idealized objects from some source in her early childhood, she also has a good chance of creating a more cohesive self by actively using her own unique strengths and talents (Restoration 82).

The power of a self who acts, as reflected in many of Morrison's female characters, is further underscored by African-American psychologists who describe action as a way of developing a strong sense of self in the face of an oppressive society. Adelbert Jenkins states: "What is required here is a clear picture of the active quality of the self. One has to be aware of self as agent . . . [one can] encourage self worth by encouraging the child to be an agent, by opposing the seeing of the self as a variant of white societal expectations" (31). Jenkins concludes that "seeing blacks as imposing order of their own making on events, one that has premises of competent striving in it, helps to make clearer their psychological survival through history" (18).

In conclusion, Sethe's acts of rememory restore her sense of self along a psychological and historical continuum that Kohut emphasizes. Once she re-connects to this psychological and historical past, she can reclaim the strengths she exhibited as a way of moving on to the future (Kohut Restoration 184). By reciting her rememories, Sethe begins to re-examine her own psychological nature and the strengths that insured her survival, as well as the losses she must face in order to repair her fragmented sense of self.

BELOVED'S MURDER

Despite the aspects of Sethe's strength and self-cohesion just enumerated, other events in the novel soon reveal the more negative effect of Sethe's early childhood deprivation. After her escape, Sethe does not have a chance to claim ownership of her new self for more than twenty-eight days; the arrival of Schoolteacher, her "owner" and representative of slavery's ever-present threat to autonomy and selfhood, shatters her security and sense of control. His sudden appearance triggers both Sethe's fierce protective feelings towards her children, as well as the fragile side of Sethe's sense of self - the side that represents powerlessness, fear, fragmentation, as well as the remembered brutality of her slave existence. These feelings, in turn, force the disastrous act that follows: Sethe's murder of two-year-old Beloved. The murder fragments Sethe and destroys any confidence or sense of power that her early survival at both Sweet Home and the escape provided. Therefore, in addition to recovering memories of her strengths and fierce survival, Sethe must confront both Beloved's murder - as well as the attempted murder of her other three children - in order to restore fully her sense of self.

Morrison says that in Beloved, she wanted to explore the act of self-murder, or the ways people sabotage themselves with the best possible intentions (Charlie Rose Interview). Thus, the murder points to deeper feelings hidden by Sethe's earlier courageous actions and struggle for physical survival. By paralleling the murder with Denver's recent birth, Morrison highlights the contradictory aspects of Sethe's sense of self that she must reconcile if she is to become a whole and fully functioning woman once again. Painfully, Sethe must dive back into her past, in order to understand her motivations and feelings that led to the murder. Denver overhears Sethe explain the murder to Beloved in the following way:

That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up . . . Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing - the part of her that was clean. (251) [Italics mine]

In this passage, we finally hear the central reason Sethe killed Beloved and tried to kill her other children: "I have felt what it felt like" - the violation by Schoolteacher's nephews; the stealing of her self by whites. When the nephews violated her boundaries of self, first by stealing her milk and then by beating her, she learned the deepest agony of slavery: total helplessness and loss of control.

Since Sethe's strong sense of self saw no escape for herself or her children when Schoolteacher entered the yard, she claimed the ultimate power of the mother who is both giver and taker of life. However, Morrison complicates this interpretation by connecting Sethe's action to her recent violation, going deeper into Sethe's psyche to a place even Sethe cannot articulate, but a place she must explore if she is be whole. Her choice reveals the underside of her active, surviving self, showing the fragile nature of her self-structure. Kohut warns that if the child suffers the traumatic loss of first the mirroring object and then the idealized object, the child does not acquire the needed internal structure that promotes cohesion . . . (Analysis 45). Therefore, beneath Sethe's fierce exterior lies a sense of fragmentation created by all of her earlier losses.

In addition, her act mimics those of abused children who, rather than turning the rage toward the real abuser, take the rage out on themselves, since they feel helpless and powerless. German psychologist Alice Miller investigates mothers who were abused as children and eventually murder their own children. Her conclusions closely resemble Sethe's motivations and actions, pointing to the pervasive trauma slavery caused, even to the strongest, bravest women and mothers. Alice Miller writes about the disastrous results of mothers who repress memories of childhood abuse:

What can a child do when she is left so utterly alone with her panic, her impotent fury, her despair and anguish? The child must not even cry, much less scream, if she doesn't want to be killed. The only way she can get rid of these emotions is to repress them. But repression is a perfidious fairy who will supply help at the moment, but will eventually exact a price for this help. The impotent fury comes to life again when the girl's own child is born, and at last the anger can be discharged - once again at the expense of a defenseless creature. . . . [the adult] is unlikely to be able to grasp that the origin of all this suffering is to be found in her own parents and others involved in her upbringing. That former labor of repression to ensure survival renders such an insight impossible. . . . If, to survive, a child is required to ignore certain things, the chances are that she will be required to continue to ignore those things for the rest of her life. . . . The life-saving function of repression in childhood is transformed in adulthood into a life-destroying force. (Miller 40-41) [Italics mine]

Although Sethe is not taking out her anger on Beloved like Miller's murdering mothers, the repression of the feelings she experienced over and over again in slavery are acted out in the murder. She no longer keeps back the flood of feelings; the repression breaks and she kills in desperation. Although Sethe claims she wanted to protect her children from a fate worse than death, Miller's research suggests that Sethe's act of murder is actually guided - even impulsively guided - by unconscious feelings and memories. Throughout the text, Sethe struggles with her guilt over the murder, assuming complete responsibility for it, yet not articulating these deep feelings of anger and powerlessness. Not until the end of the novel is Sethe able to exorcise the guilt and express the rage that she has bottled up for eighteen years.

However, Miller implicates society in abuse cases because, all too often, we are not empathetic to the true pain and history of abused children (40-41). This lack of empathic connection between the Cincinnati community and Sethe is key in understanding the complex social forces that led Sethe to murder her child. Yet Morrison clearly tempers the responsibility of both Sethe and the black community for Beloved's death by forcibly implicating the white institution that created the tragedy in the first place. Again, Morrison challenges the reader to understand the white world's complicity in Beloved's murder through Denver's observation:

All the time, I'm afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again . . . . Whatever it is, it comes from outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it wants to. (205) [Italics mine]

Once more Morrison draws the breathing presence and danger of white society and highlights the ultimate power of whites who keep Sethe and others from having total control over their "selves." As Schoolteacher remarks, "definition belongs to the definers - not the defined" (190). And for eighteen years, Sethe accepted Schoolteacher's definition as nigger woman, creature, cannibal, murderess (150-51). However, Paul D's arrival and his relationship with Sethe dramatically challenge Schoolteacher's definition of Sethe's selfhood, enabling her to reconnect with her memories and feelings. In turn, we, as readers, are constantly challenged to feel both this seething white presence and the enormous strength the characters show in resisting its brutal dehumanization. Ultimately, Morrison wants us the see that Sethe's choice was self-destructive because she had only self-destructive choices.

Because Morrison weighs each component of the tragedy so carefully, we become more empathic to Sethe's choice. By revealing the varying psychological reactions of the community to Baby Suggs and Sethe, as well as to Beloved's murder, Morrison parallels possible reader responses. In essence, we become Sethe's community and are forced to consider the various social and psychological ramifications of her actions. By illuminating the various personal and communal responsibilities for the murder, Morrison creates a strong, empathic connection to Sethe, both consciously and unconsciously, and invites us to share her burden.

BELOVED RETURNS

However, Morrison understands that the mere retrieval of memory or identification of feeling is not enough to restore the fragmented sense of self that Sethe's various losses have created. Since Beloved was Sethe's greatest loss, Morrison creates a chance for them to meet once again, as a way to restore, literally, what Sethe considers one of her "own best things." Sethe's willingness to feel again in the empathic warmth of Paul D opens her to the possibility of reconnecting with the spirit world. As if the spirit of Beloved senses the opportunity for a deeper engagement with (even possession of) Sethe, it returns in physical, human form, literally grabbing a second chance at life for herself and giving Sethe a second chance as well. With Beloved, Sethe re-visits the passion and the love, as well as the shame, guilt, and anguish caused by her choice to kill. As Morrison remarked to Bill Moyers, "The only person I felt who had the right to ask her that question was the child she killed" (March Interview).

Although the bulk of the novel is crafted around the three women, their memories and dialogues, one key scene demonstrates the power of empathy to create a new sense of self and restore human relationships. Several feminist psychologists at the Stone Center in Boston amplify the developmental issues of female sense of self, by focusing on the unique empathic connection between mother and daughter. The special emphasis these psychologists put on the mother/daughter relationship is the effect that the relationship has on the mother, since mothers and daughters develop a sense of self-in-relation to one another.[3] Throughout the novel, we see the healing that occurs as a result of Sethe's empathic reconnections with both Denver and Beloved. Their interactions restore the early mother/child relationship and recreate the "matrix of the self-self object environment" where the nuclear self is created (Bouson 15).

The most powerful passages of restoration occur when the three women speak of their connections with one another in a series of monologues and dialogues that restore truly self-reflective, empathic sharing of feeling (203-17). We see each character developing M.M. Bakhtin's "innerly persuasive speech," (and what Mary Belenky et al in their work Women's Ways of Knowing call "constructed knowledge") as each absorbs and ponders the voice of the other. Through their interchanges, they discard their previous notions of themselves and each other, creating new selves in the process. Thus, in these interactions, Morrison is restoring a primary relationship - the one so frequently disrupted or destroyed in slavery - in which women learn empathic connection: the mother-daughter relationship and the primal moments of self-in-relation.

In this "litany" of voices, each monologue reveals both history and feeling. Among the first things we hear is Sethe describing in more detail the brutality of her life at Sweet Home, memories of her own mother, but most importantly, the powerful way she loves her children. Denver's monologues serve to solidify her own autonomy, as well as her deep connections to both Sethe and Beloved. As she recounts her history, we also see a deepening sense of self. Beloved's soliloquy, in contrast to Sethe's and Denver's, is distinguished by its fragmentary syntax and images that describe the Middle Passage, Africa and death (210-13). Since Beloved has "been to the other side," she is reporting images and feelings that cover the history of slavery from Africa to Cincinnati. However, underscoring the words is the intense yearning for her own mother and the deep sense of loss that Beloved expresses over and over again.

At the end of the three monologues, the voices seemingly merge in a trialogue that expresses the women's deepest feelings for one another. Jean Wyatt suggests in her book, Reconstructing Desire, that these voices merge symbiotically into one identity at the end (198). I propose that they do not merge in that way. Three voices are present, indicating three people speaking. Instead of merged identity, I think what is accomplished in this interaction is a deep, empathic mirroring of one another, Sethe to her daughters, and the daughters to Sethe, thus restoring all three selves-in-relation. Such mirroring builds a sense of safety and security which, in turn, recreates a stable sense of self.

This particular trialogue ends with the three women saying: "You are mine." Although Wyatt suggests that this sentence is a merging of the voices - a unifying gesture (198) - M.M. Bakhtin's theories offer a different interpretation. Even though these characters have articulated the same words, they signify new meanings for each individual character, reflected in their behavior after this particular interchange. This interaction creates a moment of realization for all three, or what Bakhtin calls a threshold, or "porog of several interacting consciousnesses, a 'plurality' of 'unmerged voices'. . . . which cannot be contained within a single consciousness" (Morson and Emerson 237). These characters become the "plurality" of "unmerged" voices; the truth they articulate cannot be expressed by only one voice; they must speak both individually and through a chorus. As a result of this reverie/dialogue, Sethe, Beloved and Denver profoundly change their understanding of themselves and their relationships with each other; these changes, in turn, determine each one's behavior as each moves toward the climactic action of the novel.

After the monologues and dialogues, the three women retreat from the world in order to talk and play together, something each has been deprived of because of life's circumstances. During the ice skating scene, they are content with each other and are in total connection with one another. Since this is the only fully developed play scene in any of Morrison's novels, it is of major importance. First, play permits feeling with all of the senses. The scene resonates with sensual feelings and imagery: the women's laughter, the cold, clear winter air, the steamy woolens drying by the fire, and the taste of rich hot cocoa - all restorative experiences and images to three women who have rarely have a chance to enjoy the pleasure of using all of their senses. Secondly, and even more importantly, play teaches empathy and sharing, as well as opens the inner self to the outer world and to the possibility, as Patricia Yaeger observes, of transformation.[4]

Thus, the skating scene acts to consolidate and strengthen each woman's sense of self.[5] After the women return from skating, Sethe recognizes Beloved as her lost daughter for the first time and is "transformed." She launches into deeper dialogic interaction and scurries around to meet Beloved's every need. Beloved is transformed into an insatiable, narcissistic two-year old whose desire, as Wyatt observes, threatens to devour Sethe (196-198). Denver, however, benefits the most positively from the empathic reconnection that occurred during the skating scene. She represents what Janet Surrey suggests is the most "accurate" aspect of empathy which "involves a complex process of validation of the differences between the self and other. It includes, too, the recognition of the other as a growing individual with changing needs and newly developing competencies. . . ." (Connection 58). This recognition of both Sethe and Beloved as others with changing needs leads to a "transformation" when Denver re-connects with the community beyond 124 Bluestone, in order to save Sethe from Beloved's overwhelming desire.

By stating "you are mine" during the women's dialogue, Denver realizes that Sethe, more than Beloved, is the "mine" to preserve and protect. Denver has developed both power and empathy, first through the stable care she received early in life (Sethe, Baby Suggs and Stamp Paid), then through her last few months with Beloved. In a sense, her relationship with Beloved has enabled her to consolidate her sense of individual self so that she can see her mother's plight. Denver knows what her mother needs because it is what she herself needs: to leave the exorcised past behind. She senses the danger in staying in the past guilt, and, thus, moves out to get help. She articulates this new, independent sense of self when she admits to "having a self to look out for" (252).

Denver's going to town for help opens 124 Bluestone and its inhabitants to the influence of the world it has sealed itself from for eighteen years. But before she is given a job that will help feed her sister and mother, she has to tell the community the whole story, once again showing the importance of storytelling as a way to reclaim control over one's life (253). Now the community, both white and African-American, hears for the first time the true anguish that has existed at 124 Bluestone for eighteen years and intercedes (256-57). Thus, through Denver's empathic understanding of what Sethe needs, Sethe and her daughters reconnect with the community, an essential act of both survival and restoration.

The first step of healing occurs when Ella brings the women to help rescue Sethe from Beloved's clutches. The women's singing carries Sethe from the past to the present in an instant. As she stands in the doorway with Beloved, the final moments of restoration begin. The appearance of this crowd of women reconnects Sethe to the power of Baby Suggs' message to "love yourself" and the connections she once had with the community of women. Perhaps this sudden feeling of connection empowers her to act out her years of grief and rage when Mr. Bodwin rides into the year looking like Schoolteacher. Even though he is trying to help Sethe and Denver, he - alone on his horse - represents to Sethe the white dominance, oppression and violence of slavery and racism. Thus, Sethe completes the exorcism of her sorrow, loss, and rage by going after the white man with an ice pick. Once again she acts to preserve her beloved children; but this time, she turns the rage toward the perceived perpetrator of the violence rather than toward herself or her "own best things."

This scene also serves as a paradigm of restoration for Beloved as well. All of Sethe's explanations and talk have not really made an impact on her. However, through Sethe's impulsive, but purposeful, attempt to kill Mr. Bodwin (Schoolteacher), Beloved sees and feels how powerfully beloved she is; her quest is finished and she disappears. This scene also restores the healing power of the community. Since the attempted murder could have landed Sethe in jail once again, Morrison is also showing the danger of impulsive anger. Because Morrison understands the uncontrollable aspects of desperate rage and anger, she shows the importance of others to step in and help. Therefore, this scene is a moment of restoration for the entire community when the women stop Sethe from committing another murder. In essence, they empathically acknowledge her rage, understand its source, and support her by not abandoning her this time. Their presence, in turn, models Alice Miller's call for the communal responsibility to recognize feelings, pain and anger, and to channel these feelings in less destructive ways.

However, Sethe savors no moment of triumph or restoration. Although she has struck at the appropriate symbol of her enslavement and grief, she is destroyed by the loss of Beloved for a second time and takes to her bed. She no longer feels the inner strength, will, or energy to keep going. But when Paul D reappears, he gives her the message that she indeed has the strength and the right to live: "You are your own best thing." In a way, he is forcing her to move "from a relationship of caretaking to one of consideration, caring and empowering; that is, moving from the early definition of the mother-daughter relationship toward more comprehensive and flexible adult forms of relationship" (Surrey 63). In his support, Paul D is sharing the most empathic moment and voicing the essence of the novel: he understands and encourages the importance of Sethe's personal sense of self. In turn, this final moment is also a moment of awareness for Sethe when she asks, "Me? Me?" (273).

Thus, by the end of the novel, we are left with the hope that Sethe can once again regain the inner energy and spirit she once had. Through her empathic connections with Beloved, Paul D. Denver and the community, she has exorcised her guilt and her shame; she has expressed her profound love for Beloved; she has felt the weight of all the years of loss; she has confronted the demons within and without; all these are therapeutic and necessary in order for Sethe to move on and create a new life. Sethe has modeled the way one confronts the pain of the past which must be explored and examined minutely and confronted with screams and tears. But then, in order for life to go on, the past must be accepted and left behind.

THE READER'S RESPONSE

Yet the reader will remember the haunting story of Sethe and Beloved. Thus, the responsibility for this story is passed on to the community of readers. But how do we as readers respond? I suggest that one final, powerful aspect of Beloved is the empathic connection Morrison creates with the reader, a connection similar to the interchange of empathic moments among the characters. In an 1987 interview for the BBC, Morrison states that in writing Beloved, she wanted to create the experience of slavery, not like the broad sweep found in history books, but one that was "narrow and deep." She wanted the reader to "feel what it was like." We can further describe the powerful invitation Morrison offers us as readers through what Bakhtin describes as "live-entering" which closely models empathic connection. Through live-entering, (closely related to Kaplan's "affective response"), the reader experiences what the author is saying, while maintaining her own individuality or, as Bakhtin says, "outsidedness" or Alexandra Kaplan's "cognitive component of empathy". In turn, this "outsidedness" is important in the transformation of human consciousness. Because the reader is able to bring her own experience and with it a capacity to contribute something new to the dialogues created by the author, the novel then becomes a potential tool in promoting social change (Rethinking 55). Yet there is a certain circular relationship needed when one engages in "live-entering" or empathy. In order to "live-enter" and empathically engage with the text, one needs a degree of self-awareness, self-understanding, and psychological insight. Therefore, Morrison's novel, while inviting us to enter, at the same time provides us with both knowledge and new facets of self-awareness that are essential, if we are to fully participate in the transformation - both personal and social - such live-entering encourages. Thus, Morrison's novels can serve as Kohut's compensatory structures in that they provide guidance and support of the readers' evolving sense of individual self, as well as self-in-relation to others.

Morrison's empathic connection, first established among her characters, engages the reader in several ways. Despite the brutality of the book, Morrison creates Winnicott's "holding environment" for the reader, one in which we can experience "anxiety associated with disintegration" that may occur when reading the terrible events of the novel. She leads us into Sethe's story the same way Sethe builds a fire: "Quietly, carefully she stepped around her [Beloved] to wake the fire. First a bit of paper, then a little kindlin - not too much - just a taste until it was strong enough for more" (181). [Italics mine] Then, by giving us the pieces of each character's psychological and cultural history, she asks us to be what Brook Bouson calls "participant observers" who, like the empathic analyst keeps a "sustained empathic-introspective immersion . . into the interior life of the patient" (Bouson 27, 22). The empathic reader participates in both the "passive mode of immersion and the active mode of perception and understanding . . . "(Bouson 22). Bouson further observes: "Like the analyst, the empathic critic/reader focuses attention on the disruptive and disturbing responses - the anger, anxiety, disgust, boredom, fear of encroachment, need to master or desire rescue - engendered by the characters and texts being investigated. And like the analyst, the empathic reader is aware of the negotiated roles he or she is invited to play when responding to fictional texts" (Bouson 27). Through this position of participant, we can "feel what it was like" and offer something of our own experience, as Bakhtin suggests, in order to enact the kind of transformations modeled by Sethe, Denver and Beloved during and after their intimate dialogues.

The major reason we are able to engage so personally in the text is that Morrison's characters actually perform as Bakhtin's "personalities." For Bakhtin, a character who is a personality "is a genuine other person, capable, as real people are, to change his or her essential identity. . . However complexly drawn, a character is all 'given;' a personality is always being 'created'" (Morson and Emerson 263). As empathic readers, our affective involvement allows us to "feel along side these characters," while our cognitive awareness of our own personality gives us enough distance to contribute "something of our own" to the interaction. In addition, these personalities are presented as subjects in their own right. Likewise, the reader, by maintaining the cognitive component of empathy, preserves her own sense of self. Thus, when we empathically engage with Morrison's characters and text, we are meeting both as subject to subject. Like Sethe and her daughters, in our interactions with the text we are able to recreate a new sense of "self-in-relation" to both the characters and the text.

Therefore, Beloved provides powerful moments of reclamation of both self and history specifically for the African-American reader. Morrison has stated that in Beloved, she wanted to challenge the impression that slaves were freed solely "by well-meaning" white folks (BBC Interview). She indeed recreated the historical ingenuity and fierce acts of survival that ensured generations of African-American life. By tracing Sethe's psychological and cultural history, the African-American reader can reclaim a personal history, thus restoring herself to an historical continuum that Kohut considered essential to a recreation of a stronger sense of self. Through the dialogic sections especially, the reader engages with both the pain and the triumph of the characters and is able evaluate her own sources of pain and fear, as well as her own strengths and history of survival. Finally, through the interactions with both text and characters, the reader can find a "compensatory structure" that supports and helps recreate a new sense of self.

Yet this reclamation is not reserved for African-Americans alone. All who live in the United States have been affected by these centuries of slavery, racism and lost African heritage, both consciously and unconsciously. As a white reader, I am brought face to face with the white characters who represent the range of white attitudes: the do-gooder, but distant Bodwins and other abolitionists who stepped in to save Sethe from death; Amy, the indentured servant who treated Sethe like a slave, but who also helped with Denver's birth and their escape; Mrs. Garner who treated Sethe kindly one moment only to beat her the next; Schoolteacher, the representative of the dehumanizing attitudes and physical brutality of both slavery and racism. I am forced to ask what am I to do with the agony that whites have created for centuries; how do I address the brutality of the past; how do I deal with guilt; how do I help create safe spaces where mothers/fathers/children can fully experience empathic connections? In her novels, Morrison no longer permits distance from our communal responsibility. We are challenged to be involved, to "know what it was like" and to enter into dialogic and empathic connections with her characters.

As Kohut and the Stone Center psychologists suggest over and over again, empathic connection encourages subject to subject dialogue, thereby creating the potential break-down of the historical split between self and other, black and white, male and female. Through the empathic process modeled by Sethe and her daughters, the reader can participate in moments of recreation of both self and of our larger social order. According to Homi Bhabha, "what is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narrative of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular and communal - that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself" (1-2) [Italics mine]. He adds: "The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not part of the continuum of past and present. . . .it [art] renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent 'in-between' space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present" (7). He further states that "we should remember that it is the 'inter' - the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space - that carries the burden of meaning of culture" (38). Throughout the entire narrative of Beloved, Morrison creates these "interstitial spaces," and demonstrates the dialogic process of empathic connection that makes these spaces both negotiable and places of transformation. Her novels recreate that "borderline" of cultures and encourage a "new" encounter that moves beyond the old continuum. She gives us that "in-between" space where we may create a new relationship with ourselves, our past and our culture at large. Consequently, her text and the reader involvement she encourages furthers the breakdown of old binary divisions and encourages new creations of selves-in-relation for all readers.

Perhaps what readers can do will arise out of the dialogues that occur after we have read the novel, since "live-entering" does not end when the novel is finished. In all of her novels, but especially Beloved, Morrison crafts narratives that live on in the mind of the reader, carrying on the dialogues she has so carefully created. Robert Coles' observation about the potential connection of novel to reader underscores the sustained presence of her work:

The whole point of stories is not "solutions" or "resolutions" but a broadening and even a heightening of our struggles - with new protagonists and antagonists introduced, with new sources of concern or apprehension or hope, as one's mental life accommodates itself to a series of arrivals: guests who have a way of staying, but not necessarily staying put. (129)

Thus, Beloved helps reclaim aspects of our communal history as a nation. Our lives in this country have been inextricably woven together since the first slave ships arrived on these shores. Thus, through all her novels, but especially Beloved, Morrison confronts all readers and challenges them to find their place in the narrative as a way of becoming more aware of our history, our involvement in it, and our potential place in effecting social and political change. The women's litany of "you are mine" is of utmost importance to all readers. Therefore, Beloved confronts old systems of power and reveals the inhumanity that exists in our country still. Morrison challenges us to address this inhumane treatment and find our place in it - all of us, to ensure that Beloved, in the words of Mae Henderson, is not a story to be passed on or passed on (Identities 83).

Endnotes

1. In her book Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, Patricia Collins gives a thorough discussion of the central role "othermothers" have played in the African-American community. [Return to text]

2. In Beloved, Nan, Lady Jones, the Garners, the Bodwins, and, especially Baby Suggs and Paul D, represent powerful compensatory structures of nurture for both Sethe and Denver. [Return to text]

3. Women's Growth in Connection: Writings from the Stone Center, eds. Judith V. Jordan, Alexandra G. Kaplan, Jean Baker Miller, Irene P. Stiver and Janet Surrey, presents the complex psychological dynamics that influence both mothers and daughters in the process of selving. [Return to text]

4. For a full discussion of the psychological power of play, see Chapter 7, "Toward a Theory of Play" in Yaeger's Honey Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writings. [Return to text]

5. This consolidation of self parallels the process described by Baker and Baker on page 5. [Return to text]

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---. Interview. Bill Moyers' World of Ideas. Public Affairs Television, Inc. WNET, New York. 11 March, 1990.

---. Interview. Charlie Rose. Public Affairs Television, Inc. WNET, New York, June, 1993.

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