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NEW AMERICANISTS IN POLAND
Edited by Tomasz Basiuk Vol. 8
Agnieszka Łobodziec /
Blossom N. Fondo (eds.)
The Timeless
Toni Morrison
The Past and The Present
in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
A Tribute to Toni Morrison
on Occasion of Her
85th Birthday
The book presents a cultural study of Toni Morrison’s fiction, focused on
her representations of the past and present, along with the relationship be-
tween the two. The authors analyze Morrison’s texts not solely as aesthetic,
autonomous objects but as manifestations of a cultural and creative practice
closely related to actuality. They examine various incorporations of history
in Morrison’s writings. The contributions search out thematic continuities
as well as discernable ruptures in the texts while noting futuristic tendencies
in Morrison’s novels and the texts’ envisagement of the human race.
Agnieszka Łobodziec is Assistant Professor at the English Department of

the University of Zielona Góra.
Blossom N. Fondo is Associate Professor at the Department of English in
the Higher Teacher Training College of the University of Maroua.
www.peterlang.com
The Timeless Toni Morrison
NEW AMERICANISTS IN POLAND
Edited by Tomasz Basiuk
BAND 8
Agnieszka Łobodziec / Blossom N. Fondo (eds.)
The Timeless Toni Morrison

The Past and The Present in Toni Morrison’s Fiction
A Tribute to Toni Morrison on Occasion of
Her 85th Birthday
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbiblio-
thek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in
the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic
data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Łobodziec, Agnieszka editor. | Fondo, Blossom N. editor.
Title: The timeless Toni Morrison : the past and the present in Toni
Morrison's fiction : a tribute to Toni Morrison on occasion of her 85th
birthday / Agnieszka Łobodziec, Blossom N. Fondo (eds.).
Description: Frankfurt am Main ; New York : Peter Lang, 2017. | Series: New
Americanists in Poland ; vol. 8
Identifiers: LCCN 2017006400 | ISBN 9783631672624
Subjects: LCSH: Morrison, Toni—Criticism and interpretation. | Race relations in
literature. | Psychic trauma in literature. | Identity
(Psychology) in literature. | Memory in literature. | History in literature.
Classification: LCC PS3563.O8749 Z87 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006400
This publication was financially supported

by the University of Zielona Góra, Poland.
ISSN 2191-2254
ISBN 978-3-631-67262-4 (Print)
E-ISBN 978-3-653-06829-0 (E-PDF)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-70479-0 (EPUB)
E-ISBN 978-3-631-70480-6 (MOBI)
DOI 10.3726/b11081
© Peter Lang GmbH
Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
Frankfurt am Main 2017
All rights reserved.
Peter Lang Edition is an Imprint of Peter Lang GmbH.
Peter Lang – Frankfurt am Main · Bern · Bruxelles · New York ·
Oxford · Warszawa · Wien
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.

Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems
This publication has been peer reviewed.

www.peterlang.com
Table of contents
Introduction ..................................................................................................................7
History Imagination and Truth
Agnieszka Gondor-Wiercioch
How to Speak about the Unspeakable – Historical Trauma in
Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms......................................13
Irina Popescu
Biting Iron, Forever Smiling: the Iron-Bit, the Wounded
Mouth, and Un-Silencingin Toni Morrison’s Beloved.............................................31
Identity
Tammie Jenkins
Moving Beyond the Veil of Double Consciousness: Making the
Past, Present in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon...................................................47
Agnieszka Łobodziec
From Essentialism to Choice: The Emergence and Intricacies of
Contemporary Playful Racial Identities in Toni Morrison’s
God Help the Child.......................................................................................................61
Barbara Compagnucci
Pragmatic and Linguistic Functions in Toni Morrison’s Beloved..........................77
Challenging Master Discourses
Stephanie Li
The Paradox of the Master Narrative: The Contradictory Voices
of Toni Morrison’s Home............................................................................................91
Misty Standage
Constructing the Long, Lost Son: Multiply-Voiced Discourses
in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.................................................................................... 113
6 Table of contents
Ji Hyun Lee
‘We Are the Furrow of His Brow’: Countering Mythic
History in Morrison’s Paradise............................................................................... 127
Blossom N. Fondo
Challenging the Mirror of Whiteness: the Politics of
Images and Sight in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye............................................ 145
About the authors..................................................................................................... 165

Introduction
This volume entitled The Timeless Toni Morrison has emerged in celebration of
Toni Morrison’s 85th birthday in 2016.
Toni Morrison frequently underscores the role of history as a significant
referent in the process of her fictional writing. In that vein, literary historical
representations may evoke debate. Questions pertaining to the objectiveness or
subjectiveness of the fictional portrayals, their correspondence between historical
fact and fiction, the level of traditional realist artistry, and being overly literary
representational might arise. Critics have applied the concepts neorealism, histori-
cal criticism, social realism, magical realism, and poetic realism in their analyses
of Morrison’s fiction. Over against such theoretical polemics, Morrison accentu-
ates historical accuracy. She seeks to fuse her artistic imagination with historical
knowledge obtained by in-depth research. For instance, in response to the ubiq-
uitous classification of her fiction as magic or incredible Toni Morrison contends,
“I consider that my single gravest responsibility (in spite of that magic) is not to
lie.” The novelist even ascribes more truth to fiction as opposed to documented
history and other history-laden texts. She aspires to discover and reconstruct the
truth by imagining the interior lives of her characters. For instance, with regard to
slave narratives, she asserts, “I’m trying to fill in the blanks that the slave narratives
left – to part the veil that was so frequently drawn, to implement the stories that
I heard – then the approach that’s most productive and most trustworthy for me
is the recollection that moves from the image to the text. Not from the text to the
image.” As far as the representation of “major things that have been erased from
our history […] the other things that were going on in the 1950s” in Morrison’s
novel Home, the writer maintains, “In the United States, we think of the 50s as a
kind of golden age. Right after the war, everybody was making money, the GI Bill
was sending soldiers into college campuses, and the television was full of […]
happy stories […] And I didn’t think so. I thought that there was a crust or veil
that was being pulled over the 50s” (Interview. CBC).
With thought given to Toni Morrison’s perspective towards history, her litera-
ture invites considerations of issues such as intersections between historiography
and historical fiction; differences between historiography and creative writing,
objectivity, subjectivity, and truth; the historical context of the author, the reader
and text; new historicism; slave narratives and neo-slave narratives; various forms
of realism and literary representations of history; history and myth; language and
8 Introduction
discourse; image and imagination; meaning, interpretation, and ideology; the past
and memory; the past and identity.
The questions that Morrison’s novels inspire include: What thematic continui-
ties as well as ruptures can be discerned in Morrison’s texts? How and in what
ways has Morrison’s world shaped her works? What other literary influences and
interactions can be deciphered that bear on her art? What futuristic tendencies
can be found in her literature and what do they envisage for the human race?
What critical referents do her texts provide? What aesthetic peculiarities can be
observed in Morrison’s works?
The aforementioned aspects have been thoroughly covered by individual con-
tributors to this volume.
Agnieszka Gondor-Wiercioch carries out a comparative study of Morrison’s
Beloved and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storm, which offer complex postmodern liter-
ary reconstructions of African American and Native American experiences of
bondage respectively, which the novelists achieve through employment of crea-
tive imagination in envisioning the depths and circumstances of the historically
documented acts of infanticide and in utilization of culturally unique narrative
modes. Irina Popescu deconstructs Morrison’s employment of iron bit in Beloved
as a signifier of silenced traumatic past that is confronted by individual characters
in order to unveil the unspeakable truth.
Tammie Jenkins traces the development of Black American self-defined iden-
tity portrayed in Song of Solomon, as a spiritual and cultural journey from the
sense of twoness towards self-integrity, exemplified by the character Milkman’s dis-
covery of ancestral heritage and revaluation of his present experience. Agnieszka
Łobodziec ferrets out the construction of identity as a playful, perpetual process
that brings about the sense of uncertainty. Barbara Compagnucci undertakes a
theoretical approach to Morrison’s explorations of the lives of African Americans,
especially the subjugation of women in misogynistic and racially oppressed times.
This she does by focusing on the importance of language using a postmodernist
framework.
Stephanie Li analyzes Morrison’s novel Home, demonstrating how, since every
story reflects its teller, narrative is inevitably composed of the biases and limita-
tions produced by individual experiences. She shows in her essay how Morrison’s
novel seeks to question, undermine and expose the master narratives produced
by literary texts and national histories. Misty Standage contends that Tar Baby is
comprised of several narrative layers, each layer providing context for and criti-
cism of another. This, she maintains, keeps Tar Baby from being a narrative that
universalizes black experience. Ji Hyun Lee examines Toni Morrison’s Paradise
Introduction 9
and upholds that the Disallowing – the traumatic rebuff that leads to the found-
ing of Haven – informs the rest of the narrative. The author closely examines the
formation, transmission and reception of the Disallowing myth, highlighting some
of the unintended consequences of trying to control history. Blossom N. Fondo
reads The Bluest Eye as a construction of the cultural desert which existed for the
blacks in America prior to the publication of a novel such as hers, which drama-
tizes the dangers of an exclusivist narrative.
History Imagination and Truth
Agnieszka Gondor-Wiercioch
Jagiellonian University
How to Speak about the Unspeakable –

Historical Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms
Abstract: In my paper I would like to focus on the problem of incorporating the histori-
cal experience of marginalized groups into fiction. Toni Morrison and Linda Hogan have
decided to refer to two historical processes that have been long silenced in the official
American history, i.e. Black slavery and ethnic holocaust of Native Americans. In the novels
of Morrison and Hogan these collective experiences emerge as counter-histories told from
the perspective of the survivors. The perspective is respectively African-American and
Native-American and both writers additionally include the voices of the victims that were
particularly neglected because their deaths were not precisely recorded; Morrison dedicated
her novel to the Blacks who did not survive the Middle Passage and Hogan concentrated on
the Indian inhabitants of the islands on the lakes between contemporary U.S. and Canada
who died anonymously in great numbers and belonged to the less known Native American
cultures. What is more, both Morrison and Hogan were inspired by true stories; Morrison
used the story of Margaret Garner and Hogan that of her adopted daughter Mary. It is also
worth mentioning that in both cases tragedy stemmed from the fact that desperate mothers
decided to kill their daughters and Morrison as well as Hogan used these individual dramas
to speak about collective traumas of African-Americans and Native-Americans. Toni Mor-
rison focuses on the character of Sethe who killed her daughter because she wanted to free
her from slavery. The ghost of Beloved haunts Sethe and she would have died if the black
community had not decided to intervene and save her. Finally Sethe manages not only
to survive her past trauma but also to regain her second daughter Denver whom she had
neglected because of the ghost. As in the majority of magical realist texts, the status of the
ghost is unclear; the reader never learns if the ghost was just a part of the imagination of the
mother who was not able to finish mourning or if the apparition really invaded the world
of the living. Linda Hogan concentrates on the character of Angel, a Native American girl
who got nearly killed by her mother, a mad Indian woman. The madness of Angel’s mother
was a result of haunting; her head was full of ghosts of Indians who died violently during
colonization of America. Similarly to Sethe, Angel is rescued by a group of women, this
time Native American, who take her on a trip during which Angel rediscovers her Indian
identity. I would like to argue that both authors are successful at handling the historical
material because they have managed to create convincing literary accounts in which in-
novative poetic imaginary is far more important than ideology. They communicate with
the readers through polyphonic narration, in which the present time is often disrupted by
14 Agnieszka Gondor-Wiercioch
retrospection and ellipsis. Both writers do not hesitate to include magical realist perspective
when they present outlooks that go beyond rational Euro-American paradigms of thought.
These strategies not only help Morrison and Hogan to address the issues of intercultural
violence that taints past and contemporary America, but reveal a lot about the nature of
cultural memory and expose the difficulties in recording trauma.
Keywords: Native American, African American, trauma, religious syncretism, history.
Both Toni Morrison and Linda Hogan are interested in ethno-history and the
role it plays in identity formation of contemporary African Americans and Na-
tive Americans. What they also share is the emphasis on a well balanced feminist
perspective and their respective ethnic traditions. While analyzing Morrison,
Missy Dehn Kubitschek (1998) noticed that the novelist joins in the majority of
postmodernists’ quests such as presenting exposing pluralism understood as the
ongoing presence of conflicting points of view, perceiving reality as a political
construction, and abandoning the distinction between popular culture and high
art because ethnic minorities most often express themselves through cultural
products that had been regarded in the past as primitive and degrading, e.g. blues
and jazz. The only pivotal feature of postmodernism from Kubitschek’s list that
is absent in Morrison’s fiction is parody. The same is true about Hogan’s fiction.
Similarly to Morrison, Hogan acknowledges the legitimacy of differing and con-
flicting perspective in her revision of history, she is deeply interested in showing
the political consequences of neocolonial practices and refuses to recognize a
boundary between high art and popular culture because this division does not
pertain to Native American perspectives, and “low brow” activities of Indians had
been repeatedly depreciated in the paternalistic tradition of the past. Last, but not
least, Hogan’s prose is almost devoid of parody, contrary to the works of many
contemporary Native American authors such as Sherman Alexie, Gerald Vizenor
or even Louise Erdrich.
Morrison’s Beloved and Hogan’s Solar Storms perfectly illustrate the postmod-
ern pursuits mentioned above, but before I go into a more detailed comparative
analysis I would like to emphasize that both Morrison and Hogan were inspired
by true stories. Toni Morrison’s incentive for writing Beloved was Margaret Garner
who in 1856 escaped from a slave plantation in Kentucky with her four children.
When the family reached Cincinnati, their former master caught them and Gar-
ner decided to kill herself and the children. She managed to kill her two year
old daughter with a knife but was then apprehended; after a long trial the judge
returned her and her family to their previous owner (http://www.blackpast.org/
aah/margaret-garner-incident-1856).
How to Speak about the Unspeakable 15
Toni Morrison in the interview with Elisa Schappel (2003) explained that she
does not write autobiographically and Beloved was not meant as a biography, but
was inspired by the two articles Morrison wrote about Garner. As the writer con-
cludes: “Here’s a woman who escaped into Cincinnati from the horrors of slavery
and was not crazy. Though she’d killed her child, she was not foaming from her
mouth. She was very calm. She said, ‘I’d do it again.’ That was more than enough
to fire my imagination” (Schappel 264).
Linda Hogan similarly used historical material; a true story was merely the
spark which ignited her creativity. Just like Morrison, she chose the violent story
of a mother and daughter in which violence was the result of a broader historical
context. In her memoir (2001), Hogan recollects the story of her adoptive daugh-
ters. Right from the start the novelist realized that the traumas of her children
were very similar to the experience of other Native American children because
they were connected with the practices that the American government used suc-
cessfully to eradicate Native American culture. As Hogan points out: “Along with
the girls, history came to live with us, the undeniable, unforgotten aspect of every
American Indian life. She was a remnant of American history, and the fires of a
brutal history had come to bear on her” (Hogan 77). “She” refers to Hogan’s eldest
adoptive daughter Marie who never managed to overcome the consequences of
her past trauma (she had been sexually abused and left to die in the snow). As a
grown up person Marie inflicted suffering on her own children and, as a result,
they were taken away from her. Hogan was able to understand her daughter’s
failure to avoid auto-destruction because she had gone through traumatic experi-
ence herself when she became an alcoholic. Hogan perceives alcoholism, domestic
violence and child abuse as the legacy of colonial and neocolonial practices in the
U.S., as the outcome of American history, as she explains: “It is –was – a way of not
remembering. It was an escape from the pain of an American history” (Hogan 54).
Not only the trauma of the history imposed by the white people matters, but
also the fact that Native Americans were stripped of their history; that is why,
similarly to Toni Morrison, Hogan wants to concentrate on re-memory. Only
this practice may help to heal past wounds and disrupt the vicious circle of vio-
lence. When Hogan analyses the behavior of Marie who tried to kill her child, she
concludes that Marie’s resistance to therapy was connected with her entrapment
in the past. When Marie insists that the child is not hers because her child died
she does not see an infant in this child, but herself. According to Hogan, it is not
Marie’s child who died but it is Marie who passed away because her sensitivity
and her sense of inner balance have been irrevocably destroyed. In the novel,
individual trauma becomes collective which is signaled by the dedication for her
daughter (“For Danielle Marie. May you find your way always to those who love
you”) and further references in the text of the novel to all those Native American
cultures which perished on the territory between today’s Minnesota and Canada.
Hogan attempts to commemorate them all. Toni Morrison uses a similar a reverse
strategy; she dedicates Beloved to “Sixty Million and more” of those Africans who
died during the Middle Passage and then makes one feminine character most
memorable of all; but again, the overall aim is to combine the collective experi-
ence with the individual one.
Now I would like to examine the ways in which Morrison and Hogan construct
their counter-histories and give voice to those who had been silenced or ignored
in the official American history for a long time. What Beloved and Solar Storms
have in common, as far as the structuring of ethno-history is concerned, is the
aim of Morrison and Hogan to show history as multi-perspective and dialogic.
Additionally, both novelists rather diversify the voices from their ethnic groups
than juxtapose the perspectives of the white colonizers and African Americans
or indigenous peoples. White characters are marginal in Beloved and Solar Storms
because both authors recognize the need to write against the stereotypes of Black
people and Native Americans in mainstream American culture and in literature,
and they devote the majority of their texts to complex portraits of the representa-
tives of their ethnic groups. Toni Morrison explains: “In American literature, we
have been so totalized – as though there is only one version. We are not one
indistinguishable block of people who always behave the same way. (…) I try to
give some credibility to all sorts of voices, each of which is profoundly different.
Because what strikes me about African-American culture is its variety” (Schap-
pel 259–260). Linda Hogan also calls for transcending the stereotype: “For white
Americans, even today, we Indians came to represent spirit, an earth-based way
of living, but the true stories of our lives were, and are still, missing from history,
the geography of our lands changed” (Hogan 2003, 60).
Beloved and Solar Storms are also examples of transcultural reconstruction
of history. Even though the perspective of white characters is of lesser impor-
tance, both novels are clearly based on two models: American and Native/African
American African/Indian. One of the aims is to construct history lessons for
everybody, including ethnic minorities, so the narratives must be hybrid to reach
such a wide audience. Contemporary African Americans and Native Americans
still have to learn a lot about their traumatic past because the understanding of
one’s past is crucial for identity formation. White readers also need this knowl-
edge because they are part of an immigrant multiethnic nation. The problems of
a lost identity may be no longer as much stressed, now that post-ethnic issues are
rather emphasized, but the novels appeared in 1988 and 1995 when the dilemmas
connected with identity construction and representation were more pronounced.
Both Hogan and Morrison use the Euro-American genre of the novel and adapt
it in a way that enables them to include African-American and Native-American
perspectives. The result is a hybrid genre that combines the polyphonic novel
tradition and orality. In my opinion, magic realism is not a coincidence in both
novels, but results from the practice of transculturation, just as it is the case in
many other contemporary literary texts inspired by non-Western paradigms.
I agree with Missy Dehn Kubitschek (1998), who enumerates the following
similarities between African American and Native American cultures: 1) in both
there is a lack of distinction between the sacred and the profane; every act echoes
divine creation, 2) linear time is accompanied by cyclical time and the latter is
often more important (it explains, e.g., the presence of ancestral spirits in everyday
reality); past and present are often united and individual development depends on
the integration with an ancestral community because the self cannot exist alone,
3) orality must be appreciated because many ethnic groups were cut off from the
written medium, misrepresented or cheated (African Americans were forbidden
to learn to read and write, Native Americans were cheated in written treaties);
therefore oral forms emerge as more accurate in ethnic literature. I think that these
assumptions underlie the transcultural reconstruction of history in Beloved and
Solar Storms and the magical realist mode of both novels.
What is striking in both texts is that the official history associated with the text-
book context (like the post-Civil War exodus of Black people or Native American
civil rights movement) is moved to the background, instead the novelists intro-
duce personal histories of women who have experienced double marginalization:
first as members of an ethnic minority, and second, as women. History in Beloved
and Solar Storms is devoid of recognizable historical heroes and big events of
national importance like historical battles or treaties. Instead, we are offered an
opportunity to participate in the histories of broken families, in the dramas of
mothers pushed to the extreme who inhabit little known places and troubled
communities. Another similarity is the theme of survival; both Morrison and
Hogan write about the miracle of survival of what some call ‘ethnic genocide,’
but this survival is not accompanied by hope, but by terrible and traumatic costs.
Morrison concentrates on the life of Sethe who kills her two-year-old daughter
Beloved because she wants to save her from the life of slavery. Sethe’s act not only
results in her personal trauma, but also ruins her family and the Black community
which cannot accept a mother who killed her child. The ghost of Beloved who
enters this fictional world changes everything; even though she almost kills Sethe,
she also pushes Denver to act and save what is left of the family and the same ghost
inspires empathy in Ella who recreates communal ties in the African-American
community. Thus a personal history becomes collective; through the act of saving
Sethe from madness and perhaps another crime, the community acknowledges
that her trauma is their trauma as well and that they are the victims and survivors
of the same history. Sharing pain and shame is not only an act of bravery, but a
starting point of healing. Women seem to be better at it because as mothers they
have to act more quickly. Men, like Paul D, try to live without confronting their
memories, as constant wanderers without homes, but even they finally find cour-
age to come home and start anew.
Hogan tells the story of Angela Jensen, also known as Angel Wing, who comes
back to Adam’s Rib after years spent with foster families. Angel returns to her step
grandmother Bush, her grandmother Agnes Iron and great-grandmother Dora-
Rouge. The trauma is hidden in Angel’s past; as an infant she was nearly killed by
her mother Hannah Wing who burned half of daughter’s face. Hannah was born
as a daughter of Harold, Bush’s husband, and his lover Loretta. As a child, Han-
nah was so violent that her parents gave her away to Bush who tried to control
her destructive nature. Bush realized her complete failure when Hanna gave birth
to her own daughter and proved to be a disastrous mother. Thus the decision of
sending Angel away was a means of protecting her from her mother. Similarly to
the African-American community in Beloved, the Native American community
in Solar Storms is portrayed as weak and divided. They are also survivors, but
they are far from helping each other to cope with the effects of the past traumas.
Just as Morrison’s characters are constantly reminded of the atrocities of slavery,
Hogan’s protagonists are far from forgetting the slaughter they experienced during
colonial exploits that continued long after the United States of America ceased to
be colonies in a political sense. The only help Angel receives comes from her two
grandmothers and her great-grandmother who take her on a trip that becomes a
vision quest and provide her with a clan and a sense of identity.
In both novels the focus is on women who find the power to reject victimiza-
tion and start to act in order to create their own future. It is not easy to rely on
one’s non-Western heritage if little is known about it, but Morrison and Hogan
found ways to convince her characters and some of the readers to appreciate the
African-American and Native-American legacy. First of all, their prose is char-
acterized by inner perspective; it is Western readers who are the outsiders in
this world and they may be surprised how complex and multi-layered it is. Even
though the novels start with the events that betray despair and seeming deprav-
ity (the attempts of killing innocent children), we learn through retrospection
that these acts were forced by the brutal practice of white men, and the original
communities, African-American and Indian, abhorred such acts because in both
cultures family and children were protected and cherished. It was the outsiders
from the Western culture who violated these traditions to the extent that, even
though both Sethe and Hannah are responsible, only those who ignore history
completely could suggest that those who profited from the slave system and the
policy of reducing Indian population in the U.S. could be considered innocent.
Despite the fact that as a slave Sethe had no right to her children or to her own
family, she loved her family more than anything in the world. The same can be
said about Baby Suggs, Halle, Stamp Paid and many other Black characters who
fought for their beloved as long as they could (e.g. Halle worked for years to set
his mother free, Sethe did everything to escape from Sweet Home) and when
they lost family members they sometimes went mad from pain (Halle, Sethe).
Everything they did for their families in the terrible inhumane conditions that
were imposed on them was heroic. Everyday activities, predictable and boring,
become special. When Kubitschek mentions the lack of distinction between the
sacred and the profane in African-American culture, I think that there are many
examples of this belief in the ways in which Morrison portrays family ties and
the daily struggle of her characters. They do what they can to make sense out of
an existence that is, in fact, a nightmare. The fact that her characters find time for
love, for affection, for protecting the weak, for spirituality while living in hell is
a miracle and magic. What Sethe does for her family is at the same time profane
and sacred, just like her motherhood is both a burden and a blessing. Nowhere is
this more visible than in her dealing with the ghost of Beloved when Sethe wants
to compensate for Beloved’s lost childhood. She is such a devoted mother that at
certain points she risks being devoured by the ghost; yet when she is finally free
of it, she experiences loneliness and the pain of grieving: “There is a loneliness
that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding on, this motion, un-
like a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight
like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is
alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own
feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”(Morrison 323)
There is no restraint in Sethe’s devotion; her sacrifice is so complete that Paul
D needs to protect her from that all consuming love at the end of the novel
(“You your best thing Sethe” [Morrison 322] he says). As a mother, Sethe has
features of ideal mother and one is tempted to think that she could have become
one, if it had not been for the crime she had been pushed to. Even though such
an extremely strong bond between mother and children might be considered
culturally universal, in Beloved it gains an African dimension because it includes

love towards the ghost of a child who is treated as a family member, and it refers
to the experience of the Black slaves who were not allowed to create family ties.
This lack of distinction between the sacred and the profane in also visible in
Solar Storms. In fact, there are so many examples of it in Hogan’s novel that it is
impossible to innumerate them all in this paper. Definitely the merging of the
Western dichotomy is best seen in the Native American perception of nature.
Especially during canoe rafting we can seen how profane actions gain spiritual
dimension. The journey itself is a rite of passage because Angel gains her Indian
name Maniki and Agnes dies, joining the world of the bear which was her spir-
itual guide. The travelling women never conquer nature in the Euro-American
fashion, but patiently learn its ways and experience a kind of communion with
animistic spirits of the whole creation. The human being is not a crown of crea-
tion, like in Judeo-Christian myth, but equal to animals and plants. Survival is
connected not with controlling nature but with living responsibly in harmony
with it. Angel notices:
Our lives, the old people say, are witnessed by the birds, by dragonflies, by trees and
spiders. We are seen, our measure taken, not only by the animals and spiders but even
by the alive galaxy in deep space and the windblown ice of the north that would soon
descend on us.
The people at Adam’s Rib believed everything was alive, that we were surrounded by the
faces and loving of gods. The world, as described by Dora-Rouge, was a dense soup of
love, creation all around us, full and intelligent. Even the shadows light threw down had
meaning, had stories and depth.” (80–81)
The same conviction that nature can instruct man is evident in the scenes of
studying maps of white people. The act itself ceases to be trivial looking for one’s
way and becomes a kind of vision. As Angel says:
With my own eyes I saw that none of the maps were the same; they were only as accurate
as the minds of their makers and those had been men possessed with the spoils of this
land, men who believed California was an island. Bush said those years also showed up
in the rings of trees.
I was intrigued that the history could be told by looking at paper. I’d wondered before
what it was about the maps that occupied Bush’s time and now I, too, became interested.
I could see it myself. Just as I saw sleds with frozen animals. A deeper map. I would pore
over them beside her, the lantern lightning the table in front of us. They were incredible
topographies, the territories and tricks and lies of history. (…) What I liked was that land
refused to be shaped by the makers of maps.”(123)
The earth is animate and one has to learn to hear its voices; what is important
in Hogan’s perspective on nature is that nature is never a background like in
Euro-American literature nor it is an inspiration for the human being who uses
it to speak about himself (like in the Romantic tradition), but nature is an active
participant, perhaps even a character. Nature invites Angel to counteract the ac-
tivities of the white people who tainted it; it refuses to be a silent witness of man’s
actions. As Angel confesses:
Sometimes I thought I could hear these things myself, the lonely, sad songs coming
through trees and up from the banks of their destruction. Always, behind those songs,
I heard our own deep-pitched songs that were the songs of land speaking through its
keepers. Sometimes, too, I heard the old ones in the song of wolves. It made me think we
were undoing the routes of explorers, taking away the advance of commerce, narrowing
down and distilling the truth out of history. (176)
Thus they are not merely covering distance and ensuring survival in the wilder-
ness, but they magically try to follow ghost dancers who several decades before
Angel’s journey prophesized the disappearance of all things European.
There are more examples of blending the profane and the sacred in the ho-
listic perspective of Native Americans in the articles by Benay Blend, Katherine
R. Chandler, and Barbara J. Cook. Blend comments that “Because ‘the land refused
to be shaped by the makers of maps’(…) it exerts its own will, much like Native
people who resist colonization by refusing to be contained, clearly mapped, or
controlled by the dominant culture” (Blend 5). Chandler sees the function of
Hogan’s evocation of exposing “Terrestrial Spirituality” as a way of promoting an
“ecology of mind”; as the critic explains: “Hogan’s ‘ecology of mind’ recognizes the
necessity of involving ourselves in the natural world with an attitude of participa-
tory reverence rather than viewing it with a distanced objectivity” (Chandler 15).
Equally important is Hogan’s concern for history which includes oral tradition
and its myths. In my opinion, it resembles Toni Morrison’s strategy of relying on
African-American oral tradition and its myths in Beloved. Certainly, history for
Morrison is more than quoting facts in an objective way; her homage to slave nar-
rative is obvious, but before I concentrate on these formal aspects of the novels, I
would like to come back to the question of ghosts.
The haunting presence of ghosts in both novels is connected with the abuses
of history. Just like Beloved recalling the horrors of the Middle Passage might be
perceived as a medium for those whom history silenced forever, some of Hogan’s
characters also become “channels” for ancestral spirits; the dead speak through
them. It is well discernible in the protagonists of Beloved and Hannah who func-
tion as mediums for the ancestral ghosts finding no peace after past traumas. This
haunting drives them mad. The magical interpretation does not exclude a psycho-
logical one, but it enriches it by showing how other cultures, different from the
Western tradition of thought, try to explain post-traumatic syndromes. Beloved

is not only a carrier of the trauma of Sethe’s daughter, but she also remembers the
suffering of those who experienced the Middle Passage; she somehow gains access
to the collective psyche of African-Americans. Hannah, similarly to Beloved, has
to carry a burden that is too heavy, which leads to her madness. As it is explained
by Dora-Rouge after Hannah’s visit to a medicine man:
I didn’t know what he meant at first. But I saw it in time, her life going backward to where
time and history and genocide gather and move like a cloud above the spilled oceans of
blood. That little girl’s body was the place where all this met. (…) Some of her ancestors
walked out of death, out of massacre. Some of them came from the long trail of dying,
people sent from their world, and she was also the child of those starving and poisoned
people Elk Island. ‘I can smell it,’ Old Man said. ‘I can see them All of them. She is the
house, the meeting place.’ (101)
All stories started to inhabit Hannah; these stories are sometimes presented as
ancestral ghosts or voices which bring us straight to the second similarity between
African-American and Native-American cultures, i.e. the collision or the presence
of two times, linear and cyclical, manifested in the ghosts from the past inhabit-
ing the present of the living characters. Both Morrison and Hogan use magical
realist modes to challenge the Euro-American rationalist perspective. The basis
of magical realism is ambiguity about the nature of reality and characters. What
Morrison and Hogan additionally have in common as far as the introduction of
ghosts is concerned is that in their novels ghost enter realistic space in a matter-
of-fact way; nothing unnatural precedes the appearance of Beloved and nothing
out of this world happens when Hannah is born. It seems that some places and
some people are haunted because there is too much suffering, the world has lost
its balance, and the weakest elements of the community start to emit dangerous
signals. The dead not only inhabit the minds of the living but they feed on them.
The children from the future generations pay a high price for the past abuses –
both Angel and Denver suffer and their lives are endangered. In both cases, the
remedy for the destructive activity of the ghosts is restoration of the communal
ties. Angel is aware what saved her life:
From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women
and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle
closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived
this narrowing circle of life. (107)
Suffering is also written on women’s bodies. Sethe has a horrible scar on her back
from whipping; Angel’s face is disfigured:
The scars, I knew, were from my mother. They were all I had of her. For me, she was like air.
I breathed her. I had to breathe whether I wanted to or not, and like air, she was invisible,
although sometimes I thought I recalled her heartbeat from when I was inside her body.
At those times a distant memory tugged at me in a yearning way, and I felt something
deeper than sorrow. (34)
Sethe is saved by Paul D who loves her despite of her scars, and Angel learns self-
acceptance through reading Agnes diary where the broader context of Hannah’s
madness is suggested:
I don’t know where the beginning was, your story, ours. Maybe it came down in the milk
of the mothers. Old Man said it was in the train tracks that went through the land and
came out of the iron mines. I’ve thought of this for years. It might have started when the
crying children were taken from their mothers or when the logging camps started and
cities were built from our woods, or when they cut the rest of the trees to raise cattle. (40)
When old communities get dispersed or destroyed (African-Americans lost their

languages and cultures in the Middle Passage and later on plantations when clans
and families were divided, and Native-Americans when they lost their lands and
were forcefully acculturated), new ones must be created. What has been done can-
not be undone – both Morrison’s and Hogan’s prose convey this sense of irrepara-
ble loss. The past cannot be changed, but past traumas must be revisited in order
to move forward. Sethe’s second attempt to kill a white man is such a re-visitation
of the past because Sethe associates an innocent man with the Schoolteacher who
years ago came to capture her and her children. Sethe travels in time in her mind
but luckily is stopped from the second act of violence by the Black women who
assist her. The howl that comes afterwards has a ritualistic function and it helps
to get rid of the ghost of Beloved. Thus violence comes in cyclical patterns, but
healing also comes back in a cycle. The community was once united around Baby
Suggs and now gets reunited around Sethe.
In Solar Storm cyclical time is also crucial for healing. Before Angel is ready to
face her mother and forgive her, which is synonymous with breaking away from
the vicious circle of violence, she enters mythical time: “As we travelled, we en-
tered time and began to trouble it, to pester it apart or into some kind of change”
(Hogan 168). Dora-Rouge becomes a kind of medium through which Angel can
safely glimpse into the past and come back not poisoned by revenge but with the
power to cope with the legacy of dispossession and shame:
Through her I could see into the past. I saw the deep past, even before the time of Dora-
Rouge.
In the past, I’d heard, it was a woman who saw the first white men arrive in a boat. They
were floating toward her. Before she’d seen the wind-filled sails of the graceful boat of
death, she thought it was a floating island and that it carried strange and beautiful be-
ings instead of the tormented world that was its true cargo. No one could have guessed
its presence would change everything until she and her people wanted to lie on ice, like
Dora-Rouge’s little sister, and die. The woman who saw the island coming towrd her didn’t
know beloved children would be mutilated, women cut open and torn, that strong, brave
men would die, and that even their gods would be massacred. (168)
Similarly to Sethe, Angel is saved from violence. She is offered a chance to become
the first mother who will leave her past traumas behind. Significantly, in both
novels feminine bonds are emphasized and motherhood is redefined. Just like
Sethe is not just an ordinary mother, Angel’s “mothers” are in many ways similar
to Sethe because they are equally devoted to their child; even though Angel is their
granddaughter, they try to act on behalf of the mother Angel never had. Sethe had
the power of love beyond the grave; at one point one may have the impression
that Beloved was summoned from the land of the dead by Sethe’s longing and
she is ready to sacrifice her life to compensate for the past crime. Bush, Agnes
and Dora-Rouge risk their lives to go with Angel through her rite of passage and
later protect her when she fights against the building of the dam in Two-Town.
Without them Angel would have never regained her Indian legacy and gained a
chance for normal relationships.
When Catherine Rainwater (1999) analyzed Hogan’s first novel Mean Spirit,
she noticed that time is crucial for its interpretation. According to her, Hogan in
her novel juxtaposes external Euro-American history with the internal Native
American perspective. The external narration is a historical novel, chronologi-
cal with dates from the Western storyline. The internal narration is a text within
a text and it refers rather to mythical dimensions of history. Since the novel is
Euro-American in origin, Hogan introduces “Book of Horse” as its Native Ameri-
can equivalent. The external narration calls for a Euro-American paradigm of
interpretation and the second type of narration is less accessible for Non-Native
readers; we are aware that an important myth is reborn but we do not know what
consequences it will have for the Osage people. We can only hope that this sacred
text will help them to save their culture. As Rainwater notes, it is not the point
that we decipher everything, but that we acknowledge two ways of reading and
interpretation and reflect on the nature of our participation in the story:
Hogan subverts the Eurocentric boundaries that for some readers define “reality” as well
as many of the conventions for its representation in language. Hogan shows us what
might happen should Eurocentric “reality” (described in one narrative layer) give way to
the “Native American” reality (described in the other narrative layer). “Re-signing” the
boundaries of reality and representation in “Indian” terms, Hogan exploits the consider-
able, world-altering political power implicit within aesthetic form. (Rainwater 47)
I think that Catherine Rainwater’s conclusions might help us to interpret the role
of the Native American code in Solar Storms. Even though in this novel there is
no equivalent of the Native American ‘Bible’ as “Book of Horse” was called, there
are voices of Native women (Agnes’ and Bush’s tales) who give direct access to Na-
tive American tradition. They serve the role of tribal storytellers because they not
only instruct Angel but also have impact on her transformation. They also offer a
counter-history in which not the dates and linear progression are important, but
the Native concept that everything is interconnected and the past is integrated
with the present all the time and animal transformation is not a bygone myth but
a present possibility, as in the fragment related by Bush:
By then, the land was settled. No bears were there to disturb the people. But at night
in the woods, settlers heard branches snap. They heard the breathing in the forest. The
bear lived there still, and it lived inside their own skin and bones. Everything they feared
moved right inside them.
Agnes wanted to know, always, why some men will do what they do. She believed wearing
its skin would show her these things.
Sometimes it happens that, at twilight, I see those eyes and that large paw brushing Agnes’
back and I hear her sing and I get a feeling, just a feeling. Agnes is becoming something.
Maybe the bear. Maybe she knows her way back to something. (48)
In the passage above, the history of the U.S. looks completely different than in
the official records. The settlers are neither winners over nature nor do they make
America their home. They are lost and confused. Their cruelty and violence is
dictated by fear. Native Americans, on the other hand, do not have a monopoly on
knowledge; even for them nature is a mysterious spiritual realm, but they at least
try not to destroy it. It is important to notice that Agnes asks a bear for wisdom,
in fact, she aspires to become an animal that white settlers most probably treated
as a primitive beast. Last, but not least, even though this excerpt is in part retro-
spection, it is not important when exactly the events took place because the white
people described by Hogan in her novel have not changed their habits and still
violate nature in the name of progress. Their violence is cyclical and sometimes
it appears to be timeless, that is why Angel, Bush, Agnes and Dora-Rouge cannot
cease in their efforts to oppose this destruction. They have to remember their ver-
sion of history and revitalize their tradition because ceremonies need to be alive if
they are to change reality. For that reason all three women try to make themselves
similar to an animal during their journey; Agnes’ individual transformation into
a bear is not enough, all of them have to learn how to form relationships with
the natural world: “The four of us became like one animal. We heard inside each
other in a tribal way. I understood this at once and was easy with it. With my
grandmothers, there was no such thing as loneliness” (177).
In Morrison’s Beloved, orality is not used to reconstruct broken relationships

with nature, but it definitely serves the function of uniting an African-American
community which learns to accept Sethe’s drama and recognizes it as a part of
their bigger history. The tales that are exchanged in Beloved are equally painful
as those exchanged in Solar Storms, but there is a contrast between two novels as
far as the theme of loneliness is concerned. Angel is relatively quickly integrated
with her Native American relatives, whereas Sethe suffers from severe alienation
almost throughout the whole novel. Even when she decides to live with Paul D, her
life is full of longing for Beloved. Additionally, in the last part it is repeated three
times running that the story of Beloved “is not a story to pass on.” While African
Americans (or perhaps just Sethe) doubt the power of oral transfer, Hogan’s Na-
tive Americans trust it completely. Why? Was slavery more traumatic and culture
depraving than the removal of Native Americans from their original territories
and their later forced assimilation into the white culture? In my opinion, the an-
swer might be connected with the distance from the place of origin. Even though
the overwhelming majority of Native Americans lost their original land, they still
inhabit the same continent – they are more at home than African Americans.
However, both Morrison and Hogan expose fragmentation as a part of the
experience of their characters; in Morrison’s fiction, particularly in Beloved, this
fragmentation is more acute. As Gulia Scarpa notices, “Beloved is a discourse
of fragmentation. Its fragmented discourse epitomizes the experience of Black
Americans since their displacement from Africa” (102). For Hogan’s characters
the union with nature has a healing power, because her characters still inhabit
the animistic space of their ancestors or cultural groups that had similar spiritual
background. Morrison’s characters lost their tradition irrevocably during the Mid-
dle Passage, when sold into slavery on the American shore and again while living
on different plantations where families got divided and African cultural practices
strictly prohibited.
Orality understood as a reaffirmed reconstructed tie with one’s ethnic culture is
used by both Hogan and Morrison. There is emphasis on telling rather than writ-
ing in both novels. In these story-telling sessions, we can see communal sharing
and instruction for the less experienced community members. In Beloved, Baby
Suggs plays the role of the storyteller who for some time unites the members of
the Black community; in Solar Storms, we have three representatives of the elders
who teach through stories: Bush, Agnes and Dora-Rouge. The young do profit
from these lessons even though it takes a lot of time, and sometimes they also
have to learn how to listen to the spirits; Denver and Angel do this when they get
in contact with Baby Suggs and Agnes after their death.
It is also important how these contemporary stories are shaped; in both novels
storytellers have to access the listeners who have gone through the pain of forced
assimilation into the American white culture. Linda Krumholz notices that Baby
Suggs has learned to heal through combining African and Christian elements; in
Clearing, the place that signifies the necessity for a psychological cleansing from
the past, she helps others to transcend the control that the destructive memories
have over them (399). Her speeches resemble Christian sermons, but do not take
place in a church, but in a forest and they are accompanied by African-American
music so they are syncretic. I think they might also be treated as examples of
transculturation because, in accordance with Fernendo Ortiz’s definition (2002),
the elements of the African and American cultures are intentionally mixed and a
new hybrid form emerges.
Hogan’s storytellers also create a hybrid because they address a girl that was cut
off from her Native American tradition, and they have to explain a lot to her. Bush
goes even further; before she starts to heal Angel through storytelling she teaches
her how to respect nature and how to survive in the wilderness. While living with
Bush in her island hut, Angel goes through many trials, and only when she gains
experience, she is allowed to accompany other Indian women on their risky trip.
Another element of Native American story-telling tradition that is visible in Solar
Storms is its tendency to digress and illustrate the performance with background
stories or myths. In Hogan’s fiction, not only Angel, but the readers as well, are
made to look at the world because the narrators insist on showing rather than ana-
lyzing. The novel is full of long descriptive passages and at times one might have
an impression that the elements of the natural world become characters in the
story (e.g. the bear Agnes saved from a circus). Linear time seems to be sometimes
suspended and the characters return to the cyclical time that enables constant
transformation, e.g. while travelling all women become one animal, as Angel says
(177). The circle of life is presented as a perfect natural order, as demonstrated in
Agnes’ death, which is not a violent disruption of life but a peaceful transcending
from one world to the other. Her decision to leave her body for the wild animals
is not shocking for anybody; it is rather treated as a wise submission to the circle
of life, the final submersion into the natural harmony.
Circularity is also an important aspect of Beloved. As Philip Page writes, in
Morrison’s fiction circularity stems from her inclusion of oral tradition in the
genre of the novel. During storytelling sessions, the audience sits in a circle or
the role of the story teller alternates from person to person around a ‘story circle’,
and Page adds that circularity in Beloved is particularly connected with the theme
of collective memory and the ways of presenting events that return in time. As
the critic explains:
[T]he events are still really there, but also because the minds and the memories of the
characters interpenetrate, because the novel is a collective memory. Moreover, their rec-
reation of the story replicates the recreation that is the novel itself, Morrison’s imagining
(…). And just as Beloved, the listener, shares in the creation of Denver’s story, so the reader
is, or must become, the co-creator of Morrison’s novel. (38)
The last, but not least similarity between Beloved and Solar Storms connected with
the African and Native American backgrounds of the texts are the mythical figures
that inspired the construction of the haunted characters, e.g. Beloved and Hannah.
When Linda Krumholz notices that history-making becomes a healing process for
the characters, the reader and the author of Beloved, concludes that the character
of Beloved is the Trickster of History: “She is the physical manifestation of sup-
pressed memories” (400), both the pain and the cure. The critic further explains
that in the same way that Beloved catalyzes Sethe’s memories, the novel Beloved
catalyzes the reader’s historical memories. Moreover, as a mythological Trickster,
Beloved manipulates the characters with her spiritual presence and cannot be
contained. Krumholz observes that “she stands as a contradictory image, both as
the African ancestor, the beautiful African mother, connecting the mothers and
daughters of African descent to their pre-slavery heritage and power, and as the
all-consuming devil-child” (401). Thus, according to Krumholz, writing history is
a resurrection of ancestral spirits and Beloved is at the same time a ritual recovery
of history and from history.
It is hard to deny that Hannah is also based on mythological character. The
Trickster is crucial for both African and Native American mythology, but, in my
opinion, Hannah is rather modeled on Wendigo, the creature who can freeze
others to death. The Trickster always manipulates others and Hannah never does
it and, luckily for her children, she also fails “to freeze” them, to traumatize them
beyond repair as many Wendigos did. In Native American tradition, some Wen-
digos Winnebagos are created when other Wendigos affect them; in the story of
Hannah the fact that she is also a victim is crucial. Significantly, even though Mor-
rison and Hogan use different mythological figures, they serve similar purposes.
In both stories, the characters who inherit a mythological potential have the power
of bringing the voices of ancestors back so that the living might hear them. Both
are powerful and destructive; they are unable to love without killing and they
cannot be exorcized by any means, they have to be loved and let go; only in this
way can others survive. Both Beloved and Hannah have strong connections with
history; without them the counter-history would have never been reconstructed.
As Krumholz concludes:
By inscribing history as a trickster spirit, Morrison has recreated our relationship to
history in a process baffling and difficult, but necessary. Through the character Beloved,
Morrison denies the reader analytical explanations of slavery. Instead, the reader is led
through a painful, emotional healing process, leaving him a haunting sense of the depth
of pain and shame suffered in slavery. (407)
We could not wish for a more memorable history lesson.
Works Cited
Blend, Benay. Linda Hogan’s “Geography of the Spirit”. Division and Transcendence
in Selected Texts in ed. Cook, Barbara J. From the Center of Tradition. Critical
Perspectives on Linda Hogan. Colorado: University Press of Colorado 2003.
Print.
Chandler, Katherine R. “How Do We Learn to Trust Ourselves Enough to Hear
the Chanting of Earth?”. Hogan’s Terrestrial Spirituality in ed. Cook, Barbara J.
From the Center of Tradition. Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan. Colorado:
University Press of Colorado 2003. Print.
Cook, Barbara . Hogan’s Historical Narratives. Bringing to Visibility the Interrela-
tions of Humanity and the Natural World in ed. Barbara J. Cook, From the
Center of Tradition. Critical Perspectives on Linda Hogan. Colorado: University
Press of Colorado 2003. Print.
Ed. Furman, Jan . Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A Casebook. New York: Oxford
University Press 2003. Print.
Hogan, Linda. Solar Storms. New York: Scribner 1995. Print.
Hogan, Linda . The Woman Who Watches Over the World. A Native Memoir. New
York: W.W. Norton & Company 2001. Print.
Krumholz, Linda . The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved. African American Review, Vol.26, No.3, Fiction Issue (Autumn, 1992),
pp. 395–408.
Kubitschek, Missy Dehn .Toni Morrison. A Critical Companion. Westport: Green-
wood Press 1998. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Vintage Books 2007. Print.
Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar. Madrid: Cátedra,
2002. Print.
Page, Philip. Circularity in Beloved. African American Review, Vol.26, No.1, Wom-
en Writers Issue (Spring 1992), pp. 31–39.
Raiwater, Catehrine. Dreams of Fiery Stars. The Transformations of Native American

Fiction, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1999. Print.
Scarpa, Gulia. Narrative Possibilities in Beloved, MELUS, Vol.17, No.4, Black Mod-
ernism and Post-Modernism (Winter, 1991- Winter 1992). Pp. 91–103.
Schappel, Elisa . The Art of Fiction in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A Case-
book, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2003. Print.
Irina Popescu
UC Berkeley
Biting Iron, Forever Smiling: the Iron-Bit,

the Wounded Mouth, and Un-Silencing
in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Abstract: In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the iron bit, an instrument usually made of metal and
placed inside the mouth of a horse in order to help a rider control and direct his animal,
was also placed in the mouths of plantation slaves. Serving to prevent all communication
between slaves, while ensuring their productivity and limiting their potential for resistance,
the bit imposed silence. As both Sethe and Paul D remind us, this instrument of torture left
the tongue numb and the mouth forever smiling, an ironic reconstruction of the wounded
slave body, creating a face of content amidst the most depraved conditions. This paper will
address the bit as a physical torture device both silencing and restructuring the mouth into
a smile and as a figurative, metaphorical device employed inside the novel to explore how
the process of telling and the instrument of telling (the mouth) gain the power to un-silence
the past. This paper will be divided into the three parts, each exploring how the iron bit, as
an object circulating throughout the novel, both reveals a history of violence and helps the
characters bear witness to their own traumas. The first part examines Paul D and Sethe’s
descriptions of the iron bit, focusing specifically on descriptions of the wounded mouth,
in order to understand the bit as a physical torture mechanism used to prevent the very
telling that Beloved provides. The second part investigates what I term the “ghostly-bit,” or
the haunting of the mouth by metal once the actual iron has been removed, a process of
restructuring which, in preventing the wound from healing, leaves the mouth “smiling”
yet unable to speak. The third and last section explores how the iron bit is reclaimed by
the characters and the novel itself. Through the multiple acts of telling and bearing wit-
ness which occur through speech-acts, textual absences (or the inability to use language),
and sounds (both music and the hollers of the crowd outside 124 toward the end), the
iron represents the forcibly silenced history of oppression, which, when reclaimed, gains
strength and encroaches upon historical silence and forgetting.
Keywords: Beloved, iron bit, Toni Morrison, trauma, language, silence
Many silenced histories tell and retell subjugated stories without relying on spo-
ken or written words. These silences erupt into sound as we begin listening to the
hushed individual traumas bent on liberating their horrific past through an unor-
thodox process of narration that creates a new relationship between language and
the silenced victim. Memories and “rememories,” songs and tune-filled murmurs,
32 Irina Popescu
telling and retelling, words and “word-images,” all combine in Toni Morrison’s
Beloved, allowing hushed voices to finally take hold of their forced silence.
The physical bit: constructed smiles and wounded mouths

“Did you speak to him? Didn’t you say anything to him?
Something!”
“I couldn’t, Sethe. I just…couldn’t”
“Why!”
“I had the bit in my mouth” (82).
Instruments of torture inflict pain upon the victim in order to ensure a victim’s
obedience, to punish disobedient actions, and also to extract desired information.
The ancient forms of torture, as discussed in early Roman law, were primarily
established as a means of torturing slaves accused of a crime. In using torture
as a punishment for a misdeed, a legal societal framework was established upon
the newly formed public (Peters 1). Early Roman jurists identified torture as “the
torment and suffering of the body in order to elicit truth,” directly connecting it
to a desired speech act, extracted through pain (Peters 1). Yet, as Elaine Scarry
(1985) reminds us in The Body in Pain, “physical pain does not simply resist
language but actively destroys it” (4). An individual experiencing certain types
of pain, therefore, must abandon the linguistic medium since that medium no
longer furnishes his or her ability for adequate expression. In other words, tor-
ture, which often seeks to extract information by forcing an individual to speak,
paradoxically prevents that very speech act by severing the tormented individual’s
access to language.
However, unlike the establishment of torture as legal punishment for a mis-
deed or the extraction of truth in early Roman society, plantation owners in the
antebellum South used forms of steady torture to ensure productivity by keep-
ing their slaves in the constant state of bearing pain, thus weakening their psy-
chological health without preventing the physical body from working. Torture
promoted ‘good behavior’ while maintaining a visible sense of ‘law and order,’
implemented by the master in order to lower the tendency for resistance. Torture
was commonplace, a practice made so visible that it became part of the everyday
experience. Unlike early practices of torture, turning to punishment as a public
spectacle preserving the legal structure, the implementation of torture in ante-
bellum South sought to make torture, and its implicit dehumanization of the
victim, as visible and as familiar as possible, act as a warning against undesired
or resistant behaviors.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved 33
Historians discussing the torture devices employed on the plantation in the

antebellum South have consistently focused on lynching, tarring, steel collars with
long spikes, fetters on the arms and/or legs, and face irons as the main instruments
of torture. In nineteenth-century American newspapers and periodicals, as well as
modern day investigations on slavery and torture, there is little information on the
iron bit (often called the “face-iron”). This suggests that its physical representation
and implementation remains locked away in the realm of the unimaginable. Some
human bits covered the entire mouth, neck, and nose, leaving the eyes unfettered
so the slave could continue to see and thus proceed with his or her work. In this
sense, the bit initially prevented speech by covering the mouth. After the bit was
removed, the mouth was so dehydrated that the victims found themselves too
hoarse to form words. This plantation slaves’ inability to speak after the torture
mechanism was finally removed is akin to the victims’ post-traumatic failure of
speech, as they were unable to name and isolate their pain. The bit inflicted a
wound disguising itself as a smile, a wound inscribing contentment upon the
silenced mouth. This unnatural inscription of pleasure through painful torture ap-
pears throughout Beloved, in conversations between Sethe and Paul D and Sethe’s
memories of her own mother’s mouth. It is through these textual representations
that the process of unsilencing the tortured occurs.
The bit is first introduced when Paul D begins to tell Sethe that Halle had seen
the boys steal her milk (81). Paul D reluctantly tells Sethe that the bit is what pre-
vented him from speaking to Halle. Right after Paul D admits to having the bit in
his mouth, Sethe sits on the porch steps, unable to speak, desiring madness. This
moment of silence, occurring directly after the first explicit mention of the bit,
reinforces the silencing effect imposed by the object, which quickly forces both
characters to abandon spoken language altogether. “He wants to tell me,” Sethe
thinks soon after,
he wants me to ask him about what it was like for him, about how offended the tongue
is, held down by iron, how the need to spit is so deep you cry for it. She already knew
about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, little girls,
women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back.
Days after it was taken out, goose was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing
to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye. Sethe looked up into Paul D’s
eyes to see if there was any trace left in them. (84)
Sethe’s internal thoughts during this scene create the most tangible illustration
of the bit presented throughout the novel’s entirety. She describes the manner in
which the physical object is used (something that yanks the lips back), creates a
setting for the object (“a time before Sweet Home”), names the victims (“men,
34 Irina Popescu
boys, little girls, women”), and discusses the wounds left upon the victim’s mouth
and eyes after the object’s removal (“a wildness”/soreness of the corners of the
mouth). The eye’s “wildness” suggests that the bit animalizes human flesh, creating
a permanent savagery as the victim is quite literally turned into a beast of burden.
Paul D’s inability to speak “is forced upon him by the bit in his mouth which both
confers as well as signifies his status as an animal.” This blurring of man and ani-
mal is confirmed with the mention of Mister, the rooster, on the following page
(Chandra 51–52). Mister appears right after Sethe asks Paul D if he would like to
tell her about the bit. He responds, “I just ain’t sure I can say it. Say it right, I mean,
because it wasn’t the bit - that wasn’t it” (Morrison 85). The trauma left behind by
the bit is instantly transferred to Mister, the smiling rooster who “looked so free”
(86). Furthermore, in focusing on Mister’s smile (“I swear he smiled” (85)), Paul
D indicates that the rooster could smile freely while his own mouth underwent
a satirical reconstruction as the bit forced a perpetual smile on his face. The act
of smiling, described throughout Beloved, represents the mouth as an organ of
speech and a tortured wound.
Toward the end of the novel, Sethe’s reflections on her mother’s experience with
the bit, offer the second representation of the bit’s torturous effect on the body:
“You know what? She’d had the bit so many times she smiled. When she wasn’t
smiling she smiled, and I never saw her own smile […]. They say it was the bit
that made her smile when she didn’t want to” (240). Smiles are wounds in Beloved.
The forced raising of the corners of the mouth inflicted by the bit creates a false
sense of pleasure by reconstructing the smile as “a silent statement of endurance.
To smile is to know the horror of what it means to be slave” (Rodrigues 155). The
bit silences the mouth and erases the trace of visible discontent by constructing
a smile out of the most painful means of torture. Beloved too smiles as she first
enters the novel, making her terrifyingly inapproachable “not because she was wet,
or dozing or had what sounded like asthma, but because amid all that she was
smiling” (60). Unlike the welcoming smile generally perceptible as the mouth’s
corners rise in contentment, Beloved’s smile, like that of Sethe’s mother, is strik-
ing as unwelcoming, forced, unnatural and, thus, inapproachable. A ghost-smile.
A wound.
Paul D’s reflections on Mister last only a short while and are interrupted as soon
as he tells Sethe that he “was something else and that something else was less than
a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub” (85), finding himself unable to continue his
narrative. Sethe begins to frantically rub his knee, attempting to beat back the past,
using her hands to push back his troubled words. Touch supersedes speech in this
instance, as Sethe’s hands replace language, and trauma is quite literally pushed
back inside the body, unable to escape the body’s prison. The image of kneading
dough, occurring near the end of the passage, implies that the labor of beating
back the past provides sustenance for a body unwilling and perhaps still unable
to gain a linguistic hold over pain. To say anything more “might put them in a
place they couldn’t get back from” (86), and the novel is not ready, at this point,
to bear witness to the trauma of the past. Language is taken over by another type
of intimate interaction: touch.
Phantom iron-bit: haunting of the mouth

At the beginning of Beloved, when Paul D steps into 124, unexpected images of
iron filter through the narration. These images unpack a past that the reader is
not yet aware of:
But what he did broke three more Sweet Home men and punched the glittering iron out
of Sethe’s eyes, leaving two open wells that did not reflect firelight.
Now the iron was back but the face, softened by hair, made him trust her enough to step
inside her door smack into a pool of pulsing red light. (11)
Iron haunts Paul D’s eyes as he looks and analyzes Sethe’s face. Iron taints his vi-
sion, taking over Sethe’s features as he finds himself unable to look at her body
without the memory of iron tainting her flesh. For Paul D, the iron bit confines
the mouth; the mouth becomes the prisoner and victim while the iron bit takes
on the perpetrator’s role. The iron bit creates a world of confusion for the slave by
torturing and not torturing, forcing the body to exist as free and imprisoned as
only the mouth is locked away while the rest of body continues to function and
work. The tortured body thus exists inside and outside the room of torture, fur-
thering the confusion of the victim by fashioning a body able to walk but unable
to speak, confined and unconfined, mobile and immobile. Furthermore, the iron
bit establishes a distance between the mouth and the rest of the body, estranging
the mouth from speech and thought. The emphasis on Paul D’s mouth, the taste
of iron, and the relationship between iron and flesh, suggests that he is unable to
think and speak without the iron bit clouding over his language. Paul D thinks and
tastes iron. His descriptions and thought patterns immediately and instinctually
connect flesh to the metal his mouth was once confined to.
Even before his reflection on Sethe’s features, when first arriving on the porch
of 124, Paul D makes “a face as though tasting a teaspoon of something bitter”
upon asking Sethe why she is barefoot which she responds with “[I] messed up
my legs back yonder. Chamomile” (7). The bitter taste erupting in his mouth is
directly followed by Paul D’s unwillingness to listen: “I don’t even want to hear
36 Irina Popescu
‘bout it. Always did hate that stuff ” (7). When the bitter taste erupts in Paul D’s
mouth, he uses chamomile as the object upon which he displaces his hate. In
other words, he associates the bitterness in his mouth with the plant and not with
his own captive traumas. The conversation between Paul D and Sethe is marked
by his asking questions and Sethe’s reluctant answers to those questions. Paul D,
on the other hand, does not confess anything. He reveals nothing about his own
history and trauma in this scene, focusing his energies on Sethe’s suffering and
their shared memories of Sweet Home. He thinks to himself, but does not express
those thoughts aloud, further illuminating the silence surrounding the scene:
“Paul D looked at the spot where the grief had soaked him. The red was gone but
a kind of weeping clung to the air where it had been. Probably best, he thought. If
a Negro got legs he out to use them” (11). In one of the first physical descriptions
of Paul D in the novel, his face is portrayed as contorted rather than smooth, as
if his features have undergone permanent disfigurement (11). His face, therefore,
gains identity through the markings of torture, existing as a face already marked
by the bit, as the inside tasting of bitterness manifests outward. The eruption of
bitterness automatically allows feelings of hatred to surface as the word “hate” ap-
pears, directly connecting itself to the chamomile as an object. This scene recalls
the earlier scene with Mister, as Paul D’s focuses his hatred on Mister as he bites
down on the iron in his mouth. The chamomile transforms into another object
for transferring trauma; an object of displacing the feelings Paul D is not yet ready
to cope with.
Ironically, chamomile is both a sleeping aid and a plant containing healing
properties, often used to disinfect sores and reduce inflammations. However, Paul
D’s unwillingness to ask Sethe about her own wounds mirrors his inability to
access and therefore heal his wound: his mouth. The initial chapters of Beloved
portray the merging of the mouth, bitterness, iron, wounds, hate, and silence,
creating a landscape of listening and not listening, silence and speech, inside and
outside. Trauma is revealed through the image of a confined mouth, a wounded
entity turning to silence as a means of protection.
Paul D’s power to describe, his power over narration, over his own history, like
his face, is distorted. The bit inserts itself inside the victim’s mouth, and forces the
tongue to intimately taste and feel the instrument of torture. Beloved demonstrates
that silence is what is left after torture. It takes over the emotional body and its
ability to form descriptions as well as the physical, internal body. Paul D’s heart, for
example, is described as a “tobacco tin buried in his chest” which has rusted shut:
He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where
a red heart used to be. (86)
It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his broth-
ers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper,
one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest. By the time he got to 124, nothing in
this world could pry it open. (133)
The tobacco tin, like the bit, prevents speech. The “red heart,” however, appears
only after he touches Beloved’s “inner part.” For Paul D, Beloved is the circulation
of the past, transforming the metal tin back into the flowing red organ destined
to preserve life by breaking the lock, allowing the silence to unravel into sound.
His heart starts beating once again, his chest “rose and fell, rose and fell under
[Sethe’s] hand” after Beloved finishes with him, suggesting that interaction with
and reclaiming of violence precedes the recuperation process (156). Beloved de-
mands Paul D to touch her, and he, like a “ragdoll” follows her command, recalling
the master/slave relationship. As he touches Beloved “on the inside,” the inside/
outside structure of the bit, an instrument which exists inside and outside the
mouth is evoked. Beloved forces Paul D to access the part of his past he has shut
away, blurring the bodily boundaries of inside and outside he has kept separate for
so long. The rising and falling of Paul D’s new-found heart mimics the narrative
structure, as both Sethe and Paul D rise and fall with their stories, each coming to
divulge bits and pieces of traumatic remembrances which finally merge towards
the end of the novel.
The mouth holds the power to both contain and expel trauma. Speech is pre-
vented and distorted by the iron bit, wounding the mouth into a silence, which,
like the tobacco tin heart metaphorically turning flesh into an object turns spoken
language into an expressionless thing. When Sethe begins feeding Beloved’s desire
for storytelling, an instance of the mouth as a haunted entity prevails:
it became a way to feed her. Just as Denver discovered and relied on the delightful effect
sweet things had on Beloved, Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from
storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of
her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had agreed
without saying so that it was unspeakable; to Denver’s inquiries Sethe gave short replies
or rambling incomplete reveries. Even with Paul D, who had shared some of it and to
whom she could talk with at least a measure of calm, the hurt was always there- like a
tender place in the corner of her mouth that the bit left. (69)
The “tender place in the corner of her mouth that the bit left” connects hurt, sto-
rytelling, and the mouth, suggesting that the bit still presides over the organ of
speech, repeatedly inflicting the same wounds. As soon as Sethe begins to speak,
vocalizing stories for Beloved, the bit reappears, reminding her of the still tender
wound in her mother’s, Paul D’s, and her own mouth. Pain feeds Beloved; she ex-
tracts hurt and lives off of it, grows from it, feeds on it like a parasite feeding on a
38 Irina Popescu
host. Beloved pries Sethe and Paul D away from the power of the now imaginary
bit while also reinforcing its presence by forcing them to go inside and face the
pained silent thoughts in the hopes transforming the “rambling incomplete rever-
ies” into coherent testimonies of the past.
Paul D reflects on Sethe’s mouth countless times throughout the novel, insisting
that the mouth in the newspaper cut out is not hers but someone else’s. Paul D
“mentions her mouth in some form at least twelve times in five pages (154–158);
that is to say, this is not her story. This is the imposition of a discourse that has
decided on the ‘truth’ and meaning of the case without consulting the defendant”
(7). The newspaper article superimposes silence upon the predominately oral
story Beloved tells, both through its objectification of Sethe’s act and through Paul
D’s inability to understand what the “black scratches said” (183). In blocking his
access to understanding while demanding that he look and witness, the clipping
reminds us of his last encounter with Halle, when the bit prevented the latter from
communicating and showing compassion, forcing Paul D to engage in an objective
reading of his friend. The bit prevents communication and as Stamp Paid pushes
the article into Paul D’s hands, he forces him to witness another trauma. Paul D is
transported back into the past, to a time when his own mouth belonged to the bit
rather than to himself. As he “smoothed the clipping with his fingers and peered at
it, not at all disturbed… [he] knew that it ought to mess him up, that what whatever
was written on it should shake him” (181). He immediately turns to the mouth
as a way to recognize and denounce the newspaper’s narrative, a written account
objectifying Sethe’s untold trauma. Just as Mister and the chamomile served as
objects of hate-displacement for Paul D earlier in the novel, the picture of Sethe’s
mouth in the article clipping supplies Paul D with another object of this kind,
furthering the process of traumatic displacement. Although his own tobacco tin
has already opened, he still lacks the language necessary to propel the remaking
of his world, reconstructing his pain into something linguistic and, with time,
surmountable. The clipping forces Paul D to confront written language, a startling
confrontation bringing him face to face with something he cannot understand,
neither literally nor figuratively: Sethe’s killing of her daughter.
Breaking the bit: sounds, songs, and hollers

In writing about the beginning of Beloved, Toni Morrison states that
[…]there is something about numerals that makes them spoken, heard, in this context,
because one expects words to read in a book, not numbers to say, or hear. And the sound
of the novel, sometimes cacophonous, sometimes harmonious, must be an inner ear
sound or a sound just beyond hearing, infusing the text with a musical emphasis that
words can do sometimes even better than music can” (Morrison, 1989 p. 31–32).
The sound “just beyond hearing,” the words just beyond words, the memories just
beyond memories, create an elsewhere for the novel, a space resisting knowledge,
language, even history. Alternative means of communication, a communication
through sounds, from hollers to whispers, takes over the pages of Beloved as we
enter into a world where what is not articulated gains more presence than what is.
Torture subjects facing interrogation undergo a process of intense objectification
in which the pained body is “overwhelmingly present and voice, world, and self
are absent” (Scarry, 1985, p. 46). Voice transforms into something akin to pain,
and language, as part of the interrogation process, becomes “the concrete agent of
physical pain” as the interrogators demand responses from a pained body provid-
ing them unwillingly. The victim begins feeling betrayed by language. Language
betrays the tortured subject, often imposing more pain upon the body. Trauma,
as Cathy Caruth reminds in Unclaimed Experience (1996), means “wound” in the
original Greek. In her discussion of Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” she
defines trauma as “a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (4);
these kinds of wounds do not heal like a flesh wounds. In Beloved, the strength of
Paul D’s body is juxtaposed against the fragility of his mind. His wound surfaces
upon his mouth, and more specifically, his difficult relationship to language dem-
onstrates how that wound was set in place by past abuses. Paul D’s inability to ac-
cess language while watching Halle spread butter all over his face in a maddening
gesture of anguish, forces him to redefine his relationship to language altogether.
Therefore, he no longer relies on words as the vehicles of communication, since
words have become inaccessible. Sound, ungrounded by the signified/signifier re-
lationship producing linguistic meaning, replaces language throughout the novel.
The communal hollers of the women gathered outside 124, for example, work in
expelling the wounds of the past. A loud holler can break through the haunting
iron still holding the mouth captive, helping both Sethe and Paul D reclaim their
present and finally claim “ownership of [their] freed [selves]” (112).
In order to remove the phantom bit, Paul D (and Sethe to an extent) must
reestablish his relationship to language. When words become obsolete, commu-
nication can either stop completely or it can be reinvented, recreated. Images
of iron appear another time in Beloved, through the memory of Paul D’s chain
gang experience, when he stood chained to 46 other men, each connected to one
another by iron links fastened to their arms and legs. Paul D tells us that “no one
spoke to the other. At least not with words. The eyes had to tell what there was to
tell” (126). The access to language is denied the men once more here, as another
40 Irina Popescu
kind of “bit” appears to force the mouth shut: “breakfast” involving forced fellatio.
The mouth is violated once again, this time by flesh. Right after this scene, the “first
sound, other than ‘yes sir’” that “a black man was allowed to speak each morning,” a
piercing “Hiiii” occurs, a sound which the lead member of the chain yells to begin
the workday (127). During their work, the men sing songs using “garbling words
so they could not be understood; tricking the words so their syllables yielded up
other meanings. They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the
animals they had tamed themselves or seen others tame…” (28). These garbled
words are words transformed; words attached to brutal sound rather than histori-
cally codified definitions. When the rain starts, the men communicate through the
iron, using the very instrument preventing their mobility to move and escape. It
is here, with a description of Paul D’s mouth, that communal sounds overpower
individual ones. Sound, unattached to any meaning, begins replacing language
as the primary means of communication: “Paul D thought he was screaming; his
mouth was open and there was this loud throat-splitting sound - but it may have
been somebody else. Then he thought he was crying. Something was running
down his cheeks” (129). Paul D detaches himself from his own mouth as a com-
munal mouth unites all the men, much like the iron connecting them enables the
formation of one unified body. Words, like “yes sir”, forced upon the slave’s lips dur-
ing the oral rape scene, stand as tainted entities, contaminated objects wounding
the slave body and mind, preventing real speech from occurring. The characters
view speech, in this scene and in many others in the novel, as something con-
structed and forced upon them; language therefore exists as the ultimate betrayer,
perpetually raping the mouth. The process of telling and expelling a traumatic
past allows the victim to completely reconstruct his relationship to language. This
reconstruction occurs only when the victim is allowed to go back to a beginning,
a beginning where sounds replace words in their struggle for meaning and help
redefine the contours of the traumatized mouth.
Towards the end of Beloved, flashbacks intensify. Giti Chandra (2009) reads
this intensification as “a crystallizing of Morrison’s use of novelistic discourse in
the internal monologues of the three main women characters, Sethe, Denver and
Beloved herself; the internal monologues representing the novelistic inscribing of
‘unspeakable things unspoken’” (64). The internal monologues demonstrate that
the characters feel betrayed by spoken language since their relationship to spoken
words primarily helped create objects out of subjects. After these monologues, in
part three of Beloved, the abandonment of language becomes necessary for the
reclamation of individual and communal traumas.
When the group of women gather outside of 124, Ella hollers. She, like Sethe,
killed her baby, yet, unlike Sethe, did so passively. However “the idea of that pup
coming back to whip her too set her jaw working, and the [she] hollered,” as the
women surrounding her “stopped praying and took a step back to the beginning”
(305). It is this “step back to the beginning” that demands our attention, provoking
us to wonder where the beginning lies and what it can provide that the present
simply cannot. This step transports the women where only sound exists, a world
where words do not have the power to define individual bodies: “in the begin-
ning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (305). Bare
sound stripped of structured meaning has the power to create a community of
subjects that recognize each other through the desperate hollers erupting from
their communal throat. In the final description of the communal gathering of
female hollers, empathy prevails as the
women [hum] in an empathetic circle around Sethe, [and] Morrison can be seen as con-
structing such a core of communal ‘harmony’: a music that predates language and which
communicates without words and dissonances. It is an attempt to ‘realize’ an ideal vision
of collectivity, and its functions, in the novel, as a ‘resolution,’ if not a ‘conclusion.’ (305)
The resonance, loud enough to create a “wave of sound wide enough to sound
deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees,” figuratively baptizes Sethe.
The mouth finally breaks its silence as this female community uses its holler to
rebuild Sethe’s world, enabling her to come face to face with the present she has
refused to take part in.
The second to last section of the novel occurs right after the scene of empathetic
hollering and begins with the following song:
Bare feet and chamomile sap.
Took off my shoes; took off my hat.
Bare feet and chamomile sap.
Gimme back my shoes; gimme back my hat.
Lay my head on a potato sack,
Devil sneak up behind my back.
Steam engine got a lonesome whine;
Love that woman till you go stone blind.
Stone blind; stone blind,
Sweet Home gal make you lose your mind. (310)
We have another return to the beginning here, a return to the beginning of the
novel where Paul D expressed his hate for chamomile as he first arrived on the
steps of 124. The images of “bare feet” and “chamomile” transport the reader back
to this past, a past now reconstructed into song. Paul D’s mouth has finally healed,
42 Irina Popescu
as the chamomile reappears, detaching itself from the hate of the past. The song
also makes demands, “gimme back my shoes; gimme back my hat,” suggesting
that the compliant “yes sir” has now transformed into a demand. In turning to
song, Paul D is able to reclaim his access to language on his own terms, creating
music out of words, a blues song enabling him to redraw the past and abandon
the betraying linguistic medium.
When Paul D makes it back to 124 at the end, the image of iron reappears as he
starts thinking about Sethe’s “wrought-iron back; the delicious mouth still puffy
at the corners from Ella’s fist” (321–322). Iron no longer takes over the eyes and
face, but acts as a support for the back, reconstructing the scarred tree Sethe car-
ries on her skin into something strong, like wrought iron. Wrought iron is a more
malleable form of iron, one which welders can easily manipulate and weld due
to its fibrous composition. The iron of the past has given way to another form of
malleable iron, enabling Paul D to regain a flexible control over his descriptions.
Sethe’s mouth, a point of focus for Paul D, undergoes a similar transformation. The
corners “still puffy…from Ella’s fist,” are no longer the corners upon which “goose
fat [needed to be] rubbed” after the iron bit was removed for the day (84). Ella’s
fist penetrates deeply with a different kind of violence, one which removes the
iron shackles from the mouth once and for all. Paul D connects these two images,
the image of the wrought iron back and the image of the puffy mouth corners,
with a semi-colon, creating a powerful relation between the two. When Paul D
takes Sethe’s hand, he tells her she is her best thing. Finally Sethe can say “me,” her
mouth forming a word it hardly recognizes as she, for the first time, acknowledges
herself living inside the present.
The iron bit, as an image and a physical torture device, shows how the process
of confining the mouth can undergo transformation only when individuals begin
to recreate their linguistic maps, reestablishing their relationship to language on
their own terms. In focusing on sound, Beloved goes back to a beginning, a holler,
a song, a breath, unadulterated by the process of objectification which turned men
into animals, women into objects, and language into something inaccessible and
remote. Paul D and Sethe recreate their world, redefining words through sound
rather than preordained meanings, breaking out of the bit once and for all.
Works Cited
***
I primarily used the C-19 database on the UCB library website for research
on the iron bit itself, looking through American periodicals, newspapers, and
journals for the early to mid- 19th Century.
Baker, Houston, A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular
Theory. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1984.
Boudreau, Kristin. “Pain and the Unmaking of the Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.”
Contemporary Literature (Autumn, 1995), 447–465.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hop-
kins University Press: Baltimore, 1996.
Chandra, Giti. Narrating Violence, Constructing Collective Identities. Palgrave: New
York, 2009.
Dobbs, Cynthia. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Bodies Returned, Modernism Revis-
ited.” African American Review (Winter, 1998), 563–578.
Goodell, William. The American Slave Code. Arno Press: New York, 1969.
Jesser, Nancy. “Violence, Home and Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Af-
rican American Review (Summer, 1999), 325–345.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage International: New York, 2004.
Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in
American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28.1 (Winter 1989), 31–32.
Peters, Edward. Torture: Expanded Edition. University of Pennsylvania Press:
Philadelphia, 1985.
Plasa, Carl.Ed. Columbia Critical Guides: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Columbia Uni-
versity Press: New York, 1998.
Rodrigues, Eusebio, L. “The Telling of Beloved.” The Journal of Narrative Technique.
(Spring, 1991), 153–169.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. Oxford University Press: New York, 1985.
Solomon, Barbara H. Ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. GK Hall and
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Tally, Justine. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Origins. Routledge: New York, 2009.
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in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Narrative (October 2004), 263–280.
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the other hand, he did not know of the fish, he must have expected a
watery grave, whether the idolaters threw him into the sea, or
whether he waited until the ship went to pieces. In this case, also, if
a Talmudist, it would have been his duly to have staged where he
was, and if he perished, die in the fulfilment or the command, to
show no mercy to idolaters. But he did not—he had compassion on
them, and, to save their lives, relinquished his only chance of safety,
by telling them to throw him into the sea. It is plain, therefore, Jonah
was not a Talmudist. We have here, then, three inspired prophets,
Daniel, Elisha, and Jonah, all bearing a practical testimony against
the Talmudic principle, which extends God’s law against the
Canaanites to all idolaters, and under all circumstances.
Lastly, We have the testimony of the God of Israel himself. He who
gave the command to destroy the Canaanites on account of their
exceeding wickedness, shows by his own dealings with the world,
that this case is an exception to the general rule, for “The Lord is
good to all, and his mercies are over all his works.” He provides food
and clothing for the idolater, as well as for those who worship him in
truth; or, as the New Testament says, “He maketh his sun to rise on
the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the
unjust.” (Matt. vi. 45.) He, then, whose conduct most resembles that
of his Creator, is, beyond all doubt, the nearest to the truth. The
Talmud, therefore, is wrong, and the New Testament explanation of
the command, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” is right. We
ask the Jews, then, to account for this fact, that Jesus of Nazareth
was right, and those who condemned him wrong, respecting one-half
of the whole law. And we ask, moreover, those Jews who abhor the
above Talmudic principles, how they can conscientiously join in the
synagogue prayers, which ascribe to the Talmud Divine authority?
We ask them why, at the very least, they have never publicly
protested against these enormities; but allow their brethren through
the world to remain victims to a system, which not only contradicts
the written law of God, but outrages all the better feelings of even
fallen humanity?
No. VI.
COMPULSORY CONVERSION OF THE GENTILES.
When, at the close of the fifteenth century, the Jews were driven out
of Spain, some of the magnanimous exiles, who had preferred loss
of all things to a compulsory change of religion, arrived at the
frontiers of Portugal, and there sought an asylum. A permanent
abode was refused, and a temporary sojourn was granted them on
two conditions—1st, That each should pay a certain quantity of gold
for his admission; and 2dly, That if they were found in Portugal after
a certain day, they should either consent to be baptized, or be sold
for slaves.[12] Now Jews of every degree and shade of religious belief
will agree with us, that these conditions were most disgraceful to
those who imposed them. To refuse gratuitous assistance to the poor
and needy, merely because they had been brought up in a different
religious faith, was utterly unworthy of those professing faith in
Divine revelation. To compel the unfortunate to choose between loss
of liberty or of conscience was the act of a fiend. But now suppose
that the Portuguese had endeavoured to persuade these poor exiles
that their conduct, however base it might appear, was commanded
by God himself. Suppose, further, that when called upon to prove
that this command was from God, they had confessed that no such
command was to be found in the written books of their religion, that it
was only a tradition of their oral law, do you think that the Jewish
exiles would have been satisfied with such proof, and submitted?
Would they not, in the first place, have questioned the authority of a
command resting merely upon uncertain tradition? And would they
not have argued, from the detestable nature of the command itself,
that it could not possibly emanate from the God of truth and love?
We ask you then to apply these principles to ‫ תורה שבעל פה‬the oral
law. The Portuguese refused to perform an act of humanity to the
unfortunate Jewish exiles, unless they were paid for it. Your oral law,
as we showed in our last number, forbids you to give medical advice
to a sick idolater gratuitously. The Portuguese voluntarily undertook
to convert the Jews by force. Your oral law teaches compulsory
conversion as a Divine command. If the oral law could be enforced,
liberty of conscience would be at an end. Neither Jew nor Gentile
would be permitted to exercise the judgment, which God has given
him. His only alternative would be submission to Rabbinic authority,
or death. The dreadful command to kill, by any means, those
Israelites who have become epicureans, or idolaters, or apostates, is
well known,[13] and sufficiently proves that the oral law recognises no
such thing as liberty of conscience in Israel. It pronounces a man an
apostate if he denies its Divine authority, and demands his life as the
penalty. The execution of this one command would fill the world with
blood and horror; and recall all the worst features of inquisitorial
tyranny. Not now to mention those Israelites who have embraced
Christianity, there are in England, and every part of Europe, many
high-minded and honourable Jews, who have practically renounced
the authority of the oral law. The Rabbinical millennium would
commence by handing over all such to the executioner. Their talents,
their virtue, their learning, their moral excellence, would avail
nothing. Found guilty of epicureanism or apostasy, because they
dared to think for themselves, and to act according to their
convictions, they would have to undergo the epicurean’s or the
apostate’s fate.
Such is the toleration of the oral law towards native Israelites, but it
is equally severe to converts. It allows no second thoughts. It
legislates for relapsed converts, as the Spanish Inquisition did for
those Jews who, after embracing Christianity, returned to their
former faith and sentences all such to death.
‫ ואחר כך וצה לחזור מאחרי ה׳ ולהיות גר תושב בלבד‬, ‫בן נח שנתגייר ומל וטבל‬
‫ אלא יהיה כישראל לכל דבר או יהרג ׃‬, ‫ אין שומעין לו‬, ‫כשהיה מקודם‬
“A Noahite who has become a proselyte, and been circumcised and
baptized, and afterwards wishes to return from after the Lord, and to
be only a sojourning proselyte, as he was before, is not to be
listened to—on the contrary, either let him be an Israelite in
everything, or let him be put to death.” (Hilchoth Melachim, c. x. 3.)
In this law there is an extraordinary severity. The oral law admits that
a Noahite, that is, a heathen who has taken upon himself the seven
commandments of the children of Noah, may be saved. It cannot,
therefore, be said that the severity was dictated by a wish to deter
men from error, and to restrain them from rushing upon everlasting
ruin, as the Inquisition pleads. The oral law goes a little further, and
not only will not permit a man to change his creed, but will not even
suffer him to change his ceremonial observances. Though the man
should commit no crime, and though he should continue to worship
the one true God, in spirit and in truth, yet if he only alter the outward
forms of his religion, modern Judaism requires that he should be put
to death.
But the tender care of the oral law is not limited to the narrow
confines of Judaism, it extends also to the heathen, amongst whom
it directs the true faith to be propagated by the sword. First, it gives a
particular rule. In case of war with the Gentiles, it commands the
Jews to offer peace on two conditions—the one that they should
become tributaries, the other that they should renounce idolatry and
take upon them the seven precepts of the Noahites, and then adds—
‫ואם לא השלימו או שהשלימו ולא קבלו שבע מצוות עושין עמהם מלחמה והורגין‬
‫ ובוזזין כל ממונם וטפם ואין הורגין אשה ולא קטן שנאמר‬, ‫כל הזכים הגדולים‬
‫והנשים והטף וכו׳ ׃‬
“But if they will not make peace, or if they will make peace but will
not take upon them the seven commandments, the war is to be
carried on against them, and all the adult males are to be put to
death; and their property and their little ones are to be taken as
plunder. But no woman or male infant is to be put to death, for it is
said, ‘The women and the little ones’ (Deut. xx. 14.), and here little
ones mean male infants.” (Hilchoth Melachim, c. vi. 4.) Now what
difference, we would ask, is there between the conduct here
prescribed, and that actually practised by the Portuguese, at the
period above referred to, and thus described by a Jew:[14]—“At the
expiration of the appointed time, most of the Jews had emigrated,
but many still remained in the country. The King therefore gave
orders to take away from them all their children under fourteen years
of age, to distribute them amongst Christians, to send them to the
newly-discovered islands, and thus to pluck up Judaism by the roots.
Dreadful was the cry of lamentation uttered by the parents, but the
unfortunates found no mercy.” Do you condemn this conduct in the
Portuguese? Be then consistent, and condemn it in the Talmud too.
As for ourselves, we abhor it as much, yea more, in those calling
themselves Christians, We look upon the actors in that transaction
as a disgrace to the Christian name, and the deed itself as a foul blot
upon the history of Christendom. But we cannot help thinking that,
dreadful and detestable as this mode of conversion is, it pleased
God in his providence to suffer wicked men thus to persecute Israel,
that the Jews might have a practical experience of the wickedness of
the oral law, and thus be led to reject such persecuting principles.
The Jewish nation rejected the Lord Jesus Christ, and preferred the
oral law. This law, not dictated by a spirit of retaliation upon the
Portuguese, but invented by the Pharisees centuries before Portugal
was a kingdom, commanded the Jews to convert the heathen by
force, to murder all who would not consent to be thus converted, and
to take away the children. And God suffered them to fall into the
hands of men of similar principles, who took away their children,
attempted to convert themselves by force, and sold for slaves the
Jews who refused to be thus converted; so that the very misfortunes
of the nation testify aloud against those traditions which they
preferred to the Word of God. But perhaps some Jew will say that
this is only a particular command, referring to the nations in the
vicinity of the land of Israel. We reply, that the command to convert
the heathen by force, is not particular, but general, referring to the
whole world. If the Jews had the power, this is the conduct which
they are to pursue towards all the nations of the earth.
‫וכן צוה משה רבינו מפי הגבורה לכוף את כל באי העולם לקבל מצוות שנצטוו בני‬
‫ וכל מי שלא קבל יהרג ׃‬, ‫נח‬
“And thus Moses our master, has commanded us, by Divine
tradition, to compel all that come into the world to take upon
themselves the commandments imposed upon the sons of Noah,
and whosoever will not receive them is to be put to death.” (Hilchoth
Melachim, c. viii. 4.)
Such is the Talmudic system of toleration, and such the means which
it prescribes for the conversion of the world. We acknowledge that
persons calling themselves Christians have had an oral law very
similar in its principles and precepts, but we fearlessly challenge the
whole world to point out anything similar in the doctrines of Jesus
Christ, or in the writings of his apostles. The New Testament does,
indeed, teach us to seek the conversion of the world, not by force of
arms, but by teaching the truth. “Go ye, therefore, and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and
of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all
things whatsoever I have commanded you.” (Matt. xxviii. 19.) In the
parable of the tares and wheat, Jesus of Nazareth hath expressly
taught us that physical force is not to be employed in order to
remove moral error. The servants are represented as asking the
master of the house, whether they should go and root out the tares
that grew amongst the wheat, but the answer is, “Nay, lest while ye
gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them. Let both
grow together until the harvest; and in the time of harvest I will say to
the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in
bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.” (Matt. xiii.
24-43.) He tells us expressly to have nothing to do with the sword,
“For all they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword.” (Matt.
xxvi. 52.) And therefore the apostle says, “The weapons of our
warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of
strong holds.” (2 Cor. x. 4.) Here again, then, there is a great
difference between the oral law and the New Testament. The former
commands that the truth be maintained and propagated by the
sword. The latter tells us that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing
by the Word of God.” Which, then, is most agreeable to the doctrine
of Moses and the prophets? We answer fearlessly, the means
prescribed by the New Testament, for—
1st, No instance can be adduced from the Old Testament, in which
God commanded the propagation of the truth by the power of the
sword. The extirpation of the seven nations of Canaan is not in point,
for the Israelites were not commanded to make them any offer of
mercy on condition of conversion. The measure of their iniquity was
full, and therefore the command to destroy every soul absolute.
Neither in the command referred to by Maimonides is there the least
reference to conversion. It simply says, “When thou comest nigh
unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it. And it shall
be if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall
be that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto
thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no peace with
thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it: and
when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt
smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword. But the women
and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all
the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself.” (Deut. xx. 10-14.)
Here is not one word said about conversion, or about the seven
commandments of the sons of Noah. The command itself is
hypothetical, “When thou comest nigh unto a city;” and therefore
gives no colour nor pretext for setting out on a war of conversion, “to
compel all that come into the world.” As it stands, it is a humane and
merciful direction to restrain the horrors of the then prevailing system
of warfare; and beautifully exemplifies the value which God sets
upon the life of man, whatever his nation or his religion. He will not
suffer it to be destroyed unnecessarily; and even in case of
extremity, he commands the lives of the women and the children,
who never bore arms against Israel, to be spared. There is not a
syllable about forcing their consciences: that is all pure gratuitous
addition of the oral law, which turns a merciful command into an
occasion of bigotry and religious tyranny.
2dly, As God has given no command to propagate religion by the
sword, so neither has He given any countenance to such doctrine,
by the instrumentality which He has employed for the preservation of
religion in the world. He did not choose a mighty nation of soldiers as
the depositories of his truth, nor any of the overturners of kingdoms
for his prophets. If it had been his intention to convert the world by
force of arms, Nimrod would have been a more suitable instrument
than Abraham, and the mighty kingdom of Egypt more fitted for the
task than the family of Hebrew captives. But by the very choice He
showed, that truth was to be propagated by Divine power working
conviction in the minds of men, and not by physical strength. It would
have been just as easy for him to have turned every Hebrew captive
in Egypt into a Samson, as to turn the waters into blood; and to have
sent them into the world to overturn idolatry by brute force; but He
preferred to enlighten the minds of men by exhibiting a series of
miracles, calculated to convince them of his eternal power and
Godhead. When the ten tribes revolted, and fell away into idolatry,
He did not employ the sword of Judah, but the voice of his prophets,
to recall them to the truth. He did not compel them, as the oral law
would have done, to an outward profession, but dealt with them as
with rational beings, and left them to the choice of their hearts.
Nineveh was not converted by Jewish soldiers, but by the preaching
of Jonah. So far is God from commanding the propagation of religion
by the sword, that He would not even suffer a man of war to build a
temple for his worship. When David thought of erecting a temple, the
Lord said unto him, “Thou hast shed blood abundantly, and hast
made great wars; thou shalt not build an house unto my name,
because thou hast shed much blood upon the earth.” (1 Chron. xxii.
8.) Thus hath God shown his abhorrence of compulsory conversion,
and in all his dealings confirmed his Word, “Not by might nor by
power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.” (Zech. iv. 6.)
3dly, God has in his Word promised the conversion of the world, but
not by the means prescribed in the oral law. His promise to Abraham
was, “In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen.
xxii. 18.) Now this can hardly mean that his descendants are to treat
all nations, as the Portuguese treated the Jews. The 72nd Psalm
gives rather a different view of the fulfilment of this promise. It
promises not a victorious soldier like Mahomet, but one “in whose
days the righteous shall flourish, and abundance of peace so long as
the moon endureth.... All nations shall call Him blessed.” The
prophet Isaiah tells us “that out of Zion shall go forth (not conquering
armies to compel, but) the law, and the Word of the Lord from
Jerusalem. And he shall judge among the nations, and rebuke many
people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their
spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Zechariah says, “He
shall speak peace to the heathen;” and declares that the conversion
of the world will not be the reward of conquest, but the result of
conviction. “In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall
take hold, out of all the languages of the nations, even shall take
hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you, for
we have heard that God is with you.” (Zech. viii. 23.) Here again,
then, you see that whilst the oral law differs from Moses and the
prophets, the New Testament agrees with them. Account, then, for
this extraordinary fact, that whilst the whole Jewish nation lost the
great and glorious doctrine of liberty of conscience, it has been
preserved for you and for all mankind by Jesus of Nazareth. Just
suppose that the principles of the Talmud had triumphed, either
amongst the Jews or the Portuguese, what would have been the
consequence to the world? If the Talmudists had attained to supreme
power, we should have had to choose between compulsory
conversion and the sword. If the Portuguese had attained to
universal dominion, both you and we should have had the alternative
of compulsory conversion or the fires of the Inquisition. In either
case, the noblest and most precious gift that the God of heaven ever
sent down to earth, liberty of conscience, would have been extinct.
But, thank God, the doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth has triumphed
over the oral laws of both Jews and Portuguese, and the result is,
that both you and we have the liberty of worshipping God according
to the convictions of our understanding and the dictates of our
conscience. Behold, then, how you are indebted to Jesus of
Nazareth. Without him you would not have known religious liberty,
either theoretically or practically. He is right on this all-important
point, whilst those who condemned him to death and rejected his
claims are wrong. If he was not the true Messiah, but only a
pretender, how is it that God has made him and his doctrine the
exclusive channel for preserving the truth of his Word, and
conveying such blessings to you as well as to us Gentiles? If the
Pharisees were right in rejecting him, how is it that God has
rewarded their piety by giving them over to such gross delusions,
and making them the transmitters of doctrines, which would fill the
world with blood and hatred and discord, and make even the truth
odious in the eyes of all mankind? For ourselves we cannot help
coming to the conclusion, that He who has taught us mercy and love
to all men, and delivered both you and us from such horrors—and
who, in doing this, rose above all the doctrines of his nation and his
times, was taught of God, and is, therefore, the true Messiah, the
Saviour of the world.
Certain it is, that this doctrine has already been a blessing to the
world; and that until your nation embrace its principles, at least on
this one point of love and toleration, it is impossible that the
promised glory and pre-eminence of the Jewish nation should come.
With such principles as are inculcated in the oral law, a restoration to
the land of your forefathers would be no blessing. It would only
realize all the legislative and religious speculations of the Talmudists,
and arm them with the power to tyrannize over their more
enlightened brethren. It would be the triumph of tradition over the
Word of God, and that the God of truth will not permit. It would be to
instal the spirit of intolerance and persecution on the throne of love
and charity, and that God will not suffer. The Talmud is, thus, a main
obstacle in the way of God’s fulfilling his promises to the nation,
because it incapacitates Israel for the reception or the right
employment of the promised blessings. Is it not, then, the duty of all
Jews who desire and long for the glory and the happiness which God
has promised, to lift up their voice with power, and to protest against
that system which prevents the fulfilment of God’s promises; and by
all lawful means to endeavour to deliver their brethren from the
bondage of such intolerance?
No. VII.
THE FEAST OF PURIM.
The feast of Purim now at hand, recalls to the Jewish recollection

one of those miraculous deliverances, with which the history of Israel
abounds. The narrative of the institution, as contained in the Bible, is
a signal proof and illustration of the superintending providence of
God, instructive to all the world, but calling peculiarly for the gratitude
and praise of the Jewish nation, whose forefathers were then
delivered. And it is much to the honour of their posterity that they
have not suffered the lapse of more than twenty centuries to wear
out the memory of this great event, but that to this day they observe
its anniversary with alacrity and zeal. If the oral law simply contented
itself with commanding the observance and prescribing the mode of
worship for such an important season, we should have no fault to
find; but the oral law claims for itself Divine origin and authority,
anathematizes any denial of these claims as heresy, and sentences
the heretic to death. We are, therefore, compelled to examine its
pretensions, and to scrutinize its features, in order to see whether
they really bear the stamp of divinity. We have already pointed out
some, that savoured more of earth than heaven: the constitutions for
the feast of Purim may be traced to the same source. The following
law respecting the meal to be provided on this occasion did certainly
not come to man from heaven:—
‫ ושותה יין עד‬, ‫חובת סעודה זו שיאכל בשר ויתקן סעודה נאה כפי אשר תמצא ידו‬
‫שישתכר וירדם בשכרותו ׃‬
“A man’s duty with regard to the feast is, that he should eat meat and
prepare a suitable feast according to his means; and drink wine, until
he be drunk, and fell asleep in his drunkenness.” (Hilchoth Megillah,
c. ii. 15.) The Talmud, however, is not satisfied with so indefinite a
direction, but lays down, with its usual precision, the exact measure
of intoxication required.
‫חייב איניש לבסומי בפוריא עד דלא ידע בין ארור המן לברוך מרדכי ׃‬
“A man is bound to get so drunk with wine at Purim, as not to know
the difference between Cursed is Haman, and Blessed is Mordecai.”
(Megillah, fol. 7, col. 2.) But perhaps some learned champion of the
Talmud will fly to that sort of refuge for destitute commentators, the
parabolic language of the orient, and tell us that this precept is not to
be understood literally but figuratively; and that so far from
recommending intoxication, it means to inculcate excess of sobriety
or devotion, such abstraction of the senses, from all outward objects,
as not to distinguish between cursed is Haman and blessed is
Mordecai. This sort of defence is neither imaginary nor novel. In this
way Rabbi Eliezer’s permission to split open an unlearned man like a
fish has been made to signify the spiritual opening of the
understanding, and of course the overweening anxiety of the
Rabbies to communicate instruction to the ignorant. But however we
dull Gentiles may be enlightened by such an exposition, we much
doubt whether the greatest amhaaretz in Israel will believe the
interpretation. The great and learned Rabbies Solomon Jarchi and
Moses Maimonides have understood literal drunkenness, and have
named wine as the legitimate liquor. R. Joseph Karo has simply
given the command verbatim as it stands in the Talmud, but a note in
the Orach Chaiim shows, that some of the modern Rabbies were not
able to swallow such a command, and, therefore, say that an
Israelite does his duty, if he only drink a little more than usual. The
Talmud itself admits of no such softening down, nor explaining away,
for immediately after the precept it goes on to propose an example
and to furnish an illustration of its meaning in the following history of
the very Rabbi, on whose authority this traditional command rests;—
‫ איבסום קם רבה שחטיה לרבי‬, ‫רבה ורבי זירא עבדו סעודת פורים בהדי הדדי‬
‫ לשנה אמר ליה ניתי מר ונעביד סעודת פורים‬, ‫זירא למחר בעא רחמי ואחייה‬
‫בהדי הדדי אמר ליה לאו בכל שעתא ושעתא מתרחיש ניסא ׃‬
“Rabba and Rabbi Zira made their Purim entertainment together.
When Rabba got drunk, he arose and killed Rabbi Zira. On the
following day he prayed for mercy, and restored him to life. The
following year Rabba proposed to him again to make their Purim
entertainment together, but he answered, ‘Miracles don’t happen
every day.’” (Talmud, Tr. Megillah, fol. 7, col. 2.) This history of one of
the men who are authorities for the above Talmudic command to get
drunk, plainly illustrates its meaning, and shows that the Talmud
meant and commanded its followers to drink wine to excess on this
occasion. It sets before them the example of one of the greatest
Rabbies committing murder in his drunkenness, and so far from
reprobating this sin, it gravely tells us that God interposed by a
miracle to prevent the ill-consequences; and that the Rabbi, far from
being cured of his propensity, or making any declaration of his
intention to amend, continued in that state of mind, that his colleague
found it imprudent to trust himself at his table. Now every body that
is acquainted with the Jews, knows that they are a temperate and
sober people; and because they are so, we ask them whether the
above command can be from God? and whether they believe that
the Talmud speaks truth in giving the above narrative? It says not
merely that men may get drunk with impunity, but that to get drunk is
an act of piety, and obedience to a command! Here, again, the
Talmud is directly at issue with the New Testament, which says, “Be
not drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” (Ephes. v. 18.) “Take heed
to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with
surfeiting, and drunkenness, and the cares of this life, and so that
day come upon you unawares.” (Luke xxi. 34.) The New Testament
holds out to us no hope, that if in our drunkenness, we should
commit murder, a miracle will be wrought in order to deliver us from
the consequences; but tells us, that “neither murderers nor
drunkards shall inherit the kingdom of God.” (1 Cor. vi. 9, 10.) Now
which of these two doctrines is the most agreeable to the revealed
will of God? How would you desire to meet death, if death should
come upon the feast of Purim? Would you wish the angel of death to
find you, in obedience to the oral law, insensible from overmuch
wine? or in that state of sobriety and thoughtfulness prescribed by
Jesus of Nazareth? Does not the inward tribunal of the heart decide
that Jesus of Nazareth is right, and that the Talmud is wrong? And
does not the Old Testament confirm the sentence? Isaiah says,
“Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may
follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them!
and the harp and the viol, the tabret and pipe, and wine are in their
feasts; but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the
operation of his hands. Therefore my people are gone into captivity,
because they have no knowledge; and their honourable men are
famished, and their multitude dried up with thirst.” (Isaiah v. 11-13.)
And so Moses commands the parents that should they have a son “a
glutton and a drunkard,” to bring him to justice, and to have him
stoned. (Deut. xxi. 20.) The Talmud, then, manifestly contradicts the
Old Testament; it therefore cannot speak truth when it narrates that
God wrought a miracle in order to save a drunkard and a murderer
from that punishment, which He had himself commanded to be
visited upon either of these crimes. The story of the miracle is
therefore a palpable falsehood, contradictory to the law of Moses,
and derogatory to the honour of God. How, then, can the Talmud be
of God? If you attempt to distinguish, as some do, between the
Talmud and the oral law, and say that though the Talmud contains
the oral law, yet it is not all inspired, then we ask, how can you rely
upon the testimony of a witness convicted of wilful, gross, and
flagrant falsehood? If you do not believe in the above miracle of the
drunken Rabba, you denounce it as a liar. If it lie, then, upon this
solemn occasion in relating a miracle, in handing down the law of
God, how can you depend upon it at all? If it does not scruple to
forge miracles, what warrant have you for believing that it does not
forge laws also?
But suppose, which is far more probable, that Rabbi Zira, when killed
by Rabba, had not come to life again, would Rabba, in the eye of the
modern Jewish law, be considered as a murderer, and guilty of
death, or as an innocent person, who might safely be permitted to go
at large, and pursue his usual avocations? This is a question well
deserving an answer from some of your learned men, and naturally
suggested by some principles asserted and implied in the following
decisions of the oral law:—
‫ והדברים ידועים שהיא תקנת‬, ‫קריאת המגלה בזנה מצות עשה מדברי סופרים‬
, ‫ אנשים ונשים וגרים ועבדים משוחררים‬, ‫ והכל חייבים בקריאתה‬, ‫הנביאים‬
‫ ואפילו כהנים בעבודמן מבטלין עבודתן ובאין‬, ‫ומחנכין את הקטנים לקריאתה‬
‫ קל וחומר‬, ‫ וכן מבטלין תלמוד תורה לשמוע מקרא מגלה‬, ‫לשמוע מקרא מגלה‬
‫ ואין לך דבר שנדחה‬, ‫לשאר מצוות של תורה שכולן נדחין מפני מקרא מגלה‬
‫מקרא מגלה מפניו חוץ ממה מצוה שאין לו קוברים שהפוגע בו קוברו תחלה ואחר‬
‫כך קורא ׃‬
“The reading of the Megillah (the book of Esther) in its time is an
affirmative precept according to the words of the scribes, and it is
known that this is an ordinance of the Prophets. The obligation to
read it rests upon all, men, women, and proselytes, and manumitted
slaves. Children also are to be accustomed to the reading of it. Even
priests in their service are to neglect their service, and to come to
hear the reading of the Megillah. In like manner the study of the law
is to be omitted, in order to hear the reading of the Megillah, and a
fortiori all the remaining commandments of the law, all of which give
way to the reading of the Megillah: but there is nothing to which the
reading of the Megillah gives way, except that particular class of
dead person called the dead of the commandment, who has none to
bury him. He that happens upon him is first to bury him, and
afterwards to read.” (Hilchoth Megillah, c. i. 1.) On this extract we
have several remarks to make, but at present we request the
attention of our readers to the reason given why the reading of the
Megillah is more important than any of the commandments. It is this.
According to the oral law, “the study of the law is equivalent to all the
commandments, and the other commandments are to give way to
this study.” But according to the passage before us, the study of the
law is to give way to the reading of the Megillah. The reading of the
Megillah, therefore, being greater than the greatest of the
commandments, is of course greater than all the inferior ones. Now
apply this reasoning to the above command to get drunk, and you
will prove that getting drunk at Purim feast is the greatest of all the
commandments. In order to get drunk, it is plain that the study of the
law must give way. The man who cannot distinguish between
“Cursed be Haman and blessed be Mordecai,” certainly cannot
study, neither can he bury the dead. The commandment, therefore,
to which the study of the law and the burying of the dead give way,
must be the greatest of all the commandments; i.e., the getting drunk
on Purim is the greatest of all the commandments. This conclusion,
which inevitably follows upon Talmudic principles, necessarily shows
that those principles are false. But that is not the object for which I
have exhibited this conclusion; it is with reference to the case of
Rabba above-mentioned. Having got drunk according as the oral law
commanded, and having thereby obeyed the greatest of the
commandments, and one to which all others are necessarily in
abeyance, was he guilty or innocent in having murdered R. Zira? It
certainly seems a very hard case to condemn him to death for an
act, which resulted from his obedience to the greatest of all the
commandments. He might urge that he had a great dislike to
drunkenness—that he had overcome his natural aversion simply to
satisfy the Rabbinical requirements—that by the time that he had
arrived at the prescribed incompetency to distinguish between
Haman and Mordecai, he had lost all power of distinguishing
between right and wrong—that, therefore, he had not done it with
malice propense; what sentence, therefore, does the Talmud
pronounce against a murderer of this sort? If Rabba was allowed to
go at large, as would appear from his invitation to Rabbi Zira the
following year, a repetition of the same offence was possible, a
repetition of the miracle in R. Zira’s opinion highly improbable. Thus
Rabba might go on from year to year killing one or more with
impunity, and would be a far more dangerous neighbour than “the ox
that was wont to push with his horn.” If, on the other hand, he is to
be punished capitally, then the oral law is plainly not from God; for
obedience to the greatest of its commandments makes it possible for
a man to commit the greatest of crimes, and to subject himself to the
extremity of punishment. But we object, secondly, to the exaltation of
a mere human ordinance above the Word of God. The reading of the
book of Esther at the feast of Purim, is no doubt a very appropriate,
and may be a very profitable exercise. But it is confessedly of human
appointment. It is of the words of the scribes; the time and the mode
are altogether Rabbinical ordinances. Why, then, “are all the
remaining commandments of the law to give way to the reading of
the Megillah?” The priest was to neglect the service to which God
had appointed him, in order to obey a mere human institution. And
the Israelites to neglect the duties of love and charity, to fulfil a mere
ceremonial commandment. Here is a plain token that the oral law is
not from God, but is the offspring of human invention and
superstition. The human mind exalts ceremonies above moral duties.
God declares that all outward observances are secondary. “I desired
mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt
offerings.” (Hos. vi. 6.) “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love
mercy, and to walk numbly with thy God?” (Mic. vi. 8.) And so the
New Testament says in the very same spirit, “The first of all the
commandments is, Hear O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord, and
thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, &c. This is the first
commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love
thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater
than these.” (Mark. xii. 29-31.) The oral law, on the contrary, tells us
that “all the commandments, except the burying of the dead, are to
give way to the reading of the Megillah,” to a mere ceremony; and
that not even of God’s appointment. God prefers mercy before the
sacrifices which He himself has instituted. The Talmud prefers a
human institution to all God’s commandments. A more striking
instance of genuine superstition, and a stronger proof of the human
origin of the oral law cannot be found.
The book of Esther appears to have been a peculiar favourite of the
Rabbies. The reading of it takes precedence of all other duties but
one, and is considered as obligatory, even upon the women, who are
declared exempt from the study of the law. It is true that it contains a
very notable warning for disobedient wives, and a striking instance of
the deliverance of Israel by the instrumentality of a woman; but when
we consider that the name of God does not occur once in the whole
book, and that the law contains the account of man’s creation and
fall, the ten commandments, the deliverance from Egypt, and all
those events of primary interest to women as well as men, it
becomes of some importance to consider why the women, who are
not bound to study the law of God, are bound to read the book of
Esther. The authors of the oral law appear to have attached
uncommon importance to this book, as appears from this
circumstance, and still more so from the following startling
declaration of Maimonides:—
, ‫כל ספרי הנביאים וכל הכתובים עתידן ליבטל לימות המשיח חוץ ממגלת אסתר‬
‫והרי היא קיימת כחמשה חומשי תורה וכהלכות של תורה שבעל פה שאינן לעולם‬
‫׃‬
“All the books of the prophets, and all the Hagiographa, except the
roll of Esther, will cease in the days of Messiah. But it is perpetual as
the five books of the written law, and the constitutions of the oral law,
which shall never cease.” (Hilchoth Megillah.) Some of the Rabbies
say that this is to be taken conditionally, “although they were all to
cease, yet this would not cease.” But this still attributes a decided
superiority to the book of Esther above all the other books. What
then is there in it, that gives this book such a peculiar favour, and
makes the history of Esther more important than that of the conquest
of Canaan, or of the glory of Solomon, or of the restoration of the
house of the Lord? Is there more devotion and piety to be found in it
than in the Psalms of David? Does it contain more wisdom than the
Proverbs of Solomon? Is there a sublimer flight of Divine poetry, a
more heavenly afflatus than in the visions of Isaiah? A more open
revelation of the mysteries of the Deity than is to be found in Job, or
Daniel, or Ezekiel? Why do the Rabbies pronounce it worthy of
preservation, whilst they contemplate without emotion the loss of all
the other books? We cannot possibly discover, unless it be that it
furnishes more gratification to the spirit of revenge so natural to all
the children of Adam, whether they be Jew or Gentile. To forgive is to
be like God—and God alone can teach forgiveness either
speculatively or practically. But the book of Esther contains an
account of the revenge which the Jews took upon their enemies, not
like the destruction of the Canaanites, fulfilling the commands of God
upon His enemies, but taking personal and individual revenge on
their own. And this very fact may be one reason why God did not
permit his most holy name to occur in the whole book—just as he did
not permit David to build him a temple, so he would not have his
name associated with deeds of personal revenge. But, however that
be, we can discover no other reason for the decided preference
which the oral law gives to the book of Esther. And we think that after
the specimens which we have already given of their spirit towards
idolaters we do them no injustice; especially as, in this particular
case, the oral law breathes this spirit aloud.
‫ ארורים כל‬, ‫ ארורה זרש ברוכה אסתר‬, ‫צריך שיאמר ארור המן ברוך מרדכי‬
‫עכו׳׳ם ברוכים כל ישראל ׃‬
“It is necessary to say, Cursed be Haman, Blessed be Mordecai,
Cursed be Zeresh, Blessed be Esther, Cursed be all idolaters,
Blessed be all Israel.” (Orach Chaiim, sec. 690.) Why this is
necessary, is not told us. It appears not to bring glory to God, nor
any blessing to man. Haman and Zeresh have long since passed
into eternity, and received from the just Judge the reward of their
deeds. Mordecai and Esther have in like manner appeared before
the God of Israel, and received according to their faith. To these,
then, the voice of human praise or reproach is as nothing. But to
curse a dead enemy, to pursue with unrelenting hatred those who
have already fallen into the hands of the living God, is certainly not a
Divine ordinance, and cannot be an acceptable act of worship in
poor sinners, who themselves stand so much in need of forgiveness.
To curse the dead is bad, but to curse the living is, in one sense, still
worse. “Cursed be all idolaters.” According to our calculation, there
are 600 millions of idolaters—according to the Jewish account, there
must be more. Why, then, should they be cursed? That will not
convert them from the error of their ways. It will not make them more
happy, either in this world or in the next. We are not aware, even if
God were to hear this execration and curse the idolatrous world, that
it would be productive of any blessing to Israel. Why make a day of
thanksgiving for mercies received an opportunity of invoking curses
upon the majority of mankind? The Word of God teaches a very
different petition for the heathen. “God, be merciful to us, and bless
us, and cause his face to shine upon us. That thy way may be known
upon earth, thy saving health among all nations. Let the people
praise thee, O God; yea, let all the people praise thee.” (Ps. lxvii.)
No. VIII.
RABBINIC CONTEMPT FOR THE SONS OF NOAH.
The noblest inquiry, to which the mental powers can be directed, is,
Which religion comes from God? The most satisfactory mode of
conducting such an inquiry, independently of the external evidence,
is to compare the principles of one system with those of the other,
and both with an acknowledged standard, if such there be, and this
is what we are endeavouring to do in these papers. We by no means
wish to make the modern Jews responsible for the inventions of their
forefathers, but to show them that their traditional argument for
rejecting Christianity, and that is the example of the high priest and
the Sanhedrin, is of no force; inasmuch as these same persons, who
originally rejected Jesus of Nazareth, were in great and grievous
error in the fundamental principles of religion, whilst He who was
rejected taught the truth. To do this we must appeal to the oral law,
and discuss its merits. We have shown already that those persons
did not understand at least one half of the law; that their doctrines
were in the highest degree uncharitable. It has, however, been
replied, that the Talmud is more tolerant than the New Testament, for
it allows “that the pious of the nations of the world may be saved;”
whereas the latter asserts that “whosoever believeth not shall be
damned.” We must, therefore, inquire into the extent of toleration
and charity contained in that Talmudic sentence. The first step in this
inquiry, is to ascertain who are the persons intended in the
expression “The pious of the nations of the world.” The oral law tells
us, as quoted in No. 6, that the Israelites are commanded to compel
all that come into the world to receive the seven commandments of
the sons of Noah, and adds,
‫והמקבל אותם הוא הנקרא גר תושב בכל מקום ׃‬

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