Nabarun Ghosh
Research Scholar
Department of English Banaras Hindu University Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
The term ‘subaltern’ was first coined by the Italian Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci to refer to the marginalised classes in a society. He has also opined that the term is not restricted to the economically subversive subjects of the society; rather it also refers to all the persons who have been denied their subjectivity on the basis of gender, sexuality, education or race. Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern has influenced several intellectual thinkers of the twentieth century. But the term became popular, as we see now, with its application by a group of Indian communist historians, and the most important among them was Ranajit Guha. These postcolonial Indian historians have deployed the term subaltern in order to dig out the repressed voices of the marginalized communities or individuals from the traditional historiographies. In short, subaltern studies, was an attempt to write history from below.
Nowadays the term subaltern has made its journey from historiography and postcolonialism to deconstruction and Foucauldian notion of power. Power plays a vital role to create the identity of the subaltern subject. An elite individual can also be a subaltern figure in a group. Here the determining factor is not economy but power. For example, the character of Amla in Anita Desai’s Voices in the City is an intellectual subaltern. She is educated and not at all economically poor, but she is the subaltern figure in the novel because she has no agency to speak. This concept of agency is a debatable issue. Critics like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Harish Trivedi and many others have commented much upon it. According to Guha, the subaltern consciousness is autonomous and existed independent of the elite. Spivak has stated that it is because of the autonomous entity of the subaltern consciousness that it has always remained beyond the reach of the discursive regimes that produced colonial subjects. Spivak in her famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” has answered the title question in the negative and she has also said that the subaltern can only be spoken for. But Harish Trivedi has stated that the subaltern can speak and has always spoken in his/her own modes of expression, which was difficult for the elite, Eurocentric, bourgeois intellectual to grasp. P. K. Nayar, in his book Literary Theory Today, says:
Harish Trivedi addresses a similar issue in his response to Spivak’s question, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Trivedi argues that the subaltern has always spoken, although in a native tongue. The issue is not whether the subaltern can speak, rather it is whether the subaltern can speak the language of a metropolitan centre, that is English and the language of high theory. As Trivedi puts it, “Can the subaltern spivak?” (Nayar 207)
Toni Morrison is considered as one of the most important authors of the African-American literary renaissance, the other notable writers of which are Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara. The writings of the renaissance urge reconsideration and rearticulation of the particular
experiences of African-American women. The works of Morrison depict her characters’ experiences of being black and marginalised. One major influence on Morrison was the Black Aesthetics Movement. The fundamental concept the movement was that art produced by African-Americans should, in addition to artistic concerns, address and help to transform the political, social and economic problems faced by African-American communities. According to the precepts of the Black Aesthetic, the value of art could be measured by the extent to which it expressed the realities of African-American people. Toni Morrison truly succeeds in representing the actual condition of the marginalised in her novels, and her attempt to do this is best to be seen in her famous novel Beloved (1987). The novel is set during the reconstruction era in 1873, and centres on the powers of history and memory. The past is a burden for the former slaves in the novel which they willfully try to forget. But Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, fails to do so because her past is deeply rooted in her memory. The memory of her slavery haunts her present in the form of her deceased daughter, whom Sethe has murdered eighteen years before in order to save her from the atrocities of slavery. The novel is based on the actual anecdote of Margaret Garner, a former slave, who in 1851 escaped with her children from Kentucky to Ohio. When her owner and a body of people formed by the U.S. marshal in Cincinnati tracked her down, Garner cut the throat of her three-year-old daughter before being captured. This story of Garner is used by Morrison in the novel for the character of Sethe, but as the novel develops Sethe emerges as a fully-imagined character.
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Morrison writes Beloved in order to retell the unspoken stories and the horrors of slavery which the traditional slave narratives fail to illustrate. She notices that the discourse of the contemporary black movement, as the conventional slave narratives, does not give sufficient aid to the details of slavery. According to her, the African-Americans consider their past as a burden which they willfully try to get rid of. They want to forget the past and live in the present and to create a new identity. And in Beloved Morrison reminds her people that the construction as well as the development of identity is not possible by ignoring the dark sides of the past. The past is not a burden; rather it is a heritage which they should remember.
Beloved gives us a vivid picture of the dehumanising effects of slavery on the body and mind of the slaves. The most dangerous of the effects of slavery is its negative impact on the former slaves’ senses of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Paul D, for instance, is so alienated from himself that at one point he cannot tell whether the screaming he hears is his own or someone else’s. Consequently, Paul D is very insecure about whether or not he could possibly be a real man, and he frequently wonders about his value as a person. The slaves of the then America were not treated as human beings, rather as commodities. They were bought and sold in the market like the animals as we see now. Their prices were determined on the basis of their strength, gender and age. Such was the condition of the slaves before being bought. But the real predicament in their lives started when they were bought by their owners. And it is this predicament that is depicted by Morrison through the characters of Sethe, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Halle and others in her novel Beloved.
The subhuman treatment of Sethe is to be found when we see Schoolteacher describing her animal characteristics to his pupils. When Sethe hears Schoolteacher she feels alienated from herself. That is why she sees the best part of herself only among her children. But ironically enough they are also the victims of identity crisis. Denver conflates her identity with Beloved’s, and Beloved feels herself actually beginning to disintegrate. Baby Suggs has also been a prey to
slavery which denied her to be true wife, sister, daughter, or loving mother. So, in a way Sethe is only carrying forward these never-ending paralysing effects of slavery. This loss of identity and disbelief in self is also to be seen in the character of Paul D. But unlike Baby Suggs, he has developed a self-defeating coping strategy to fight with the emotional pain forced on him through slavery. Any feelings he had were locked away in the rusted tobacco tin of his heart, and he concluded that one should love nothing too intensely. While the other slaves like Jackson Till, Aunt Phyllis and Halle became insane, Paul D remained true to his self at least some part if not the whole. Sethe also fears that she will go mad at the end. Literally she indeed becomes mad when she kills her own daughter. But this madness is only a part of her greatness. This is the best expression of her love towards her daughter. The only way she could save her daughter from the dehumanising effects of slavery was by killing her.
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The dangerous effects of the institution of slavery is not only limited to the black people but also to the whites who created it and in praise of it. In other words, slavery affects the collective identity of the Americans. This is the reason that Morrison suggests that the nation’s identity, like the characters in the novel, need to be healed. The future of America depends on the understandings of the past, as we see in the novel Sethe secures a future with Paul D and Denver only after confronting her past. It is important for every society to know the dark sides of it and only by facing them and taking lesion from them progression can be achieved. A subaltern narrative is very appropriate in depicting the hidden corners of a society or a history. And Morrison truly narrates the story in the novel Beloved from Sethe’s, Paul D’s, Stamp Paid’s and Baby Suggs’s point of view and not from that of the Bodwins’ and Schoolteacher’s.
One of the most important characters in the novel is the character of Denver. In the novel we see that her favourite story is the story of her birth and the past of her mother. Although she gets some detail about her birth from her mother Sethe, the latter does not reveal the terrible past of her suffering as a slave. Here, Denver seems to be the representative figure of the readers of African-American history who are denied of the knowledge of the atrocities of slavery in the past. But, though the effect is the same, the causes are different. Whereas the readers are not provided the knowledge of the past because of the traditional historiography, Sethe does not tell her past to Denver because her past was too tragic to be recounted. But Denver also takes another role by the end of the novel—that of a teacher, the historian, and the author. She becomes an intellectual who wants to use the power of the white in order to define the African-Americans and make their history in a way that steals their past, their souls and their humanity. In short, she wants to become the subaltern historiographer. Thus, Denver is Morrison’s precursor, the historian with her roots in African-American history and culture, who has a relationship with her ancestors.
Toni Morison’s Beloved is a reconceptualisation of the American historiography. Here she represents the tragic condition of the slaves of the past, who have been treated as marginalised figures in the traditional history, through the acts and consciousness of Sethe, the representative figure of the slaves. Contradictory to the subaltern voices like Sethe, Paul D, Baby Suggs et al, Schoolteacher represents the voice of the Eurocentric white in the novel. He is a cold, sadistic and vehemently racist kind of fellow. He never succeeds in realizing the psyche of the slaves; however, he never tries to do so. He is a mechanical man who treats the slaves as animals and gives teaching lessons to his pupils on the animal features of the slaves. Thus, he is the embodiment of the Eurocentric historiography, which falls short of depicting the proper condition of the marginalised.
Morrison writes Sethe’s story with the voices of those people who historically have been denied the power of language. That is how she provides a critique of the dominant methods of historiography in America. This attempt of Morrison, like the subaltern critics, shows that epistemology is culturally constructed by a certain group. Morrison believes that to depict the subaltern, we need to feel the emotional condition of the subaltern, which she does properly in the novel Beloved. Morrison justifies the violent act of the murder of the baby-child by Sethe by reading her psyche. She kills her daughter to save her from the terrible consequences of slavery. However, this act of murder keeps her mentally and emotionally enslaved even after eighteen years of freedom. So far as Sethe’s voice is concerned, she fails to explain her murderous act and repeats only the single sound “No. No. Nono. Nonono” (Morrison 193). It is Morrison who gives a voice to Sethe in her novel Beloved. And we know that Sethe’s voice is none other than that of Margaret Garner.
Works Cited:
Bloom, Harold, ed. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Toni Morrison’s Beloved. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009. Print.
Carmen, Gillespie. Critical Companion to Toni Morrison. New York: Facts On File, 2008. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Print.
Morton, Stephen. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. New York: Routledge Publications. 2004. Print.
Nayar, P. K. Literary Theory Today. New Delhi: Asia Book Club, 2002. Print.
Spivak, G. C. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft et al. New York: Routledge, 2006. 28-37. Print.