1. “Comes back whether we want it or not”:
Lecture Three
“Comes back whether we want it or not”:
The Ethics of Reading and the Return of the Repressed
Lecture 1:
The narrative strategies of the novel: “literary archaeology”
“National Amnesia”: the resistance to traumatic memory
Lecture 3: Examine repression and Morrison’s imaginative and reconstructive recovering of the past
Novel set in the Reconstruction Period
What exactly is repression?
Using the tools of Psychoanalysis to understand the novel
Images of Personal Repression in the novel
Discussion: The traumatic facts and the ethics of reading
the history of Margaret Garner
Sethe’s “rough choice”

2. Fusion of forms/genres
Historical accounts of slavery
First-person slave narratives
__________________________________
African-American orature – folktale, song, the blues, the language of the pulpit, dialect
The Bible
Psycho-analysis: the theoretical understandings of the processes of mourning, repression, repetition, remembering and working through
___________________________________

3. Beloved : An imaginative & reconstructive recovering of the past Novel’s time line:
Fugitive Slave Act Civil War Reconstruction Era
1863 Emancipation Proclamation

4. Repression
Repression is the burial of traumatic experiences in the unconscious
“The action, process or result of suppressing into the unconscious or keeping out of the conscious mind unacceptable memories or desires” – Sigmund Freud
The novel is a metaphorical depiction
of the return of the repressed:
“It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home”
“But it’s where we were” said Sethe “All together. Comes back whether we want it or not.” (p. 16) [14]

5. Images of Repression: Sethe’s Chokecherry Tree
Her back skin had been dead for years (p. 21) [18]
I’ve never seen it and never will
(p. 18) [16]
your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom (p. 93) [79]
the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen … was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. (p. 25) [21]
A slave named Gordon, taken after his escape and revealing horrendous scars on his back from whippings. Life, April 2, 1863

6. Repression: Paul D’s tobacco tin
He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut (p. 86) [71]
It was some time before he could put Alfred Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, 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 the world could pry it open. (p. 133) [113]

7. Repression: Denver’s Deafness
Even when she could muster the courage to ask Nelson Lord’s question, she could not hear Sethe’s answer, nor Baby Suggs’ words, nor anything else thereafter. For two years she walked in a silence too solid for penetration.
(pp ) [103-5]
Didn’t your mother get locked away for murder? Wasn’t you in there with her when she went? … She went deaf, rather than hear the answer.
pp. 123 [104-5]

8. Morrison’s source for Beloved: The history of Margaret Garner
Compiliation of newspaper articles, images and other forgotten sources of African-American history
Morrison worked on this text while working at Random House. Compiled by Middleton Harris, with the assistance of Morris Levitt, Roger Furman & Ernest Smith.
Clipping: “A Visit to a Slave Mother who Killed her child” from The American Baptist (page 10)
RU LIB: HAR

9. The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 29th 1856
Fugitive Slave Act 1850
“to use such reasonable force and restraint as may be necessary, under the circumstances of the case, to take and remove such fugitive person back to the State or Territory whence he or she may have escaped as aforesaid.”
The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 29th 1856 
Thomas Satterwhite Noble The Modern Medea (1867)