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Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and Morrison - ed
MELUS, Spring, 1999 by Ellen J. Goldner
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While Melville breaches the dominant discourse from a stance within it, and Chesnutt positions himself between the Western discourse and an African-derived discourse, Morrison in Beloved (re)works gothic conventions into a full, alternative discourse which finds the scientized master discourse that presides over slavery to be Other. Whereas a scientific discourse would judge the haunting of Sethe's house as irrational, Beloved defines the gothic as the real. Morrison's novel offers many African American characters who, together, acknowledge the haunting of Sethe's house as the central "fact" of the former slave's life. Until its final pages, every African American character accepts the haunt as true. The novel also defines the gothic as the real when it gives its ghost a body with unmistakable physical powers: Beloved alternately massages and chokes Sethe; she seduces Paul D; and she grows visibly pregnant. Once the embodied ghost appears on Sethe's doorstep, the gothic not only grows real, it also grows in scope, taking up more and more room in Sethe's house and in the narrative.
While the novel allows increasing scope to its haunted lives and spaces, it works to contain the master discourse. Morrison's novel personifies the discourse of the efficient management of slaves in the bounded image of Schoolteacher, whom Sethe describes as small and confined: "He was a little man. Short. Always wore a collar, even in the fields" (36). As Beloved limits the scope of the scientized world view to the minor white characters, Schoolteacher and his nephews, it forges in its expansive haunted spaces an alternative epistemology of witnessing. Witnessing, derived from religion and exemplified by the Gospels, values not the distanced and "objective" view of science but rather the personal, morally-committed, and even passionate testimony that derives from situated, lived experience. Witnessing thus attests to the reality of historical atrocity, to the moral judgement of it, and to the suffering of those who endure it.(6)
As an African American woman who writes in the late twentieth century, Morrison constructs a gothic version of witnessing, a haunting, that draws on traditions both feminist and African American, which bring what is other into and through the self. Helene Cixous describes women's writing as the act of bringing the other through the self in ways that do not reject the other as alien but, instead, accept it as a part of the self ("Sorties" 84-86). While Cixous in "Sorties" chiefly describes women's writing through the metaphor of bisexuality, she also draws liberally on maternal metaphors. She writes of the child's relation to the mother as "the other without violence" (90). Bringing the other through the self metaphorizes the act of giving birth that is so important in Beloved. The act of birthing, bringing the other bodily through the self-in-pain, produces the mother's fluid identity which merges with the identity of the child. When Sethe says of Beloved, "She was my best thing" (272), her brief words point toward the prelinguistic bond between mother and child which appears in Morrison's novel in the mother's song that includes the voices of her children: "You are mine. You are mine. You are mine" (216), and amid the rhythms of shared life of nursing mother and child (Liscio 44, 39).
