Reader, text, and subjectivity: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' as Lacan's gaze qua object

Worn out from her obsession to regain her subjectivity and to give Beloved her own subjectivity, however, Sethe lies still, hoping to die peacefully, but must confront Paul D when he appears. "She opens her eyes, knowing the danger of looking at him" (272), that is, the danger of his gaze that will unleash her unspoken thoughts. Paul D, reflecting her slave life and the hardships they both endured as objects in the South, will shake her subjectivity by reminding her of what she has repressed. For example, she filters thoughts about her monstrously scarred back, a reminder of her whipping as a disobedient object who sought agency through Mrs. Garner. Other painful thoughts that lie buried are those of her own mother's desertion of her, an abandonment that confirmed her object status. Also, she does not want to think of her sons' fearful escape from her when she violently asserted herself as subject. With Paul D's return, Sethe fears that she will confront herself as object in the gaze of this man who fled when he heard of her heinous crime. Instead, she finds in his gaze herself as subject: "You your own best thing, Sethe. You are" (273). The reader confirms this assessment by way of what Bhabha describes as an "unhomely" moment of shocking "recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world" ("World" 141).

At other moments, Sethe gains a stronger subject position from her perception of herself as object. In order to pay for Beloved's gravestone, for example, she prostitutes herself with the stone carver. Thinking back to this encounter, she contemplates herself as object in the midst of agency:

Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten "Dearly" too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible - that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral . . . engraved on her baby's headstone: Dearly Beloved." (5)

She attains the gravestone on his terms, not on her own terms. Adding to her degradation is the memory of seeing herself as object in the eyes of the carver's son: "rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger on his face so old" (5). While such memories constantly threaten Sethe's subjectivity, the moments of self-recognition allow her to shift back to a subject position to regain her balance. Despite her limited means, then, she is able to bury her daughter properly.

Another moment of shifting occurs with her retrospective enunciation of her successful birthing of Denver with Amy's help. First, Sethe remembers her painful escape and how she lay down to die when she could go no further. She enumerates her hardships as object in life as well as in death: "That on a ridge of pine near the Ohio River, trying to get to her three children, one of whom was starving for the food she carried; that after her husband had disappeared; that after her milk had been stolen, her back pulped, her children orphaned, she was not to have an easeful death" (31). But her vision of herself is interrupted by the arrival of Amy, who helps her to shelter, nurses her bleeding back, restores circulation to her feet, and assists with Denver's delivery. Amy's responses (especially her assessment of Sethe's ruinous back - "What God have in mind, I wonder") confirm Sethe's piteous state (79). Yet she gains strength from Amy's gaze and gains subject status when she pictures how "two throw-away people . . . wrapping a ten-minute-old baby in the rags they wore . . . did it appropriately and well" (84-85). Instead of dying, Sethe survives to reach her destination and start her new life with her children, full of hope and with "milk enough for all" (100).