Name of the Contributor: BIMAN NONDAL
Designation
: GUEST LECTURER of Bhangar Mahavidyalaya,
South 24 Parganas
Mobile
: 9635459691
Email
: biman2011@gmail.com
Declaration
This paper titled “PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO TONI MORRISON’S SELECTED NOVELS” is an
original work and has not been published anywhere or been sent for Publication anywhere.
Short Bio Note of the Contributor
Name: BIMAN MONDAL
Designation: GUEST LECTURER in English,
Bhangar Mahavidyalaya, South 24 Parganas,
Pin- 743502
West Bengal
Brief Career History: BIMAN MONDAL did his M.A. from GURU GHASIDAS CENTRAL UNIVERSITY,
BILASPUR His areas of interest include VICTORIAN AND AMERICAN AMD AFRICAN AMERICAN
LITERATURE MORE PARTICULARLY NOVELS.
Postal Address : VILL- BALARAMPUR, P.O-PIRPUR, P.S-ULUBERIA, DIST-HOWRAH, AND PIN -711303
West Bengal
Mobile No. - 9635459691
Email Address: biman2011@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison is an African American writer. She has written many novels. Various scholars
have written a lot of articles on her works. I particularly focus on her selected novels such as
Sula, song of Solomon and Beloved with the psychological judgment. In That case I particularly
have taken great Psychologist Sigmund Frued’s theory of sexuality and mind in relation to
Lacan’s psychology.I have given various critics from several books. My main purpose is to show
to know the mind of the novelist.
Key words- Psychology, Id, Ego, Superego, Image, Symbol and Real.
PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACHES TO TONI MORRISON’S
SELECTED NOVELS :-
Toni Morrison is the first African-American novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1993 for his novel “Beloved”. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and
richly detailed characters. She is an American novelist, editor and professor. She wrote ten
novels. Among her best known novels are “The Bluest Eye”, “Sula”(1974), “Song of
Solomon”(1977) and “Beloved”(1987). In 2012,an interview in The Guardian, she tells that she
became a Catholic at age 12 and received the baptismal name "Anthony", which later became the
basis for her nickname "Toni". She did her post-graduation in English from Cornell University in
1955, for which she wrote a thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia
Woolf. Morrison began writing fiction as part of an informal group of poets and writers at
Howard who met to discuss their work. She wrote a short story about a black girl who longed to
have blue eyes. She later developed the story as her first novel, “The Bluest Eye” (1970). She
wrote ten novels, the latest one is “Home” (2012). She also wrote for Children’s literature as
well. In contemporary woman novelists of America, Toni Morrison is the rare one who thinks
highly of nature in her works. As the emerging psychoanalysis some studier began to research
these novels in terms of psychoanalytical critics.
Psychoanalysis was born out of the self analysis undertaken by various psychologists. It is a
disciplined devoted to the study of psychic life. It aims to cure the disease of the soul. Its
founder, Sigmund Freud, placed it among the science of the mind. It is not simply a branch of
medicine and psychology. It helps understand philosophy, culture and religion and the foremost
literature. Freud is the greater one who is familiar with the greater works of universal literature.
Sigmund Freud is the author of the structural model of personality. In this
theory, Freud explains that each person’s personality is formed of three
parts: the Ego, the Superego and the Id. Psychoanalysis is the process of
using what we know about these three parts of someone’s personality to
analyze the ways that person behaves. Literary critics sometimes analyze
the actions of literary characters using the three personality structures that
Freud identified. As critics explore the ego, superego, and id of characters in
a work, they focus on the ways that these parts of the characters’
personalities influence the work as a whole. This process is called
psychoanalytic criticism.
My article brings out the central place given to imagination in the psychological study and the
similarities between his approaches and that of comparative literature, which likewise rests on
process of translation, comparison and interpretation of fine details. We are stuff as dreams are
made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep: William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act 4,
scene1.But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence to be prized highly, for they are
apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not
yet let us dream. In Psychoanalysis and Black novels Claudia Tate said that psychoanalytical
theory has been left by the black creative writers. They emphasized that it ignores the social
forces and it relegates the bleak material circumstances of real lives to the background. Thus
African American scholars shun psychoanalysis, for it effectively deletes racial prejudice of the
white world and recasts its effect as personality disorder caused by familiar rather than social
psychology. But Toni Morison is very aware of the social pathology of the racism and examines
the social trauma of the racial oppression in her novels. She focuses the sustained attention of the
private world of the individual and family as she depicts the African American experience. In her
selected novels such as, Sula , song of Solomon and Beloved, the psychoanalytical criticism is
found from the point of family and individual interpretation more particularly the mother and
daughter relation.
In the novel Sula , Shadrack, a resident of the Bottom, fought in WWI. He returns a shattered
man, unable to accept the complexities of the world; he lives on the outskirts of town, attempting
to create order in his life. One of his methods involves compartmentalizing his fear of death in a
ritual he invents and names National Suicide Day. The town is at first wary of him and his ritual,
then, over time, unthinkingly accepts him. Meanwhile, the families of the children Nel and Sula
are contrasted. Nel is the product of a family that believes deeply in social conventions; hers is a
stable home, though some might characterize it as rigid. Nel is uncertain of the conventional life
her mother, Helene, wants for her; these doubts are hammered home when she meets Rochelle,
her grandmother and a former prostitute, the only unconventional woman in her family line.
Sula's family is very different. She lives with her grandmother, Eva, and her mother, Hannah,
both of whom are seen by the town as eccentric and loose. Their house also serves as a home for
three informally adopted boys and a steady stream of borders. Despite their differences, Sula and
Nel become fiercely attached to each other during adolescence. However, a traumatic accident
changes everything. One day, Sula playfully swings a neighborhood boy, Chicken Little, around
by his hands. When she loses her grip, the boy falls into a nearby river and drowns. They never
tell anyone about the accident even though they did not intend to harm the boy. The two girls
begin to grow apart. One day, in an accident, Sula's mother's dress catches fire and she dies of
the burns.
Sula is a novel about ambiguity. It questions and examines the terms "good" and "evil" often
demonstrating that the two often resemble one another. The novel addresses the confusing
mysteries of human emotions and relationships, ultimately concluding that social conventions are
inadequate as a foundation for living one's life. The relationship between micro and macro is
relevant in the novel Sula. The character Sula pulls the real story of the community behind the
language of a joke. The story parallels the story shows the dynamic relationship between Nel
Wright and Sula Peace. Here Elizabeth Abel in his book, “The Reproduction of Mothering”
makes use of object relation theory. There Chodorow describes how the infant daughter’s pre –
oedipal attachment to her mother leads in the development girl and adult woman, to a relational
mode of identification characterized by a fluidity of self-other boundaries. Abel explained that
the female bonding of Nel and Sula exemplifies a relational mode of self definition. The
friendship is both the vehicle and product of self knowledge. Actually Toni Morrison combines
the adolescent need for the identification with the adult need for the independence. On the other
hand Alisha Coleman said that the community of Nel and Sula’s friendship acknowledges that
Morrison’s characters complement or rather compete each other. The two friends combine to
form an identity. Nel represents the super ego or conscience. In the opinion of Freud, Freud said
the superego is the part of the personality that represents the conscience, the moral part of us.
The superego develops due to the moral and ethical restraints placed on us by our caregivers. It
dictates our belief of right and wrong. The superego is sometimes represented by an angel sitting
on someone’s shoulder, telling the ego to base behavior on how the action will influence society.
Here Sula shows the unconscious pleasure and desire of the id. According to Freud The id is the
part of the personality that contains our primitive impulses—such as thirst, anger, hunger—and
the desire for instant gratification or release. According to Freud, we are born with our id. The id
is an important part of our personality because as newborns, it allows us to get our basic needs
met. Freud believed that the id is based on our pleasure principle. The id wants whatever feels
good at the time, with no consideration for the other circumstances of the situation. The id is
sometimes represented by a devil sitting on someone’s shoulder. As this devil sits there, he tells
the ego to base behavior on how the action will influence the self, specifically how it will bring
the self pleasure. Marianne Hirsch emphasis the fusion of the two friends and their preseparation female past and it shows the separation of the roles and voices of mothers and
daughters. Morrison’s characters are unable to transcend or repeat the plots of their mothers.
In the novel Song of Solomon, Robert Smith, an insurance agent in an unnamed Michigan town,
leaps off the roof of Mercy Hospital wearing blue silk wings and claiming that he will fly to the
opposite shore of Lake Superior. Mr. Smith plummets to his death. Discovering at age four that
humans cannot fly, young Milkman loses all interest in himself and others. He grows up
nourished by the love of his mother and his aunt, Pilate. He is taken care of by his sisters, First
Corinthians and Magdalene (called Lena), and adored by his lover and cousin, Hagar. Milkman
does not reciprocate their kindness and grows up bored and privileged. In his lack of
compassion, Milkman resembles his father, Macon Dead II, a ruthless landlord who pursues only
the accumulation of wealth.
Milkman is afflicted with a genetic malady, an emotional disease that has its origins in
oppressions endured by past generations and passed on to future ones. By the time Milkman
reaches the age of thirty-two, he feels stifled living with his parents and wants to escape to
somewhere else. Macon Jr. informs Milkman that Pilate may have millions of dollars in gold
wrapped in a green tarp suspended from the ceiling of her rundown shack. With the help of his
best friend, Guitar Bains, whom he promises a share of the loot, Milkman robs Pilate. Inside the
green tarp, Milkman and Guitar find only some rocks and a human skeleton. We later learn that
the skeleton is that of Milkman’s grandfather, Macon Dead I. Guitar is especially disappointed
not to find the gold because he needs the funds to carry out his mission for the Seven Days, a
secret society that avenges injustices committed against African-Americans by murdering
innocent whites.
Encouraged by his findings, Milkman heads south to Shalimar, his grandfather’s ancestral home
in Virginia. Milkman does not know that he is being followed by Guitar, who wants to murder
Milkman because he believes that Milkman has cheated him out of his share of the gold. While
Milkman initially feels uncomfortable in Shalimar’s small-town atmosphere, he grows to love it
as he uncovers more and more clues about his family history. Milkman’s findings give him
profound joy and a sense of purpose. Milkman becomes a compassionate, responsible adult.
After surviving an assassination attempt at Guitar’s hands, Milkman returns home to Michigan to
tell Macon Jr. and Pilate about his discoveries. At home, he finds that Hagar has died of a broken
heart and that the emotional problems plaguing his family have not gone away. Nevertheless,
Milkman accompanies Pilate back to Shalimar, where they bury Jake’s bones on Solomon’s
Leap, the mountain from which Solomon’s flight to Africa began. Immediately after Jake’s
burial, Pilate is struck dead by a bullet that Guitar had intended for Milkman. Heartbroken over
Pilate’s death invigorated by his recent transformation, Milkman calls out Guitar’s name and
leaps toward him.
The novel Sula shows the importance of female relationship but Song of Solomon describes the
protagonist Milkman Dead’s development of a masculine identity in the Black Patriarchal
family. Through the reading of the text, this novel can be put into the framework of Freudian
psychoanalytical analysis for the understanding of the novel. Eleanor Branch said that Morrison
“rewrites the traditional oedipal narrative to highlight what she perceives to be critical issues in
the development of Black male identity” (53, 56).Branch actually describes the protagonist
Milkman’s negotiations with the oedipal issues that regulate his own life such as his oedipal
attachment to his mother and his rival and antagonistic relationship with his father. According to
Eleaner Branch, Morriosn’s use of oedipal struggle shows Milkman’s reclamation of his African
heritage and his masculine identity. Gary Storehoff said that the psychoanalytical criticism
describes Morrison’s multigenerational novel by stressing on the too oedipal issues. Making use
of history Storhoff argues that Morrison’s novel “ contrasts Macon Dead’s and Ruth Foster’s
families of origin to reveal why They over involve themselves in Milkman’s life, as they attempt
to recapitulate childhood patterns in their own family”( 291).Milkman has performed the double
role 1) serving the connective agent he becomes triangulated into his parents’ struggle and 2)
Fighting he at last becomes able to affirm family relation while freeing himself from the
anaconda love of the parental enmeshment.
The novel Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Sethe, a former slave, has been
living with her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver. Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, lived
with them until her death eight years earlier. Just before Baby Suggs’s death, Sethe’s two sons,
Howard and Buglar, ran away. Sethe believes they fled because of the malevolent presence of an
abusive ghost that has haunted their house at 124 Bluestone Road for years. Denver, however,
likes the ghost, which everyone believes to be the spirit of her dead sister.
From this fragmented memory, the following story begins to emerge. Sethe, the protagonist, was
born in the South to an African mother she never knew. When she is thirteen, she is sold to the
Garners, who own Sweet Home and practice a comparatively benevolent kind of slavery. There,
the other slaves, who are all men, lust after her but never, touch her. Their names are Paul D,
Paul A, Paul F, and Halle. Sethe chooses to marry Halle, apparently in part because he has
proven generous enough to buy his mother’s freedom by hiring himself out on the weekends.
Together, Sethe and Halle have two sons, Howard and Buglar, as well as a baby daughter whose
name we never learn. When she leaves Sweet Home, Sethe is also pregnant with a fourth child.
After the eventual death of the proprietor, Mr. Garner, the widowed Mrs. Garner asks her
sadistic, vehemently racist brother-in-law to help her run the farm. He is known to the slaves as
schoolteacher, and his oppressive presence makes life on the plantation even more unbearable
than it had been before. The slaves decide to run.
When schoolteacher finds out that Sethe has reported his and his nephews’ misdeeds to Mrs.
Garner, he has her whipped severely, despite the fact that she is pregnant. Swollen and scarred,
Sethe nevertheless runs away, but along the way she collapses from exhaustion in a forest. A
white girl, Amy Denver, finds her and nurses her back to health. When Amy later helps Sethe
deliver her baby in a boat, Sethe names this second daughter Denver after the girl who helped
her. Sethe receives further help from Stamp Paid, who rows her across the Ohio River to Baby
Suggs’s house. Baby Suggs cleans Sethe up before allowing her to see her three older children.
Sethe spends twenty-eight wonderful days in Cincinnati, where Baby Suggs serves as an
unofficial preacher to the black community. On the last day, however, schoolteacher comes for
Sethe to take her and her children back to Sweet Home. Rather than surrender her children to a
life of dehumanizing slavery, she flees with them to the woodshed and tries to kill them. Only
the third child, her older daughter, dies, her throat having been cut with a handsaw by Sethe.
Sethe later arranges for the baby’s headstone to be carved with the word “Beloved.” The sheriff
takes Sethe and Denver to jail, but a group of white abolitionists, led by the Bodwins, fights for
her release. Sethe returns to the house at 124, where Baby Suggs has sunk into a deep depression.
The community shuns the house, and the family continues to live in isolation.
Meanwhile, Paul D has endured torturous experiences in a chain gang in Georgia, where he was
sent after trying to kill Brandywine, a slave owner to whom he was sold by schoolteacher. His
traumatic experiences have caused him to lock away his memories, emotions, and ability to love
in the “tin tobacco box” of his heart. One day, a fortuitous rainstorm allows Paul D and the other
chain gang members to escape. He travels northward by following the blossoming spring
flowers. Years later, he ends up on Sethe’s porch in Cincinnati.
When Paul D learns the story of Sethe’s “rough choice”—her infanticide—he leaves 124 and
begins sleeping in the basement of the local church. In his absence, Sethe and Beloved’s
relationship becomes more intense and exclusive. Beloved grows increasingly abusive,
manipulative, and parasitic, and Sethe is obsessed with satisfying Beloved’s demands and
making her understand why she murdered her. Worried by the way her mother is wasting away,
Denver leaves the premises of 124 for the first time in twelve years in order to seek help from
Lady Jones, her former teacher. The community provides the family with food and eventually
organizes under the leadership of Ella, a woman who had worked on the Underground Railroad
and helped with Sethe’s escape, in order to exorcise Beloved from 124. When they arrive at
Sethe’s house, they see Sethe on the porch with Beloved, who stands smiling at them, naked and
pregnant. Mr. Bodwin, who has come to 124 to take Denver to her new job, arrives at the house.
Mistaking him for schoolteacher, Sethe runs at Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick. She is restrained,
but in the confusion Beloved disappears, never to return.
In the novel Toni Morrison describes the slavery undermining the characters and the sense of
self. She stresses on the importance of the nurturing power of community. It exposes the
communal mothering. Fitzgerald argues the novel Beloved, “offers an alternative to the
individualism and autonomy privileged by the classical psychoanalysis” (683). The sense of
identity is built not within the narrow confines of the hegemonic nuclear family but in relation to
the whole community. On the other hand Jean Wyatt uses lacanian theory of psychoanalysis.
Lacan uses three levels of human psyche such as the imagery is the field of images and
imagination, and deception. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality,
and similarity. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the mirror stage between the
Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of
radical alienation: "alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order, The Symbolic is also the
field of radical alteration—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is
the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. The Symbolic is the domain
of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. By working in the Symbolic order, the
analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysis. These changes will
produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic and Lacan's
concept of the Real. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with reality. Not only opposed to
the Imaginary, the Real is also exterior to the Symbolic. The Real is the object of anxiety,
insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is the essential object which is not an object any
longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of
anxiety par excellence. More particularly Jean speaks about the symbolic order. The entry of the
child into the patriarchal symbolic order of language entails a move from maternal body
connection to a register of abstract signifiers. Actually the novel Beloved challenges Lacan’
account of the opposition between bodily presence and abstract signifier. Wyatt explains that just
as Sethe , “ declined any mediation between her body and her nursing baby insting on presence,
so she refuses to replace that baby with a signifier, to accept the irrevocability of absence by
putting the child’s death into words”( 475, 477). The novel Beloved is a more inclusive
replacement for Lacan’s paternal symbolicsocial order that nurtures her with the words and
teaches her. Thus, again and again, many have employed the psychoanalytical theory to show
the relationship between Sethe and Beloved. They have expressed the psychoanalytical notion of
‘return of repressed’ to explain the novel clearly. Mau Henderson said that the psychoanalysis is
based on the theme of return of repressed. Here incidents which afflicted Sethe have become the
source of both repression and obsession. She should pile up the past to relate the present.
Through the psychoanalysis process Sethe has been able to free herself from the humiliated past
and from the burden of history. Linda Krumhlth thought Beolved as, “the physicial
manifestations of suppressed memories”. (400) Naomi Morgenstern said Morriosn’s Beloved,
“insists that, “it is only through an account of traumatic repetition that the story of slavery ever
gets told” (118)
Finally, it is clear to us that the novels of Moriosn can be judged in different ways. Psychological
is one of the segments to judge her novel. Many modern critics have found the Freudian and
Lacanian theory in the analysis of the girlhood bonding of Nel and Sula, the oedipal development
of Milkman Dead in the novel Song of Solomon and the mother and daughter relationship of
Beloved and Sethe in Beloved. Many psychoanalytic citics have revealed the central place of
fantasy and unconscious in Morriosn’s novels.
Works cited:-
1) Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledges for Preserving
Cultural Diversity, vol-1. Literature and Pdychoanalysis-Stephane Michaud.
2) The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia edited by Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, Greeenwood Press,
2003.
3) Internal journal of English and literature Vol. 3(3), pp. 60-70, March 2012.