The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. By Herbert G. Gutman. (New York: Pantheon, 1976. xxviii + 664 pp. Illustrations, charts, tables, appendixes, notes, and indexes. $15.95.)

A Glance Beyond Doubt: Narration, Representation, Subjectivity

he terms home and community are frequently uttered with reverence by feminists, non-feminists, and anti-feminists alike. These terms and the spaces they conjure up are invoked as the cure to no end of social ills, from stress and malaise to crack addiction and corporate downsizing. Calls for the return to home and to community are both nostalgic and utopian. In "Coming Home," Carol Pearson discusses a feminist utopian narrative through which, "A . . upon discovering a sexually egalitarian society, the narrators have a sense of coming home to a nurturing, liberating environment" (63). Other feminist theorists of utopia, such as Lucy Sargisson, worry that such blueprints represent an "inappropriate closure" to feminist utopian imaginings. Because domestic spaces have worked out for many women as places to be domesticated and/or to be a domestic, it is not surprising that most have mixed feelings about a structure that contains the often unfulfilled dream of possession and the lived experience of servitude. Beloved, a novel published during the domestic retrenchments and anti-feminist "backlash" of the 1980s, shows both the dystopian and utopian properties of the space named "home"

Violence, Home, and Comrmnunity in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Recent critical history has seen renewed interest in theorizing
the ethics attributed to literature. What such interests mean for
reading drives the argument of this essay, which contends that an
ethics of literature emerges out of the reading problems posed by Toni
Morrison's Beloved and Sula. Centered on protagonists whose narratives
defy communal as well as literary convention, Beloved and Sula compel
readings insistent in their efforts to delineate resolution. Yet in their
ceaseless provocation of reading both novels demand that judgments be
made even as they suspend the determination of such judgments.

Doing things with ethics: beloved, sula, and the reading of judgment

Near the end of Toni Morrison's Beloued, Paul D returns to find Sethe in bed, exhausted, beaten, and almost hopeless from her struggle with Beloved, memory, and slavery. Paul D begins an exchange of words about theirhis and Sethe'stomorrow, but Sethe is still focused on the twicelost baby girl, who she claims is her best thing. Paul D's response is generous, loving, and enchanting: "You your best thing, Sethe. You are." His is a complicated response, which does not preclude Sethe's claim of her lost daughter (or her alive one) as her best thing, even as it suggests that Sethe has a self to be loved, claimed. The incantatory "you your best thing," especially as a signal moment in a novel of Beloved's literary proportions, foregrounds the issue of selfhood that is central not only to the world of this novel, but to the many other works and lives it echoes. What or who is this "you"? What are its boundaries, or, how does one know one "you" from an/other? How is an awareness of this "you" as a process of selfhood, achieved, sustained, and facilitated, especially for Black women who historically do not figure as subjects? The central consideration in this essay is the issue of selfhood, of identity, a consideration of some significance, for as Zora Neale Hurston proclaims, self-revelation is "the oldest human longing."1 Though the discourse of self is widely articulated in contemporary literary criticism and theory, I want to focus on the relational aspects of selfhood evidenced in two contemporary Black women's narratives: Toni Morrison's Sula and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. In both texts, selfhood is an issue of community, a negotiation of and balance between the individual and the people around her. The argument in this essay is this: through a discourse of

The Other Dancer As Self: Girlfriend Selfhood in Toni Morrison's Sula and Alice Walker's The Color Purple

When Paul D urges Sethe to "Go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out" (46), he is inviting her to "work through" past traumas with himself as psychotherapist (Freud). The novel's intertwined narratives can be viewed as a form of "talking cure": consequently, several critics have taken a psychoanalytical approach to Beloved.2 But many theorists, especially Black and feminist, have grave reservations about psychoanalysis (Abel; Spelman). Although Freud demonstrated the specific cultural construction of the psychic processes he analyzed, both he and his successors have tended to generalize from limited data unproblematically, positing a model which is both normative and universalized. As a result, psychoanalysis isolates psychic experience from the diversities of ethnicity and class; furthermore, it focuses intensively on the interaction of infant and mother as if this existed as a freestanding relation, independent of the economic, political or social conditions which affect the circumstances of parenting. In doing so, it defines motherhood according to a very specific, restricted norm, and places a huge burden of responsibility, not to say blame, on mothers (Riley; Walkerdine and Lucey; Nice). It pathologizes nonnormative families, privileging the healthy development of individual autonomy, highly valued by white Western capitalism.

Jennifer FitzGerald

Papers

Selfhood and Community: Psychoanalysis and Discourse in Beloved