Toni Morrison\'s Beloved: The Color Red as a Motif PDF

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Professor Martha Cutter...

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Allie Gruner Professor Cutter ENGL 4203W 2 March 2019 Tracing Red: The Pathways of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Tracing Red: The Pathways of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a poetic expression of trauma, a cultivated collection of motifs meant to convey the bygone agonies of millions. The vision of trauma that Morrison conceives is dynamic and indefinite, bleeding beyond the frontiers of momentary suffering and constantly evolving beyond its original form. The novel employs color to undertake the task of conveying these diverse, amorphous torments; the reader beholds Sethe’s story from the lens of red, a color that materializes in moments of strife, hope, and affliction. Morrison crafts tangible red symbols to serve as indicators of trauma; their strategic placement throughout the novel allows the reader to track trauma’s journey through time and observe the ways in which characters interact with their suffering at different junctures. Morrison’s trauma, signified by the color red, seems to appear in three distinct forms: red symbols are initially involved in inflicting trauma at the moment of its inception, then morph and resurface as tokens of past woes in posttrauma life. In its final form, the symbolic red emblem is pictured in motion, propagating traumas through future generations. Morrison punctuates the cycle of trauma using the color red throughout her narrative. In portraying trauma as an ever-changing entity, an oppressor; a remnant; and the transferred relic of another’s trauma, she asserts that trauma is relocated and reassumed. From this conceptualization emerges a unique take on generational trauma as an optimistic, rather than dejected, force; while it seems impossible for Morrison’s characters to shed their own traumas, they can be modified into endurable memories by proxy when shouldered by outsiders.

2 Gruner Morrison situates red within the context of trauma by assigning the color an essential role in the delivery of suffering as it unfolds; red, in this present tense form, becomes either a signifier of trauma or the perpetrator itself. Red most evidently acts as a token of trauma when it takes the shape of baby girl’s blood, “pump[ing]…down” Sethe’s dress as she clutches her freshly slain daughter in her arms. Morrison’s description of the grisly scene in the shed fixates on the excess of blood: “two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest,” she writes (Morrison 75). Sethe even conceptualizes her trauma in terms of blood; her twenty-eight days of “unslaved life,” the time spent at 124 after escaping Sweet Home but before the incident in the shed, are a “pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face.” Yet this dribble of her baby girl’s saliva turns to “oily blood” after her twenty-eight day allowance expires (47). This chilling imagery illustrates trauma as a red stain tainting Sethe’s life, a hateful force that contaminates her baby girl’s saliva. Despite her legal freedom, Sethe considers herself enslaved by her trauma for the remainder of her days at 124, often recalling the haunting vision of “red baby blood” (19). Blood, then, acts as both a badge of trauma and an active contributor to? its inception. Morrison’s alternate means of infusing red into scenes of active trauma is her assignment of the color to the role of oppressor. At the crux of Paul D’s pivotal traumatic moments lays the color red; recall Mister, the “hateful” rooster. Mister, “bloody...and evil” with a “comb as big as [his] hand and some kind of red,” is framed in red imagery - in fact, red is the only color the reader is invited to paint Mister with in their mind’s eye. The rooster becomes a representation of Paul D’s trauma, the culmination of all of his oppressors signified by a single symbol. “He looked so...free,” he remarks, looking on as Mister taunts him with his freedom, strutting around at his leisure while Paul D remains shackled with a bit in his mouth. His layered interactions with

3 Gruner trauma are evoked by the single red rooster; Mister is “stronger, tougher,” mocking Paul D with his masculinity, an expression of the manhood that he has been deprived of. “Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was,” Paul D continues, “But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was...I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub” (36). Mister accents the utter dehumanization that Paul D faces; even an animal is afforded more autonomy than he. This hateful symbol of trauma is, of course, tagged by the color red, which reappears upon Paul D’s arrival to the second site of his pivotal traumas: Alfred, Georgia. The “red dirt” in which Paul D’s cell is buried takes the shape of oppressor in a very literal manner; as the “one thousand feet of earth” that consumes him when the chain gang retires for the night, it is the landscape within which a hallmark of his trauma is fitted. With “two feet of it over his head,” the red dirt consumes Paul D, actively confining him to his traumatic fate (53). The rendition of trauma portrayed in Beloved transitions to its next phase as the novel’s principal characters escape active suffering and forge lives outside of its realm. The role of red transforms; red symbols are no longer chief actors in facilitating trauma. Instead, they are lingering remnants of its occurrence, bleeding into the post-trauma lives of victims even trauma itself lays stagnant in the past. Red blood resurfaces in Sethe’s reality, but this time as a reminder of a past trauma rather than a feature of a current trauma. The chokecherry tree on her back teems with the color, “red and split wide open, full of sap.” Sethe’s tree is a relic of her Sweet Home trauma, following her even outside of its bounds. The “roses of blood” that later “blossom in the blanket covering [her] shoulders” serve the same purpose (46): even in a place of refuge, a promised land in Sethe’s mind, the red reminder of suffering seeps through. The motif of the red mark of trauma that follows its victims is also the red light at Sethe’s front door. When Paul D enters 124 for the first time, he follows Sethe “through the door straight into a pool of red and

4 Gruner undulating light that lock[s] him” in place. Sethe addresses the potent force, assuring Paul D that “’It’s not evil, just sad.’” “’Come on. Just step through,’” she coaxes him. This “pool of pulsing red light” is said to soak Paul D in a “wave of grief,” making his journey to the “normal light” inside of the house a difficult one (4). This manifestation of red acts as a portal to Sethe’s trauma that trails her like a shadow, latching onto her house and inviting past traumas into her present. In crossing the threshold each and every day, it can be said that Sethe undergoes a sort of ceremonial retraumatizing. Morrison accentuates residual trauma; the red of past traumas takes on a present tense form, a remainder left behind by the oppressor rather than the oppressor itself. Trauma’s final phase is detached from its victim; red relics of suffering fall into the laps of non-victims with the potential to be reformed. Morrison’s trauma is in constant motion, invading the lives of the unscathed to be endlessly propagated through time; although it cannot be eradicated, hope for gaining control of trauma seems to emerge when it is assumed by those who lay on the periphery. Take Stamp Paid’s red ribbon, for instance. Presumably the lost accessory of a lynched girl, the ribbon is found fixed to the underside of Stamp Paid’s boat. While the smell of “skin and hot blood” pervades the scene, Stamp evades this trauma himself, merely bearing witness to the traces left in its wake. Eventually, he finds himself grasping “a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp.” This emblem is the conveyor of the memories associated with a violent, heinous murder, but when appropriated by Stamp Paid, its function shifts. “Dropp[ing] the curl in the weeds,” Stamp Paid distances the object from the trauma which it is meant to represent (89). In the years to come, he takes on the habit of keeping his ribbon on his person at all times, fingering it in times of stress. When he attempts to confront the stranger holed up in 124, for example, he “clutch[es] the red ribbon in

5 Gruner his pocket for strength;” here, the reader witnesses Stamp Paid’s subtle reclamation and reshaping of another’s trauma into a constructive force (91). Denver is another major figure who both assumes and transforms the trauma of others. Her life is inaugurated in red; born on the “b l o o d ys i d eo ft heOh i or i v e r( 1 5 ) , ”De n v e re me r g e s “face up and drowning in [her] mother’s blood,” soaked in the red symbol of Sethe’s trauma (42). She later ingests the red of Sethe’s subsequent trauma when she takes “her mother’s milk along with the blood of her sister,” her nursing milk mingled with the red mark of murder (77). Morrison employs red to physically represent the transfer of generational trauma from its direct victims to its indirect associates. Ironically, Sethe projects trauma onto her only child not born into slavery; Denver held the potential to emerge trauma-free, yet she is inevitably submerged in her mother’s trauma. The symbolic red with which Denver interacts visually reaffirms that trauma is not static or fixed as it is transmitted beyond the experience of its direct victim; nonetheless, like Stamp Paid, Denver assumes another’s trauma only to conquer it in some fashion. The reader meets Denver, meek and terrified, as she is confined to 124, trapped in the physical harbor of her mother’s trauma. Once afraid of being “swallowed up in the world beyond the edge of the porch,” Denver, laden with a trauma that is not her own, eventually claims autonomy. She becomes the novel’s imperfect symbol of hope or, perhaps, redemption (121). Stamp Paid notes that Denver is “the first one to wrestle her mother down” when Sethe targets Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick (132). In the moment where Sethe’s trauma resurfaces, plunging her into the recesses of past fears, Denver is the force that interrupts its proliferation. We see a foreign trauma being passed down to Denver through the conduit of red, but, like Stamp Paid, she is able to refashion it in a way that enables her moving on.

6 Gruner What Denver and Stamp Paid accomplish on behalf of other sufferers cannot be achieved if one attempts to reform their own trauma. Baby Suggs resigns to bed to contemplate color, too burdened by her overwhelming agonies; years later, Sethe lays in the same bed at her story’s conclusion, deemed “lost” by her daughter (132). Neither woman is capable of truly reconciling with their traumas – when they try, they are drained of sustenance or submit to the retirement of life as they once knew it. When transferred to tangential figures, however, trauma proves to be malleable, more receptive to its conversion to a more endurable version of itself. Morrison’s red representations of suffering blaze a precarious path through the cycle of trauma; this strategic device conveys both the futility of attempting to eradicate trauma and the possibility to overcome it. A (94) Allie, I like this paper very much. The ideas are very strong and you argue them well. I have seen many papers on the color red in Beloved, but yours was very strong in organizing the topic into something like a logical structure. I do think that your examples of people who are “tangential” to trauma and therefore suggest the possibility of healing are not as strong as some other parts of this paper, however. Denver is associated with red, but her movement out of the house is not. Therefore, perhaps Morrison is saying she isn’t marked by red/trauma in the same way as Paul D and Sethe? With Stamp Paid, I think he accepts the red ribbon and its associated trauma because he knows that trauma will always be a part of him; having had to sacrifice his own wife to her master means that he fully understands trauma and is marked by it. So I guess what I am getting at is that some of your examples are stronger than others in proving your thesis. I think I could be convinced on the Denver/Stamp Paid points—I would just need to see more support. Overall, I really did like this paper quite a bit. It was interesting and persuasive. If you want to skip the revision and just take the A as your grade, I will allow that. Good work overall! Best, Martha...