Traumatic Colorblindness

3/18/15

Text: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Critical Lens: Psychoanalytic Lens

"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it" (41).

In this close reading, Sethe is painfully reminded of her past the moment she looks at her hands and the world around her. She recedes deep within her memories of when she solicited her body to the preacher’s son who promised to engrave the seven letters, “Beloved” for “ten minutes”. It was from that point in which all the color Sethe had perceived and admired in her life, faded into obscurity. The last colors that went through her mind was the “red baby blood” and “pink gravestone chips” which is a sign of repression that eternally haunts her like the ghost of her dead daughter, revealing her total color blindness.

The way Sethe repeats the phrase, “Deliberate” when she thinks that, “it must be deliberate,” She’s right, because it is obvious she knows that she is putting up a defense mechanism to avoid unearthing this deeply repressed memory. As Sigmund Freud, the grandfather of psychology, has stated, “...repression doesn't eliminate our painful experiences and emotions...we unconsciously behave in ways that will allow us to 'play out'...our conflicted feelings about the painful experiences and emotions we repress."(Tyson 15). With every color she admires or notices, the same agonizing experience causes her inner psyche to prevent her from acknowledging any color in her life. “There was something wrong with that.” Sethe tells herself, it most certainly is because it explains many of the conflicts within her existence that demonstrates her desire to forget about her dark past and be able to move forward.

Another thing to note is that Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother, had this fascination of color Sethe was completely devoid of. Sigmund Freud also mentioned another defense mechanism that can take place in one's ego is denial. This is similar to repression where it prevents us from having painful experiences come to fruition, but instead she deliberately denies that there was a reason to acknowledge the color in her world. One could maybe infer that it is not just this experience alone that she is trying to avoid, but it is also the fact that she refuses to accept this feeling as a reality, binding her eternally.