How Powerful is Motherhood in Shaping Individuals

4/28/15

Text: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Critical Lens: Psychoanalytic Lens

In Sandra Mayfield’s critical essay, Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Psychological Reading, she ambitiously tackles motherhood and mothering in all of its layers of complexity, in particular how it impacts slave women.  By examining the writings of other authors she is able to add “meaningful insights into the psychological processes operating in the relationships between mothers and their children” and she uncovers “the relationship between woman, death, religion, and text”. Her trio of theorists that she bases much of her information on includes Helene Cixous, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva. Each of these of authors adds insight into the process of mothering and how it psychologically impacts Sethe.

Helene Cixous, a French psychoanalyst, based on her disposition, as well as the texts she analyzes, she uses to corroborate demonstrates that women have not sublimated the way men have so they are the most pure in the sense that they have avoided having to filter their emotions. What that more or less signifies is that no one is truly able to best raise their young as well as mothers do which demonstrate why the struggle of the slave woman is one that is about being entrapped within the reality that they will always be a product of slavery.

Jacques Lacan was a theorist that conflicted with Freudian theory by stating that the longing for possessing their mother “is not merely sexual, but “a longing for a kind of existential reparation, perpetually unfulfillable, eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else” (198).” While Beloved throughout the book shows that she has this insatiable desire to possess Sethe in Chapter 23 which the purpose is to literally represent the conscience of Beloved because she repeats phrases like “You are mine You are mine You are mine.” and “I loved you You hurt me You came back to me You left me I waited for you.” best represents Lacan’s perspective.

Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian European critic, “suggests that mothers who are deprived of a sense of wholeness in their subjectivity, endure a period of “abjection,” self-hatred,  contempt, alienation, and disgust with the biological and psychological processes of mothering.” Similarly, Sethe had isolated herself from society not just by being rejected but choosing to live in 124 only to be reminded of her sins and atrocities committed to her children.