Both an Angel and a Madwoman: Female Character and Female Reading in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

Abstract

The paper is concerned with Toni Morrison’s contemporary novel Beloved, from the point of view of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s notions of the madwoman in the attic and the anxiety of authorship. The first term refers to the rebellious female hero from the nineteenth-century women’s literature, whereas the latter concerns the fear of writing as a male profession, felt by the nineteenth-century women writers. It is precisely this anxiety that influenced these writers to create the madwoman character, who opposes the patriarchal system in a latent manner. Starting from this critical perspective and asking the question whether contemporary women’s literature also contains such anxiety, the paper focuses on the main female character of the novel Beloved, initially published in 1987. The aim is to point out the difference which separates contemporary Toni Morrison from the nineteenth-century women writers, but is not solely temporal. This difference has to do with the character of the postmodern age, but is mainly related to a shift from the manner in which the nineteenth-century women writers created their female characters. The paper analyses this literary distinctiveness, but also attempts to find a broader meaning of this originality as seen from the point of view of contemporary women’s literature and reading. By focusing on Sethe – the main character of Beloved, the paper points out that Toni Morrison breaks with the tradition maintained by her literary ancestors in that she does not divide her female characters into obedient and recalcitrant ones in relation to the patriarchal system. Instead, she creates a character who is both a motherly angel and a madwoman committing infanticide, thus making it possible for her readers to interpret the novel from the perspective of a woman with ambivalent roles and specific experience. In this way, she also deconstructs the male writing and reading rules. By doing so, Morrison conveys a message that the anxiety of authorship of a contemporary woman novelist can be if not totally cured then certainly lessened by means of writing.