Btw: This is a repurposed essay I wrote for a college English course; light modifications have been made from the original.

The questions and implications of existence in a subjected body are at the heart of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  Embodiment is a source of agency, an assertion of humanity, and a means of connecting emotionally with others.  But simultaneously, the body is a site of oppression in Beloved.  Not only is it what white characters use to mark Black characters as “Other,” it is exploited, controlled, and commodified through slavery, beginning in the Middle Passage and continuing into the lives of the characters.  But this does not mean that embodiment must remain that way. 

Rather, embodiment is fluid and ever-shifting, just as racial categories and history are unstable constructions themselves.  This is all reinforced by the ambiguously-present Beloved and her connection to this past.  As the scholar Carole Boyce-Davies argues in “Migratory Subjectivities,” racialized identity can be reclaimed through a “tactical assertion of Blackness” which imagines a positive, community-based interpretation of race, built upon a shared past (5).  Through this lens, the possibilities of embodiment become something more than individual, navigating collectively-felt joy and pain.  Beloved presents racialized embodiment as a painful and affirming process, shaped and shifted by fluid constructions.

Embodiment in the Middle Passage

This fluidity of race and embodiment is, of course, firmly rooted in the Middle Passage.  The scholar Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley demonstrates this in her essay “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic”.  She writes that “the brown-skinned, fluid-bodied experiences…surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds of years ago…” (191).  Beloved explores this interpretation of embodiment and the Middle Passage though the equally fluid perspective of Beloved. 

In a temporally fluctuating passage from her perspective, Morrison writes, “storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men” (250).  This queering, or diversion from normativity, of both gender and individuality parallels Tinsley’s argument, as she points to the Middle Passage as an important site for the disruption of gender, race, and sexuality. 

Likewise, Beloved’s body and presence are a study in disruptions and queering, mixing the past and the present, death and life, and infancy and adulthood.  She thereby becomes an amalgam of the many complications and contradictions of Black embodiment.  Just as embodiment is shifted, disputed, and reclaimed in Beloved, the very idea of what constitutes a body and a self is likewise far from stable.

Embodied and Disembodied Dehumanization

With this conception of embodiment in mind, it is necessary to examine how the systems of slavery and racism are built upon the disembodiment and dehumanization that began in the Middle Passage.  Tinsley connects its violence to subjectification: “once loaded onto the slave ships, Africans became fluid bodies under the force of brutality” (197).  Beloved describes these dehumanizing conditions of the Middle Passage as well, describing how “we are all trying to leave our bodies behind,” while firmly placing this trauma in the present (Morrison, 248-249).  Beloved remembers how enslaved Africans attempt to dissociate rather than endure this abuse, abandoning that which connects them to the world, to the self, and to life. 

In a way, this history is repeated in one of the novel’s most crucial events, when Sethe kills Beloved.  Like the enslaved Africans, Sethe determines that it would be better for her daughter to have no body, and no life, than to have one marked by injustice and subjugation: one that is not truly her own.  Beloved thus reveals the historical continuity of external and internal control executed through manipulation and violence upon the Black body, and the subsequent theft of agency and embodied connection.

Physical torment is a key part of slavery’s subjectification and otherizing of Black people, and is something endured by Sethe, Paul D, and Sixo, among other characters in Beloved.  Morrison is careful to show the impact of violence not just on the body, but on the psyche as well. 

For example, after being imprisoned in a chain gang, Paul D is tormented to the point that “his hands quit taking instruction.  On their own, they traveled” (Morrison, 126).  Paul D’s internal agency over his body is stolen, turning him into a lifeless machine capable only of work. 

Indeed, the very fear of bodily harm is also used to subjugate.   While enslaved, Baby Suggs “behaved and did everything right in front of her children because she didn’t want them to see her knocked down…it made children crazy to see that” (Morrison, 246).  Believing her children would be driven insane if they were to see her powerlessness and lack of agency over her own body, Baby Suggs yields her internal agency.  She would rather make this horrible sacrifice than have her children be confronted by their own inability to protect themselves and those they love.  Thus, bodily violence is used to both physically and psychologically keep the enslaved enslaved, exposing the brutality inherent to and at the very heart of slavery.      

Commodification is another key player to consider in the theft of embodied agency.  When Paul D is captured and shackled after attempting to escape, he overhears his captors discussing him, and “discovers his worth, which is to say he learns his price.  The dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future” (Morrison, 267). 

Morrison is careful to show the impact of violence not just on the body, but on the psyche as well.

These men reduce his value as a human being to mere pieces; everything that gives Paul D the capacity for and the right to agency is converted to a dollar value, and made part of his lack of agency.  This analysis of slavery’s dehumanizing effect on the bodies and selves of slaves is best put by Sethe’s daughter, Denver: “anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind.  Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you” (Morrison, 295).  Stealing their ownership and love of their bodies, white slaveowners attempt to control the “whole self” of slaves.  And in doing so, they violate their entire being.

Reclaiming Embodiment

But the characters in Beloved do not simply yield to such constructions or abuse.  Rather, paralleling Boyce-Davies’ “tactical assertion of Blackness,” they reclaim their bodies as a source of agency and freedom.  This is particularly trueof the ministry of Baby Suggs, who argues for a defiant, revolutionary love of self.  She exclaims, “we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass.  Love it.  Love it hard” (Morrison, 103).  She does not yield to racialized dichotomies of body and soul; she recognizes her whole self as a complete, inseparable being. 

Baby Suggs calls for a passionate, unapologetic love of touch, movement, all that the body is capable of, while also asserting the shear necessity of this act: “Yonder they do not love your flesh.  They despise it” (Morrison, 103).  She makes it clear that, to white people, they are no more than a means of profit: “…my people they do not love your hands.  Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.  Love your hands! …  Raise them up and kiss them” (Morrison, 103).  Cognizant of the commodification and violence inflicted upon the bodies of Black people, Baby Suggs exalts and reclaims embodiment for herself, refusing to let anyone “dirty” that which is only hers.

She does not yield to racialized dichotomies of body and soul; she recognizes her whole self as a complete, inseparable being.

Black embodiment is likewise asserted through the physical connection of other Black characters.  This, again, is linked to the Middle Passage; Tinsley notes how, in spite of the brutal treatment they endured, embodiment was affirmed through Africans’ connections to one another.  She describes how imprisoned Africans created same-sex bonds with one another, and how “in so doing, they resisted the commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these ships” (192).  Similar to Baby Suggs’ acclamation of the body, enslaved people fought against their disembodiment by seeing the humanity in both their own bodies and the bodies of others. 

The importance of connection in the assertion of embodiment is particularly evident in intimate moments of touch in Beloved.  For example, when Sethe finally achieves freedom, she is bathed by Baby Suggs, and fondly remembers her massaging the back of her neck, something which the mere memory of is enough to give her a great deal of comfort and security (Morrison, 112).  Closely associated in her mind with freedom, the relationship between physical connection and liberty reveals just how closely embodiment is connected to external factors, and how mutual acknowledgement of humanity is crucial to humanization.

But freedom is most closely associated with the ownership of and agency over one’s own body.  In Sethe’s first days of “unslaved life,” she is particularly struck by the fact that for the first time, she has control over her life, and feels as if “she had claimed herself.”  Morrison clarifies that “freeing yourself was one thing: claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (111-112).  Sethe’s liberation comes not from merely existing in a freed body, but from fully asserting her embodiment and control. 

Embodiment is also the first thing Baby Suggs is aware of when she steps into freedom: “…suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, ‘These hands belong to me.  These my hands’ (Morrison, 166).  This affirmation of embodiment is articulated by Baby Suggs to her granddaughter, Denver, who recounts her words: “[slaves] were not supposed to have pleasure deep down.  She [Baby Suggs] said for me not to listen to all that.  That I should always listen to my body and love it” (Morrison, 247).  Denver learns to respect her connection to her body, as well as the joy and liberty that can come from this intrapersonal bond.  Ownership and love of the body is thereby equated with freedom, likewise a reclamation of one’s own subjectivity. 

“You Are Your Own Best Thing”

Embodiment, identity, and agency over one’s body are in constant flux in Beloved, reflective of the historical conditions of slavery and the Middle Passage, the conscious efforts of slaveowners to commodify and separate Black people from their selfhood, and symbolized by Beloved’s ambiguous embodiment.  But just as embodiment can be stolen it can also be regained, as characters reclaim their bodies and reassert their right to them.  Thus, while the pains of subjectification are not ignored, the reassertion, and reclamation of embodiment is equally if not more significant.  The body which connects one to the world, to life, and to others is a precious thing, and though it is inevitably superficially defined, it is also, first and foremost, “the best thing” a person can possess, and inherently, unequivocally, one’s own (Morrison, 322).

Works Cited

Boyce-Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1st Vintage International ed, Vintage International, 2004.

Tinsley, O. N. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14, no. 2–3, Jan. 2008, pp. 191–215.