The Haunting of Trauma: PTSD and Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' |
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Fiction conveys the texture of PTSD in ways that evade clinical descriptions.
In "Beloved," Toni Morrison uses allegory and narrative structure to show the ways trauma can disrupt a life.
For many sufferers of PTSD, complicated feelings accompany the prospect of relinquishing the past.
Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved uses these rhetorical tools to offer a brilliant and accurate account of trauma. The heroine Sethe has suffered multiple, severe beatings and sexual assaults, routine among the many abuses of the enslaved in the pre-Civil War South. But the event that pushes her over the edge is the death of her beloved child, a toddler girl whom she murders to save from slavery. As she later explains to her teenage daughter Denver, “If I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.” Slavery was a death worse than death.
Beloved checks all the diagnostic boxes for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as listed in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Trauma affects both mood and belief; Sethe experiences a persistent negative emotional state consisting of depression and intense grief for the death of her child, as well as guilt for the killing. She loses interest in the outside world, and she feels detached and estranged from others, withdrawing into her home and leaving only to go to work and back. She tries to avoid memories of the trauma: “To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.”
Above all, Morrison conveys the way trauma impacts memory, as in her accounts of Sethe’s flashbacks to the past: “She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. . . . and suddenly there was Sweet Home [the plantation where she was enslaved] rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream.” You’re reading along, just as Sethe was strolling through a field, and then you’re suddenly immersed in Sethe’s flashback, taken to Sweet Home along with her.
PTSD memories refuse to become part of the past like ordinary memories. In addition to their unbidden appearance, they often feel more solid and real than current lived experience. PTSD prevents people from moving on, from fully inhabiting their current lives, as Bessel van der Kolk describes: “Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.”
What better way to convey the haunting of traumatic memory than with a ghost? When Sethe shows signs of recovering and moving on, the dead child, who has haunted the house for years by moving objects and creating havoc, appears in corporeal form as a young woman, the age the child would have been had she reached adulthood. Beloved literally incarnates the tenacity and solidity of traumatic memory.
Her presence says much about the stranglehold of trauma, as Sethe begins to recover. Relationships that provide attunement, empathy, and safety are key to helping people heal from trauma, and these need not be with therapists. Conversely, whatever techniques therapists might use to treat trauma disorders, a strong therapeutic alliance is indispensable. Paul D, also enslaved at Sweet Home, offers such a relationship when he suddenly appears at Sethe’s home. As their connection deepens, Sethe begins to wonder if she might “trust things,” be fully present in the here and now, rather than working constantly to avoid memories or encountering them through intrusive, unwanted thoughts.
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Paul D takes Sethe and Denver to a local carnival; this is the first time since the tragedy that Sethe has ventured out of the house for anything other than work. As they’re walking, Sethe notices “that the three shadows that shot out of their feet to the left create the illusion that they are holding hands," and she thinks to herself, “as if they are a family.” Morrison offers an implicit pun on foreshadowing: The happiness they experience together at the carnival might indeed be an intimation of the happiness they could have as a family. Sethe takes their shadows as “a good sign. A life. Could be.”
But trauma doesn’t let go easily. For many sufferers of PTSD, complicated feelings accompany the prospect of relinquishing the past. Traumatic memories, horrific as they are, capture the last moments a sufferer truly felt alive; being alive to unbearable pain versus being dead to just about everything—it’s not an easy choice. For those who survive a trauma that claims the lives of others, resolution can involve unbearable survivor's guilt, as well as the prospect of saying goodbye to loved ones by consigning them to the past. As long as Sethe was trauma-bound to the past, the ghost was happy just to haunt in the usual manner that houses are haunted. But when Sethe begins to truly believe in the possibility of a future and of putting the past to rest, the ghost gets serious. When they return from the carnival, she is there waiting for Sethe. Beloved does everything she can to cling to Sethe and to draw her back into a deadened, hopeless condition, the death-in-life that allows them to be together.
Who wins, Paul D or Beloved, past or present, trauma or healing? You’ll have to read this extraordinary novel to find out.
American Psychiatric Association (2022). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Text Revision, Dsm-5-tr. Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
Herman, Judith (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books.
Morrison, Toni (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred Knopf.
van der Kolk, Bessel (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.