"To take the sin out of slicing trees ...": the law of the tree in 'Beloved.'

When Baby Suggs, Beloved's ancestor figure and moral beacon, expresses her view of what seems to be the novel's central transgression, the murder of a child at the hands of her own mother, she sums up what the whole work tends to demonstrate regarding the tragic deed: "... she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice" (180). Endeavoring to understand rather than judge, she acknowledges the legitimacy of some of Sethe's arguments while being aware of more questionable elements in her decision, such as her daughter, in-law's dangerously possessive conception of mother love, or the psychological damage her act has inflicted on each of her four children. Like Baby Suggs, Morrison clearly refrains, at least explicitly or in conventional terms, from either condemning or condoning Sethe's desperate deed. When the murder is overtly branded as a crime or a sin, it is by people--the community and Paul D--whose moral choices are not reliable. As a matter of fact, it is repeatedly suggested that the ultimate culprit is not the individual who committed infanticide, but the system that created the conditions for it, the "peculiar institution." As the novel unfolds, the whites increasingly come under attack, even if, adding to the moral complexity and ambiguity of the book, they are also presented as the victims of a system they have themselves set up, while the blacks in turn prove to have been contaminated by the cancer of slavery, as shown in Stamp Paid's metaphor of the jungle (198-99).(1)

Curiously enough, however, Morrison reserves the word sin for another context. It first crops up in Baby's address to her people in the Clearing when she urges them to love their abused bodies and heal the wounds inflicted by slavery:

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no

more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its

inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace

they could imagine. (88)

This statement is interesting in that it shows Baby distancing herself from established religion, overtly discarding the Christian notion of sin as an acceptable moral standard. This perception is actually confirmed by the use of the word in its second occurrence. When Paul D, shortly after his arrival at 124, takes Sethe and Denver out to the carnival, they walk past a big patch of rotting roses stretching along the lumberyard fence. The narrator then makes the following remark: "The sawyer who had planted them twelve years ago to give his workplace a friendly feel--something to take the sin out of slicing trees for a living--was amazed by their abundance ..." (47).

What this statement brings out is that the tree is a natural element that serves as a law--and a sacred one at that--unto man. In other terms, the religious referent that transgression is measured against is not Western religion or even some secular yet holy human law, but man's natural environment. This might seem to be a somewhat extravagant or incidental remark were it not for the fact that trees play such a prominent part in the novel, either in the form of the highly symbolic tree stamped upon Sethe's back by schoolteacher's whip, or as the real trees that the protagonists repeatedly turn to for spiritual support. Furthermore, one should bear in mind that trees, and in particular sacred groves, play a crucial role in African religion, where they are considered as intermediaries between God and man--they are even worshiped by some tribes as God himself in his immanent aspect (Mbiti 112-64). The pervasive presence in the book of trees, and the moral significance they are imparted with, as the above quotation suggests, seems therefore to be in keeping with Morrison's claim that she is not an American, but an Afro-American writer, intent on preserving and transmitting her community's cultural heritage, which she insists is an essential dimension of her fiction.(2) Indeed the print of Africa is to be felt everywhere in the novel, much more so than in Morrison's previous fiction: It manifests itself through the characters, several of whom were born in Africa, still speak a native language, or have gone through the ordeal of the Middle Passage. It is also present in the religious, moral, or philosophical values conveyed by the text: the vital importance of the community (and in a more general way the necessary complementarity between self and other); the prominence given to the body, with the particular role attributed to the heart and blood(3); or the presence of the dead among the living. In Morrison's own words, the form of the book is also indebted to African traditions.(4) It is therefore interesting to explore the field opened up by the narrator's comment on the sin of cutting trees, and to examine how a number of the transgressions perpetrated in the novel can be construed as violations of the natural law trees embody.

The Tree and the Law of Life

The most salient feature of the tree is that it is identified with Life--a sign of the influence of African religion, which holds that trees concentrate within themselves the vital force that flows through and animates the universe (Thomas 110). Sixo, the only truly flawless character in the novel, the African hero and role model, provides the first example of their beneficent, life-giving virtue. He "went among trees at night. For dancing, he said, to keep his bloodlines open ..." (25). The trees whip up the flow of the blood that animates his body; they infuse him with some vital energy that feeds and multiplies his own; they are revivifying. Denver's bower is similarly endowed with a nurturing, healing, rejuvenating power. It is made of "five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring" (28), where she regularly seeks refuge to relieve her aching solitude. It provides Denver with the company she so painfully craves; it soothes and revitalizes her: "Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, and salvation was as easy as a wish" (29). The juxtaposition of the two adjectives green and live suggests a semantic equivalence between the two terms, which is made quite explicit in a later reference to the bower when the narrator speaks of "the before-Beloved hunger that drove her into boxwood and cologne for just a taste of life" (120). The vibrant depth of the green leaves, which irradiate "an emerald light," also connotes vitality. Denver imbibes and feeds on it. "In that bower ... Denver's imagination produced its own hunger and its own food ..." (29). The womb-like shape of the trees, a secret place that you have to "crawl into" and which forms a ring, further enhances their life-giving virtue.

The spiritual character and nurturing role of the tree are given particular relief by Sixo and Paul D's Brother. Paul D evokes the tree under which they elect to sit for their midday breaks at Sweet Home in the following terms: "... trees were inviting; things you could trust and be near; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did since way back when he took the midday meal in the fields of Sweet Home. Always in the same place if he could .... His choice he called Brother, and sat under it ..."(21). Morrison exploits the tree's symbolic value by specifying that the men sit under it, thus drawing attention to the fact that they seek safety and refreshment from its protective, cooling, rejuvenating shadow. It is even more significant that they should have chosen it as the place where they partake of their meals, as if the tree itself supplies them with the sustenance they need to replenish themselves. Morrison goes beyond this symbolism, however: The tree's very name, Brother, emphasizes not only its animate but its human-like nature, which is unambiguously underlined by such terms as trust and talk to. The tree is a caring parent or friend who gives advice and moral support.

The blossoming trees that help Paul D find his way north to freedom after he has escaped from Alfred, Georgia, perform a similar role. Taking the advice of the Cherokees who have greeted the runaway convicts, Paul D follows their trail:

"That way.... Follow the tree flowers

.... Only the tree flowers. As they

go, you go, You will be where you

want to be when they are gone."

So he raced from dogwood to

blossoming peach. When they thinned

out he headed for the cherry blossoms,

then magnolia, chinaberry, pecan, walnut

and prickly pear.... He merely

followed in their wake, a dark ragged

figure guided by the blossoming

plums. (112-13)

The trees lead him to freedom, which in accordance with a trope familiar to slave literature the novel equates with life, as we will see below. This is the reason that, in presiding over Paul's passage from South to North, they do not merely signal his passage from symbolic death to symbolic life; being active catalysts of his spiritual rebirth, they are shown to have a creative force of their own, the faculty of generating the life that goes with freedom.

A similar power is ascribed to the Clearing, the name for the cluster of trees where Baby speaks the Word, and which is quite obviously one of those sacred groves so central to African worship (Mbiti 109-240). It is to the Clearing that Sethe turns for comfort after the shock she has suffered on learning about her husband's madness. Dazed and overwhelmed as she is upon entering the grove, she reemerges from it with a clear mind and a stronger love for Paul D, having drawn fresh moral vigor from the surrounding greenery: "... she wanted Paul D. No matter what he told and knew, she wanted him in her life. More than commemorating Halle, that is what she had come to the Clearing to figure out, and now it was figured. Trust and rememory, yes ..."(99).

The significance of the Clearing, whose name obviously carries a metaphorical connotation of spiritual cleansing, is nevertheless best illustrated by Sethe's recollection of the meetings held there by her mother-in-law. It is no coincidence that it should be the setting for Baby's message of love and self-healing:

After situating herself on a huge

flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her

head and prayed silently. The company

watched her from the trees. They

knew she was ready when she put her

stick down. Then she shouted, "Let the

children come!" and they ran from the

trees toward her.

"Let your mothers hear you

laugh," she told them, and the woods

rang. The adults looked on and could

not help smiling.

Then "Let the grown men come,"

she shouted. They stepped out one by

one from among the ringing trees.

"Let your wives and your children

see you dance," she told them,

and groundlife shuddered under their

feet. (87)

The people first sit among the trees, intimately connected with them ("the company watched her from the trees"), and it is from them that they leap in response to her call ("they ran from the trees toward her"). Indeed each of her shouts is followed by a close-up on the trees which underlines their supportive role:

"Let the children come!"

and they ran from the trees

toward her. "Let your

mothers hear you laugh,"

she told them, and the

woods rang.... "Let the

grown men come," she

shouted. They stepped out

one by one from among the

ringing trees.

The people are at one with the trees, which take part in the action, both by sympathizing with them (they "ring") and breathing into them an energy made palpable by the powerfully rhythmic tempo of the whole passage. They are not merely a setting; they are truly active participants whose salutary role is to be measured by the miracle worked among them. At Baby's bidding, the children, the men, and the women, after beginning in their usual roles--the children laughing, the women crying, the men dancing--swap roles and are thus led to commune with each other, stepping out of the confining limits of their selves, and growing richer from the communal experience intitiated by the trees.

It is also no coincidence that the Clearing should be the place where Baby delivers the fervent address urging her people to love and piece together the bodies that have been broken up by slavery, to re-member what has been dis-membered. The surrounding trees nourish Baby's inspiration while helping the people reconstruct their fragmented selves, as the "harmony" (89) achieved at the end of the scene suggests. No wonder then that the community's priestess should be pictured as smelling "like bark in the day and leaves at night" (19) or that after the murder has killed her faith in life she should be seen tramping along among dead leaves (177)--thus providing further evidence of the deliberateness and consistency of Morrison's treatment of the theme.

The Clearing's regenerating energy is perhaps even plainer in one of the last scenes of the novel when the women of the community gather in front of 124 to exorcize the spirit that has driven Sethe to the verge of death: "For Sethe it was as though the Clearing had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.... It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash" (261). As is so often the case with Morrison's writing, the reader's mental categories are here subverted. Contrary to one's expectations, the main protagonist is not the group of women acting with the Clearing as a backdrop: The protagonist is the Clearing, while the women recede into the background. It is the sacred grove that is the agent of the spiritual rebirth connoted by the image of baptism.

The "Peculiar Institution" and the Transgression of the Tree's Sacred Law

We can now better grasp the meaning of the narrator's comment upon the sawyer's misdeed: It is what the tree encloses, Life itself, that is sacred. It follows that even if no explicit judgment is passed on Sethe's deed, even if we are given a number of unquestionably good reasons that partly legitimate her decision, she is nevertheless shown to commit a major transgression in deciding to cut her daughter's throat since she infringes upon a principle whose sacredness is postulated by the narrator's remark on the sawyer's sin and demonstrated by the nourishing quality of the tree. Besides, Morrison introduces two details which leave no doubt as to her intention to use the tree as evidence of her protagonist's crime. The man who commits the sin of cutting trees is no anonymous person. He is a sawyer, which cannot but call to mind the very saw that Sethe uses to cut Beloved's throat, thus drawing attention to the similarity between the two actions. The parallel is further enhanced by the fact that the victim of the murder is constantly associated with a felled tree: Sethe first spots Beloved sitting on a stump, and later on both Paul D and Denver repeatedly and pointedly refer to this circumstance when talking about her.

Yet Sethe is not the only one who commits a sin against Life. The whites perpetuate the same type of transgression. Slavery first inflicts bodily death: The novel is dedicated to the "Sixty Million and more" who perished in the Middle Passage, and one of its most dramatic scenes is the description of the prisoners' dreadful agony in the hold of a slave ship. Beloved witnesses the passing of the man whose heavy body has long been crushing hers; piles of dead people are thrown into the sea; Beloved's mother chooses to hurl herself into the ocean rather than keep enduring her excruciating ordeal. The novel also alludes to or describes other deaths: Sethe's mother's, Sixo's burning (tied to the trunk of a tree), Paul A's hanging, the lynchings after the Civil War. As for the numerous maimings the slaves suffer as punishments or as a result of excessive toil, they are but a seemingly milder form of death, especially in Morrison's world, where the body is at least as precious as the mind.

Death is also symbolic and is conveyed by a spatial metaphor, that of the dividing line between the slave and the free territories whose crossing is pictured as the passage from death to life. This is first the case with Sethe, who is nearly dead when she meets Amy near the Ohio River. Blood trickles from her festering back; her feet are monstrously swollen; her exhaustion is such that she can hardly crawl. Indeed her state is so critical that the white girl bets she will not last the night. Yet, against all odds, she comes back to life on leaving Kentucky. She makes it across the river and is restored to health in her mother-in-law's home; even more significantly, she gives birth to a daughter in those very waters which separate the two worlds, a highly emblematic event pointing to the exact equivalence of life and freedom.

The symbolic rebirth represented by the crossing of the Ohio River is also suggested by its biblical association with the River Jordan: The slaves are ferried across by Stamp Paid, formerly Joshua, who was named after the man who led the Hebrews from captivity into the Promised Land. A similar point is made when Baby's body is seen to become literally alive the very moment shesets foot on free soil:

... suddenly she saw her hands and

thought with a clarity as simple as it

was dazzling, "These hands belong to

me. These my hands." Next she felt a

knocking in her chest and discovered

something else new: her own heartbeat.

Had it been there all along? This

pounding thing? (141)

In recovering her freedom, she recovers the life that had been stamped out of her, so that, as with Sethe, the passage from South to North is experienced as a spiritual resurrection.

The mental death inflicted by slavery is also symbolized by Sethe's unresponsive back, whose lifelessness mirrors both the repression of unbearable memories and, in a more general way, the suppression of all emotion, more particularly those dangerous feelings of love which are bound to be frustrated by an institution that systematically separates mothers and children, husbands and wives, families and friends. If they want to survive, the slaves have to silence--that is, kill--their hearts, as Paul D's tin box neatly exemplifies. He first describes it while telling Sethe of one of his worst ordeals, his encounter with Mister, the plantation's rooster: "Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut" (72-73). Both as metaphor (it holds the traumatic experiences of the past) and metonymy (it is buried in his chest) the tin box materializes the death of his heart, the death of what the novel shows to be the highest expression of life, love.

The Alfred, Georgia, episode, which marks the lowest point in Paul D's descent into hell, is another illustration of the identification of slavery with death which pervades the

whole chapter. It is thematized by the prisoners' songs to "Mr Death" and symbolized by a number of details: the pall-like mist that shrouds the scenery, the latter's uniform colorlessness,(5) the underground cages that are reminiscent of the netherworld, the image of "the unshriven dead, zombies on the loose" (110), the symbolic rebirth of the prisoners when they reemerge from the mud (Samuels 125).

This scene is of additional interest insofar as it features a tree which seems to embody slavery's deadliness, emphasizing its utter incompatibility with life. It is interesting that the death camp, the product of the "peculiar institution," should have wiped out all manner of vegetation, allowing only the tiniest tree to grow, Paul D's little aspen: "In Alfred, Georgia, there was an aspen too young to call sapling. Just a shoot no taller than his waist." It holds him enthralled, being the only sign of life left in the wasteland of the prison camp, and thus testifies to his invincible passion for life ("His little love was a tree ..." [221]). But it has an ambivalent function, for its tiny size also provides a comment on slavery's devastating force, confirming what the death imagery of the whole chapter points to. It is impossible for saplings to grow into real trees, for life to develop and flourish, in a world ruled by slaveholders.

Life however is not the only value attached to the tree, at least in the form I have been considering--that of the vital energy that animates the human and natural worlds and allows individuals to be regenerated. The descriptions of the tree of flesh stamped onto Sethe's back and the light it throws both on her and the slaveholders' actions show that this tree embodies yet another law, what I will call the law of growth, the constant violation of which is again used as evidence of the perversity inherent in slavery.

The Tree and the Law of Growth

The first allusion to Sethe's tree comes in the form of a question by Paul D after Sethe has laconically announced," `I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house ...'" (15). This startling revelation prompts the question," `What tree on your back? Is something growing on your back? I don't see nothing growing on your back'" (15). Paul D's wording focuses attention on the fact that Sethe's tree is not only inscribed in her flesh, as his choice of the verb to grow and his insistence on it emphasize; it also takes root in her body. It is not merely an image or a mark bearing a resemblance to a tree; it is an active, living tree with an irrefutable power and reality of its own. The tree possesses a kind of awesome materiality which seems to invest it with some transcendent meaning, thus echoing and reinforcing all the details pointing to the tree's holiness. In addition, the intimate connection, indeed the continuity, between Sethe's body and the tree suggest that they are made of the same fabric, and that what concerns the tree necessarily concerns human creatures. The choice and repetition of the verb to grow also draws attention to what the tree represents, which brings us back to what Mircea Eliade, among others's considers as its most universal symbolic value: growth and regeneration.

It is Amy, Sethe's white savior, whose creative vision transforms the slave woman's lacerated back into the trunk, branches, and blossoms of a chokecherry tree. Her description is first briefly reported by Sethe to Paul D:" `That's what she called it.... that's what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny chokecherry leaves'" (16). This description is subsequently expanded in the narrative Denver makes of her mother's escape:

"It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry

tree. See, here's the trunk--it's red and

split wide open, full of sap, and this

here's the parting for the branches.

You got a mighty lot of branches.

Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these

ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms,

just as white. Your back got a

whole tree on it. In bloom." (79)

Amy's description does not stress the tree's greenery, as was the case with Sixo's trees, or the trees in the Clearing or the Bower. It does not draw attention to the vital energy spontaneously associated with the leaves and the color green, but to the principle of division and extension, growth and transformation represented by the passage from trunk to big bough to smaller branch and finally to blossoms. It thus conjures up the image of the genealogical tree, be it in its lay version or in the biblical one of Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 4), or, as Paquet remarks (117), Jesse's tree (Isaiah 11). Indeed, the emphasis laid on its growing from Sethe's back may well be designed to underline the similarity between the fictional and biblical figures. Furthermore, Morrison uses two metaphors which explicitly conjoin the family and the tree: Commenting on Beloved's destructive preying on her mother, the narrator warns, "Ax the trunk, the limb will die" (242). As for Sixo's son-to-be, he is alluded to as "his blossoming seed" (229).

Yet the most convincing evidence that Sethe's tree is of the genealogical type is the strategic importance of the family theme in the novel, one of whose major, if not essential, messages is that the individual is not self-sufficient. It has permeable frontiers and extends beyond the individual proper, drawing substance and sustenance from the family and the community, for the genealogical tree does not represent the family in the narrow sense of the term, that generally accepted in Western culture. It should be given the much broader extension it is given in the African culture Morrison claims as her own and which is understood as the clan, the community, what the author calls "the village." Her novel once again demonstrates how vital the tree is to the individual. This is best illustrated by a scene which has already been discussed, that of the Clearing which shows the people swapping selves and in so doing regenerating themselves. It is also evidenced by the fact that it is the community which achieves the final regeneration, both by helping Denver break the enchanted circle of 124 and grow into a real person, and by exorcising Beloved and saving Sethe from death. Indeed, the latter scene shows the people officiating as a communal priest in what is described as Sethe's baptism; that is to say, her symbolic rebirth into life.

One of the novel's most salient themes is that slavery and community are strictly antagonistic. The "peculiar institution" is grounded on the principle that the slaves are not human beings, but chattel--or, at best, animals. Slaves are "checkers" (23) that the owners feel free to use as best furthers their economic interests. Family ties are therefore of no consequence. Indeed, one of the leitmotifs of the novel is the systematic breaking up of families: We hear Baby Suggs complaining in the very first pages of the narrative that she was left with only one out of her eight children. Paul D has never had any family except for his half-brother Paul F, who is finally sold away to another plantation. During his wanderings after the Civil War he comes across men, women, and children drifting all by themselves on the roads. They have permanently lost touch with their relatives or friends. He is awestruck and incredulous when he meets a real Negro family, complete with parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles. We are also reminded that black infants were routinely removed from their mothers after a week or two and nursed by a slave woman whose work it was to tend all the children, while the mothers were sent back to the fields to avoid jeopardizing productivity. Sethe thus tells us that she has seen her mother only two or three times in her life (60).

It is, as a matter of fact, the disruption of the bond between mother and child that is the most striking, actually paradigmatic, manifestation of the very common practice of separating slave families. Because the mother-child link is the primal human bond without which, as the text amply suggests, the self cannot come into being, it can be considered as the condensed form, the epitome of all family ties. Since the thematic core of the novel is the separation of mother and daughter--be it that of Beloved as the mythical child from her African mother or that of Beloved as the historical daughter of the main protagonist--with the disastrous consequences it entails, one may assert that the central motif of the narrative is the role played by family in the development of the self. Sethe's being prevented from being a real mother (which is in the end the reason that she decides to escape) is but the most dramatic evidence that the system of slavery tramples upon the principle materialized by her tree.

Milk and the Tree

Whites however are not the only ones who transgress the law inscribed in Sethe's back. Though we are led to sympathize with her and recognize, at least partially, the legitimacy of her arguments, we also gradually discover that her own attitude--her conception of motherhood and her behavior toward her children--is at odds with the principle of the tree. Close scrutiny of the text confirms what is actually signified from the very beginning by the tree's particular place on her body: It is rooted in her back, that part of her body which she cannot see, a detail which might be dismissed as merely coincidental were it not emphasized by the remark she adds when first describing it:" `I've never seen it and never will' "(16). There could be no clearer hint that she is going to disregard the lesson imprinted on her back.

Its being placed there conveys however yet another meaning, which is essential to the understanding of the subject. It is directly opposite her breasts, those breasts that are made so much of through her obsession with the milk they carry, and which epitomize her conception of motherhood--she explains her decision to run by claiming that she had to bring her milk to her daughter (16-19). It is indeed highly revealing that when she first speaks of the tree she should immediately associate it with her milk; in answer to Paul D's request for an explanation after she has announced, "`I have a tree on my back and a haint on my house,'" she first briefly reports Amy's description, but immediately proceeds to add, without any transition: "`I had milk ...'" (16). She then explains that she was whipped and got the scars that became a tree under Amy's transforming vision. The striking characteristic of the ensuing conversation is however that, while Paul D insists on being informed about the tree, she keeps brushing his questions away and doggedly reverting to the stealing of her milk by schoolteacher's nephews:

"We was talking `bout a tree,

Sethe."

"After I left you, those boys came

in there and took my milk...."

"They used cowhide on you?"

"And they took my milk."

"They beat you and you was

pregnant?"

"And they took my milk!" (16-17)

Her obsession with her milk and disregard for the tree, which form the structural and thematic backbone of this scene, tell us a lot about the way she envisions her relationship with her children, although one should not forget the milk's ambivalent function, its positive as well as negative connotations: Sethe's being made unable to nurse her daughter is a powerful signifier of slaves' inability to feed and therefore nurture their children and bring them up into full-fledged human beings. A dominant theme of the book is that, because the children have been deprived of proper nurturing, they have been unable to develop into real persons--it accounts not only for Beloved's crippled and ultimately evil character but also for Denver's unnatural childishness and inner emptiness. Even Baby claims that she has no self, which the text suggests is the result of her early separation from her mother. The robbing of Sethe's milk, which is so often evoked in the narrative and referred to as what she owns and as her children's very life, is thus the materialization of the fundamental perversity of the institution which kills the slaves' selves by severing the bonds between mother and child.

Yet Sethe's milk also has negative connotations. Her obsessive concern with nursing her child signifies a view of motherhood which turns out to be a very unhealthy, destructive one. The nursing stage is essential in a person's development, yet it is only a stage, and Morrison demonstrates a universal truth: Mother and child must outgrow their initial relationship, namely the symbiosis that typifies that period of life in which they are engrossed in each other, locked up in the exclusive dual relationship characteristic of the pre-Oedipal stage. One immediately recognizes a major theme of Beloved, which has been expansively commented upon(7) and whose analysis I will therefore take for granted. A fact that seems to have been overlooked, however, although it is relevant to the study of Sethe's conception of motherhood, is that she has the same kind of attitude toward Denver as toward Beloved, even if it takes a much milder form, since Denver is now eighteen. One cannot speak of a dual relationship in the full sense of the term, as is the case with Beloved, yet the mother's over-protectiveness--her order not to step out of the home (i.e., her desire to keep her daughter confined to the closed circle of the maternal space)--together with her explicit insistence that Denver is a" child"(8) instead of the adult she should see in her at eighteen, testifies to her reluctance, indeed her failure, to renounce her initial fusion with her children and recognize their separateness and independence. Besides, Sethe's remarks on motherhood,(9) while displaying her passionate love for her children, also betray a potentially dangerous sense of possession deriving from the notion that her children are mere extensions of herself.

Morrison dramatizes the disastrous consequences of this exclusive, paralyzing, withering kind of love. Denver has no self of her own: She has to go into the woods in search of the life of which she has been deprived; she desperately clings to Beloved's company because she has no other; and when her sister vanishes into the air of the cold room, she is left with an unbearable void within her--" ... she has no self" (123). Beloved, whose murder has forever frozen her in the dual relationship she was in at the moment of her death, finally comes close to devouring her mother.

Yet even more direct, unmistakable allusions are made to the deadliness of a relationship that remains modeled on the pre-Oedipal mother-child bond: Disorder and chaos invade the house in part III after Paul D has left, leaving the women free to indulge unreservedly in their fantasy. They plant flowers in the dead of winter; the loud jarring colors and chaotic arrangement of the garden, dimly reminiscent of Ophelia's madness, conjure up the image of a dangerously anarchic jungle. Indeed, the women's attitude is explicitly described as that of lunatics.(10)

The message is also conveyed through other rich metaphors: As Beloved's grasp on her mother tightens, the snow falls thicker and thicker, paralyzing all movement, bringing life to a halt. The process comes full circle when the creek turns into a huge ice patch, an unmistakable sign--especially in view of Morrison's emphasis on the symbolic significance of water--that death has struck 124. Indeed the whole thrust of the episode showing the three women taking advantage of the cold to go ice-skating on the river is to reveal the deadliness of the dual relationship Beloved and her mother--and more marginally Denver--have to this point regressed to: Paul D's departure has made it possible for them to turn in upon themselves and cut themselves off from any contact with the outside world, as shown by the circularity of the ring they form on the frozen creek. 11 The regression to the pre-Oedipal stage, which is markedly referred to in the next scene in which Sethe is shown heating up milk for the girls, is accompanied by a number of details which all connote death: the ice the women skate on; the paralyzing cold of winter; the grey, death-like color of the women's skin, which has "turned pewter in the cold and dying light" (174); and the final adjective, which is a direct comment on the significance of the scene. The leitmotif which punctuates the episode--"nobody. saw them falling"--is but a variation on that central theme.

We can now better understand the mutually illuminating and, to a large extent, mutually exclusive relationship between Sethe's--milk and her tree. The tree shows the way out of the deadlock into which the misguided maternal love materialized by the milk leads. The principle of division which presides over its structure stands as a cogent reminder that separation, differentiation--in human terms, individuation--is part of the law of nature or, more profoundly, of that vital, primal force which we have seen is the other major feature of the tree.

In the same way that the text dramatizes, both thematically and symbolically, the deadly danger involved in prolonging the pre-Oedipal bond beyond its proper time, it develops into narrative form the message inscribed in the tree's ramified structure, overtly enhancing its exemplary character.

The Maternal versus the Paternal World

Denver's story offers the most conspicuous and consistent demonstration of the passage from the stifling maternal world to self-fulfilling separation and emancipation. Until she realizes that her mother is about to die as a result of Beloved's destructive demands on her, Denver behaves like a very dependent child, clumsy and diffident, terrified at the thought of leaving the maternal space of the home. She has not yet evolved a self of her own. In that respect, as I have already mentioned, she is fundamentally very much like her elder sister. Yet alarm at her mother's plight finally forces her to take a decisive step and break away from her tightly closed, crippling universe. When she becomes aware that all three women are certain to starve to death unless she does something, she overcomes her terror and makes the very momentous and symbolic gesture of stepping out of the circle of 124 into the outside world: "She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help" (243). In so doing she initiates her own spiritual rebirth, as signified both by Lady Jones's calling her "baby" and by her own reaction to that name: "She did not know it then, but it was the word `baby' ... that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman" (248). She then becomes the one who provides sustenance for the family; even more significantly, she calmly accepts separation from her mother ("`I think I've lost my mother, Paul D'" [266]) and starts a romance with Nelson Lord.

Denver thus becomes the full-fledged person Paul D has all along wanted her to become: From the very beginning he has disapproved of Sethe's reluctance to acknowledge her daughter's independence. When Denver aggressively asks him how long he plans to stay and Sethe wants to apologize for her, Paul D rebukes Sethe for not letting the girl assume responsibility for her act:

"Look here. I apologize for her.

I'm real--"

"You can't do that. You can't

apologize for nobody. She got to do

that." (44)

The final scene between the two lovers is similarly indicative of Paul D's desire to respect and foster personal integrity; he urges Sethe to stop defining herself as a mother and to think of herself as a woman: "`You your best thing, Sethe. You are.'" His desire to "put his story next to hers" (273) instead of taking possession of it also reveals his deep sense of otherness, in contrast to the mother's spontaneous tendency to annex her children's self.

It is clear that in this sense Paul D accomplishes the Law of the Tree, offering an alternative to the kind of relationship represented by Sethe's milk. His role is undeniably a beneficent one: From the very beginning, he brings Sethe back to life; he makes the long dead nerves of her back ("... her back skin had been dead for years") responsive to his touch ("Maybe this one time she could ... feel the hurt her back ought to" [18]); he makes her see the colors she bad stopped being aware of after her fateful deed ("Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color.... after Paul D came, she was distracted by the two orange squares that signaled how barren 124 really was. He was responsible for that. Emotions sped to the surface in his company" [39]). In the final scene, he wakes her up from the dazed slumber she has sunk into, and starts massaging her half-dead body, repeating the healing ritual of Amy and Baby Suggs (272). It is also his love that enables Sethe to bring back to consciousness--and, in the process, accept--the repressed traumatic experiences of her past.

The lesson of the narrative is unambiguous: There is no harmony in the human world without a harmonious relationship between man and woman. The nucleus of the real family is not mother and children, but mother, father, and children. Withdrawing into a woman-to-woman relationship only leads to disaster. A man must come and unlock the mother-child dyad, open up the circle of the pre-Oedipal bond, as is best illustrated by the merciless, deadly fight that pits Paul D against Beloved, whose narcissistic possessiveness is radically antagonistic to his own attitude. It is significant that their struggle for power should make up the plot underlying that part of the narrative set in 1873. Paul D's first gesture is to drive the ghost out of 124, thus making room for a real family, with mother, father, and child, as the carnival scene suggests. But immediately upon their return from the fair Beloved bursts upon the scene and gradually forces Paul D out of 124. He finally leaves the house when Sethe reveals to him the real circumstances of her daughter's death, but Beloved's conspicuous presence at the top of the stairs hints that it may not be so much his revulsion at Sethe's gesture that is driving him away as Beloved's evil power (165). She is then free to unleash her desires and draw her mother back into the narcissistic world of her infancy. The community's intervention brings her invasion to an end, however, expelling her from the world of the living and symbolically destroying the maternal world she has embodied. Paul D can now come back, offering a different pattern of relationship.

The necessity of a male presence is also signified in the symbolic mode by a detail inserted in the description of Sethe's preparations for the outing on the frozen creek: Rummaging for shoes to put on, she can only find one of the man's blades (174). As a consequence, mother and daughters are unable to stand upright on the ice, a transparent sign that women should not think they can dispense with men, oust them from their rightful place. The only sound relationship is a triangular one, not the deceptive one of the ice-skating scene where the women are in reality but two, mother and daughter(s), but rather the relationship in the scene it pointedly parallels, the one showing Paul D taking Sethe and Denver to the local fair. Whereas the characteristic feature of the former episode is the ring formed by the women--and their constant falls--the carnival scene shows Paul D taking the women out of the circle of the home and making them renew their ties with the community: It was Sethe's "first social outing in eighteen years.... [Paul D] said howdy to everybody within twenty feet.... There was something about him ... that made the stares of other Negroes kind, gentle, something Denver did not remember seeing in their faces. Several even nodded and smiled at her mother ..."(46-48).

What Sethe's tree finally represents in contrast to the fake family of the maternal world and its basically tautological relationship is the real family--both the paradigmatic nuclear family of mother, father, and child and the wider family of "the village," figured by the tree's characteristically ramifying structure, which reconciles separateness and connectedness, self-reliance and solidarity. What seems however to signal a shift in Morrison's fiction is that, considering the role Paul D plays in Sethe's emancipation and his attitude toward Beloved, the tree stands as a reminder not only of the vital importance of community, an already familiar theme in her fiction, but also of the complementarity between man and woman and the necessity to give men their proper place in a world which, if it remains exclusively female, is doomed to mental suffocation (Sixo's heroic stature is also significant of this shift).(12)

Conclusion

The novel, which starts and develops as a tragedy, finally winds up with an optimistic conclusion: Denver releases herself from the prison of the maternal world and becomes an adult, a full-fledged person; Sethe and Paul D are reunited, and the mother accepts to grow into a woman; the community and the people of 124 are finally reconciled. Both individually and collectively, they thus become the tree whose law they had previously violated. It is therefore the tree's regenerative power that prevails and helps erase the transgressions that have been committed against it. Indeed, Sethe's very name has been encapsulating the message from the start, functioning as a central, even a master, emblem structuring the text, irradiating it with its powerful symbolic meaning--a meaning which is both concealed and conspicuous: concealed because it is symbolic and therefore calls for deciphering, yet conspicuous when one breaks the surface of words. For Sethe's name cannot but call to mind the legend of Seth, the biblical character whose story undoubtedly presided over Morrison's choice of her protagonist's name, considering its relevance to the text: As Seth's father Adam lay dying, the archangel Michael offered Seth a bough which, coming from the forbidden tree of Eden, was endowed with marvelous healing virtues. The bough was no help to Adam, who was already dead when his son came to him, but when Seth planted the branch on his grave, it grew into the tree which eventually provided wood for the cross on which Jesus was crucified.(13)

The tree that is stamped on Sethe's name--stamped on her soul as it is on her flesh--thus duplicates and concentrates upon itself the meaning that unfolds in the diachrony of the narrative. It brings into play the forces of life and death and, because of the part the tree plays in Christ's Resurrection, foretells what the narrative gradually reveals--the victory of Life over Death. Sethe's name thus epitomizes the drama that builds around the numerous trees that people the narrative, beckoning to the bewildered readers in their search for meaning. Slavery has transgressed the Law of Life and Growth, the Law of the Tree. Yet what the trees enfolded in Sethe's name and the narrative also demonstrate is that beyond transgression lies regeneration.

Notes

(1.) Concerning the moral ambiguity of good and evil in the novel, see Otten and the author's own comments in "Intimate Things in Place" ("One can never define good and evil. Sometimes good looks like evil; sometimes evil looks like good.... evil is as useful as good is" [476]) and "A Conversation" ("The best thing that is in us is also the thing that makes us sabotage ourselves" [584]).

(2.) See in particular "Rootedness," in which Morrison, after explaining that the oral quality of her fiction is a direct heritage of her Afro-American background, complains that critics often fail to judge her books in terms of "their accomplishment within the culture out of which" she writes (342).

(3.) On the conception of the body and the definition of selfhood in African culture, see Thomas and Luneau 27-29, 33, 35; see also Zahan 19-20.

(4.) "If my work is faithfully to reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture, it must make conscious use of the characteristics of its art forms and translate them into print: antiphony, the group relationship to audience performance, the critical voice which upholds tradition and communal values and which also provides occasion for an individual to transcend and/or defy group restrictions" ("Memory" 388-89). Sale analyzes this aspect of the book.

(5.) Throughout the book, the ability to perceive colors is presented as a symptom of sensitivity to life: The blindness to colors that has been paralyzing Sethe since the murder of her child (89) is suddenly dispelled when Paul D's love reawakens her to a sense of life (38-39). After the murder, Baby Suggs gradually loses all interest in life except for colors, which are the only surviving sign of her former passionate attachment to it. Beloved, who hungers for life, is fascinated by the orange squares on Baby's quilt (54, 77-78).

(6.) In his chapter on "Regenerative Trees," Eliade describes the tree as "a source of Life," giving various examples showing that the mere fact of touching a tree is "beneficial, fortifying, fertilizing" (261-62).

(7.) The reader may refer to my article in Americana and the papers quoted there.

(8.) "`Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing'" (45).

(9.) "The best thing she was was her children" (251); "`She was my best thing' "(272); "all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful" (163).

(10.) "It was as though her mother had lost her mind ..." (240). Denver later speaks of "their lunatic asylum" (250).

(11.) It is also signified by Sethe's pointed unawareness of the footprints that Stamp has left around the house (181-82) and her decision to remain tightly locked up in 124: "`Paul D convinced me there was a world out there and that I could live in it. Should have known better. Did know better. Whatever is going on outside my door ain't for me. The world is in this room' "(182-83). "... there is no world outside my door" (184).

(12.) See the comments Morrison makes in "Rootedness" about Song of Solomon, a novel which starts dramatizing the "nourishing" role played by men (in my opinion, in a much more muted way an in Beloved): "Pilate had a dozen years of close, nurturing relationships with two males, her father and her brother. And that intimacy and support was in her and made her fierce and loving because she had that experience. Her daughter Reba had less of that and related to men in a very shallow way. Her daughter had even less of an association with men as a child, so that the progression is really a diminishing of their abilities because of the absence of men in a nourishing way in their lives.... That is the disability we must be on guard against for the future--the female who reproduces the female who reproduces the female" (344).

(13.) As Eliade remarks (250-51), several versions of the legend developed in the Middle Ages; they all focus however on the regenerative power of the tree, which consistently metamorphoses into the symbol of Redemption.

Works Cited

Bonnet, Michele. "Histoire Singuliere, Histoire Collective: la Double Identite de Beloved." Americana 11. Paris: Presses de I'Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, 1994. 33-37.

Eliade, Mircea. Traite d'Histoire des Religions. Rev. ed. Paris: Payot, 1968.

Mbiti, John S. Concepts of God in Africa. New York: Praeger, 1970.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

--. "Memory, Creation and Writing." Thought 59 (1984): 385-90.

--. "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." Black Women Writers. Ed. Mad Evans. Garden City: Anchor, 1984. 339-45.

--. "The Site of Memory." Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Ziesser. Boston: Houghton, 1987. 103-24.

Naylor, Gioda, and Toni Morrison. "A Conversation." Southern Review 21.3 (1988): 567-93.

Otten, Terry. The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.

Paquet, Anne-Made. "Beloved: Tree of Flesh, Tree of Life." "Beloved, She's Mine." Ed. Genevieve Fabre and Claudine Raynaud. Paris: Cetanla. 1993. 115-25.

Sale, Maggie. "Call and Response as Critical Method: African Oral Tradition and Beloved." African American Review 26 (1992): 41-50.

Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Thomas, Louis Vincent, and Rene Luneau. La Terre Africaine et ses Religions. Paris: Larousse Universite, 1975.

Zahan, Dominique. Religion, Spirituatite et Pensee Africaines. Paris: Payot, 1970.

Michele Bonnet is an associate professor at the Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, where she teaches American literature. An earlier version of this essay was presented as a talk at the University of Provence (France) at a G.R.E.N.A. colloquium in March 1994.