Literary articles - Toni Morrison 2024

Toni Morrison's Beloved: Space, Architecture, Trauma

Andrew Hock Soon Ng

Space is a prominent feature in Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987/1988), and whether it is literal or figurative, it compels an allegorical appreciation as to how and what it signifies. For example, 124 Bluestone is unmistakably an architecture that reifies pastness and entrapment. Here, Sethe and Denver are locked in a persistent memory that refuses to set them free. The Clearing, the backyard over which 124 Bluestone overlooks, is, as its name suggests, a place of renewal. This is where Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law, encourages the black people to reacquaint themselves with their bodies that have been violated by slavery (88). There is the ironically named Sweet Home, a place which only evokes painful memories for those who once sojourned there. But the novel also references figurative space to speak of memories, emotions and sometimes ideology. Paul D's heart, for example, is spatially configured as “a tobacco tin lodged in his chest” into which his traumatic memories are placed so that “nothing in this world could pry it open” (113). In this way, he protects himself from being overwhelmed by the perpetual loss (of identity, of family and friends) he experiences. Sethe sees memory as space filled with sorrow or gaps (which she calls “empty space” [95]). And finally, the whitefolk's fear of, and desire for, power over their slaves are metaphorized as a jungle of their own creation (198-99).

As much as space functions metaphorically in the narrative, it is also undeniable that space, especially place, is also a literal, material, and geographical reality which carries social and psychological significances. Criticisms of Beloved tend to ignore that 124 Bluestone, for example, is also a place where Sethe and her daughter live, and whose very presence as architecture refracts the two women's uncanny, and their hopes. To cite two recent examples: in “Haunted Houses, Sinking Ships” by Samira Kawash, apart from postulating that “the danger signaled by ‘haunting' derives from the very structure of the house, not from some external element,” the essay has actually very little to say about the house's materiality, and the way this materiality influences its dwellers. Instead, the house is read as a prison metaphor, which Kawash associates with the system of slavery (74). Similarly, despite J. Hillis Miller's innovative focus on boundaries and space in Morrison's novel in his essay “Boundaries in Beloved,” his reading merely uses the novel as a launching pad to meditate on several contemporary US policies on national security and international relations. Undeniably, such scholarship attests to the dexterity of the novel to invite multiple interpretations and meditations on various levels, but as essays discussing space, they fall short of actually delving into space as, quite frankly, space.

My interest is in Beloved's representation of space as dimensions to register trauma. It is important to consider 124 Bluestone not merely as a metaphor of a stubborn, destructive past, but as a literal place whose haunting has to do with how its inhabitants negotiate with lived space. Following Elizabeth Grosz (who draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology),1 I argue that a house does “come alive” in the way it invariably embodies its dwellers' desires, and that this “aliveness” is important as a critical juncture where the trauma of memory and identity converge. Trauma, in this sense, is not something ensconced within, and which perpetually disturbs, the psyche, but can become transcribed onto the very walls of a lived environment: it becomes at once symptomatic and visible, unseen yet obvious. Linked to trauma is an important theme, which is also spatially captured and conceptualized in Morrison's novel: “rememory.” This essay concludes by framing the narrative's treatment of space against Donald Kuntze's elegant tripartite reading of architecture as virtuality, secrecy, and monstrosity, and relating it to Deleuze's concept of the fold (pli). Kuntze shows that architecture, like reading, requires interpretation, but the silence and “untranslatability” (28) of certain architectural experience sometimes renders this endeavor difficult, even unforthcoming.2 This, however, does not mean that interpretation should then be abandoned, but “read” all the more in order to establish a connection between dweller, space, and history. Although a “melancholic” enterprise, interpreting architecture is necessary because it is what ultimately bridges “this moment” to “other spaces, other times, and other meanings, completely here and now” (35).

124 Bluestone: The Architectural Uncanny
Much of Beloved takes place at 124 Bluestone. The narrative consistently represents its “aliveness,” especially through personification. For example, we are told at the start of the novel that “124 was spiteful” (3), which directly grants the architecture an identity. Not just and address, 124 is an entity with a name, and along with this, tyrannical attributes that render its inhabitants fearful and helpless. Sethe's two sons have “snatched up [their] shoes and crept away” (3), while her daughter, Denver, and herself have given in to the house, doing “what they could, and what the house permitted” (4) in order to continue living there. As an address, the house's numbers are significant. For William Handley, they imply the inevitable effect of misrecognition that occurs when “one speaks for another” (685). What Handley means is that “representing” through storytelling is a deeply ethical enterprise, but one which is fraught with the problem of misreading. To speak on behalf of another requires interpreting that otherness, which inevitably renders it “fictional.” The receiver of that “fiction” (the reader, us), twice removed from the other of which is being spoken, thus doubly misrecognizes it because two layers of interpretation are involved. This complication, Handley surmises, is reflected in the way Sethe's home is addressed:

The double misrecognition or misreading between Sethe and Beloved occurs in a structure—Sethe's home—that houses the allegory of our own reading: “124” addresses this double specularity, or this doubling relationship, in that the numbers each double the one preceding. The pictographically specular address is addressed to the reader, an allegory of whose activity is mirrored in the processes of Sethe's mourning, in her attempts to account for Beloved. (685)

Sethe's attribution of the haunting to a “baby ghost” (Morrison 96) reveals an inability to perceive the haunting as relating to herself. This directly results in her failure to recognize who or what Beloved is. Sethe, in other words, is unable to read Beloved properly because the story she furtively allows herself now effectively denies this daughter any existence. As such, Beloved becomes an interstitial entity, hovering between “thereness” and textual void. As a reading experience, the novel is unsettling because the reader no longer “feels at home” in the text, for the anchoring normally established by clear characterization is lost.

Handley's reading, innovative as it may be, rehearses, however, the problem of allegorizing place, which tells us nothing about the house itself. Also, Handley's theory elides altogether a consideration of the missing number in the sequence. Number three is noteworthy because, like Beloved, Sethe's third child, its absence is what announces its presence all the more. The number three is represented by virtue of its invisibility, in the way Beloved lingers as an unseen, unspoken presence that saturates the house. Sethe, Denver, and Beloved constitute three beings who live in 124 Bluestone, but their community cannot, however, be quantified by the number three. Three, in this sense, reflects the ambiguity that Beloved embodies—an empty space that nevertheless resounds as an inevitable trace.

The house is intimately connected with its inhabitants, especially Sethe. Somehow, despite its oppressive nature, the house seems to modulate its moods according to Sethe's. For example, when Sethe is about to respond to Paul D's (who had just arrived) suggestion that she and Denver move out, “Something in the house braced” (15), as if it too is waiting in anticipation for what Sethe may say. From that moment, the house diverts its spite towards

Paul D. He begins to tremble, but soon realizes that “his legs were not shaking because of worry, but because the floorboards were and the grinding, shoving floor was only part of it. The house itself was pitching” (18). Indeed, this physical movement is the consequence of the house's anger, but this anger also mirrors Sethe's own resentment at Paul D's indiscretion. For Sethe, the house symbolizes ownership—of “having” something at last, of “claim[ing] herself” (95), and being able to “manage every damn thing” (97); it is not “a little thing” from which she can easily walk away, as he seems to assume (23). Sethe is of course aware that the house is haunted, but fails to realize that she is the source. The haunting, in other words, is a refraction of Sethe being there. Denver, on the other hand, actually realizes that the haunting is connected to her mother, although she does not know why (because she was too young to remember when Sethe murdered Beloved). This revelation, in a passage I will quote at length, came to her “an autumn long before Paul D moved into the house with her mother”:

Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, tremble and fell into fits. Her steps and her gaze were the cautious ones of a child approaching a nervous, idle relative (someone dependent but proud). A breastplate of darkness hid all the windows except one. Its dim glow came from Baby Suggs' room. When Denver looked in, she saw her mother on her knees in prayer, which was not unusual. What was unusual (even for a girl who had lived all her life in a house peopled by the living activity of the dead) was that a white dress knelt down next to her mother and had its sleeve around her mother's waist…. The dress and her mother together looked like two friendly grown-up women—one (the dress) helping out the other. (29)

Through a series of metonyms, this passage carefully links the house, the haunting, and Sethe. Denver never registers the house as merely a structure, but intuitively realizes its “humanness” as interrelated to her mother. More importantly, the house is characterized by deep sadness and overwhelming terror—again signifying its connection to Sethe. When Denver witnesses the “ghost” caressing her mother, its posture and action seem to mimic Sethe's, as if they were each other's double. This implies that the ghost is not only connected to Sethe, but is engendered by her as well. That is, the ghost is the energy and memory of Sethe's pain concentrated, at this moment, in a single spectral entity, but which at other times, is writ large throughout the house, permeating the entire architecture to culminate in a haunting.

The haunting of 124 Bluestone, in a sense, warrants a discussion of the uncanny because it is related to trauma. Both are the persistent recurrence of something that should, but cannot, remain repressed. Anthony Vidler, in The Architectural Uncanny, a study which revises Freud's model, proposes that “the ‘uncanny' is not a property of space itself nor can it be provided by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming” (11). He further qualifies, if actual buildings or spaces are interpreted through this lens [that is, as uncanny], it is not because they themselves possess uncanny properties, but rather because they act, historically or culturally, as representations of estrangement…. [T]here is no such thing as an uncanny architecture, but simply architecture that, from time to time and for different purposes, is invested with uncanny qualities. (11-12)

Vidler's argument reminds us that Freud's theory of the uncanny is foremost an architectural one. In his essay “The ‘Uncanny,'” Freud derives this idea from a careful consideration of the German term for homeliness, heimlich, which he claims is “identical” to its opposite as well, unheimlich (unhomely) (225-26). From this, it is implied that inherent within the home is its own threat: home, in other words, is itself a danger to its inhabitant. But as Vidler remarks, this sense of the unhomely is derived from the inhabitant herself. The inhabitant projects her own uncanny onto the lived space, which in turn, harbors it as a constant presence that discomfits her. It is a cyclic process: both lived space and inhabitant feed on each other's anxiety. The fracturing of this allegedly safe space and its transformation into a menacing one directly plots such a space as interstitial. And because the uncanny is a “mental state” transcribed by its dweller onto the space of the home, it collapses the signifier of security and its antithesis into a single experience, and relegates the dweller to a threshold existence—one which straddles the real and the irreal (the traumatic).3 In other words, the home has now become uninhabitable precisely because it houses that which should have been kept out but which, ironically, has been invited in by the dweller herself. Because the uncanny resides in the unconscious, its threat remains shadowy and shapeless, always experienced as felt, but ultimately unnameable and unspeakable. The architectural uncanny, in this sense, is at once the unconscious spatial extension of the owner, and an eerie instance of a house taking over, or possessing, its owner.

Vidler's view that an uncanny space is also historically and culturally determined ascribes space with a certain persistent energy that haunts it. Space, in other words, can be invested with particular (cultural) signifiers or qualities at a given moment (historical) in time, after which these qualities will remain as spectral presences that persist indefinitely. Such a view of space certainly contravenes rational perspectives, but this does not suggest something “supernatural” about it. Space, as many contemporary theorists have articulated, is not merely a neutral container of objects; it accrues specific meanings based on the way its inhabitant negotiates with it and other objects occupying it. As Kathleen Kirby asserts,

Space forms a medium for reconnecting us with the material, but it also maintains a certain fluidity, a mobility: If we are speaking of space in the abstract, it is a certain fluidity, division, and reshaping. A space persists only as long as the coordinates holding it open are deliberately maintained, and the shapes and boundaries modeling space are, at least ideally, open to continual negotiation. (175)

Whether space remains static or is transformed depends on how it is “thought,” or “abstracted.” The coordinates of space are plotted in its dweller's psyche, and when these coordinates are shifted, so will the significance of space. In the case of a haunted environment, it is arguable that the energy enervating it has settled into a kind of a dynamic containment, and as such, has made it a locatable, if disturbing, “place.” Place, unlike space, involves boundaries (176), and the parameters inscribing its limits can potentially transform it into a trap. It is unsurprising that stories of haunting are almost always about an architecture, usually a house. It is also unsurprising that Freud's treatment of the uncanny is metaphorized as the home—a bounded space (place) where comfort effortlessly slides into terror. Within such a place, it is never certain that the specter is “real” or ultimately a projection of its dweller's traumatic memory.

Trauma, according to Cathy Caruth, is “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11). Trauma, in this sense, is sometimes conceived as a haunting because of the similar psychic mechanisms triggered in both. From a psychological point of view then, it is arguable that the haunting Sethe experiences is actually the intrusion of trauma into her everyday life. Caruth further states that trauma is an “overwhelming experience” that must nevertheless be forgotten in order for the patient to survive. In other words, trauma must remain unclaimed—“an experience that immediate understanding cannot permit” (11). The same could be said of the uncanny. Both are encounters that, once experienced, can no longer be denied even though their repression is vital in order for the patient to carry on living. Such an impossibility affects the existential condition of the subject. She becomes constrained within a perpetual loop that compels a re-experience of the traumatic/uncanny moment even though she refuses, or rejects, it. In Beloved, Sethe cannot rest in her unclaimed experience because the house itself is constantly compelling her to confront her past. Despite her valiant and relatively successful endeavor to never “go inside” her memory (46), the story she refuses to acknowledge takes on an energy that permeates the house, and which now threatens her life.

It is possible that Sethe's trauma may be less to do with her refusal to bear witness (again) to the distressing memory then it is a loss of capacity to be a witness at all. As Dori Laub observes, “it was inconceivable that any historical insider could remover herself sufficiently from the contaminating power of the event so as to remain a fully lucid, unaffected witness, that is, to be sufficiently detached from the inside to stay entirely outside of the trapping roles, and the consequent identities, either of the victim or the executioner” (66). Accordingly, trauma is the victim's inability to properly see the “contaminating” event, thus clouding her objectivity. When her witnessing is placed under erasure and results in her experience “no longer communicable even to” herself, the traumatic event becomes potentially a non-event—it “never took place. This loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one's history is abolished, one's identity ceases to exist as well” (66-67). If, as Laub observes, both victim and executioner are implicated in trauma, how much more delirious this event would be if the individual is both victim and executioner, as in Sethe's case. Indeed, both mother and daughter exist on the brink of disappearance: abandoned by the black community after the “misery” (Morrison 171),4 both women are in danger of gradually fading from history and communal memory because Sethe has done more than just kill her daughter: she has failed as a witness. Her refusal to face her past renders that traumatic moment a non-event, and by extension, Sethe's eventual nonexistence as well. That she is trapped in trauma and cannot escape is due, ironically, to her repudiation of that trauma by avoiding any discussion of it. As Nancy Jesser observes, “Sethe's resistance to re-living the past has cast her into a kind of limbo, with no judgment and no forgiveness” (334). Her life has ceased continuing, and she is perpetually looped in the traumatic moment that has become spatially embodied as her house. As she tells Paul D, “Whatever is going on outside my door ain't for me. The world is in this room. This here's all there is and all there needs to be” (Morrision 183).

The novel establishes the house as a spatial location for trauma in two important ways. First, although the house is a double-storied architecture, narrative focus largely remains on two areas: the kitchen and Sethe's bedroom (formerly occupied by Baby Suggs). Both areas are significantly affiliated with Sethe's “misery.” Arguably, the kitchen was the space that initiated her traumatic experience. In her desire to celebrate Sethe and Denver's escape from Sweet Home and safe arrival at 124 Bluestone, Baby Suggs held a grand cookout (156) and invited the entire black community. However, instead of gratitude, the community reciprocated with resentment at Baby Suggs' alleged “special,” “blessed” status (157). This unspoken “meanness” (157) led to complacence and failure to warn, on that fateful day, either Sethe or Baby Suggs of Schoolteacher's (Sethe's owner) imminent arrival to reclaim Sethe and her children, precipitating the “misery” afterwards. After the traumatic incident, Baby Suggs retreated to her bedroom, and would spend her remaining days there in bed. Despite her communal standing as a kind of preacher who is able to rouse the community to love its sullied flesh, Baby Suggs will end her days defeated by slavery's cruelty. When Sethe moves into Baby Suggs room after the latter's death, this insinuates the former's identification with defeat as well. Time now stands still in 124 Bluestone, whose walls are etched with the traumatic memory of what Sethe had done. The house has become a spatial monument testifying to Sethe's trauma and stasis, for although she is alive, she has nevertheless ceased to exist. And that Sethe occupies the kitchen and her bedroom most of the time when at home (at least during the course of the narrative) suggests, eerily, an unconscious attachment to her trauma.

Second, it is noteworthy that Beloved, when she becomes flesh, nevertheless identifies herself as a place (the house). She tells Denver, for example, that “This the place I am” (123; my emphasis). Of course, this could be Beloved's clumsy way of saying that 124 is where she belongs—that is, with her mother. But it is equally possible to construe this strange statement as Beloved establishing, not so much her possession of the house, but her being embodied by it (and vice versa). In this sense, the notion of haunting in Beloved provides an alternative approach to the haunted house narrative; instead of distinguishing the haunting entity from the haunted space, Morrison's tale suggests that the two are merged and inseparable. Hence, when Beloved appears as a young woman, it is not only specter taking on flesh, but a house becoming personified. This interpretation also provides an explanation as to why Beloved's appearance as a young girl coincides with Paul D's reentry into Sethe's life. A familiar view in scholarship of the novel is that Paul D's arrival “disturbs the unhealthy equilibrium at 124. In evicting the ghost and touching Sethe, he initiates the process of articulating ‘word-shapes' [99] for the past that still imprisons them” (Lawrence 237). If, as mentioned earlier, the ghost of 124 resents Paul D's presence, this view, accordingly, posits that Paul D reawakens Sethe's hope and desire for a future—a possibility which the ghost cannot allow. He is Sethe's savior, and the ghost an evil presence that incarcerates the women. Unfazed by his experience at 124, Paul D proceeds to exorcise the specter (Morrision 18), an enterprise which he momentarily succeeds. But such a consideration suffers two limitations: it fails to account for Beloved's reappearance, and uncritically paints Beloved as menace. This, in fact, is far from accurate: that Beloved returns in the guise of a girl will eventually lead to Sethe's salvation. Paul D's arrival may signify promise for Sethe, but it does not guarantee her escape from trauma as long as she is unwilling to confront her past. As she solemnly declares to Paul D, her future lies “in keeping the past at bay” (42). Beloved's recurrence, this time as flesh, provides the needed catalyst to compel Sethe into admitting her repressed memory, something which 124 has failed to accomplish in the last eighteen years because Sethe has persistently ignored and misrecognized the significance of its haunting. The house wants her (and by extension, even Paul D and Denver) to face her trauma, but she conscientiously refuses (although she remains unconsciously attached to areas in the house that reiterate her pain most); in the process, she gradually contributes to the annihilation of her history, and inevitably herself and Denver. Paul D's arrival, however, sets the house in concentrated motion: it will henceforth focus all its energy into an embodiment of trauma—the figure of a young woman—that Sethe, Denver, and Paul D cannot deny.

Such an interpretation insinuates that underlying the story of these people is the problem of seeing. The inhabitants of 124, each entertaining a private trauma, fail to see that suffering will not be surmounted unless it is communicated and confronted. Paul D has locked his pain away in “a tobacco tin lodged in his chest” (113), and Sethe is too busy “keeping the past at bay,” while Denver is only interested in the present. For them, the house is just haunted—daunting, but manageable—nothing more. It merely functions as background, albeit an unsettling one, and “insofar as it is experienced as a background, [it] is visually present to a subject even though it makes no determinate contribution to [their] experience” (Kelly 82). In refusing to admit the past, the three of them encourage a self-reflexive blindness which the haunting alone cannot reverse. If the house is to help them find liberation and peace, it must transcend its normative role to play a more determinative one in: it must, in other words, move from being background to something more palpable so that its inhabitants can “get a better, fuller, or more complete experience of the focal thing” (97). The house must compel them to “see a point of view on the figure, a point of view that solicits [them] to take it up” (97). It achieves this when it transposes hauntedness to the figure of a childwoman. In shifting trauma from building to body, the ghost is soliciting a focal point so as to force its inhabitants to “take [trauma] up…better, fuller and more complete,” so that a necessary “change” can finally be experienced.

But success is, unfortunately, unforthcoming. So immobilized are Sethe and Paul D by trauma that they are unable to recognize Beloved for what or who she is. To them, she is another young, black, and troubled woman to whom Sethe has taken a liking. Sethe initially even fails to notice that this girl shares her dead daughter's name. In the way that she is drawn to the kitchen and the bedroom of 124, she is attracted to Beloved because the latter embodies her trauma, although she remains unable to “see” this. Sethe registers Beloved as possibly a good companion for Denver, which is justification enough for this mysterious young woman to stay with them (Morrison 56). Even when Sethe eventually realizes Beloved's identity, her misrecognition continues. In fact, Beloved is divested further of the trauma she embodies for she has now become the daughter who has miraculously returned from the dead, thus cancelling out the past altogether. In failing to revalidate the past, however, Sethe becomes even more entrapped in her unspeakable trauma.

Paul D, on the other hand, increasingly perceives Beloved as a threat as he finds himself sexually drawn to her. Her “shining” (65), which could arguably be a reference to her allure, is viewed as an attempt at arousing him. This is again misrecognition because Beloved's desire for intimacy is meant to affect his release; as the narrative later reveals, when Paul D eventually has intercourse with Beloved, what he experiences is healing:

She moved closer with a footfall he didn't hear and he didn't hear the whisper that flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, “Red heart. Red heart,” over and over again. (117)

Yet Paul D's healing is complicated by fear and anxiety, not because it is Beloved who is bending him at last to his desires, but because the experience proves overwhelming. Paul D has learned to store away his traumatic memories deep in his psyche for so long that he is unprepared for a re-acquaintance with them.

Curiously however, the misreading of Beloved are equaled by her growth in stature (242). If she is the concentrated focal point at which 124 arrives in order to foreground the trauma of its inhabitants, now it is as if she is trying to exert her size in order to force them into recognition. It will soon become evident, however, that she cannot achieve this aim. Instead, Paul D flees the house and Sethe plunges deeper into paralyzing guilt, while all this time, Beloved continues to grow larger. Sethe's disintegration, as opposed to Beloved's amplification, is captured in spatial terms as well: she becomes “confined…to a corner chair” (250), implying not only her diminished place, but her gradual relegation to furniture (a motionless thing) as well.

Denver, who alone recognizes the symbiotic relationship between Beloved and the house, realizes that her mother's misrecognition of Beloved is fuelling the latter's detrimental energy. To save her mother (and herself), she must “step off the edge of the world” (243) to connect their history to the rest of the community's in order to encourage communication. If her mother cannot face her trauma because she refuses to speak it, then the community must articulate it on her behalf and bring to fruition at last what Beloved intends. Denver must, in a way, help transform what is otherwise a “solitary activity” with “no social component” (van der Kolk and van der Hart 163), to something communal and directly, historical. Thirty women respond to Denver's plea for help, including Ella, whose past also hints of infanticide. Together, they walk “slowly, slowly toward 124” (257), and as they near the house, “Ella hollered…. In the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what that sound sounded like” (259). This wordless sound is the utterance of the unspeakable, a sound that cannot be symbolized by words. It recalls pain and violence, and is shared by all the women in their intense acquaintance with slavery and loss. When the sound finally finds “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). For Sethe, “it was as though the Clearing had come to her” again (261), thus connecting the present and the past to explode in a confrontation with her trauma again.5

“Rememory”: An Interlude
Space functions as a repository for memories, even those that have been repressed. As Vidler notes, the uncanny quality—a dimension of memory— of a place is often induced by its dweller. But to argue that the uncanny in Beloved is solely Sethe's transcription of trauma into spatial terms is to deny the fantastic element of the narrative. The novel, in the end, cannot be reduced to a psychological case study because the earthy presence of Beloved vexes such an absolution. Indeed, part of the narrative's power is Beloved's profound ambiguity as a presence. As much as Vidler's model is useful to understand Sethe's trauma, that Beloved is also a ghost story necessarily compels the reader into acknowledging that 124's “aliveness” is also ultimately separable from, although related to, Sethe. The merging of trauma with architecture sets the house off as an entity energized by an invisible agency which, in time, consolidates into a singular focal point that perpetuates, and transforms the nature of, haunting. But the house is not the only site of haunting and trauma in the novel, as Sethe's musing on “rememory”—an important theme in the novel—will reveal.

The fantastic nature of Morrison's narrative must be broaden to include Beloved's representation of space as well.6 On the one hand, the narrative clearly demonstrates that it is humans who give space meaning. Space is significant as long as humans dwell in, and negotiate with, it. Space and the objects occupying it may have a “pre-objective” reality (that is, a kind of a priori status), but the value of their objectiveness can only be established by a perceiving individual. As Colin Smith avers, “This field [of space] is real, because it is resistant, but pre-objective, and it is precisely the aim of perception to bring objects into it. Perception will do so in accordance with the dictates of another ‘field,' which is myself, a historical being with a situation and certain exigencies” (111). To a point, 124's relationship with Sethe affirms such a perspective. Although the house has a shadowy history—its pre-objective reality—long before Baby Suggs and Sethe ever lived in it (Morrision 259), it accrues a haunted value only when Sethe brings to it her other “fields.” Morevoer, Colin's view also reinforces Vidler's point about space as historically (and culturally) determined. The significance of space is dependent on how a dweller, who embodies previous space-dependent fields, comes to view her current self as “spaced.” And because the self is always limited to the extent of her body and dwelling, her experience of space is always reduced to that of place, both past and present. A new place when arrived at will signify according to how the individual has experienced preceding places. Comparison between places becomes inevitable, as the individual brings residual memories (and feelings) of her previous experience(s) of place(s) to the present one. This can result in either an affirmative or unsettling sense of belonging.

On the other hand, Beloved also suggests that space can inherit an “identity” of its own, one which, despite being shaped by human activities and memories, ultimately transcends them. To put it differently, there are places that preserve memories indefinitely, including memories that are independent of their original inhabitants but which affect subsequent sojourners nevertheless. Such a configuration of place is implied in the notion of “rememory.” As Sethe tells Denver,

If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place—the picture of it— stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world...I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there…. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear and see something going on…. And you think it's you thinking it up…. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was [Sweet Home] before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away…if you go there—you who never was there—…it will be there for you, waiting for you. So Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over—over and done with—it's going to always be there waiting for you. (36)

For Kristin Boudreau, this passage reflects Sethe's attempt at realizing her pain in spatial terms so as to lend her experience with meaning and substance. “If,” as Boudreau argues, “language cannot render the experience of suffering, at least, Sethe believes, that experience can continue to occupy physical space in the world, so that a stranger may ‘bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else'” (462). But why should this be? Does Boudreau's reading not tacitly imply that it is Sethe who desires remembrance for her experience of trauma, and not be written off by history as another statistic? Although Boudreau remarks that such a desire is “an alternative to romanticism” (462), I am not sure how her reading can be anything but romantic. Furthermore, Sethe's opinion of such a space is blatantly pessimistic, unlike Boudreau's seemingly affirmative interpretation. Sethe realizes that such places are dangerous but inevitable, and duly warns Denver to avoid them. A more plausible interpretation of this passage is Sethe acknowledges that there are places in the world which harbor powerful, unseen forces that can adversely influence those who unwittingly enter them. Unlike the phenomenological model deployed thus far in this essay to consider the relationship between trauma and space, Sethe's formulation of rememory seems to evoke a sense of the mysterious in space, one intertwined with evil. There are, in other words, places that register a “break in plane which opens a communication between cosmic levels” (Shiner 432);7 such places preserve “recollections of ‘other' human worlds” (432) that are no longer available to contemporary dwellers but which somehow continue to influence them. Sacred places conform to such a category, but there are others. In fact, the type of place that constitutes Sethe's rememory, despite similar qualities it shares with what Mircea Eliade views as sacred space, is diametrically opposed to the latter in terms of functionality. For Eliade, sacred space “is equivalent to the creation of the world” (22), but a place haunted by rememory is annihilative.8 Nevertheless, one common denominator of both spaces is the interpenetration of temporality. Here, the past invades, and interfaces with, the present to reawaken the inhabitant's unspoken fears and desires. The inhabitant, in turn, must learn to confront and manage them, or risk dissolution. What she experiences in such a space may seem unfamiliar and otherworldly (“cosmic”), but they are, in truth, merely originary and repressed by time but not forgotten by space.

Conclusion
The fantastic nature of space in Morrison's novel can gainfully be considered through Donald Kuntze's meditation on architecture as an untranslatable moment. According to Kuntze, there is architecture whose power lies in its seeming reification of an “alien and prohibitive order alongside the normative” (28). Such architecture compels “reading” rather than just habitation (32) because its incongruence invites opposing meanings which, in turn, can potentially complicate dwelling. Kuntze identifies three distinct and related qualities inherent in this architectural type: virtuality, secrecy, and monstrosity. Virtuality is a spatial aspect that encourages tension and collision in terms of what it signifies. Architecture that exhibits this quality often carries contradictory meanings, and thus invites interpretation. But because interpretation is already always vexed by ambiguity, the architecture succeeds in maintaining its secret. This preservation of secret inevitably leads to nonclosure, which Kuntze sees as the architecture's monstrosity. To a large extent, the depiction 124 Bluestone subscribes to Kuntze's framework. It is unclear if the house is haunted or uncanny (in Vidler's sense). The impossibility of establishing the quality of the house, coupled with its already suspicious history (Morrision 259), transforms 124 into a virtual monument whose secret remains unacknowledgeable, and therefore monstrous. Even after Beloved is exorcised by the thirty women, her presence remains unmistakably imprinted upon the house, which stands “Like a child's house; the house of a very tall child” (270). The ambiguous line that concludes the novel—“This was not a story to pass on” (274)—only serves to reify the non-closure embodied by this architecture. In the end, whether or not Beloved was first a spectral entity that later took on flesh, or if she was, in the end, exorcised are merely moot points. What is clear is that the house will keep its secret and maintain its monstrosity, perhaps even after it has passed into (re)memory.

Yet, it is undeniable that the house is also the key to Sethe's healing. In this sense, 124 Bluestone also reflects Deleuze's concept of the pli, or the fold, in architecture. For Deleuze, the pli is a place that simultaneously conforms to and breaks away from the norms of social space. Deleuze writes that within such a place “the relation to oneself assumes an independent status. It is as if the relations of the outside folded back to create a doubling, allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension” (100). The pli, in other words, is a site that both entraps and liberates. More precisely, it is a place that liberates through entrapping, at least until the self “develops its own unique dimension.” The subject situated in the fold encounters immobility and violence, but also finds redemption and freedom. Arguably, 124 exemplifies such a paradox. The very fact that it houses Sethe's trauma and forces her to confront it daily (despite her valiant refusal), actually predisposes it towards healing. Sethe's “unique dimension” is the realization that she is her “own best thing” (Morrison 273), a revelation dawns as a result of the house folding back into itself in the form of a ghost. Beloved is, in the end, a “double” that mirrors Sethe's unspeakability, whose manifestation and exorcism metaphorically point to Sethe's revisitation of her traumatic past and her eventual liberation from it.

1See Grosz (92).

2Kuntze here is speaking specifically of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

3I prefer the term “irreal” to “unreal” because the latter seems to imply that trauma is, at the end of the day, imagined. Although it is true that trauma is psychological, and that some trauma exists only on the level of the imagined—that is, the patient had never encountered anything traumatic, but “believes” he did, and as such, symptomatically reenacts this original moment of trauma repeatedly—this does not mean that the exertion of the power of “imagined” trauma is to be dismissed as “unreal.” Whether the patient has indeed encountered a traumatic moment or imagines he does, his suffering is real, and must be accounted for.

4The “misery” is Stamp Paid's euphemism for the tragic event that saw Sethe attempting to murder her children.

5For insightful discussions, see Corey (1997) and Rushdy (1992).

6See Todorov (1973) for the development of the fantastic narrative.

7Shiner's argument is premised on Mircea Eliade's theory of sacred space.

8Eliade admits that there are such things as pseudo-religious space, that is, space invested with private meanings because they constitute for the subject a special moment in his life. But Eliade's examples are limited to happy moments, and the space he discusses are subsequently confined to birthplaces, “scenes of first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth” (24).

References

Boudreau, Kristin. “Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” Contemporary Literature 36.3 (1995): 447-65.

Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.

Corey, Susan. “The Religious Dimensions of the Grotesque in Literature: Toni Morrison's Beloved.” The Grotesque in Art and Literature: Theological Reflections. Eds. James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, MA: William B. Eerdmans, 1997. 227-42.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. S. Hand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York and London: Harcourt, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.'” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. XVII. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth P, 1953-75. 217-52.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Handley, William R. “The House a Ghost Built: Nommo, Allegory, and the Ethics of Reading in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” Contemporary Literature 36.4 (1995): 676-701.

Jesser, Nancy. “Violence, Home, and Community in Toni Morrison's Beloved.” African American Review 33. 2 (1999): 325-45.

Kawash, Samira. “Haunted Houses, Sinking Ships: Race, Architecture, and Identity in Beloved and Middle Passage.” The New Centennial Review 1.3 (2001): 67-86

Kelly, Sean Dorrance. “Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty.” The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Eds. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 2005. 74-110.

Kirby, Kathleen M. “Thinking Through the Boundary: The Politics of Location, Subjects and Space.” boundary 2 20 (1993): 173-89.

Kuntze, Donald. “Architecture as Reading: Virtuality, Secrecy, Monstrosity.” Journal of Architectural Education 41.4 (1988): 28-37.

Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 61-75.

Lawrence, David. “Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved.” Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. Ed. David Middleton. New York and London: Garland, 2000. 231-46.

Miller, J. Hillis. “Boundaries in Beloved.” symplokē 15.1-2 (2007): 24-39.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. London: Picador, 1988.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved.” American Literature 64.3 (1992): 567-97.

Shiner, Larry E. “Sacred Space, Profane Space, Human Space.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 40.4 (1972): 425-36.

Smith, Colin. “The Notion of Object in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.” Philosophy 39.148 (1964): 110-19.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Cleveland and London: The Press Case of Western U Reserve, 1973. van der Kolk, Bessel A., and Onno van der Hart. “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 158-82.

Vidler, Anthony. Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT P, 1992.