The Self And The Other

Beloved, the fifth novel written by Toni Morrison, depicts the life of ex-slave African Americans in the 1870s. Employing multiple voices and flashback, interweaving past and present, phantasy and reality together, Morrison not only represents vividly the inhuman treatment they suffer under slavery but also profoundly exposes the deep psychic damage on the black victims which hinders their aspiration from freedom years after their final escape from slavery. Beloved is mainly concerned with the intention of the characters who are trying to reconstruct the self and identity of which slavery had deprived them. Few of Morrison, up to now, have studied the novel from Lacan's mirror stage, which is, rich and complex in implication, first of all a theory about identity formation of human beings at the earliest stage of their life. While the main characters in the novel, like a child before the mirror stage, have no sense of distinct selfhood because of the psychological damage on them under slavery and all live in a state of identity confusion. In the regard, Lacan's theory of the mirror stage may shed light on the depiction of the figures in the novel Beloved. Therefore, this paper, in accordance with the presupposition of Lacan's theory about the mirror stage, attempts to probe into the hidden cause of their psychic devastation and traces their long and impeding process of self construction, aiming to point to the fact that one is ontologically as well as emotionally dependent upon the others to construct his or her selfhood and at the same time to prove the plausibility of the French thinker's theory about identity formation and to illustrate the possibility to apply it to an analysis of the characterization of Morrison. This paper begins with a brief introduction to Morrison's life experience and her works, followed by an introduction to the writing purpose as well as the study approach of this paper. The object of the study of this paper, Beloved, is loosely based on the 1850s historical event of Margaret Garner, a female black slave, who escaped from her Kentucky slave owner and took refuge in Cincinnati in Ohio with her husband and her children. When pursued by the slave owner, she seized a butcher knife and tried to take the lives of her children rather than return to slavery. She killed one daughter and then was overpowered. Enabled by a powerful imagination, in her work, Morrison models her main character Sethe on Margaret Garner and brings the dead baby the latter killed into life in the figure of a nineteen-year-old girl. Through the interaction of Beloved with Sethe, Denver and Paul D, this novel reveals the most profound individual anguish of each main character and accuses slavery of its psychological damage on the slaves. Part two provides a detailed literary review of the study of the novel Beloved. Part three mainly discusses Lacan's theory of mirror stage and self-formation. Western humanists place human subject in a privileged position and insist that our selfhood is built on natural spontaneity. According to Lacan's theory of mirror stage, it is impossible to gain any sense of selfhood and identity outside of relationships with other people. His famous "mirror stage" dramatizes the actual process of acquiring identity of children. According to this theory, human child is born prematurely. A long period after its birth, the child has no sense of itself as a whole being and therefore has no selfhood. Only after the mirror stage in which the child identifies with a whole image outside could he or she gain mental cohesion and develop into a separate being. Lacan's theory of mirror stage demonstrates that the self is developed in the relationships with others. Selfhood is not natural but a construction and derivation. In part four, an analysis is made in the unmaking of self in the novelBeloved. According to Lacan's theory of mirror stage, one's experience as a whole being is dependent upon the recognition of the other. In Beloved, the main characters were not only deprived of the love of...