Issue 1 : Emancipation Theory : Milton S. F. Curry

Emancipation Theory : Milton S. F. Curry
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Morrison acknowledges here that the black consciousness and the subject have never been fully owned by blacks themselves

The linkages between architectural theory and the spatial subtext that exists in black American literature, film, music, and other cultural idioms and icons is extraordinarily undervalued and overlooked. As I can only scratch the surface of this vast territory of undisclosed potential, I will do so with examples taken from a slave narrative and a novel with which many are familiar: Linda Brent's narrative and Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Linda Brent, in Incidents in The Life of A Slave Girl, calls to some future descendent to establish for her a home, a reprieve, a place for the slave (writing for the abolitionist movement) to rest her head, a place where there are no insects or mice of the larger power structure to corrupt the raw truth. Morrison, in attending to that call in Beloved, responds by attempting to locate the sins of slavery, and the joys of freedom within confinement that Brent so elegantly conveys in her own words, in the physical structure of the protagonist's home, 124. In attempting to effectuate the shifting identities of the African-American in contemporary life, Morrison utilizes as the main trope of her project the haunted house—a symbolic space, in which there exists no reprieve from the horror of slavery. It is, architecturally, a space of exile or confinement. A spatial description of 124 never occurs in the text. Instead, the reader learns more and more about the characteristics of the house through the characters themselves. The dynamic consciousness of the characters erupts into the space of the house; in that eruption, the house is transformed, from "just another weathered house needing repair,"¹⁵ into a jungle. 124 is the nerve center of every character and his or her own consciousness.

Morrison formulates a grotesque, highly contorted representation of slavery, which should be read as nothing short of revolutionary, using the trope of baby killing and the grotesque as a way to advocate subversive practice.¹⁶ White racism and the marginalization of women are drawn out in Beloved, not as subjects to which the specific experiences of the characters are subordinated, but instead as constantly living organisms knawing away at the consciousness of the reader. Consider the following passage:

It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them [blacks]. . .It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. . .The secret

spread of this new kind of whitefolks' jungle was hidden, silent, except once in a while when you could hear its mumbling in places like 124.

¹⁷

Morrison acknowledges here that the black consciousness and subject have never been fully owned by blacks themselves. Women, especially, did not have dominion over their own bodies: they were in constant danger of being raped or beaten by white masters. The idea of planting a jungle is internally contradictory—jungles evolve over time, they are not simply planted all at once. But the real implication here is that the jungle had previous ownership, and is only being transplanted into the blacks.

The acknowledged "spread" is part of an evolution of the jungle to the point of its becoming a kind of virus. Was it previously viral, or just a nuisance? Its first "spread" seems to be construed as an impediment, but not a virus; the second "secret spread" is most certainly hidden and necessarily viral, at least in its movement from one set of conditions to others. The "mumbling" is an instance in which the virus is seen and can be confronted—it is sufficiently visible or apparent to those who occupy 124. But is the "mumbling" that of the dead master or of a suicidal slave?

These questions alone form the fast-moving oscillation between the poles of a revolutionary discourse and the polite Western novel. The writing of Morrison's text is a highly political act; she is struggling with the same structures of subject positioning that Harriet Jacobs and other abolitionists were struggling with in positioning themselves above or below, within or without the abolitionist movement and all of its hegemonic baggage. Morrison problematizes the effects of slavery not only on those who were subjected to it, but on the subjector as well. Like a disease, the effects of slavery spread, and eventually attacked its maker. Slavery as the metaphor for a race of black people shamed by the New World is now slightly reversed; Morrison points to the hidden subtext of the "whitefolks' jungle" as a source of shame and disgrace. This begins to shift the site of critique from the psychology of the enslaved to the site of the normative construction of whiteness and white male patriarchy.

Morrison further solidifies the institutionality of the house as representative of structures both latent and exterior to it when she writes,

There was only one door to the house and to get to it from the back you had to walk all the way around to the front of 124, past the storeroom, past the cold house, the privy, the shed, on around to the porch.

¹⁸

The impenetrability of this house, within which is housed a multitude of spiritual and physical subjects, is ironic. The house, after all, is the inanimate one—that we should even speak of it in anthropomorphic terms is obtuse. But it seems that whenever one attempts to describe the oppressor using his terms, one is faced with the lingering presence of a residue of identity—either to be totally discarded or thrown back into the very formulation from which it arose.

Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled 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).

¹⁹

For Denver and the other characters, 124 is a human being, marked with the frailties of error and circumstance much like their own lives (or deaths). The personification of the house does not act in any way to soften its blow, or increase its sensitivity to human tragedy. If anything, this approach to 124 is disruptive and self-defeating. Certainly for Sethe, objectification and depersonification of the spatial regime might have helped her overcome the limitations and confinement within that space. The commitment to "living out one's own death" in the house is one that could only come from an approach to the house that personifies it.

"We could move," she suggested once to her mother-in-law. "What'd be the point?" asked Baby Suggs. "Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief."

²⁰

In this exchange, Baby Suggs locates black grief in the hidden rafters and garrets of American life. The isolation that exists within the novel is iterated periodically throughout the text. This is one example in which the feeling of embarrassment of slavery is actually predicated upon the absence of a historical consciousness that fully explicates the effects of that oppression. The white fathers of slavery have abandoned the name slavery, but have not sufficiently drawn out of slavery the pathological actions that brought it into existence.