The Ghost by Qiaofeng Zhong
I am curious why the baby ghost, or the haunted house, was felt and interpreted by different people in very different ways. First of all, we start with a more or less objective description of it: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." However, the author then moved on to give different perspectives and how the characters felt differently towards it.
Baby Suggs was kind of indifferent and accustomed to it: "What'd be the point? Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby."
Paul D, when he was introduced to the haunted house for the first time, thought of it naturally as some kind of evil: "Good God. What kind of evil you got in here?"
Sethe, on the other hand, corrected him and told him that it was sadness rather than evil: "It's not evil, just sad."
Denver felt it in yet another way: "Not evil. But not sad either...rebuked. Lonely and rebuked."
There were also the brothers and the passybies, who might simply be terrified by the haunted house.
These feelings then led them to carry out different actions. Some ran, some stayed and died, some decided to stay, and some wanted to run.
It is as if the ghost that was really there was not the ghost people really felt. Or, maybe it was their relationship with the ghost and their own history that made everything different.
What interested me most was how the grandmother, the mother, and the daughter all felt so differently towards this ghost. Perhaps there were some similarities between the grandmother and the mother, but still different, especially when Baby Suggs was still alive, for Sethe suggested that they could leave when Baby was alive. This shift of generation somehow led to a difference in their feelings and attitudes towards this baby girl.
This is a very interesting question. It reminds me that each member of a family relates differently to the family's grief. In our reading for today, we hear that Denver "went deaf rather than hear the answer" (pg. 123) to her question: did Sethe go to prison for murder? Sethe and Baby Suggs know the answer. But Denver doesn't know and doesn't want to know. She is a child and therefore cannot process the full weight of her mother's actions. But she finds a way to hold her familial grief. She forms a bond with the crawling-already? baby's ghost. In this way, she forms a bond with her sister and acknowledges the trauma in the family in an emotional sense, although not in a conscious rational sense.
ReplyDeleteBaby Suggs relates differently to the ghost, and also to the sorrowful action which brought the ghost about. "Her faith, her love, her imagination and her great big old heart began to collapse twenty-eight days after her daughter-in-law arrived" (pg. 105). Formerly, Baby had a heart so big she could share her love with a meadowful of people. When she saw her daughter-in-law kill her granddaughter, this love left Baby's heart. But Baby does not quit 124, nor does she quit Sethe and Denver. She stays, silently eroding with nothing but an occasional request for color. The grandmother, the older generation, does not commit the grievous action; but she does witness it. She knows her daughter-in-law's culpability, but can do nothing to punish it except whither and die herself. She accepts the ghost as necessary, accepts the murderous deed as commonplace, and dies believing that "there was no grace" (pg. 105).
Sethe's relationship to her own guilt and grief, and consequently to the baby ghost, is the most confusing to me. When Denver asks her if she had really gone to jail for murder, Sethe presumably answers honestly, or else why would Denver go deaf in order not to hear her. But strangely Sethe does not seem obsessed with her own guilt. She does not wish to run away from 124; she does not seem to mind the baby ghost. Does Sethe feel absolved of her own baby's oily blood? When Beloved enters the scene, "Sethe was deeply touched by her sweet name; the remembrance of glittering headstone made her feel especially kindly toward her" (pg. 63). Why feel kindly towards the remembrance of your own murdered child's tombstone, which to engrave with seven letters cost Sethe to give her body to the engraver? How has rememory here shifted Sethe's guilt? How does Sethe relate to the grief for the child she murdered?
Fascinating, both of you. I wonder if Sethe is essentially a pagan, and without any Christian hope of forgiveness or redemption, she simply owns the deed as part of herself and expects no dissolution of the past. Hence there is no anguishing about it. The anguish she already felt before the deed; she might have worked through it with all her heart already. Baby Suggs' loss of faith might be connected to her awareness of Sethe's paganism -- that someone could live like that, without any need of forgiveness or liberation from the past, let alone belief in their possibility. It would be interesting to revisit Kierkegaard's accounts of the two kinds of despair.
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