Tradition extends the wrongs of the past into the present—that much is clear; yet without tradition the present is a state of flux and the future largely a blank.
Hawthorne is just as ambivalent about the present as he is about the past”
LEO B. LEVY, “Picturesque Style in The House of the Seven Gables”.
The past is an issue of great interest in these gothic romances mainly because of its effects on the present. Both Morrison and Hawthorne show how the influence of the past on all the characters is so strong that past and present merge and their differences blur. The horrible past of the Pyncheon and Maules and the dramatic legacy of slavery are a terrible burden in the present of the story. In Seven Gables it is Colonel Pyncheon’s reincarnation in his descendants and the ghosts which haunt the mansion that establish the enduring presence of the past. On the other hand, in Beloved, "it is always now" (Beloved: 210):65 scenes of the past combine with the present life of Sethe’s story. The presence of the revenant which haunts 124 metaphorically symbolizes the power of the past.
In Seven Gables Hawthorne contrasts “the organic relation between past experience and the living moment” (R. W. B. Lewis: 8) to the ideal of newborn innocence that the “hopeful” claimed. His individual is not free from history or the family’s inheritance. Past misdeeds continue to affect the present through the model of usurpation, Colonel Pyncheon’s illicit acquisition of Maule’s plot of land: “Since Walpole, the model of usurpation in Hamlet had been central to Gothic structures, and
64 Ana Mª Manzanas Calvo argues that “la aparente disposición caprichosa de los tiempos (pasado versus presente, pasado versus pasado anterior a pasado) es un reflejo formal de las vidas truncadas de los personajes y de la fragmentación de la memoria individual y colectiva que sufrían los africanos al llegar al Nuevo Mundo” (90).
65 Toni Morrison (1987). Beloved. New York: Plume (all subsequent quotations from this edition will be identified by the name of the book and the page number included in parentheses in the text).
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in response to revolutionary challenges had helped to make the Gothic suitable for inquiry into past wrongs” (Arac: 10). Consequently, the most pervasive link between previous times and the present is established through the feud between Pyncheons and Maules, the conflict between the two opposed social forces in both ages, “the deed is itself evidence of past evil persisting into the present” (Gollin: 153).66
The mysterious and terrible past of the Pyncheons and Maules has a deep impact on their present. As Nina Baym says, “In The House of the Seven Gables the visible world exists in the romance’s present time and is controlled by the invisible world which is the past. As it becomes increasingly clear that the seen present is controlled by the unseen past, the mood of the book darkens. The sense of the present changes; its lack of freedom becomes clear” (1976: 154). According to Michael Bell, one of the main aspects of the presence of the past is its immateriality: “In Hawthorne’s subjective writings about the past—those writings in which he tries to evoke the past from significant scenes in the present—there is a characteristic contrast between the tenuous immateriality of the vision of the past and the hard materiality of the present”
(200). Thus visitations of the past usually appear in the present as ghosts or ‘shadows’
which haunt the whole narrative. However, the past is also ”endowed with a power paradoxically at odds with its immateriality” (Griffith: 390). Some of the characters, such as Hepzibah and Clifford, are definitely trapped by the old days. They are “time-stricken,” victims of the Pyncheons’ crimes. They finally seem to move forward when they flee the house and get out of the city. However, Judge Pyncheon “sinks into the past where he belongs [. . .] the Judge joins the Pyncheon shades. For him time stops”
(Horne: 462).
Like Hawthorne, in her Gothic vision, Morrison also expresses how the present is brooded over by the wrongs of the past. In Beloved, it is slavery which haunts the characters. The characters’ terrible experiences during their enslavement intrude into the present through their memories. Thus Morrison explores the past through these traumatic recollections. Mischelle Booher points out: “[. . .] all these haunting memories and apparitions have one root—slavery. Just as all of Manfred’s crimes in Otranto trace back to an original usurpation, Beloved’s memories encompass not only her history with Sethe, but also experiences in a slave ship of the infamous middle passage between Europe and America“ (128). In fact, “eternal memories are hell for the inhabitants of 124 just as they are in Otranto” (Booher: 123). It is the trauma of slavery which makes the characters’ lives a nightmare. According to Cathy Caruth:
66 Marius Bewley thinks that Hawthorne’s Seven Gables carries on a debate between, “on one hand [. . .]
the past, inherited wealth, and aristocratic status; on the other hand [. . .] the present, and [. . .] democratic equality, both financial and social” (442).
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It is this literality and its insistent return which thus constitutes trauma and points toward its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains, in its return, absolutely true to the event. It is indeed this truth of traumatic experience that forms the center of its pathology or its symptoms; it is not a pathology, that is, of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself. (qtd. in Grewal 1998: 98)67
All of the characters’ earlier lives are unspeakable and, consequently, they are still traumatized many years after their escapes from slavery. Morrison especially explores the black female’s traumatic experiences as a result of enslavement: “As the ghost of slavery, Beloved encompasses all the women’s pasts, a horror multiplying with each individual affected” (Booher: 126).
In Beloved the influence of the past on the characters’ lives is depicted as a Gothic haunting. Morrison’s narrative moves quickly from the past to the present through the memories of the different black individuals, suggesting their incontrollable capacity to remember. The past plagues the characters’ daily lives, as we can see in the invasion of the present by their memories on the plantation. When Denver asks Sethe, 'How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it?'"
(Beloved: 13), her mother answers that Sweet Home "'comes back whether we want it to or not'" (Beloved: 14). As Seven Gables’ characters are trapped and haunted by the old aristocratic days, the horrifying legacy of slavery pursues and torments Beloved’s individuals. Thus Morrison, like Hawthorne, represents the power of the past to impair life in the present. Memories are such a terrible burden that the characters cannot go on with their lives. According to Helen Cixous, the process in which the witness brings the experience of slavery through the self in women’s writing is some sort of
‘possession.’ The witness is possessed by his/her past(qtd. in Goldner: online).68 When the novel starts, Sethe and Denver live in solitude, resigned to share the house with the baby ghost that dwells in it. The past has taken possession of Sethe’s life. In her haunted condition, Sethe cannot think of a future or even the present because her life is full of “beating back the past: Rememories are stubborn, painful things to her and must be dealt with daily” (Booher: 127). Mae Henderson claims that
“’Rememory’ [. . .] is something that possesses (or haunts) one rather than something that one possesses. It is, in fact, that which makes the past part of one’s present [. . .].
67 Caruth defines trauma as an “overwhelming experience of sudden catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrollable repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena [. . .]. This repetition is a response to the sudden and “unassimilated nature” of the event (qtd. in Plasa: 149). Original text quoted: Cathy Caruth (ed.) (1995). Trauma:
Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
68 Original text quoted: Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement (1986). The Newly Born Woman. (Theory and History of Literature, 24). Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis , MN.: University of Minnesota Press.
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Sethe finds herself tyrannized by unconfigured and literally disfiguring images” (86).69 Her capacity to feel is numbed by the pain the white master had inflicted her and the death of her crawling baby. Her intense and irreconcilable emotions are buried deep inside her. Her suffering is unbearable, since her act of murder is dramatically contradictory to her maternal identity. Sethe has not assimilated her daughter’s death.
Consequently, as Nicholls points out, the deceased child becomes a phantasmal presence within her mother’s traumatic self, perpetuating her existence as something alive and foreign (140). Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call this phenomenon the
“crypt”:
Grief that cannot be expressed builds a secret vault within the subject. This crypt reposes—alive, reconstituted from the memories of words, images, and feelings—
the objective counterpart of the loss, as a complete person within his own topography, as well as the traumatic incidents—real or imagined—that had made introjection impossible. (qtd. in Nicholls: 140)70
According to Nicholls, this “crypt” is equivalent to a split in the Ego: a fragmented identity. The lost person is incorporated as something live and present, with a quality that can be spectral, magical, or sometimes even hallucinatory (141).
Denver, Sethe’s daughter, is the only free-born black of the story. Even though her mother tries to keep her away from the past, she is haunted by it as much as the rest of the characters. Not only has Denver lived all her life with the baby ghost’s presence, but she also drank her blood. Therefore, she has a double and contradictory relationship with the past, of which she is an intrinsic part while she is automatically shut out of it: Sweet Home is, for her, “a site of exclusion [. . .]. Denver is locked out, forced to see herself as an outsider” (Jesser: online). This situation makes her incapable of facing the past. When Nelson asks Denver about her mother’s crime, she cannot stand the idea of hearing any of it and, as a result, she is deaf for almost two years. Her childhood deafness shows the danger of the past for our present lives, despite her mother’s attempts to protect her from it. Afterwards, Denver recovers her hearing, apparently without any reason, when she feels the sound of the baby ghost crawling.
When Sethe and Paul D first meet eighteen years after Sweet Home, the power that compels them to make love cannot last. They are not yet ready for each other.
69 For Carole B. Davies rememory involves “crossing the boundaries of space, time, history, place, language, corporeality and restricted consciousness in order to make reconnections and mark or name gaps and absences” (qtd. in Teresa Washington: online). Original text quoted: Carole B. Davies (1994).
Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London: Routledge.
70 Introjection means the assimilation of the dead person to the self, as occurs in normal mourning. For more information, see: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1980). “Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia”. Psychoanalysis in France. Eds. S. Lebovici and D. Widlocher. New York: International University Press.
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Even when they finally have sex, they are trapped in their own memories and it is a disappointing experience for both of them. Their terrible ordeals have numbed their capacity to feel and their shared recollections block their abilities to express their emotions. Nor can sex live up to their expectations after so many years. This scene emphasizes the power of the past to impair the characters’ present life. Slaves and ex-slaves think that they have to fight their memories to survive and every day they try to beat them back.71 However, they cannot succeed in this war. Before Sethe, Denver or Paul D can have a present or a future, they must reconcile themselves with the past.