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In "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1981), Helene Cixous states that "The new history is coming" (253), and with Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) it begins to arrive.The novel is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her daughter in a desperate bid to save her from the misery and indignity of slavery when threatened with recapture-a story very few people knew before the publication of Morrison's book. Yet, while Beloved is a woman-centered narrative that challenges the "phallusy" of history (the lack of representation or misrepresentation of women in male-dominated versions of history), it is not so much a "herstory" as a "hystery" in the sense that the central protagonists can be read as hysterics: subjects haunted by the past, characters who unconsciously express repressed memories of psychic trauma through physical symptoms and use a corporeal discourse to articulate what is otherwise unspeakable. Drawing on insights from psychoanalysis and employing French feminist ideas about hysteria, I will argue that Beloved explores the means by which the disempowered and dispossessed express personal dissatisfaction and enact political dissent. By examining the relationship between the repression of pain and the repossession of the past, I propose that, like hysteria, Morrison's novel highlights the importance of confronting, reclaiming, and transforming history, and that it points to the healing potential of memory. However, I also argue that in its exploration of the politics of gender and race, Beloved challenges both Freudian and French feminist theories of hysteria in significant ways.
In Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer first challenged prevailing nineteenth-century views of hysteria as an organic physical illness and argued instead that it needed to be understood as a psychic disorder.They proposed that hysteria is the product of a traumatic event that is subsequently excluded from consciousness. Repressed memories of unresolved trauma are unconsciously transformed into bodily symptoms (such as coughs, convulsions, limps, or linguistic distortions) which function as physical metaphors of psychic distress. In other words, trauma is converted into somatic symptoms that function as "nemic symbols" of discontent (Freud 2: xviii). For example, hysterical paralysis can be seen as a symbol of feelings of powerlessness. Hysteria thus represents repressed hostility and desire transformed into physical symptoms that simultaneously reveal and conceal...