A rhetoric of abandonment, the act of representation and Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

Abstract

This dissertation examines a rhetoric of abandonment as it operates in, and shapes our experiences of, Toni Morrison's Beloved. My study argues that hegemonic representations are both constituted by and are meant to constitute material, social bodies; consequently, these representations are sites of symbolic action and, when they racialize bodies, are potential perpetrators of symbolic and actual violence. Beloved is both a narrative representation and also an act of representation: that is, it provides insight into the ways social, cultural, and ethical assumptions about race are coded into contemporary hegemonic practices, and it recuperates the losses caused by racial dividing practices.

To make these arguments, I introduce a three-fold concept of abandonment ("Introduction: Representational Practices, Toni Morrison, and Beloved") which defines "abandonment" as: the relinquishing of hope, the abrogation of responsibility, and the yielding to desire. The first two of these meanings cluster as consequences of hegemonic representational practices; the last inheres in acts of representation that seek to reclaim such losses.

Chapter II provides the theory and method that inform a rhetoric of abandonment; that is, I assemble resources from discourse, narrative, rhetorical, and social theory in order to set up a framework for engaging in the theoretically-informed, contextually-sensitive, close readings of later chapters.

For each of my three definitions of abandonment, and using the critical methodologies developed earlier, I engage in readings of Beloved to argue (Chapter III: "Abandonment as Representational Practice") that hegemonic representational practices are "ways of seeing" and acting that compromise epistemology and ontology, and that Morrison both reveals these ideological perspectives and counters their "seeing" with "listening" as a strategy for bearing witness and constructing identification between the text and readers. Representational practices have a divisive effect on society; Chapter IV ("Abandonment as Dividing Practice") discusses the motives for and consequences of white supremacist dividing practices that are both constructed by and enable hegemonic representations. I trace the rhetorical move from "white" to "whiteness" to examine how dividing practices are reified, and argue that Morrison interrogates the paradox of substance on which such practices are based by constructing "reality" on congregating, rather than segregating, terms. Chapter V ("Abandonment as Transformative Performance") argues that Morrison employs transformative, embodied, strategies to reorient readers' ideological positions: Beloved performs as a communicative body whose dyadic relatedness for the other constitutes the ecstatic element of a rhetoric of abandonment.

Finally, I conclude this study by claiming that Beloved functions as a radically epideictic rhetoric which re-members and memorializes fragmented bodies to enable a revision of community (Chapter VI: "Lament for a Disappeared Body").