Curing the Sick Ghost: Beloved, Illness, and Crip Futurity

Curing the Sick Ghost:

Beloved, Illness, and Crip Futurity

 

“It’s clear that we’re inescapably haunted by the disability to come.”

- Robert McRuer

 

124 Bluestone Road, the primary setting of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is a house under quarantine. Its inhabitants shunned by neighbors who view the family as deranged, the house ultimately becomes a makeshift hospital for the ailing Beloved, a young woman who stumbles upon Sethe and Denver in the height of her apparent illness. Quickly identifying Beloved as Sethe’s daughter, whom she killed as a young child to prevent her enslavement, Denver and Sethe eagerly respond to the young woman’s every need--no matter the consequences. However, it eventually becomes apparent just how taxing this care is on its providers; as Beloved grows stronger, Sethe becomes weaker and weaker.

 

In her piece entitled “not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there,” Avery Gordon offers a meaningful analysis of Beloved’s presence in the lives of Sethe and Denver, deeming the haunting a call for change and a better future. However, Gordon’s exploration does not make use of the consistent presence of illness, transferred from Beloved to Sethe over the course of the narrative. Queer and disability theorist Robert McRuer offers the helpful framework of crip futurity, a concept which refuses conventional narratives of “cure” attributed to illness and disability, and which reaches beyond the current order of things toward a more accessible future. McRuer’s text allows us to unsettle our assumption that the answer to illness is cure.

 

Revisiting Beloved through McRuer’s lens of crip temporality, it becomes apparent that the ghost’s illness was never meant to be cured, and never could be. Instead, her illness--the very symbol of her own haunting which does not disappear, but rather is passed off to Sethe--is the call for Sethe and Denver to change their lives. Beloved’s existence as a liminal, disabled subject, already outside of a normative, linear life course, serves to refuse the curative narratives of which McRuer writes, as her story demonstrates the absurd futility of attempts at curing a ghost.

 

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A Note on Disability Studies, McRuer, and Crip Theory

 

In his text entitled Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Robert McRuer takes a critical look at the construction of dominant and marginal bodies, emphasizing the concepts of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality. As he argues, compulsory able-bodiedness is the notion that we view a lack of disability and impairment as the norm, thus rendering it dangerously invisible and assumed--a “nonidentity” (McRuer 1). Consequently, a disabled identity is rendered flawed and deviant from the “norm.” McRuer dismantles this assumption, along with the narratives that play into it--most notably, the narrative of “cure,” by which the singular objective is to “fix” the ill or disabled subject, restoring them to the norm.

 

But if we question “cure” as our priority in the face of illness and disability, to what do we turn? McRuer offers an alternative--if we do not think of time and the body’s place in it as a linear, consistent development, then the supposed “disruption” caused by illness or disability is not a tragedy, but rather, a call for an improved order altogether. This emphasis on “curing society,” rather than the individual, he identifies as “crip futurity,” which offers a new way to make meaning of illness and disability and the society that makes these identities so disabling. As he writes in his piece “The Then and There of Crip Futurity,” “crip time unfixes” (McRuer 532).  

 

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She collapsed on Baby Suggs’ bed. Denver moved her hat and put the quilt with two squares of color over her feet. She was breathing like a steam engine (Morrison 64).

 

From the moment she enters the doors of Sethe’s house, Beloved is a patient to be cared for. Wracked with the pain of her past actions, Sethe immerses herself in caregiving, revelling in its rewards. She can at last provide for her daughter in the form of this spectral figure. Here, Beloved’s illness is a perfect opportunity. While she has no other shelter, it is her illness that justifies Sethe’s constant devotion and attention. Despite the age of the ghostly figure, Sethe can care for her as if she is the baby she was when she died, putting her to bed, feeding her, and cleaning her after she vomits. “Sethe happy when Beloved was; Beloved lapping devotion like cream,” Sethe is clearly deeply gratified by the relationship, and it is what appears to be a never-ending sickness that enables it (Morrison 286).

 

The ailing Beloved also conveniently offers clarity in terms of the needs of those around her. While Sethe has been aching for another child to care for, Denver, too, has been lonely. Isolated from friends because of her mother’s reputation, and living as an only child following her brothers’ departure, she finds a fast friend in Beloved, who needs her just as much as Denver needs Beloved. As Gordon acknowledges, “they all make Beloved their beloved” (Gordon 140). But it is not enough to love Beloved; Beloved must love them back. Desperate as she is to sustain this relationship and new confidante, Denver intends to keep Beloved needing her. She refuses to present Beloved’s health as improving, insisting she “didn’t see no such thing” when asked if Beloved lifted a chair with one hand (Morrison 67). Though Sethe had been unaware of her daughter’s pain, in the presence of Beloved, the emptiness is impossible to ignore. As Morrison writes, “Sethe looked at her daughter and thought, Yes, she has been lonesome. Very lonesome” (65).

 

The dynamics of the two relationships seems to answer a key question: Why try to cure a ghost? As both Sethe and Denver begin to believe that Beloved is the ghostly form of their lost daughter and sister, it becomes increasingly clear that their efforts to “heal” are not intended to save Beloved, but rather, to save themselves. These intentions, too, are woefully misguided.

 

“Something funny ‘bout that gal,” Paul D said, mostly to himself.

“Funny how?”

“Acts sick, sounds sick, but she don’t look sick. Good skin, bright eyes and strong as a bull” (Morrison 67).

 

And yet, suspicion of Beloved’s illness arises early on in the narrative--first, because she does not appear to be sick. This confusion is only reinforced by the family’s inability to diagnose their patient with any common ailment. This lack of diagnosis marks the possibility that Beloved’s illness may be more than just that--that perhaps her sickness cannot be named because it has a purpose beyond being healed. In fact, Beloved’s illness seems to be conveniently circumstantial, almost as if appearing in response to the thoughts and actions of those around her. This phenomenon is perhaps most evident when Paul D feels at finally driven to action, asserting to himself that he will stake his claim on Sethe and Denver’s attention--driving Beloved out to do so. Beloved is suddenly sick, and Denver and Sethe hurry to her side, nudging Paul D out of the picture once more. The haunting asserts itself.

 

He wanted her out, but Sethe had let her in and he couldn’t put her out of a house that wasn’t his [. . .] Sitting at the table, chewing on his after-supper broom straw, Paul D decided to place her. Consult with the Negroes in town and find her her own place.

No sooner did he have the thought than Beloved strangled on one of the raisins she had picked out of the bread pudding [. . .] Beloved, on her hands and knees, vomited up her food and struggled for breath (Morrison 79).

 

After endless effort to care for Beloved, it is clear that this care, though meant to save Denver and Sethe more than Beloved herself, is in fact destroying them. Their efforts are backfiring, and the illness will not dissipate--rather, it is transferred between bodies, as the haunting manifests itself, writes itself on the body. Both Denver and Sethe are impacted by this compromise, but Sethe faces the most dangerous consequences, as she sacrifices her own nourishment to feed Beloved. She feeds the ghost, at the same time as she is consumed by it. She becomes smaller and frailer each day.

 

They grew tired, and even Beloved, who was getting bigger, seemed nevertheless as exhausted as they were. [. . .] [Denver] saw Sethe’s eyes bright but dead, alert but vacant, pay attention to everything about Beloved [. . .] Then Sethe spit up something she had not eaten and it rocked Denver like gunshot [. . .] Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help (Morrison 285-86).

 

In her analysis of Beloved, Avery Gordon acknowledges the significance of Denver’s impassioned actions when she leaves her mother’s property, seeking assistance and connection. As she writes, “Denver is [. . .] the first to see the mortal conflict with the living that will never end if something isn’t done [. . .] The ghost will have to be dispatched” (Gordon 181). The doing of this “something,” however, is no small feat. Denver’s actions are in direct response to the devastation caused by her family’s haunting, which Gordon describes as “creating the possibility of making a life, of becoming something else, in the present and for the future” (142). The ghost, herself haunted, comes into Denver and Sethe’s lives as a signal that something must change.

 

If, as Gordon writes, the ghost’s presence is meant to alert the characters that they must be propelled forward, that change is needed, then the illness is both the symbol of haunting and the apparition’s strategy, her means of achieving these ends. Gordon’s language mirrors that which defines crip futurity. McRuer validates the “utopian longings” of those who insist on creating a future in which illness and disability are welcome, inherently refusing normative, linear frameworks of temporality (McRuer 533).

 

Just as the apparition in Beloved drives Denver to eventually act, as per Gordon’s analysis of the significance of haunting, her illness (which eventually becomes Sethe’s own impairment) is the last straw for Denver. Forced to confront the reality that this ghost cannot be “cured” (at least without implicating another in the sickness), Denver must face what parts of her reality she can fix.

 

But the future alone is not enough when the present has not yet been addressed. As both Gordon and McRuer acknowledge, a part of this new and better future is the acknowledgement of the intrinsic value of the “here and now.” Gordon insists that “this something to be done is not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present, a reckoning with that which we have lost, but never had” (Gordon 183). Paralleling this sentiment, McRuer offers: “Even though Feminist, Queer, Crip anticipates a then and there, coalitional work (that has characterized feminist, queer, and disability activism for decades) is materializing crip futurity in the here and now” (McRuer 534).

 

For Sethe has not truly been living out her present, either, haunted as she has been by the loss of her child, the trauma of her past enslavement and dehumanization, the violent destruction of her identity and sense of self. As she and Denver confront the illness that is perpetually present throughout their relationship with Beloved, they must acknowledge what they can, and must, “cure” and what they cannot.

 

Conclusion

 

Though the parallels between Morrison’s text and McRruer’s articulation of crip futurity are rich, Beloved does offer not-so-progressive representations of disability and illness. By associating Beloved with the young child who was killed, and by presenting her as a figure entirely unable to care for herself (thus requiring the constant maternal attention of Sethe), the text effectively reinforces infantilizing depictions of the disabled subject. It is only when Beloved begins to heal and appears to become pregnant, taking up an image of a matured young woman, that she can be disassociated from this illness and disability. Furthermore, though Beloved’s story refutes the possibility of a true “cure” on the individual level, shifting the focus to that of a “cured” outlook, purpose, and way of life, the significance of the illness as the signal of the haunting itself is fraught. If, as McRuer writes, we are all “inescapably haunted” by the disability to come, then a narrative in which the disability quite literally does the haunting seems only to reinforce public fear around illness and disability, and an anxiety around compulsory able-bodiedness.

 

Thus, it seems important to note that disability justice is almost certainly not Morrison’s project. Beloved is not a story about disability, though the lens is useful in an analysis of the haunting within the narrative. What does emerge, through a critical analysis of crip futurity within the text, is a call for a better order of things--a different and more accessible future that can become possible if it is not the disabled subject who must be cured, but rather, a disabling and damaging social order. This acknowledgement of a future beyond that which we have ever imagined before seems particularly poignant when placed within a text that follows a family living in the aftermath of slavery--who must now confront the possibility of a future that is free. As put by McRuer, in sum…

 

“Look at me: I am like you...maybe. But we’re not like the others and we might, you and I, be able to imagine something other than, different from, or beyond all of this” (McRuer 182-83).

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Works Cited

 

Gordon, Avery. “not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there.” Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1997. 137-90. Print.

 

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York UP, 2006. Print.

 

McRuer, Robert. “The Then and There of Crip Futurity.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20.4 (2014): 532-34. Print.

 

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf Doubleday Group, 2007. Print.