The Tree-Sound Chora of Toni Morrison’s <i>Beloved</i>

In Beloved’s forest clearing where Baby Suggs “calls,” Toni Morrison creates a primal space of subject formation. This article examines how the Kristevan chora of these trees and sounds shape Sethe’s journey toward individuation. Theorists such as Bonnet, Fulton, and Henderson demonstrate the abundance of trees in Beloved, adopting various critical stances toward their affective roles. Others have emphasized that Beloved creates a formative maternal scene: as Sethe, Denver, and Beloved find joy and solace living together, they argue, the threesome enact a regression into an early stage of psychological development. I contend that the chora is a central nexus connecting the novel’s psychological development with place, history, and the other-than-human. Beloved’s chora/chorus is made up of trees who witness, comprise, and delimit a liminal space of the semiotic for Sethe, Beloved, and Denver’s regression as they reenact a Kristevan chora. The trees embody a pastoral/anti-pastoral landscape of Black trauma. Morrison re-creates the chora/chorus in an imagescape of sound and liquid, as evidenced by Beloved’s emergence from the water, soaking wet, and repeated associations with fluidity, as well as in the continual references to sounds—haunting songs and uncanny pitches—that mark maternal space and interspecies relationships. These sounds embody traces and rhythms of Black spirituals, as has been established; I show that they are also influenced by a pastoral literary tradition including Eugene Field and, indirectly, the Shakespearean forest, providing additional context for understanding Morrison’s transformative encounter with the heterogeneous heritages of American pastoral, both oral and literary.