Critical Commentary

The scholarly essay on Beloved that I found was called, “The ‘scent of ink’: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the semiotics of rights” by Elizabeth S. Anker. The essay starts by summarizing Beloved and describes the book as “one of the most widely read and taught novels of the twentieth century.” The essay also provides examples from the book to strengthen the argument that the novel produces a “semiotic of rights.”

Anker explains that rather than staging an unqualified appeal for civil or human rights, the novel casts suspicion on the related constructs of rights, freedom, and self-determination. Meaning that instead of the book pleading that African Americans should get equal rights, it questions the corresponding constitutional rights, freedom, and self-willpower that the slaves should be able to have.

One of the main points of the essay was how unexpected it was for the book to depict a mixed feeling status of writing and textuality. In other words, the essay confronts how bold it was for Morrison to almost talk poorly about paper and ink, due to how it could destabilize the supports of the book’s narration. She did this by having the characters be unbearable to the scent and sound of paper and ink, but also use this equipment to provoke their troubling flashbacks to slavery. The essay then provides examples of this throughout the book, which includes how one of Sethe’s primary triggers is the ‘scent of ink’ (p.6) and how Paul D is unhinged by ‘notebook paper.’ Anker then describes how Schoolteacher’s worst punishment was just to involve writing and forms of education to create and inflict the violence of slavery. The essay states, “Within Beloved the technologies of writing and the corresponding definition of the human that they augur directly sanction the institution of slavery.”

The author of this paper interprets many parts of the book in ways that I would have never thought of, which tremendously adds to my understanding of Beloved. One of these interpretations is on Schoolteacher’s notetaking. The quote from the book that Anker breaks down is, “I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animals ones on the right” (p.229). The essay describes this “assigning and cataloging of ‘characteristics’” as fulfilling two goals, which are “first, to calculate her financial worth as property and, second, as evidence in Schoolteacher’s lessons in scientific racism.” The author then says how his method of teaching ends up portraying the partnership between property and the semiotics of rights, showing how the character’s theories not only work together to condone slavery but completely force it. This helped me understand why Morrison brought in the idea of Schoolteacher always taking notes on the slaves into the novel. I always thought the character did this because he wanted to learn more about the differences between races, but it makes more sense that he would do this to appraise them and use it to prove that whites are better than blacks.

I completely agree with all of the author’s interpretations because of how much they added to my ideas of why Morrison included certain parts in the novel. I believe this text was very eye-opening to someone else's thoughts on a novel that can be broken down to mean so many different things. I like how Anker provided an abundance of examples in the book and used each of them to prove that the book displays a semiotic of rights. Overall, I enjoyed reading this essay that dove into the novel and even connected it to my theme of dehumanization.

Work Cited:
Anker, Elizabeth S. "The 'Scent of Ink': Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Semiotics of Rights." Critical
Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 4, Dec. 2014, pp. 29-45. EBSCOhost.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage International, 1987, 2004. Print.