The 'scent of ink': Toni Morrison's Beloved and the semiotics of rights

Theorists of rights have long viewed both writing and self-narration as indispensable to the cultivation of a rights culture. This essay, however, argues that Toni Morrison's Beloved enacts a series of challenges to such a 'semiotics of rights'. Rather than to represent vehicles of uplift, writing and its implements are in the novel shown to collude with the logic of slavery and provide ideological sanction for its structures of oppression. Education is similarly a double-edged sword for Morrison's characters, and the novel thereby calls its own narrative enterprise into question. But at the same time, Beloved decries the failure of words and names to correspond with reality, and this essay accordingly reads the novel as lament over the many setbacks of Reconstruction. In particular, the essaymaintains that Beloved contends with failure of the rights and liberties enshrined within the Reconstruction Amendments to remake the legal and political landscape of post-Civil War America. © 2014, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.