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The story of Beloved is the story of human subjectivity. Maya Angelou once wrote that "No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place". (Conversations: 1989. PI67). The story of the heroes and heroines in Beloved is the story of humanity, the laying down sword and shield to past scars and wounds, our attempts to reconstruct our fragile selves and the claiming of our own future stories. Beloved is the story of an event set against the oppressive presence of slavery. This event has spread and saturated the fabric of Sethe and her children's lives. The event itself is never narrated in full. We receive fragments of the story only. The event itself is the murder of Sethe's third child Beloved. This is the active ghost in the story. She is the missing third in house 124. This Final Year Project is primarily concerned with the missing three. The need the subject has for a third party. The subject starts off his life as one (1), he then becomes locked in an imaginary relationship with his mother, and forms the mother/child dyad -they are two (2). If the subject is to move into the community at large (4), he has a need for three (3), a third other for the Oedipal triangle. I have drawn upon the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, who says human subjectivity is reliant upon this third other. The mother/child dyad needs to be triangulated, for both their sakes, so that both can claim a future story and become part of a Symbolic universe. I have looked in detail at Lacan's theory of subjectivity and I have applied this to Toni Morrison's novel Beloved.
