Alternative Indication and "the lowest yet"

Note: I have a different edition, so the page numbers won’t match up. The passage I’m working with is taken from near the end of the long chapter that begins “Three.”

“Nothing compared to the ‘lowest yet.’” (256)

I’ve been trying to figure out the function of alternative denotation in Beloved. How does Morrison represent the unspeakable in Beloved? Or, better stated, what alternative functions of the act of naming does Morrison construct? In this instance, the subject is Ella, the lowest yet being her constant rape by a father and his son. It is the low against which Ella measures all the horrors of which she hears, whether “a killing, a kidnap, [or] a rape” (256). The lowest yet is not specifically attached to Ella, but seems to be a phrase to disguise, to circle (as Sethe does when Paul D asks her about Stamp Paid’s newspaper clipping), a construction that seals away the past from the present while preserving it within an unspeakable interior. Past experience of slavery is embedded within the lowest yet, and connects Ella to Sethe, who uses a similar construction to refer to another unspeakable incident; Sethe’s murdered infant is described in the very same fashion: the “crawling already? girl.” Although we later come to know her as Beloved, her indirect introduction—this other phrase by which she is indicated—connects Sethe’s experience to Ella’s: “Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present” (256). Both women’s phrasing-away of these traumas (which to a certain extent define their lives) are acts of protection as well as reclamation, of asserting themselves within the present and locking the past away in language. The idea that Ella doesn’t like is this emergence of the past in the present—an appearance akin to schoolteacher’s appearance in Baby Suggs’ yard. This violation, which destroyed Baby Suggs, holy, is an unholy contamination of the present by the unspeakable past, the past implicit between all who have shared it. This “invasion” (257) must be exorcised largely because of the location of slavery in the past, the past being a realm of suffering and horror. The present, those who inhabit Cincinnati hope, is safe, free from slavery. The novel is very much concerned with this belief, especially in the context of the Fugitive Slave Act, which violently bursts the circle, bringing the unspeakable into the present, the horrors of slavery inside the fence.