Healing In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Introduction: American Literary stage has an array of expression. It is rightly asserted by Bhongle “Almost every literary genre is rich with new notions, and new ideologies. Women’s writings in America, Afro-American Literature, and Literature of the Immigrants Experience, and of the other ethnic groups- and the actively operating small but significant factors within these broad movements - make the contemporary American Literary scenario highly appealing” Representing principally, feminist cultural theory and ideology, this paper explores the relationship among the chief components— race and religion within the fictional narratives of Afro-American women writers; with reference to the first novel of Toni Morrison.

Memories are an innate part of us; everyone has them and are affected by them, whether they are good or bad. Memories are the past, and the past is what defines each of us, they change us in good ways and bad. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the characters are each, in their own ways, affected by the memories and traumas of slavery, whether they were slaves or not. It is these memories of slavery that have altered the characters’ beliefs, beliefs that civilization holds correct. Traumas can easily alter a person’s belief, and the continuous traumas caused by slavery can do irreparable damage to a person’s beliefs. These damaged beliefs can also affect those close to a person, such as in the case of Sethe and her children. The novel also shows how

Abstract: Language is the medium by which one’s psychological experiences, emotions and imaginations can be recreated in the minds of the reader or listener. Through ages language has been the vehicle with which humans have communicated ideas to each other. Language has not only the power to heal and to comfort but also to retrieve the suppressed experiences of an individual from the past.

(NAMI p. 3) Furthermore, Cultural Trauma probes the internal conflicts over the form and meaning of representation and culture in successive generations of black Americans after slavery. (Washington p.2). Black identity stemmed from cultural trauma during slavery. “African American”

The theme of slavery still, to this day, remains and the world doesn’t need to remain shy on this brutal topic. Gaspar, David Barry, and Darlene Clark Hine. Black Women and Slavery in the Americas: More Than Chattel. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Print.

Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420).

African-American author Toni Morrison 's book, Beloved, describes a black culture born out of a dehumanising period of slavery just after the Civil War. Culture is a means of how a group collectively believe, act, and interact on a daily basis. Those who have studied her work refer to Morrison 's narrative tales as “literature…that addresses the sacred and as an allegorical representation of black experience” (Baker-Fletcher 1993: 2). Although African Americans had a difficult time establishing their own culture during the period of slavery when they were considered less than human, Morrison believes that black culture has been built on the horrors of the past and it is this history that has shaped contemporary black culture in a positive way. Through the use of linguistic devices, her representation of black women, imagery and symbolic features, and the theme of interracial relations, Morrison illustrates that black culture that is resilient, vibrant, independent, and determined.

In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison you often see a use of words that convey a deeper meaning. “Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on...No matter what.” This quote depicts the her dear past and the underlying events leading up the this feeling. Sethe’s life for the past years have not been the best and the quote signifies the her journey and feeling of it all. Sethe has lived in constant uncertainty in a house haunted by her firstborn. Common during this time Sethe’s mother-in-law lived with her. This has a big impact on Sethe’s outlook about things. Baby Suggs prior to her death sank into deep depression. She was exhausted of life, the slavery and the lost of eight

1. Beloved, the novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison is a collection of memories of the characters presented in the novel. Most characters in the novel are living with repressed painful memories and hence they are not able to move ahead in their lives and are somewhere stuck. The novel, in a way, becomes a guide for people with painful memories because it is in a way providing solutions to get rid of those memories and move ahead in life. The novel is divided into three parts; each part becomes a step in the healing ritual of painful repressed memories.

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is a multiply narrated story of having to come to terms with the past to be able to move forward. Set after the Civil War in 1870s, the novel centers on the experiences of the family of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D and on how they try to confront their past with the arrival of Beloved. Two narrative perspectives are main, that of the third-person omniscient and of the third person limited, and there is also a perspective of the first-person. The novel’s narrators shift constantly and most of the times without notifying at all, and these narratives of limited perspectives of different characters help us understand the interiority, the sufferings and memories, of several different characters better and in their diversity.

Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” In this quote, Kierkegaard speaks of the past and how dwelling in events that already happen will prevent a person of living their life in the present. Toni Morrison conveys this message in one of her major themes, showing that constantly wallowing in past memories will prevent characters to move on with their lives. Beloved portrays various sides of cruelty, showing it from a black slave’s point of view to even the owner’s point of view. Throughout the novel, the cruelty that characters experience, whether it be at Sweet Home or from the black community, show the victims’ struggle to move on from the past and the perpetrator’s awareness, or lack thereof, of their own cruel acts.

Sethe figuratively returns to the murder of Beloved and erases from her life some of the overwhelming impact of that action, giving herself a chance to reintegrate her profoundly fractured psyche. It is almost as if there is no longer a fleshmemory of her murder of her child. Intellectually Sethe knows it happened, but the memory of it functions like a demagnetized tape recording; traces of the recording remain perhaps, but they can no longer play themselves out at anything like original volume. (Koolish 186) At this moment, Sethe focuses her rage on the cause of all her pain and misery i.e. the while folk.

Parenting has been a long practice that desires and demands unconditional sacrifices. Sacrifice is something that makes motherhood worthwhile. The mother-child relation- ship can be a standout amongst the most convoluted, and fulfilling, of all connections. Women are fuel by self-sacrifice and guilt - but everyone is the better for it. Their youngsters, who feel adored; whatever is left of us, who are saved disagreeable expe- riences with adolescents raised without affection or warmth; and mothers most impor- tantly. For, in relinquishing, a mother feels strong and liberal; and in guild she finds the motivation to right wrong.

The characters in Beloved, especially Sethe and Paul D are both dehumanized during the slavery experiences by the inhumanity of the white people, their responses to the experience differ due to their different role. Sethe were trapped in the past because the ghost of the dead baby in the house was the representation of Sethe’s past life that she couldnot forget. She accepted the ghost as she accepted the past. But Sethe began to see the future after she confronted her through the appearance of her dead baby as a woman who came to her house. For Sethe, the future existed only after she could explain why she killed her own daughter. She insisted on explaining the reason why she killed her daughter to the grown-up woman Beloved because Sethe felt

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a prose written after American Civil war. Beloved was written in honor of Margaret Garner; a black slave who was able to run away from the life of hardship and slavery and moved to the free state of Ohio. The writer represented the life of Margaret in Seethe who was the main character of the novel Beloved. In the novel, Seethe escaped from the sweet home where she was slave and moved to Ohio with her daughters; Denver and beloved. Seethe and her children lived in Ohio for 25 days before the people from the sweet home slavery found her. In attempt to protect her children from being taken by the slave masters, she killed Beloved.