Magic Realism Analysis

In simple words, ‘Magical Realism’ is a weird oxymoron that is a fusion of two contrasting elements, fantasy and reality in such a manner that the hidden ‘magic’ in reality is uncovered fluidly.

M.H. Abrams in his A Glossary of Literary Terms says, the writers of ‘Magic Realism’, “…weave, in an ever-shifting pattern, a sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and details together with fantastic and dreamlike elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy tales”.

The term was for the first time used by a German art critic, Franz Roh in 1925 who applied it to a group of painters working in Germany. Focusing on the ordinary objects, the painters uncovered the mystery in them. The expression at that time was used,

We find in the novel that the extraordinary events are presented in a very ordinary manner.

Not only this, we find various elements of magical realism in the text such as the very fact that a baby ghost is present in the house which makes 124 “spiteful”. The “two tiny hand prints” appearing in Howard’s cake and shattering of a mirror when Buglar was “merely looking” are evidences of the same. Added to this, the entry of beloved in the fifth chapter seems magical as the author says, “nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by.” Another incident that is told to us by Paul D which attracts suspicion is how a girl as weak as Beloved (initially) who barely walked without support could “pick up the rocker with one hand”. Beloved asking about Sethe’s diamond earrings is again extraordinary. One of the most defining elements of magic realism is witnessed in the Clearing scene where Sethe is apparently “strangled” even though Denver and Beloved are at a good distance from her. Moreover, in the nineteenth chapter of the text there is this scene where Denver, Sethe and Beloved go for ice skating outside of the house and Morrison remarks, “Nobody saw them falling”. Finally, towards the end of the novel, we find that Beloved just

Beloved awakens Sethe’s forgotten, painful memories which in a way can be termed as ‘return of the repressed’. If we look at the novel from the point of view that Beloved is a survivor then the other incidents mentioned previously can also be interpreted in a different way. Maybe the whole family is not in a sound mental state due to their past. Maybe it was very difficult for Howard and Buglar to understand the fact that their mother killed their sister and as a result they got stressed and started hallucinating. Also the lines like “Nobody saw them falling” can be interpreted as there was nobody actually present there. During the ice-skating incident, the temperature would have obviously been critically low and hence nobody bothered to step out of their houses.

To conclude, we can say that the text can be interpreted in whichever way the reader wants to interpret it. On one hand we do find some elements of magic realism in the text. But on the other hand we can’t classify the text as a whole to be magic realist due to the concept of the ‘return from the dead/repressed’. Brenton Priestley in his essay, “The Return of the dead and the repressed in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” writes, “In Gothic texts, the twin concepts the return of the dead and the return of the repressed are perpetually recurring.”

Both these ideas can be interpreted in the novel at some level thus, implying that Beloved is not completely a magic realist text but can