Healing Through Rememorizes A Reading Of Toni Morrison’S

Healing Through Rememorizes: A Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved Foram Patel Lecturer, E-mail- Abstract Based on fragments borrowed from the Margaret Garner incident, Morrison explores the harrowing nature of slavery in her fifth novel Beloved (1987). But far from being an objective account of slavery, Beloved is a psychological exploration of traumatic experience which examines and internalizes slavery by focusing on the day-to-day lived experiences of the slaves rendering enslavement as an intimate experience for the readers. In the novel, Morrison presents the tortured inner turmoil of the former slaves and the stultifying lives they led. Harrowing experiences leave deep wounds in one’s psyche often tormenting one’s soul. The slaves†¦show more content†¦She intends to fill up the gaps left behind by most slave narratives of 19th century by internalizing the experience of slavery in her novel. In words of Karla F. C. Holloway, Morrison revisions: â€Å"[...] a history both spoken and written, felt and submerged. It is in the coalescence of the known and unknown elements of slavery—the events, minuscule in significance to the captors but major disruptions of black folks’ experience in nurturing and loving and being— where Morrison s reconstruction of the historical text of slavery occurs†. (68) In Beloved (1987), Morrison throws light on the interior life of the slaves emphasizing their psychological agony. Inspired by a historical account of an African-American slave named Margaret Garner who had killed one of her children to save them from slavery, the novel centres around a community of former slaves that has been â€Å"spiritually incapacitated by the trauma of slavery† (Holloway: 68). The ambivalent stance of wishing to forget and remember at the same time the painful history of slavery, is evidenced in her attitude towards the story and its characters. Beloved (1987) revolves around â€Å"the wish to forget and the necessity to remember, to reject and to reclaim; and to elide the boundaries between past and present† (Mckay: 12). In the novel, the character Beloved is Sethe’s baby girl reincarnated as an adult woman. She is the physical manifestation of Sethe’s most painful memory- her killing ofShow MoreRelatedBeloved: Critique with New His toricism1749 Words   |  7 Pages Beloved is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Toni Morrison and published in 1987. The story follows Sethe as she attempts to make peace with her present (for her, post Civil War America) and her past as a former slave and the atrocities she suffered at the hands of the benevolent Gardner family. Information given to the readers from different perspectives, multiple characters, and various time periods allows her audience to piece together the history of the family, their lives, as