Memory In Margaret Atwood's The Chokecherry Tree

A chokecherry tree is a small shrub like plant that grows in Virginia. The cherries it harbors are bitter, in fact the common name for the plant is bitter-berry. The fact that Sethe refers to the whip scars on her back as her “chokecherry tree” illuminates the feelings she has toward her past. Although the “rememories” of her past are abhorrent and incredibly painful for her they are still a part of her. So instead of lingering on the bitter taste of her past she makes even the most awful of memories beautiful by naming it something pretty. Not that her past wasn't terrible, it was, it's just that Sethe wouldn't be who she turned out to be if she hadn’t of gone through all the suffering that she did. The connection that this has to the rest of the work is thin at most but if one stretches there is a connection.