The Role Of Rememory In Toni Morrison's Beloved
Beloved: A Historical Healing Toni Morrison’s Beloved reconceptualizes American history. In her novel, Morrison tells a story of the struggles of a newly freed black mother who becomes a slave to her own internal captivity. Beloved differs from conventional textbook history because it presents the firsthand thoughts and experiences of African American ex-slaves. By giving these slaves a voice in her novel, Morrison resists and subverts the Euro American discourse that has concealed the horrible crimes of the atrocious institution of slavery (Farshid 303). More importantly, however, Morrison’s novel acts as a healing process for both the nation and the affected individuals by restoring the African American identity destroyed by over two hundred
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years of slavery. Morrison’s Beloved is directly paralleled with the real life story of a slave woman named Margaret Garner who had escaped with her husband, four children and two other slaves from a Southern plantation in 1856. After being captured under the law of the Fugitives (that allowed the Southern slave owners to claim their properties all over the country, even as fugitives in the North), Garner tried to kill all of her children to hinder slave catchers from taking possession of them, but was apprehended after killing her two year old daughter. She was convicted to a jail sentence for the destruction of property (the slave child), rather than for terminating the life of a human being (304). As opposed to focusing on the widespread white aggression during the time, Morrison’s novel describing the external and internal conflicts of a slave mother named Sethe demonstrates that the psychological effects of slavery on the African American community were much more destructive than even the worst physical pain. Written as a text that can coexist as part ghost story, part historical novel, part slave narrative, and part love story, Morrison is able to uproot the traumatic lives of African slaves who have been kept “voiceless” throughout American history due to the widespread white oppression since the Reconstruction era (Malmgren 96). In chilling and graphic detail, the novel condenses the experience of African Americans before, during, and after the Civil War, which enables its reader to experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange (97). By implementing symbolism as a narrative strategy, Morrison successfully unearths the atrocious history of slavery that “runs beneath” most official records of history. In doing so, Morrison highlights the African American community’s ability to cope with its self-destructive racial past to reclaim its selfhood. Through her use of symbolism, Morrison indirectly depicts how white oppression caused the loss of the African American voice, but also demonstrates the African American community’s ability to deal with these traumas to reclaim its voice. Morrison uses the symbol of a “veil” to represent the dominant white society taking away the voice from African Americans. Since the Reconstruction period, black Americans were forced behind this veil as the white voice was the only one heard. According to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks “The American Negro, ‘born with a veil,’ can achieve ‘no true self-consciousness’ but can only ‘see himself through the revelation of the other world’”(15) Morrison explicitly recognizes this veil by stating that slaves narrators, ‘shaping the experience to make it palatable’ for white readers, dropped a ‘veil’ over ‘their interior life’(Rody 97). This veil represents the unwavering ideologies of white oppression that have been exercised throughout American history to conceal the horrible crimes of slavery.
In Beloved, Morrison uses this veil as a symbol of her distrust of white dialogue through Paul D’s reaction to seeing Stamp Paid’s newspaper clip describing the account of Sethe’s murder. Paul D denies the authenticity of Sethe’s picture by repeatedly saying, “That ain’t her mouth”, and his repeated refusal to accept the printed mouth as that of Sethe’s shows the denial of the newspaper clip’s validity (Morrison 154-158). Paul D’s flow of thoughts also echoes Morrison’s idea about the unreliability of the white media;
Paul D slid the clipping out from under Stamp’s palm. The print meant nothing for him so he didn’t even glance at it…Because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear. A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro’ face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby, or outran a street mod. Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that hardly qualifies as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of the ordinary—something white people would find interesting…And it must have been hard to find news about Negroes worth the breath catch of a white citizen of Cincinnati. (155-156)
The passage signifies the veil as the exclusion of blacks from the realm of human considerations in the white controlled media. There was no place for black people in the media during normal behavior. In her sharp criticism of print media which is a component of her overall revisionist motive in criticizing the historiography of slavery, as Farshid confirms (306), Morrison depicts the hideous role of the white dominated discourse in reinforcing slavery by dehumanizing black people through the dismissal enacted on them by the American media that was entirely controlled by Euro Americans up to the last decades of the twentieth century. To defy traditional historiography and to fill in the gaps of slave narratives, Morrison’s novel recounts the story of “disremembered, unaccounted for slaves whose voices were silenced” by the slave catchers who entrapped and traded them as well as the slave owners who exploited and tortured them, while the media kept quiet about all those brutalities (Morrison 274).
In an attempt to remove the veil for both Sethe and Baby Suggs, Morrison reveals the thoughts of a black mother when faced with returning to slavery:
And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (192)
Due to the continuous white oppression of slavery, Sethe believed that the only way to ensure her children’s safety was through death. In killing her daughter, Sethe freed her from living a life of brutalizing slavery. However, Sethe’s violence does nothing to remove the veil of oppression because it is not portrayed in the media as an act of love, but as an outrageous act of murder.
Morrison’s establishment of the African American community’s voice being drowned out by this veil of white oppression introduces the concept of “rememory” as a way to recognize that slavery is not only a memory, but a continued haunting that can be overcome and healed.
According to Morrison, rememory is what connects the past with the present. Morrison describes the healing process of rememory when Baby Suggs visits the Clearing. “Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child… took her great heart to the Clearing…laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up” (103). Baby Suggs led the community in psychotherapy sessions to release repressed emotions and memories. The Clearing was a place that the community could visit to work through past experiences in order to love in the present and plan for the …show more content…
future.
Despite their thorough attempts to forget the past, the characters in Morrison’s novel continually fail to do so because they are unable to separate their present from the past. For example, Sethe tries to ignore the past but she “works hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe” (6). Likewise, the more Sethe tries to forget the past, the less she is able to put an end to her unyielding memories because her mind is “loaded with the past” (70). Sethe’s unsuccessful attempts to overcome the past is symbolized by her relationship with Beloved—the reincarnated spirit of her murdered child that comes back to life. From her presence and consistent questioning of Sethe’s past, Beloved embodies the connection of Sethe’s present with her past.
The character of Beloved representing the physical manifestation of history is Morrison’s way of signifying how the past can invade the present (Farshid 307). As Sethe nearly loses her identity and life through her obsession with her past and her resurrected daughter, Morrison demonstrates how focusing on the past can be all-consuming and destructive. Ultimately, Sethe begins to regain control of her life by discovering her future with Paul D. Paul D tells her, “Sethe . . . me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”(273) Through the healing love of Paul D, Denver, and the black community, Sethe learns to let go of the unpleasant past that has defined her. She discovers that she can now define herself through the future she creates with her family.
Beloved’s representation as a manifestation of repressed memories correlates to modern American society’s understanding of slavery. As the dominant white social class sought to stifle slavery’s traumatic extent on society, Morrison’s depiction of Beloved uncovers the “underlying truth” (Farsid 303) For example, the day that 124 died and the visits to the Clearing ended, the novel shows how the community comes together again to evict her from 124. Beloved and Sethe looked out the window and “…saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed; others looked at the hot cloudless sky” (Morrison 308). From this scene, Morrison expresses the African American community’s healing by internally overcoming its brutal past.
Morrison portrays Sethe 's healing process to her readers as a model of healing for the nation.
She seems to recognize that the U.S. is, much like Sethe, trying to cover up the traumas of the past by not giving them voice and a chance for healing. Today, America does not like to acknowledge the truth about slavery. Americans do not like to think about slave women who were continuously raped and abused by their owners, about slave children who were taken from their parents as property, or about runaway slaves who were burned alive or lynched. The nation is also like Sethe 's community, which abandoned her when she was most in need of help and treated her action as a mental abnormality rather than a predictable result of her past trauma. Her community chose to label her as immoral and insane rather than blaming her sickness on the immorality of the slavery. Still today, much of white America labels the black population as lesser human beings. The novel clearly makes the reader think about the past and to deal with it. Although Beloved is painful, it is also a method of
healing. Slavery is, without a doubt, a deep stain in American history that is better left forgotten. However, Morrison raises the paradox that if slavery and legal white oppression are allowed to be forgotten, just as Sethe tried to forget killing Beloved, there is nothing standing in the way of their return. Her novel aims not to forget slavery’s past, but to forget the hauntings associated with it. Her novel attempts to heal both the African American community and American society at large to accept its past and move on. In general, slavery caused extreme physical and emotional trauma on the “sixty million and more” affected. This damage has lasted long after the abolition of slavery, and continues in today’s society. Brainwashed by the white perspective on how to view themselves, newly freed African Americans saw that the veil cast over their identity became impossible to penetrate. In her novel, Morrison shows that dealing with the past sufferings of slavery in a white dominated society requires the efforts of not only the individual, but of the African American community and essentially, the entire nation. By giving the African American community a voice that penetrates the veil of oppression, Morrison has allowed both the community and the individual to move towards healing for a less painful future. Equally, the period in which Morrison wrote Beloved suggests that both white and black American society have forgotten how to manage the issue of race. Morrison’s ideas concerning the veil and rememory illustrate the idea that in order for African Americans and the nation as a whole to advance society, it must not repress the memories of the past, but acknowledge the past and move on toward healing for a better future.
Works Cited
Du Bois, W.E.B., and Nathan Irvin Huggins. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. 9-23. Print.
Farshid, Sima. "Foucauldian Archaeology of Slavery In Morrison 's Beloved." International Journal Of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 5.4 (2010): 303-310.Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 May 2013.
Malmgren, Carl D. "Mixed Genres And The Logic Of Slavery In Toni Morrison 's Beloved." Critique 36.2 (1995): 96. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Apr. 2013.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.
Rody, Caroline. "Toni Morrison 's Beloved: History, 'Rememory, ' and a 'Clamour for a Kiss. '" American Literary History 7.1 (1995): 92-119.
Documentation
I referenced http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ to properly cite sources.
years of slavery. Morrison’s Beloved is directly paralleled with the real life story of a slave woman named Margaret Garner who had escaped with her husband, four children and two other slaves from a Southern plantation in 1856. After being captured under the law of the Fugitives (that allowed the Southern slave owners to claim their properties all over the country, even as fugitives in the North), Garner tried to kill all of her children to hinder slave catchers from taking possession of them, but was apprehended after killing her two year old daughter. She was convicted to a jail sentence for the destruction of property (the slave child), rather than for terminating the life of a human being (304). As opposed to focusing on the widespread white aggression during the time, Morrison’s novel describing the external and internal conflicts of a slave mother named Sethe demonstrates that the psychological effects of slavery on the African American community were much more destructive than even the worst physical pain. Written as a text that can coexist as part ghost story, part historical novel, part slave narrative, and part love story, Morrison is able to uproot the traumatic lives of African slaves who have been kept “voiceless” throughout American history due to the widespread white oppression since the Reconstruction era (Malmgren 96). In chilling and graphic detail, the novel condenses the experience of African Americans before, during, and after the Civil War, which enables its reader to experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange (97). By implementing symbolism as a narrative strategy, Morrison successfully unearths the atrocious history of slavery that “runs beneath” most official records of history. In doing so, Morrison highlights the African American community’s ability to cope with its self-destructive racial past to reclaim its selfhood. Through her use of symbolism, Morrison indirectly depicts how white oppression caused the loss of the African American voice, but also demonstrates the African American community’s ability to deal with these traumas to reclaim its voice. Morrison uses the symbol of a “veil” to represent the dominant white society taking away the voice from African Americans. Since the Reconstruction period, black Americans were forced behind this veil as the white voice was the only one heard. According to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks “The American Negro, ‘born with a veil,’ can achieve ‘no true self-consciousness’ but can only ‘see himself through the revelation of the other world’”(15) Morrison explicitly recognizes this veil by stating that slaves narrators, ‘shaping the experience to make it palatable’ for white readers, dropped a ‘veil’ over ‘their interior life’(Rody 97). This veil represents the unwavering ideologies of white oppression that have been exercised throughout American history to conceal the horrible crimes of slavery.
In Beloved, Morrison uses this veil as a symbol of her distrust of white dialogue through Paul D’s reaction to seeing Stamp Paid’s newspaper clip describing the account of Sethe’s murder. Paul D denies the authenticity of Sethe’s picture by repeatedly saying, “That ain’t her mouth”, and his repeated refusal to accept the printed mouth as that of Sethe’s shows the denial of the newspaper clip’s validity (Morrison 154-158). Paul D’s flow of thoughts also echoes Morrison’s idea about the unreliability of the white media;
Paul D slid the clipping out from under Stamp’s palm. The print meant nothing for him so he didn’t even glance at it…Because there was no way in hell a black face could appear in a newspaper if the story was about something anybody wanted to hear. A whip of fear broke through the heart chambers as soon as you saw a Negro’ face in a paper, since the face was not there because the person had a healthy baby, or outran a street mod. Nor was it there because the person had been killed, or maimed or caught or burned or jailed or whipped or evicted or stomped or raped or cheated, since that hardly qualifies as news in a newspaper. It would have to be something out of the ordinary—something white people would find interesting…And it must have been hard to find news about Negroes worth the breath catch of a white citizen of Cincinnati. (155-156)
The passage signifies the veil as the exclusion of blacks from the realm of human considerations in the white controlled media. There was no place for black people in the media during normal behavior. In her sharp criticism of print media which is a component of her overall revisionist motive in criticizing the historiography of slavery, as Farshid confirms (306), Morrison depicts the hideous role of the white dominated discourse in reinforcing slavery by dehumanizing black people through the dismissal enacted on them by the American media that was entirely controlled by Euro Americans up to the last decades of the twentieth century. To defy traditional historiography and to fill in the gaps of slave narratives, Morrison’s novel recounts the story of “disremembered, unaccounted for slaves whose voices were silenced” by the slave catchers who entrapped and traded them as well as the slave owners who exploited and tortured them, while the media kept quiet about all those brutalities (Morrison 274).
In an attempt to remove the veil for both Sethe and Baby Suggs, Morrison reveals the thoughts of a black mother when faced with returning to slavery:
And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (192)
Due to the continuous white oppression of slavery, Sethe believed that the only way to ensure her children’s safety was through death. In killing her daughter, Sethe freed her from living a life of brutalizing slavery. However, Sethe’s violence does nothing to remove the veil of oppression because it is not portrayed in the media as an act of love, but as an outrageous act of murder.
Morrison’s establishment of the African American community’s voice being drowned out by this veil of white oppression introduces the concept of “rememory” as a way to recognize that slavery is not only a memory, but a continued haunting that can be overcome and healed.
According to Morrison, rememory is what connects the past with the present. Morrison describes the healing process of rememory when Baby Suggs visits the Clearing. “Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child… took her great heart to the Clearing…laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up” (103). Baby Suggs led the community in psychotherapy sessions to release repressed emotions and memories. The Clearing was a place that the community could visit to work through past experiences in order to love in the present and plan for the …show more content…
future.
Despite their thorough attempts to forget the past, the characters in Morrison’s novel continually fail to do so because they are unable to separate their present from the past. For example, Sethe tries to ignore the past but she “works hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe” (6). Likewise, the more Sethe tries to forget the past, the less she is able to put an end to her unyielding memories because her mind is “loaded with the past” (70). Sethe’s unsuccessful attempts to overcome the past is symbolized by her relationship with Beloved—the reincarnated spirit of her murdered child that comes back to life. From her presence and consistent questioning of Sethe’s past, Beloved embodies the connection of Sethe’s present with her past.
The character of Beloved representing the physical manifestation of history is Morrison’s way of signifying how the past can invade the present (Farshid 307). As Sethe nearly loses her identity and life through her obsession with her past and her resurrected daughter, Morrison demonstrates how focusing on the past can be all-consuming and destructive. Ultimately, Sethe begins to regain control of her life by discovering her future with Paul D. Paul D tells her, “Sethe . . . me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”(273) Through the healing love of Paul D, Denver, and the black community, Sethe learns to let go of the unpleasant past that has defined her. She discovers that she can now define herself through the future she creates with her family.
Beloved’s representation as a manifestation of repressed memories correlates to modern American society’s understanding of slavery. As the dominant white social class sought to stifle slavery’s traumatic extent on society, Morrison’s depiction of Beloved uncovers the “underlying truth” (Farsid 303) For example, the day that 124 died and the visits to the Clearing ended, the novel shows how the community comes together again to evict her from 124. Beloved and Sethe looked out the window and “…saw Denver sitting on the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces of thirty neighborhood women. Some had their eyes closed; others looked at the hot cloudless sky” (Morrison 308). From this scene, Morrison expresses the African American community’s healing by internally overcoming its brutal past.
Morrison portrays Sethe 's healing process to her readers as a model of healing for the nation.
She seems to recognize that the U.S. is, much like Sethe, trying to cover up the traumas of the past by not giving them voice and a chance for healing. Today, America does not like to acknowledge the truth about slavery. Americans do not like to think about slave women who were continuously raped and abused by their owners, about slave children who were taken from their parents as property, or about runaway slaves who were burned alive or lynched. The nation is also like Sethe 's community, which abandoned her when she was most in need of help and treated her action as a mental abnormality rather than a predictable result of her past trauma. Her community chose to label her as immoral and insane rather than blaming her sickness on the immorality of the slavery. Still today, much of white America labels the black population as lesser human beings. The novel clearly makes the reader think about the past and to deal with it. Although Beloved is painful, it is also a method of
healing. Slavery is, without a doubt, a deep stain in American history that is better left forgotten. However, Morrison raises the paradox that if slavery and legal white oppression are allowed to be forgotten, just as Sethe tried to forget killing Beloved, there is nothing standing in the way of their return. Her novel aims not to forget slavery’s past, but to forget the hauntings associated with it. Her novel attempts to heal both the African American community and American society at large to accept its past and move on. In general, slavery caused extreme physical and emotional trauma on the “sixty million and more” affected. This damage has lasted long after the abolition of slavery, and continues in today’s society. Brainwashed by the white perspective on how to view themselves, newly freed African Americans saw that the veil cast over their identity became impossible to penetrate. In her novel, Morrison shows that dealing with the past sufferings of slavery in a white dominated society requires the efforts of not only the individual, but of the African American community and essentially, the entire nation. By giving the African American community a voice that penetrates the veil of oppression, Morrison has allowed both the community and the individual to move towards healing for a less painful future. Equally, the period in which Morrison wrote Beloved suggests that both white and black American society have forgotten how to manage the issue of race. Morrison’s ideas concerning the veil and rememory illustrate the idea that in order for African Americans and the nation as a whole to advance society, it must not repress the memories of the past, but acknowledge the past and move on toward healing for a better future.
Works Cited
Du Bois, W.E.B., and Nathan Irvin Huggins. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1986. 9-23. Print.
Farshid, Sima. "Foucauldian Archaeology of Slavery In Morrison 's Beloved." International Journal Of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences 5.4 (2010): 303-310.Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 May 2013.
Malmgren, Carl D. "Mixed Genres And The Logic Of Slavery In Toni Morrison 's Beloved." Critique 36.2 (1995): 96. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Apr. 2013.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.
Rody, Caroline. "Toni Morrison 's Beloved: History, 'Rememory, ' and a 'Clamour for a Kiss. '" American Literary History 7.1 (1995): 92-119.
Documentation
I referenced http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ to properly cite sources.