Toni Morrisons novel Beloved - Essay Example

Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved presents the theme of memory as a way that African-American characters in the present deal with the experience of slavery in the past. The experience of slavery is so traumatic that it has been suppressed, but finds ways to haunt the present, returning as memory "in the flesh". "Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else" (p. 43) In this way, we see Beloved as "rememory", a haunting or return of the individual and collective past in a physical form that enables the characters to deal with their trauma and move toward the future.

The novel tells the story of an ex-slave Sethe, living ten years after Emancipation on the outskirts of Cincinatti in a house haunted by the ghost of her murdered baby girl. Eighteen years ago Sethe and her young children are at 124 in a twenty-eight-day-long freedom when the Schoolteacher, her owner, rides up with three other horsemen in apocalyptic fashion. As this was in the time of the Fugitive Laws, and adamant that her children will not endure the dehumanizing conditions of slavery, Sethe runs into a shed and attempts to kill her four children, succeeding in killing the child who will be Beloved, before she is stopped.

Sethe has pushed all horrid memories deep into her subconscious - "her brain was not interested in the future" (p. 83) - but they inevitably return, in the flesh to literally haunt her. The occupants of 124 find themselves bumping into Sethe's own "rememory" that comes back "in the place where it happened" (p. 43). As neo-slave narratives revisit the past in general, and slavery in particular, a major feature is the re-presentation of the past through memory. The challenge for Morrison, writing of an experience such as slavery, was to find a narrative mode that adequately captures this, thus her choice of the embodiment of "memory desperate to stay alive" in the form of a dead baby (p. xix). As such, the story is told with memory as the "narrator", and the particular traumatic condition of enslavement and its equally destabilizing aftermath is of central focus.

With memory as the novel's narrative frame, the narrative is necessarily non-linear, following the dictates of memory, adding details as it goes along and condensing, submerging and reordering events. In the early pages of the novel, we witness the process of mental selection and ordering of Sethe's "devious" brain, that would present her with pictures she has repressed from her slave past: "Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her - remembering the wonderful soughing tress rather than the boys.

Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that" (p. 7). The result is a disruptive chronology with a past that forces its way above the surface and into the present. Sethe's concept of "rememory" shows that no space is devoid of hauntings as everywhere the Negro has wandered is graced with ghosts of the slave past: "Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture of it - stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.

[] Right in the place where it happened" (p. 43). The oscillation of the minds of the novel's central characters, Sethe, Paul D and Denver, from the present to the past, is facilitated and enabled by several spaces, including the house itself. The very first line of the novel announces that "124 was spiteful". More importantly, it operates as a repository of memories. The house seems to have registered the "rememory" of the