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“Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.” “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” “Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”. Recuperate the story of African-American slavery and survival. Beloved is, however, a historical novel; Morrison rewrites the life of the historical figure Margaret.
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Table of Contents1. Trauma in relation to Memory3. Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved3.1. The use of the colour red3.2. The repression of Memory3.3. The return of the Repressed3.3.1. Remembering Sweet Home3.3.2.
Remembering the Infanticide4. Works cited 1.
IntroductionThis term paper is concerned with the topic of trauma reflected in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, published in 1987. The novel deals with the life of Sethe and her daughter Denver after they escaped from slavery. Throughout the story, we can find flashbacks as well as memories leading the reader into the past years of Sethe’s life as a slave.The aim of this term paper is to exemplify the widespread topics of trauma and memory and to analyse in how far Morrison manages to illustrate them in Beloved. Besides, I will concentrate on Morrison’s strategies to integrate the themes of trauma and memory into the novel and to illustrate these subjects to the reader.The first part of the term paper will be concerned with a general overview of the issue of trauma. More precisely, I will define trauma and analyse in how far it is related to the idea of memory. The themes of memory and trauma are widespread so that I will concentrate on the most important characteristics which can be linked to the novel.In the second part of the term paper I am going to figure out in which ways the topic of trauma is symbolised in Beloved. In this context, my focus is on the use of the colour red as a symbol and metaphor.
The next step will be to handle the repression of memory. At this point, I will briefly mention Sethe’s strategies of repressing memory. After that, I am going to concentrate on the return of the repressed memory.
In doing so, I will refer to the memories of Sweet Home, the place Sethe lived as a slave, and to the memories of the Infanticide. For the most part, these memories belong to Sethe but I will also refer to other main characters of the novel which are important in this context. When referring to the memories of Sweet Home, Paul D plays an important role as Sethe’s interaction partner whereas the role of the ghost and afterwards girl named Beloved is significant by regarding the memories of the Infanticide.At the end of the term paper, a conclusion will be drawn in which one can see in how far Morrison enhances the topic of trauma in her novel and what she is trying to achieve by using it. Furthermore, I will resume the role of Beloved, both as a figure and a symbol. DefinitionIn early editions of the Oxford English Dictionary we can find an entry that defines trauma as “a wound, or external bodily injury in general” (Luckhurst 498).
According to the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud “a psychical trauma is something that enters the psyche that is so unprecedented or overwhelming that it cannot be processed or assimilated by usual mental processes” (Luckhurst 499). The event cannot be processed so that it drops out of the conscious memory but however is still present in the mind of the traumatized person. Thus, it exists as a ghost or an intruder. Luckhurst 499).Cathy Caruth elaborates on the definition of trauma by explaining that the overwhelming event causes a response which takes the form of repeated intrusive dreams, hallucinations, thoughts or behaviours arising from the event. In fact, the event cannot be experienced fully at the time it happens.
More precisely, the event is only belatedly experienced in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. Therefore, a traumatized person is possessed by an image or an event of the trauma (cf. Caruth 4).Therefore, the trauma can be seen as a repeated suffering of a traumatic event, but it is also a continual leaving of its site. The traumatized persons either carry an impossible history within them or they may become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess (cf. In this context, the belated history can only take place through talking with each other about the traumatic event (cf. Trauma in relation to Memory“While the images of traumatic re-enactment remain absolutely accurate and precise, they are largely inaccessible to conscious recall and control” (Caruth 151).
We can say that the most significant characteristic of traumatic recollection is the fact that it is not a simple memory (cf. Caruth 151).Instead of directly recalling a conscious memory, a traumatized person rather gets access to it in form of flashbacks.
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The history which is being told by a flashback literally can be placed neither in the past, in which it could not be fully experienced, nor in the present, in which its images cannot be fully understood. Consequently, a flashback is not only an overwhelming experience or memory, but an event that is created by its lack of integration into consciousness (cf. Caruth 152).A confrontation with the traumatic experience takes place but it cannot be assimilated within the schemes of prior knowledge. The event cannot become a narrative memory because it has not been fully integrated as it occurred (cf. The traumatized person has to return to the memory several times in order to integrate it in existing mental schemes and to transform it into narrative language. If the integration and transformation have been successfully, the person does not suffer anymore from trauma and is able to look back at what happened.
However, it is also possible that traumatized persons experience long periods of time in two different worlds. They live in the world of their trauma and at the same moment in the world of their current life because they cannot separate these worlds (cf. Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved 3.1. The use of the colour redRegarding the novel Beloved, it is striking that the colour red appears over and over again throughout the plot. There is a strong connection between the colour red and the novel’s portrayal of trauma.
The novel narrates the character’s processing of trauma through their experience with this colour (cf. In addition to its function as a link between voicelessness, troping and trauma, the colour red symbolizes slavery and the concepts that are associated with it (cf. Bast 1071). Excerpt out of 11 pagesDetails Title The Topics of Trauma and Memory in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' Grade 1,7 Author Year 2013 Pages 11 Catalog Number V318285 ISBN (eBook) 665 ISBN (Book) 672 File size 628 KB Language English Tagstopics,trauma,memory,toni,morrison,belovedPrice (Book)13.99 €Price (eBook)12.99 € Quote paper, 2013, The Topics of Trauma and Memory in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved', Munich, GRIN Verlag, comments yet.
Toni Morrison, 1993. Thomas Engstrom/Gamma Liaison SummaryThe novel is based on the true story of a black slave woman, Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her husband, Robert, and their children. They sought refuge in Ohio, but their owner and law officers soon caught up with the family. Before their recapture, Margaret killed her young daughter to prevent her return to slavery. In the novel, Sethe is also a passionately devoted mother, who flees with her children from an abusive owner known as “schoolteacher.” They are caught, and, in an act of supreme love and sacrifice, she too tries to kill her children to keep them from slavery. Only her two-year-old daughter dies, and the schoolteacher, believing that Sethe is crazy, decides not to take her back. Sethe later has “Beloved” inscribed on her daughter’s tombstone.
Although she had intended for it to read “Dearly Beloved,” she did not have the energy to “pay” for two words (each word cost her 10 minutes of sex with the engraver).These events are revealed in, as the novel opens in 1873, with Sethe and her teenage daughter, Denver, living in Ohio, where their house at 124 Bluestone Road is haunted by the angry ghost of the child Sethe killed. The hauntings are by the arrival of Paul D, a man so ravaged by his slave past that he keeps his feelings in the “tobacco bin” of his heart. He worked on the same plantation as Sethe, and the two begin a relationship. A brief period of relative calm ends with the appearance of a young woman who says that her name is Beloved. She knows things that suggest she is the reincarnation of Sethe’s lost daughter. Sethe is obsessed with her guilt and tries to the increasingly demanding and manipulative Beloved. At one point, Beloved seduces Paul D.
After learning that Sethe killed her daughter, he leaves. The situation at 124 Bluestone worsens, as Sethe loses her job and becomes completely fixated on Beloved, who is soon revealed to be pregnant. While the lonely and largely housebound Denver initially befriends Beloved, she begins to grow concerned. She finally dares to venture outside in order to ask the for help, and she is given food and a job. As the local women attempt to stage an exorcism, Denver’s employer arrives to take her to work, and Sethe mistakes him for “schoolteacher” and tries to attack him with an ice pick. The other women restrain her, and during the commotion Beloved disappears.
Paul D later returns to the grieving Sethe, promising to care for her, and Denver continues to thrive in the outside world.
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