Major Essay: Beloved

Major Essay: Beloved

Morrison’s novel “Beloved” contests traditional perceptions of history, chronology and structure through a plethora of successfully used literacy devices. Morrisons writing requests that the audience revisit formed concepts of American history, and instead consider it from the perspective of the slaves. By resurrecting the past, the novel confronts the disconnected and ruptured reality of American history, the novel offers an unprocessed account of racism, slavery, and psychological trauma. Morrison has successfully contemporised history by reviving the trauma of an unfamed generation of slavery. History is represented in Beloved is an oxymoron, a relationship, literacy challenge, project, a question of subject and writer, a space, and a copyright, and additionally an art form.

The triangular relationship between history, the reader, and the novel is evident from the onset. “Beloved” is dedicated to “sixty million or more”, it aims to give a voice to those “disremembered and unaccounted for”. Thus Morrison is removing the template of a chronological timeline traditionally associated with history. Rather, history is portrayed as non-linear, for the very act of remembrance equates to that of resurrection. To acknowledge the victims of slavery is to simultaneously trump the reality of tense. If the reader can remember the traumas of slavery, then such becomes the present, and soon to be the future. This interplay between reconstructed memory and deconstructed history is consistent throughout the novel, and is to be considered a major theme of “Beloved”. Morrison herself articulates this in the article “Rediscovering Black History”,

There is no need to be nostalgic about “the old days” because they weren’t…but to recognize and rescue those qualities of resistance, excellence and integrity that were so much a part of our past and so useful to us and to the generations of blacks, now growing up. (Morrison 11)

Morrison is acutely concerned with the preservation and celebration of the “resistance, excellence, and integrity” (Morrison 11) bestowed in the history of American slavery. A primary objective of the novel is to deconstruct traditional historical concepts and immortalise the tale of past generations.

To achieve this Morrison utilises an array of instruments, one of such is the use of a triad of narrators. By experimenting with multiple voices, Morrison is subliminally demanding the audience confront the issue of slavery from a plethora of angles. In essence, “Beloved” does not examine history from the generic, and traditionally thought of, perspective of Sethe alone, rather, the novel details individualised accounts of the past, accounts which are unique to the narrator and their own version of history, whether it be Denver, Baby Suggs, Paul D, or Beloved herself.  This technique creates a bold tangent to traditional thought of narrative authority, as described by Marilyn Sanders Mobley in “A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Beloved”, as not only amplifying but also modifying the master version of history for the audience (Mobley, 359).  

Mobley’s commentary is given ammunition when investigating the novel’s plotline further. Consider, the key events of the novel occurred 18 years prior to its present setting, Morrison’s writing throws a jigsaw puzzle to the reader. Not even the narrator is in a position of full transparency, rather the narrator’s role is to guide the reader in piecing together the series of events, and support their own journey towards the recreation of history. What is the literacy achievement of this?

By asking the reader to re-create the story of Beloved, Morrison is in fact asking that the story of slavery be recreated. The employment of multiple voices reminds us of the monstrous role of perspective, with each new narrator comes a different facet, and a new fragment of the story is internalised. Beloved engages with history from a plethora of perspectives- central and decentralised, primary and secondary, affluent and marginalised, imprisoned and free, official and unofficial. Morrison is reminding is of objectivity when remembering the fragile concept of history.  

This lateral viewpoint is complemented by the historical integrity of the Novel. Moreover it is Morrison’s deconstructions of official history through textual representations that create a net beneath the reader, no feeling or emotion passes the reader undetected.  Morrison is immediate in alerting the reader of the historical, political, and geographical context of her writing through the specific mention of 1873, Ohio, and Cincinnati in chapter one, it is then the readers role to deduce further the meaning from the novel by connecting the storyline and characters to the social changes pre and post the civil war.