Text: Beloved by Toni Morrison
Critical Lens: Race and Culture
Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a compelling novel that deals with a racial difference after the time of slavery. The novel deals with a racial and cultural difference between the blacks and whites is relevant throughout the text. One person that can be perceived as the racial and cultural difference from the past is Beloved. Beloved brings back memories to Paul and Sethe from the past and from their time during slavery. Sethe was forgetting about slavery until Beloved showed up. So, Beloved represents the cultural and racial difference from the past because she brings back memories to Paul and Sethe
In the article, “Hush, Little Baby-Ghost: The Postcolonial Gothic and Haunting History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” Ruth Van Den Akker writes about the cultural significance of the dead baby Beloved. She writes, “ As Wisker also argues, ‘the unbearable history of slavery is embodied in the presence of [this] baby-ghost’ (2005: 175). Therefore, Beloved is not merely a repetition of the familiar ghost story, but functions as an appropriation of this genre in foregrounding cultural haunting.” In the novel, the ghost baby known as Beloved has some significance to the past. I think that when she uses the reference of the baby ghost, it represents a cultural haunting from the past because when she came into Sethe and Paul’s life she brought back memories of slavery. Beloved brings back a memory to Sethe about slavery and how she killed Beloved so she didn’t have to go through slavery. Her bringing back memories to Sethe cause racial and cultural tension with her and whites toward the end of the book. Since the ghost baby brings back memories of the past she could represent the culture from the past.
Another point that Ruth Van Den Akker talks about is cultural memory. She writes, “Cultural memory likewise connects past and present: ‘cultural memorization’ is ‘an activity occurring in the present, in which the past is continuously modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future’ (Bal, 1999: vii).” When Beloved shows up at 124 she brings memory from the past for Sethe and Paul. There was a lot of cultural memory in the book especially for Sethe. When Beloved comes she brings cultural memory to Sethe. Sethe starts to remember about her time at the slave plantation and about why she killed Beloved. Her remembrance about her time at the plantation was evident in the book with how protective she was when the white man came to pick Denver to work. When Denver was getting picked up to work from a white man, Sethe became all defencive and nearly killed the man with a ice pick.
Beloved can represent a cultural aspect of the past and about the time Sethe had at the plantation. Beloved gives Sethe memories which showed us in the book the relationship and difference of the cultural difference. When Beloved came into Sethe’s life she brought the cultural memory of the plantation.
If you would like to read the article yourself click on this link
Then click on the article that says Deconstructionist_Race_Hush Baby Ghost.
-Cormac Keegan
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