"Postmodern blackness": Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' and the end of history - novel by Black female author

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1998 by Kimberly Chabot Davis

As an artist, Morrison places a great deal of faith in the power of representation to determine our perceptions of reality. For her, the character of Beloved has become a piece of living history - words made into flesh. According to Morrison, she drew Beloved as a composite of the dead child of Margaret Garner, and of a "dead girl" from a Van der Zee photograph - a girl who had been murdered by a jealous ex-lover ("A Conversation" 58384). Morrison remarked passionately in an interview:

bit by bit I had been rescuing her from the grave of time and inattention. Her fingernails might be in the first book; face and legs, perhaps, the second time. Little by little bringing her back into living life. So that now she comes running when called . . . she is here now, alive. ("A Conversation" 593)

Morrison's commitment to resurfacing the dead and paying tribute to black Americans of previous generations has made her works particularly poignant to African American readers. With the novel's newly acquired place in the canon of American literature, Morrison's representation has helped to contribute to the historical consciousness of Americans,just as the television miniseries Roots did in the 1970s. The popularity of Beloved and the healing power of its representation may have enlarged our culture's understanding of black women's history and of the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction era.

To ground my argument that Morrison's fiction has much to contribute to a postmodern theoretical debate about history and representation, I will turn to a close reading of the novel and suggest that its thematic interest in temporality relates to larger concerns about history. If Morrison's career reveals both a desire for "authentic" history-as-life-lived and the postmodernist realization that history is a fictional construct, the plot of her novel Beloved is marked by a parallel dialectic: the mind's struggle between remembering and forgetting the past. Beloved is a novel about the traumas and healing powers of memory, or "rememory" as Sethe calls it, adding a connotation of cyclical recurrence. Sethe's ambivalent relationship to her cruel past creates a kind of wavelike narrative effect, as memories surface and are repressed. On the one hand, "Sethe worked hard to remember . . . as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious," offering her memories of the beauty of Sweet Home rather than of her children (6). Painfully aware that she lacks control of her memory, Sethe also attempts to repress, to "start the day's serious work of beating back the past" (73). The ghost child Beloved represents the "return of the repressed" past that demands to be worked through and not forgotten. Although the novel proves Sethe wrong in her belief that "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay" (42), the text also contends that neither must the past consume us. With Beloved's entrenchment at 124 Bluestone, Sethe's life begins to ebb away, her strength sapped by the swelling ghost daughter, a figure for the threatening past. Morrison suggests that dwelling on one's own past, or the collective past of the slaves, can strangle your present as Beloved nearly strangles Sethe in the Clearing.