Memory, Slavery and the Representation of Trauma in Beloved

Abstract

One of the most important literary activities relying on the traumatic heritage of American chattel slavery is Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison. This paper explores the ways Morrison depicts trauma through memory, collective sufferings, and narrative structure. This exploration of seven dimensions of representation of trauma, through the trauma theory and the qualitative analysis of text, is based on the understanding of seven interrelated dimensions of representing a trauma: the infanticide and maternal trauma of Sethe, the neologism of rememory developed by Morrison, the ghost of Beloved as the epitome of communal trauma, the masculine vulnerability and psychic numbing of Paul D, the domestic space of 124 Bluestone Road, the communal healing facilitated by Baby Suggs, and the play of narrative fragmentation as an expression of the traumatic experience in its formal forms. Analysis shows that the novel by Morrison is not only a reconstruction of historical facts of slavery but an interior psychic space of the enslaved so as to make visible how traumatic memory is transported across generations, disrupting identity, and making it inaccessible to the traditional representation. The analysis shows that Beloved simultaneously serves as a literary testimony, a community grieving ceremony and an intervention in the politics of historical memory. The paper will add to the current academic discourse at the intersection of African American literary criticism, postcolonial studies, and trauma studies by shedding light on how Morrison makes aesthetic decisions to chronicle the eradication of Black suffering and ethnocentrism conditions at once.

Keywords: the theory of trauma, collective memory, Toni Morrison, Beloved, rememory, slavery, fragmentation of narratives, intergenerational trauma, African American literature.