Beloved and Ghost Stories

Beloved and Ghost Stories

Ghost Stories and History

In "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved," Linda Krumholz argues that the function of the ghost in the novel is to both represent history and offer a means of healing the trauma it inflicts. She draws upon theories of trauma to argue that repressing the past is psychologically damaging. She adds that the individual process of recovering from a terrible event can and must be "reproduced on a historical level" (3). Ultimately, Krumholz examines the role of confronting history in healing.

Krumholz, Linda. "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved." African American Review 26.3 (1993)

In Beloved, Morrison constructs a parallel between the individual processes of psychological recovery and a historical or national process. Sethe, the central character in the novel, describes the relationship between the individual and the historical unconscious:

"If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place -- the picture of it -- stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened." (36)

If Sethe's individual memories exist in the world as fragments of a historical memory, then, by extension, the individual process of recollection or "rememory" can be reproduced on a historical level. Thus, Sethe's process of healing in Beloved, her process of learning to live with her past, is a model for the readers who must confront Sethe's past as part of our own past, a collective past that lives right here where we live.

Arnold Rampersad, in his discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, also describes the recovery of history as both a national and a personal necessity:

[Du Bois's] point of view is clear. Admitting and exploring the reality of slavery is necessarily painful for a black American, but only by doing so can he or she begin to understand himself or herself and American and Afro-American culture in general. The normal price of the evasion of the fact of slavery is intellectual and spiritual death. Only by grappling with the meaning and legacy of slavery can the imagination, recognizing finally the temporality of the institution, begin to transcend it. (123)

In Rampersad's description, the repression of the historical past is as psychologically damaging as the repression of personal trauma. In Beloved Morrison, like Du Bois in Souls, negotiates the legacy of slavery as a national trauma, and as an intensely personal trauma as well. Both works challenge the notion that the end of institutional slavery brings about freedom by depicting the emotional and psychological scars of slavery as well as the persistence of racism. And both Morrison and Du Bois delve into the stories and souls of black folk to tap the resources of memory and imagination as tools of strength and healing.

Ghosts, Magical Realism, and Post-Colonialism

What does it mean to start Beloved as a ghost story?

Ghosts and Gender

What other collations are connected to the idea of haunting/ghostliness in the early pages on the novel? What do they suggest about the themes of this novel?

(Denver gets jealous of Sethe and Paul D's memories of Sweet Home)

We have a ghost in here," she said, and it worked. They were not a twosome anymore. Her mother left off swinging her feet and being girlish. Memory of Sweet Home dropped away from the eyes of the man she was being girlish for. He looked quickly up the lightning-white stairs behind her.

"So I hear," he said. "But sad, your mama said. Not evil."

"No sir," said Denver, "not evil. But not sad either."

"What then?"

"Rebuked. Lonely and rebuked."

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "Slavery, Race, And The Figure Of The Tragic Mulatta; Or, The Ghost Of Southern History In The Writing Of African-American Women." Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal Of Southern Cultures 49.4 (1996): 791-817. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.

What is the function of haunting in this novel based on its relation to _________?

What is Magical Realism?

• An "irreducible" magic which cannot be explained by typical notions of natural law.
• A realist description that stresses normal, common, every-day phenomena, which is then revised or "refelt" by the marvelous. Extreme or amplified states of mind or setting are often used to accomplish this. (This distinguishes the genre from pure myth or fantasy.)
• It causes the reader to be drawn between the two views of reality.
• These two visions or realms nearly merge or intersect.
• Time is both history and the timeless; space is often challenged; identity is broken down at times.
• (http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/magical.htm)

__Krumholz's argument that recovery from historical trauma requires a mass reconciliation with the past__ is surprisingly like __Denver's understanding of how the ghost functions in the house _ in terms of _reasoning_.

By this, I mean __the reasoning__ is ____that only by everyone acknowledging that a historical event has happened can anyone move past it __ in ____Krumholz's argument___ and the same holds true in ___Denver's understanding___ in terms of ____her desire to seperaet Sethe and Paul through invoking the ghost, but her insistence taht the ghost is "lonely and rebuked" (81)___. Noticing this pattern of ____insisting that everyone must aknowledge and talk about a traumatic event-___ suggests that ____Beloved's attempted seduction of Paul D.____ is also a part of this collation because it _____ creates division by making engaging with history private rather than a communal activity and thus disastrous__.

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old – as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once – the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn’t the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandson had taken so long to realize that every house wasn’t like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present – intolerable – and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

Throughout Beloved, Morrison reminds us that the sharing of rememories and the healing of wounds does not unfold as smoothly as Sethe hopes. The stories are not easy to tell, refine, and retell. Even when, haltingly, imperfectly, they have been told and a fragment of trust established, the powerful temptation to forget abides. Beloved, the ghost, is not claimed, for hers was not a story to pass on. And ultimately, the significance of the forgetting of that story supersedes the importance of the original event, so that the forgetting itself becomes a story that cannot be passed on. The easy part of Beloved's story, which is also inescapably Sethe's story, indicted the horrible cost of slavery for African-American slaves; the difficult part, as Morrison does not flinch from acknowledging, implicated the slaves themselves.(n5) For the transformation of slaves from passive victims--mere object--into active resisters of their own dehumanization necessarily invoked their accountability for their actions, however desperate, however constrained. The true price of their humanity lay in the scarring acknowledgement of their responsibility--that is, in their willingness to claim the story of slavery as their own subjective experience, to claim Southern history as their own.

...These complexities and ambiguities have weighed heavily on black and white authors alike, but they have especially weighed upon the imaginations of black women writers who have been most likely to attempt to capture the personal experience of slave women and their female descendants. Both blacks and whites have recognized the experience of slave women as, in some essential way, emblematic of the system as a whole. Sexually vulnerable as women, slave women were if anything more vulnerable to tragedy as mothers whose children might, at any time, be wrestled from them. Indeed, from the perspective of the black community, the greatest crime of slavery seems indeed to have been the separation of families, especially the separation of mothers and children. Slaveholders' sexual access to slave women ranked a close and closely related second, but was never taken fully to equal the separation of mother and child, at least in part because African cultures did not place the same weight as middle-class Anglo-Americans on women's premarital chastity. In the too frequent cases in which the separation was forcefully perpetrated by sale, the results were devastating but could at least be attributed to the malevolence of an external force. But what if it were perpetrated by the mother herself through running away, suicide, or infanticide?.....has covered over the stories that, until recently, none have felt free to pass on, but that have, as in the case of Beloved, a disquieting ability to return as ghosts

"that's the way the world was for me and for the black people I know. In addition to the very shrewd, down-to-earth efficient way in which they did things and survived things, there was this other knowledge or perception, always discredited but nevertheless there." --Toni Morrison, Interview

"Magical realism, unlike the fantastic or the surreal, presumes that the individual requires a bond with the traditions and the faith of the community, that s/he is historically constructed and connected." (P. Gabrielle Foreman. Past on Stories: History and the Magically Real, Morrison and Allende on Call. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 286).

"Rushdie sees 'El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practiced by [Garcia] Marquez, [as] a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely Third World consciousness. [Magical realism] is a way of showing reality more truly with the marvelous aid of metaphor. " (Patricia Merivale, Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight's Children, Magic Realism and The Tin Drum. Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, p. 331, 336).

To what extent is the use of magical elements and ghosts in Beloved like that in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao?

Could we consider enslavement a form of colonialism? What sort of post-colonial issues do we see raised in Beloved and how? In what ways is it portrayed as a different set of concerns?

Ellen Goldner

In the decades before and after the Civil War, the Western rational discourse in the United States lent prestige to "factual" genres like history writing. In its requirements for documentable evidence, the same discourse set limits on genres like the slave narrative (Olney 150). Gothic fiction may seem far removed from the normative genres: gothic images of slavery defy reasoned descriptions of that social institution, and imply that the truth of slavery is unspeakable within normative terms. Nonetheless, gothic representations of slavery often grapple with the dominant discourse they disrupt. In Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno," Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Toni Morrison's Beloved, gothic elements expose the complicity between a Western scientific world view and slavery; they reveal the distortions in the lens through which the rational discourse views the world, indicating the features of life and the lives of Others for which Western empiricism fails to account.

What data dumps would relate to this argument that women had a particularly difficult time in retelling slavery? Why, based on those collations?