Spectral Excess and Metaphorical Supplementation in Beloved

Abstract

My previous three chapters have analyzed Beloved by developing the connections between the ghost and metaphor that were traced in my introductory discussion of “In a Station of the Metro.” Each chapter has traced a different way in which the spectral figure in Beloved displays its own metaphoricity and the way that the novel’s historical concerns ultimately ground this self-reflexive metaphoricity. Chapter 2 analyzed its role in presenting absences as perceivable reality and traced the connections that this has with the novel’s narrative function in articulating gaps and absences in knowledge. Chapter 3 outlined the spectral erasure, denial, and suspension of already posited presence in the novel’s conclusion, and, drawing on the similarities with deconstruction, showed that this concluding negation is the novel’s self-reflexive recognition of its metaphorically speculative response to the uncertain and obscured historical reality of slavery. In Chapter 4, I traced the connection between the ghost as a communicative agent, which transfers between separate worlds, and metaphorical conflation and transgression of different frames of reference, again noting the way this responds to the gaps that inhibit the reclamation of slavery. In these three areas, it was shown that metaphor and its manifestation and self-reflexive depiction in the spectral figure emerge as a response to the novel’s problematic subject matter, the history of slavery.