Herstory Unwritten: Trauma, Memory, Identity and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

This epigraph to Toni Morrison’s Beloved could have very well been uttered by her protagonist, Sethe, to account for some of the main contradictions in the novel. This chapter focuses on the ways the author constructs Sethe’s identity within — and without — the black community by means of an intricate collage of memories, determined by her past as a black slave but defined by a clearly gendered experience where the issue of motherhood becomes crucial to the development of the novel. Through this revision of a slave narrative, Morrison understands the characters’ various tellings of their individual stories as representative of the cultural identity of the black community, made up of partial recollections and fragments of stories, unwritten and even untold by those who suffered under slavery. Individual and collective memory, history and herstory, the real and the supernatural merge in this novel to recover an unacknowledged part of American cultural heritage through the ghost of Beloved, Sethe’s murdered daughter, who will return to bring the slave past back to her mother’s present.

I will call them my people,

Which were not my people;

And her beloved,

Which was not beloved.

(Romans 11:32)