Beloved focuses on a runaway slave, her family, her community, and how some of these characters live on after Sethe’s escape from a slavery which Morrison represents not as exceptional but central to their American experience. In fact, the novel actually is based on a true story about a sad mother’s killing her own child. Set on the bloody side of the Ohio River, life at Sweet Home is extremely cruel and beyond anyone’s imagination. For Mr. Garner’s male slaves, life is bondage, longing, and potential death if they step outside the prescribed norms of behavior. Baby Suggs and Sethe, separated by class, and the privilege from Mrs. Garner, know the eternal ache of seeing their loved ones being tortured, abused even killed. Especially for Baby Suggs, too lost in a memory of passing mates and disappearing family, reality is a slave’s truth without a slice of hope. For Cincinnati blacks, slavery’s legacy lies beyond the whip, far from the auction block, slave catchers, rapists, child-sellers and pronged necklaces. Morrison composes her novel to honor the survivors, anyone who have the courage and determination to fight against various forms of white spite and begin with their new life.
In American history, African-Americans made persistent efforts to shake off the yoke of slavery and to pursue freedom. However, just like Sethe said, freedom is too lavish for them. It is for freedom that Sethe took the life of her baby daughter, thereby causing rejection and hostility among her family members and friends, and this is just a corner of the horrible slavery in American history.
3. 2 The ghost and its functions
The basic element of magical realism in Beloved lies in the fact that it is a story concerning a ghost. Critics have pointed out that ghosts allow us to successfully broaden and deepen our world and perhaps open ourselves to a greater reality. They also assert that ghosts often serve as “guides,” and they are, along with much magical realism, particularly well-suited to enlarging and enriching western ontological understanding, for their counter realistic conventions reject the binarisms, rationalisms, and reductive materialisms of Western ontological understanding”[6] . As such guides, the specters in magical realist works aide the characters in exploring and understanding the world around them, and these characters includes Denver in Beloved. She was isolated from their cultural community. Effectively, she was on the margins of the margins. On one hand, she was a girl of the non-white. On the other, her isolation places herself outside her own black community’s hegemony. Through her alienations, the girl develops negative and self-deprecating identity. Oppressed, it is the appearance of Beloved that allows this girl to wrestle with both her history and inheritance, enabling their process of healing and self-discovery. Thus, within Morrison’s magical realism, the supernatural acts as a cultural agent: the ghost serves as guide, opening Denver’s eyes to a greater reality. Furthermore, it is only when Denver accepts the ghostly guidance that she is empowered, positively renegotiating ideology and identity. This also brings about an understanding of the community from which she was isolated. In gaining this understanding, they are able to adapt to the community while simultaneously keeping their sense of individuality.
As Jacques Derrida notes in his influential work, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, the specter is important for it provides a path for transforming and rethinking ideological stances. It does this by calling up what already has occurred, hence it is always repeating (a “revenant”), always coming and going, but never completely gone. This revenant becomes “hauntology,” for, as Derrida says, one cannot truly learn to live without the specter and its lessons. In fact, Derrida posits that learning to live can happen only between life and death. And this being-with specter would also be a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generation. As Derrida notes, people can not live without ghosts because they provide the key for understanding and remembering what has happened in the past-memory and inheritance. Without understanding these things, we are not truly living, but simply stuck in a stagnant “now.”[7]. This can be seen in Beloved. Each character in the novel is fixated on their recent past, on things that cannot be changed. Consequently, they are trapped in an endless cycle of self-degradation, as well as isolated from their societies. Hence, the ghost pushes these past occurrences to the forefront and provides them a path for renegotiating both inheritance as well as ideological perspectives. This, in turn, allows each character to finally move forward
3.2.1 Three dominant theories for the appearance of the ghost in the magical realist works
Traditionally, ghosts in U.S. magical realism have been analyzed for their role in ethnic-American texts. Three dominant theories for their appearance are often proposed, theories that are directly linked to Derrida’s correlation of the specter and hegemony. The first posits the idea that apparitions are a way for marginalized peoples to come to terms with violent and repressive histories, which, in turn, allows them to move forward. As Arthur Redding writes, “it is by excavating the suppressed possibilities of a past that has been erased, by conversing with those ancestral ghosts that lay claim on us, which we can begin, again, to participate in the process of ethnic self-determination”[8]. The past, which has been either denied or utilized as a means of imprisoning us, can begin to function as a haunted place, a place through which we begin to imagine a future. Thus, ghosts not only aid ethnic communities in recapturing the past (past memories, traditions, but also redefine ethnic identity in the present and for the future. The second theory, inexorably tied to the first, stresses the importance of specters as the carriers of collective memory and history. As 9 notes, “through the agency of ghosts, group histories that have in some way been threatened, erased, or fragmented are recuperated and revised”[9]. Since specters in ethnic texts come to represent a shared history, they are often read communally, rather than individually. Finally, given the importance of ethnic identity, many scholars also believe apparitions aide in the reintegration of those isolated in individuality. According to Zamora, ghosts “often act as correctives to the insularities of individuality, as links to lost families and communities,” as well as, “dissent . . . from modernity’s . . . psychological assumptions about autonomous consciousness and self-constituted identity and propose instead a model of the self that is collective” [10]. The spectral represents ethnic history and oppression, therefore, it commonly illustrates the importance of a collective ethnic identity, while also enabling ethnic groups to reclaim history and memory and reshape ethnic identity for the future.
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