Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Beloved: A Spiritual

1990; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2931334

1080-6512

Karla F. C. Holloway,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

The literary and linguistic devices which can facilitate the revision of the historical and cultural texts of black women's experiences have perhaps their most sustained illustration in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Here, narrative structures have been consciously manipulated through a complicated interplay between the implicit orature of recovered and (re)membered events and the explicit structures of literature. The reclamation and revision of history function as both a thematic emphasis and textual methodology. The persistence of this revision is the significant strategic device of the narrative structures of the novel. Myth dominates the text. Not only has Morrison's reclamation of this story from the scores of people who interviewed Margaret Garner shortly after she killed her child in 1855 constituted an act of recovery, it has accomplished a mythic revisioning as well. Morrison refused to do any further research on Margaret Garner beyond her reviewing of the magazine article that recounted the astonishment of the preachers and journalists who found her to be calm . .. very serene after murdering her child (Rothstein). The imagination that restructures the initial article Morrison read into her novel Beloved is the imagination of a myth-maker. The mythological dimensions of her story, those that recall her earlier texts, that rediscover the altered universe of the black diaspora, that challenge the Western valuations of time and event (place and space) are those that, in various quantities in other black women writers and in sustained quantities in Morrison's works, allow a critical theory of text to emerge.1 Morrison revisions a history both spoken and written, felt and submerged. It is in the coalescence of the known and unknown elements of slavery-the events, miniscule in significance to the captors but major disruptions of black folks' experience in nurturing and loving and being-where Morrison's reconstruction of the historical text of slavery occurs. Morrison's reformulation propels a backlog of memories headlong into a postemancipation community that has been nearly spiritually incapacitated by the trauma of slavery. For Morrison's novel, what complicates the physical and psychic anguish is the reality that slavery itself defies traditional historiography. The victim's own chronicles of these events were systematically submerged, ignored, mistrusted, or superceded by historians of the era. This novel positions the consequences of