The Post-Modernist American Short Story

The Post-Modernist American Short Story

Outline Toni Morrison Beloved

Introduction:

- Toni Morrison - Nobel Prize-winning American author, editor, and professor.

- Beloved - wrote on a foundation of historical events -1856, Margaret Garner murdered her children to prevent them from being recaptured and taken back into slavery.

Short plot summary of the book (for a better understanding of the extract)

- the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver trying to rebuild their lives after having escaped from slavery

- one day Beloved, the dead daughter returns and the story complicates as her mother finds herself confronting and confessing her past.

- the novel presents taboo aspects of slavery, such as sexual abuse and violence.

Beloved - the character who is Beloved?

o       An ordinary woman - Sethe originally believes, she is an ordinary woman who was locked up by a white man and never let out of doors. Her limited linguistic ability, neediness, baby-soft skin, and emotional instability could all be explained by a lifetime spent in captivity.

o       The ghost of the murdered baby:

- the age and the name - the earrings and the song

- the way she appears for the first time - the scar

o       The mother Chapter 22, Beloved recounts memories that correspond to those that Sethes mother might have had of her passage to America from Africa.

o       Conclusion - she is the past - returned to haunt the present, she is a necessary evil.

Extract - chapter 22 - Beloveds monologue and her depiction of the other world

o       Summary of the extract

she speaks of thirst and hunger and dark place where the light enters through the cracks

she speaks about: crouched dead bodies, about a woman putting flowers in a basket, about a dead man on top of her, about his teeth, she develops a fascination for his sharp teeth, about a hot thing, about the white men.

She also speaks about a woman whose face she wants, she identifies with the woman she wants to join with the woman.

at the end she comes out of the water, without the iron circle around her neck and says she has to find a place to be

o       Analysis of the extract

the extract constitutes Beloveds fragmented and complex first-person stream-of-consciousness monologue

surrealistic chapter seen from the perspective of the other side

the monologue is rather elusive, several understandings of the text, the cramped, dark place that she describes can be:

a grave in the little hill of death people, where death is a 'dead man on my face' and 'daylight comes through the cracks'.

metaphorical, inescapable womb

she may also be describing a slave ship transporting Africans to America. Examples: the piled-up corpses, the food, the branding iron the hot thing.

Conclusion

Technique: stream of consciousness to capture the floating thoughts of an apparition, Morrison foregoes punctuation leaving only spaces between words and capitalization.

Magic realism:

the extract is a clear example of magic realism combining realistic elements with fantasy and magic.

The experience Beloved depicts is quite real while her character and her existence is rather magical

The way the other members of the family perceive Beloved is quite real they are even afraid of her but the way she appears and disappears in the story do not make her a real character, she is an apparition a ghost, a spirit

Alterity : The other

elements of how the other, in this case the blacks, were perceived:

if we consider her depiction the journey Africans had to make to get to America we can observe the way the Africans were treated during the trip:

v     they suffered of thirst of hunger, many of them died of disease and starvation during the journey, Beloved says that the bread is sea-colored. She also mentions the piled-up corpses.

v     of dead bodies and no place to move, we have the impression she is in a grave, where the light comes through the cracks

v     they were treated like animals, they have iron circles around their neck and the hot thing she mentions over and over again may be the branding iron like the one that marked Sethes mother earlier in the novel.

v     They also suffered from sexual abuse in the extract Beloved says: the others are taken I am not taken this rape references, references which echo the experiences of Sethes mother also who was taken up many times by the crew.