earticle

영어

This paper aims to examine how violent the historical base and the artistic inspiration for Beloved are and to insist that the way of solving the violent history of slavery lies in discontinuity from the past, not the repeated recovery of the past. In Beloved, accidental violence is pervasive and surrounds the central scene of violence, Sethe's killing of Beloved and attempted killing of Buglar, Howard and Denver. Beloved, in which the theme of violence is closely combined with the rhetoric of violence, seems to be a document of all different types of violence: hanging, cutting, poking, skinning, hurting, screaming, whipping, beating, and more. A chokecherry tree on Sethe's back is a symbol of the black female body being thoroughly victimized as an object of labor and reproduction under the institution of slavery. Beloved not only bears witness to the violent history inscribed on the black female body, but also insinuates ways in which historical trauma can be solved. As Morrison does, many critics like Deborah Horvitz and Trudier Harris assert the importance of reliving the unaccounted for and unacknowledged past. Although in part agreeing with their method of dealing with the past, this paper insists the whole clearing of the past should not be the repetition of, but the discontinuity from the past.