earticle

영어

This study explores the black female slave’s narrative desire of writing herself as a speaking subject in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. Florens carves her “telling” on the wall of the house owned by the late slave owner Jacob Vaark. This “telling” is about her desire of belonging entangled with her understandings of the meaning of spaces—Jacob’s shoes, his grand house, and natural open space. Florens’s spiritual journey to a mature subjectivity begins with her recognition of her forced identity symbolically engraved with a letter in the Sir’s shoes to endorse her slave-status. Although this identity is forcefully given and deprived of her free agency, the letter-given identity is, Florens believes, the only way to remain legally protected in society, which is proven to be a fantasy. Her act of narrating her story and her plan for burning the house allow her spectral, haunting voice to be heard across the nation and over generations, thereby transforming and extending the limited racist house into the open space and weaving her telling into collective rememory. Her ghostly narrative becomes a vehicle to deliver black communal trauma and their oppressed voices including the one of her mother while exposing the hypocritical sense of “mercy” proudly posed by the white master.