earticle

영어

This study focuses on how responsibility and interdependent relationships between the individual and the community are delineated in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison persistently describes how the black community is potentially responsible for Sethe’s crime of infanticide because of their irresponsible neglect to warn her of the approaching white slave-catchers. This tragedy transforms Sethe’s house at 124 into a house haunted by the ghost of her dead baby and more symbolically into a burial site for communal trauma and rememory. This paper discusses how the haunted individual and community can be remedied by embracing their fragmented bodies which have been traumatized by the violence of slavery. When Baby Suggs in the Clearing encourages the black community to accept and love their fragmented bodies as part of the individual’s and the community’s freed subjectivities, the black fragmented bodies do not only expose individual vulnerability but also provide a foundation for communal bonding. The image of communal bonding is epitomized when a group of 30 black women claims their fragmented bodies as a site of resistance and sings a powerful requiem that grieves for the un-remembered, ignored black slaves who were denied their life’s worth under the institution of slavery.