ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison’s Beloved is positioned, by its powerful dedication to the “Sixty Million and More” who died during America’s enslavement of Africans, as a novel written to mourn the unnamed dead. The violence depicted in Beloved by this dedication is positioned as violence explicitly offered for the purpose of catharsis and grieving. Beloved frames the horrifying tableau of a mother slitting her baby daughter’s throat to save the little girl from enslavement. Beloved, “A View of the Woods,” and Bastard Out of Carolina contain scenes of intense violence, culminating, respectively, in the slaughter of an infant, the brutal murder of a young girl, and a young girl’s graphically rendered rape. Like Morrison’s historical novel, Bastard Out of Carolina draws potency from its avowed and explicit connection to real events. Flannery O’Connor’s story “A View of the Woods” describes in graphic detail a grandfather beating his granddaughter’s head against a rock until she dies.
