ABSTRACT
Sometime ago, I published a paper (Eppert 2003) on Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, which tells the story of Sethe, a young woman who murdered her daughter in order to release her from a life of slavery, and her efforts to come to terms with this past, through the embodied return of the ghost of her daughter, named Beloved. I wrote the paper because I was struck by the novel’s ending and by the reconciliatory romances composed by several of my Canadian college students in response to an assignment I had given them that involved imagining the characters in the novel many years hence. Although Morrison’s novel details the necessity of remembrance and testimonial telling in order to work through trauma, the concluding chapter turns towards reconciliation via forgiveness and forgetting. Sethe’s community chooses to forgive her for her acts and begin anew following their collective exorcism of Beloved. The text ends with these lines: ‘So, in the end, they forgot her [Beloved] too. Remembering seemed unwise … It was not a story to pass on’ (Morrison 1987: 274). The ending made me pause: Might there be value to forgetting?
