ABSTRACT
Toni Morritom’t novel, Beloved, explores a tug-of-war between life and death and challenges her characters to find the dignity and meaning that may exist in both. Morrison has recreated an historical moment that captures the complexities and difficulties of reclaiming self after slavery with its pernicious legacy. The characters in Beloved are representative of slavery’s emotional damage in post-Civil War America while their struggles to heal form a central theme for Morrison. Morrison’s positive definition of “madness” provides a way to step out on a limb, farther than the constructed parameters allow, in order to free oneself from the control of slavery. The oral memories and histories that are hidden within the written erasure of blacks are opened to the reader of Beloved as the narrative style allows those histories to have a voice. Morrison encourages the reader to further question the act of infanticide by juxtaposing Sethe’s actions with that of natural images.
