Alyaa Hassoon Alwan 1, Zohreh Taebi 2 *, Rajabali Askarzadeh3
1 MA of English Language and Literature, Ferdowsi university of Mashhad, 2 Assistant Professor in English Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, 3Assistant Professor in English Literature, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Abstract
Toni Morrison has been considered as one of the most well-known black writers whose writings mostly revolve around the role of memory in showing how bottled-up and repressed memories can be reflected in the lives of her female protagonists. This study is an attempt to apply Freud’s ”theory of repression” in the analysis of Morrison’s Beloved. This study will examine how the main character of Beloved is under social and cultural pressure, and uses her past life to cope with her present situation. Freud’s theories of memory mean to focus on the manifestation of time, its effects and the influence of the past memory on a character’s desires and behaviors. Since the obsession with the past is one of the main themes of Beloved, the present research tries to provide a detailed examination of memory and its repression in this novel. The present study also intends to discuss the role of the time and memory in this novel that is written by a female writer about a female character. Through investigating the reflection of time and reminiscence of the past in this novel, this article will show how memories, particularly the repressed memories, can affect the identity of the character.
Key Words: Flashback, Inner Voice, Memory, Repression
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- Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Tony Morrison (1931- ) is a distinguished American writer; she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988 and the Noble Prize for literature in 1993. She started her career as a novelist with The Bluest Eye; the success of her first novel paved the way for a series of other novels written by her. Her most celebrated work is Beloved. Morrison’s novels are usually about the experience of African-American women and specifically former slaves. She has been admired for her “vast cultural knowledge” and “the richness in her novels” and an extraordinary talent for telling “compelling narratives” (Mckay 21). Beloved tells the story of a former slave, named Sethe, who is hunted by the ghost and memory of a daughter she has murdered in her previous life of slavery, called Beloved. The story happens years after the tragedy, but Sethe does not seem to be free from her past life and her affectionate-driven yet brutal deed. The novel narrates the complexities of Sethe’s state of mind and her internal world and ends with her recovering from the chains of her memories. This study aims to investigate the role of memory in Morrison’s Beloved and to show how repressed memories and their side effects manifest themselves in the life of the protagonist. The study draws on Freud’s theory of repression.
1.2 Towards Theoretical Framework
The present study aims to clarify the role of time and memory in a novel that is written by a woman about the difficulties of women. The examination of the reflection of time and reminiscence of the past in Beloved can lead to a broader understanding of the inner worlds of this novel’s main female protagonist. Although this novel has been studied before, it has not been the focus of one single study; thus, the current paper will focus on the role of memory and time in the identity of Sethe and how it can contribute to the body of other studies about women and their struggles. This study can be useful for students of literature and philosophy and due to its multifaceted subject and interdisciplinary essence can also be employed by students in other fields of humanities in accordance with their subjects of studies. This study also uses Sigmund Freud’s theories of memory to examine the role of time and memory in forming the identity of the female protagonist of Tony Morrison’s Beloved. The study will use these theories to show how the mental states of these women are affected by their past and how their ideas of identity cannot be complete without their memories.
- Relevant Studies
As this study’s primary source, Morrison’s Beloved tells the story of woman named Sethe. Sethe, a former slave, lives in a haunted house with her daughter Denver. The house is haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s deceased daughter, who has died more than 18 years ago when she was only a toddler. The arrival of Paul D., another former slave from Sethe’s past life, scares the ghost away. Just as they start to live as a happy family, a young woman, about 19-20 years old, mysteriously appears in their lives. She calls herself Beloved and claims she has no memory of her past. It is revealed throughout the story that Sethe has murdered her baby daughter when she had been on the run from her owners in an attempt not to let her be a slave too. Sethe believes Beloved is her murdered daughter so she makes sacrifices for Beloved to atone for her sin. The excess of Sethe’s attempts to satisfy Beloved makes her other daughter Denver worried. She asks the women of community for help. In a state of confusion, Sethe attacks a white man, who reminds her of her former owner, and is brought down by the women. Beloved disappears and Paul D., who had left her in the course of the novel, returns to her. As the secondary sources, it can be referred to the following studies:
As the studies in the realm of memory and repression, we can refer to the following studies:
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey, Basic Books, 1899.
In this book, Freud talks about memories, their traces and their function. Although most of the book is concerned with how an individual dream can be interpreted with an investigation of his / her past, Freud’s explanation about the nature of memories and their effects on people’s mind is useful for this study.
Boag, Simon. “Freudian Repression, the Common View, and Pathological Science.” Review of General
Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1, 2006, pp. 74-86. The American Psychological Association, doi: 10.1037/1089
2680.10.1.74
In this article, Boag investigates Freud’s theories of memory and repression and clarifies his models for repressed memory. He has a chronological approach to the development of Freud’s theories about repressed memory; it means she examines how Freud has dealt with the question of memory and repression throughout his career. Boag’s explanation of Freud’s model for repressed memory is used as one of the theoretical framework of this study.
Mollon, Phil. Freud and False Memory Syndrome. Totem Books, 1996.
Mollon explains Freud’s theories about memory with a focus on False Memory Syndrome. He talks about “chains of memory”, “Freud’s view of memory” and “Freud’s concept of repression”. The chapters dedicated to memory and repression are beneficial to this research. Beloved has also been analyzed through different perspectives as it is suggested in the following part:
Andrews, William L., and Nellie Y. McKey, editors. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A casebook. Oxford University
Press, 1999.
This book is a collection of 10 articles by different critics and an introduction by McKey about Morrison’s Beloved. They examine different aspects of the novel including its themes of slavery, mother-daughter relationship, and spirituality and its postmodernist traits. The book helps the reader to broaden his / her understanding of the novel and therefore is beneficial to this paper.
Russell, Danielle. Between the Angle and the Curve: Mapping Gender, Race, Space and Identity in Willa Cather
and Toni Morrison. Routledge, 2006.
In this book, Russell examines important concepts like gender, race and identity in the works of two novelists, Cather and Morrison. Russell’s investigation of the concept of identity in Morrison’s Beloved in chapter 1 and the significance of the setting in the novel in chapter 2 helps the researcher to have a better understanding of the novel.
Shands, Kerstin W., and Giulia Grillo Mikrut, editors. Living Language Living Memory Essays on the Works of
Toni Morrison. Elanders, 2014.
The book is a collection of 7 essays by different critics about the works of Toni Morrison. The articles investigate the concepts of identity, time, motherhood, and memory in different novels of Morrison, including Beloved. There are 3 articles devoted only to Beloved, but the researcher finds the other chapters as equally helpful.
Sanders Mobley, Marilyn (2005). “A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2005, pp. 67-78.
In this essay, Sanders Mobley talks about “intertextual relationship between The Black Book and Beloved” (68) and explain her views on Morrison’s using memory in Beloved. She argues that “Morrison uses the trope of memory to revise the genre of the slave narrative and thereby to make the slave experience it inscribes more accessible to contemporary readers” (69). Her argument about the role of memory in Beloved in beneficial to this paper.
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- Discussion
The idea of a trigger that awakens something in people’s mind resembles Freud’s theories of repressed memories. According to Freud, repression has three stages: “fixation, repression proper (or after-pressure), and the return of the repressed”; in fixation, repression leads to creating “a nucleus” in the unconscious, repression proper is linked with “mental derivatives” of fixation and/or repressions similar to it, and in the return of the repressed the unconscious attempts to repress the memory fail and results in “neurosis” (qtd. in Boag 77). This study will show that this character has failed to suppress her earlier memories and therefore struggles with the return of the repressed. This paper also aims to examine the thematic and structural use of time and memory and to provide a detailed investigation of this novel regarding the reflection of time and memory in its different sociocultural contexts and psychological preoccupations of its female protagonist.
In exploring the concepts of time and memory in Tony Morrison’s Beloved, this research benefits from Freud’s theories of memory to focus on the manifestation of time, its effects and the influence of the past memories on the main character’s desires and behavior. Since the obsession about the past is one of the main themes of this distinguished novel, the present research tries to provide a detailed examination of memory and its repression in it.
Likewise, in order to analyze the depiction of time and memory in the novel and its significance, this research has focused on Freud’s theories, and tries to explain the nature of Sethe’s state of mind. The effects of memory on Sethe’s identity in this particular novel, this research has studied repressed memories and psychological defenses are manifested and concludes that this character is reclusive, isolated, and introverted and also suffers from detachment from her community because of the different identity that she has formed for herself.
In Beloved, Morrison has constructed events that parallel the way the human mind works; this serves as a means by which the reader can understand the activity of memory. “Rememory” allows Sethe to renovate her past realities. The brightness that Sethe brings to every moment through recurrent images typifies her understanding of herself. Through rememory, Morrison makes Sethe have a journey from being a woman who identifies herself only with motherhood, to a woman who begins to identify herself as a human being. Morrison adores the ability of language, and her faith in the power and construction of words instills trust in her readers that Sethe has claimed ownership of her freed self. The structure of Morrison’s novel, which is arranged in trimesters, carries the reader on a mother’s journey beginning with the recognition of a haunting “new” presence, then gradually coming to terms with one’s fears and reservations, and finally giving birth to a new identity while reclaiming one’s own.
- Conclusion
This study sought to apply Freud’s ”theory of repression” in the analysis of Morrison’s Beloved. This paper investigated how the main character of Beloved was under social and cultural pressure, and used her past life to cope with her present situation. Freud’s theories of memory mean to focus on the manifestation of time, its effects and the influence of the past memory on a character’s desires and behavior. Since the obsession with the past is one of the main themes of Beloved, the present research provided an inspection of memory and its repression in this novel. The present study also discussed the role of the time and memory in this novel that is written by a female writer about a female character. Through investigating the reflection of time and reminiscence of the past in this novel, this article showed how memories, particularly the repressed memories, were able to affect the identity of Sethe as the main character.
References
Andrews, William L., and Nellie Y. McKey, editors. Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A casebook. Oxford University
Press, 1999.
Bloom, Phil. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Toni Morrison. Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.
Boag, Simon. “Freudian Repression, the Common View, and Pathological Science.” Review of General
Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1, 2006, pp. 74-86. The American Psychological Association, doi: 10.1037/1089
2680.10.1.74.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated and edited by James Strachey, Basic Books, 1899.
Li, Stephanie. Toni Morrison: A Biography. Greenwood Press, 2010.
Mollon, Phil. Freud and False Memory Syndrome. Totem Books, 1996.
Morison, Toni. Beloved. The Penguin Group, 1987.
Moss, Katie Reece. “The Power of Timelessness and the Contemporary Influence of Modern Thought.”
Dissertation. Georgia State University, 2008, http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/32. Accessed 12 March 2017.
Russell, Danielle. Between the Angle and the Curve: Mapping Gender, Race, Space and Identity in Willa Cather
and Toni Morrison. Routledge, 2006.
Sanders Mobley, Marilyn. “A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni
Morrison’s Beloved.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Toni Morrison, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2005, pp. 67-78.
Shands, Kerstin W., and Giulia Grillo Mikrut, editors. Living Language Living Memory Essays on the Works of
Toni Morrison. Elanders, 2014.
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