Beloved: AO3 (literary)

the American supernatural

• more psychological - focuses on the lingering consequences of European settlement, slavery and the African American experience

• a v dark and grotesque type of literature

• the fear of slavery resonates throughout American literature: reverse colonialism where the subdued take revenge, haunting

  • the uncanny of the familiar repressed coming back in an unfamiliar way to haunt the repressor

• ‘Beloved’ presents the history of slavery embodied in one ghost of a single baby

• Morrison seeks to create humanity - taking the incomprehensible and horrific and making it heartfelt and human (easier to connect with)

magical realism

• the novel begins with the baby haunting (subverting expectations of historically based novels)

• emphasises the horror of rememory + its impact and the traumatic cultural weight of slavery, its inescapabilty

• supernatural metaphor of ghosts: discomforts the reader in reminding them of the atrocities of slavery

• connections to African American folklore - oral tradition/stories that they were forced to forget about in order to move up in society

  • blurs supernatural and realism - reflects the black outlook in the world

anti-blackness and the American Gothic

• in the American Gothic: wilderness, isolated rural settings (rather than a castle/monastery/abbey)

• subtle horror: dependant on isolation and gender + racial oppression

• Gothic is a dominant mode in America, partly due to the way the country is inherently formed on the basis of contradiction

  • e.g. how the Declaration of Independence insists on equality across men but the founding fathers owned men as objects/tools of labour

  • the US is a haunted nation

the supernatural (African American folklore)

• Morrison was dipping back into African American folklore, areas often considered to be discredited.

  • often just because black people were discredited too

• blending the realism of the atrocities of slavery and the supernatural ‘was enhancing not limiting’ (Morrison)

• accepting the value of the supernatural as a way of recording lived experiences + dealing with trauma

  • the real history of facts/dates is no more real than the lived imaginary inside our heads

• the haunting of the ghost is as if to wake people up to the memory they’ve come to terms with - that they have to deal with it and move on

Morrison’s idea of rememory (how thing’s that have happened leave a trace)

• rememories are like a ghostly presence