Filling In The Blanks

The past few decades have seen a resurgence of the historical novels in general, and of the historical novels of slavery in particular. Writers have taken a new interest in revisiting America's slavery past and have appealed to a wide audience in the process. And their works are referred to as "neo-slave narratives" (a term invented by Bernard W. Bell). The neo-slave narratives emerged from a constellation of cultural and political forces during the sixties. The Black Power movement took over from the Civil Rights movement when it became clear that legal equality still left most African Americans socially and economically disenfranchised. In turn the movement fired up New Left historians of slavery, who renewed the interest in slave testimony and slave resistance that had briefly flourished in the thirties.Beloved (1987), as a neo-slave narrative, is the product of and a contribution to this historical context. Its author, Toni Morrison, a contemporary African American woman writer, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, concerns mainly about the life and history of African Americans. Though many critics have over the years praised her for transcending the blackness of her characters and bestowing on them an abstract universality that everyone can understand, Morrison does just the reverse. She aims tocreate indisputably black writing, and insists upon the particular racial identities of her fictional people-black women and men under stresses peculiar to them and their station in America-because she knows a truth about literature that seems in danger of passing from civilized memory. Morrison's commitment to resurfacing the dead and paying tribute to black Americans of previous generations has made Beloved particularly poignant to African American readers.Set during the Reconstruction era in 1873, Beloved centers on the power of memory and history. For the former slaves in the novel, the past is-a burden that they desperately and willfully try to forget. Yet for Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, memories of slavery are inescapable. They continue to haunt her, literally, in the spirit of her deceased daughter. Eighteen years earlier, Sethe had murdered this daughter in order to save her from a life of slavery. Morrison borrowed the event from the real story of Margaret Garner, who, like Sethe, escaped from slavery in Kentucky and murdered her child when slave catchers caught up with her in Ohio. Beloved straddles the line between fiction and history; from the experiences of a single family, Morrison creates a powerful commentary on the psychological and historical legacy of slavery.Part of Morrison's project in Beloved is to recuperate a history that had been lost to the ravages of forced silences and willed forgetfulness. Morrison writes Sethe's story with the voices of a people who historically have been denied the power of language. Beloved also contains a didactic element. From Sethe's experience, we learn that before a stable future can be created, we must confront the history of slavery in order to address its legacy, which manifests itself in ongoing racial discrimination and discord.Morrison once said that she wanted to help create a canon of black work, noting that black writers too often have to pander to a white audience when they should be able to concentrate on the business of writing instead. Many readers believe Morrison's novels go a long way toward the establishment of her envisioned tradition. The poetic, elegant style of her writing in Beloved panders to no one. Morrison challenges and requires the reader to accept her on her own terms.This thesis consists of seven chapters:Chapter One serves as introduction in which the features of Beloved are analyzed from the aspects of theme, structure and language through a literature review of relevantcriticism. Based on these, the aim of this thesis is stated.Chapter Two gives us the social background of the novel. Morrison's writing is informed by an acute awareness of the conditions of our own era. Although the se...