The Road To Emancipation In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, is a towering figure in the contemporary American and African-American letters and has drawn much attention from the mainstream critics at home and abroad. Her fifth novel, Beloved, which won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, is considered by many to be her best work. Ever since its publication in 1987, Beloved has aroused many critics' great interest and it has been regarded as "a milestone in American literary history."Set in the Reconstruction era in 1873, Beloved tells of a long and silent, but brutal and bloody period in black history in which the black voice was unceasingly suppressed by the discourse of slavery. Though slavery as an institution ended officially with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1863), the discourse of slavery ideologies persists and prevails in the post-slavery era. As a consequence, all the black slaves in Beloved are engaged in a constant struggle to develop self-determined identity by resisting the destructive forces of slavery and racist discourse. Set in the post-slavery context, this thesis is an attempt at interpreting Beloved from the post-colonial perspective.Under slavery, black slaves are treated as animals rather than human beings. Slavery claims ownership of all of its "property," irrespective of age and gender, including the siblings of its female slaves, who are considered human reproduction machines, the producers of labor forces. The perverse forces of the institution of slavery are illuminated in Sethe's act of infanticide: under slavery, a mother best expresses her love for her children by murdering them and thus protecting them from the more gradual destruction wrought by slavery. Beloved explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual devastation brought about by slavery, a devastation that continues to haunt those ex-slaves even when they are free now. Therefore, for those former slaves, the past is a nightmare, a...