The Concepts of Memory, Forgetting and the Past in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Year 2016, Volume: 6 Issue: 2, 343 - 350, 30.12.2016

Orkun Kocabıyık

Abstract

In one’s life there has always been a moment or an event that is so shocking and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized, it is very normal to close the memory and for self-defence to suppress the terrible emotional experience. Sometimes this neglecting and abandoning might be the best way to forget, and so do the characters Sethe and Paul D in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Trying to ignore their past and to avoid any related confrontations, they try to forget their terrible memories in Beloved. But, I think this forgetting is very temporary and it lasts only until the smallest event prompts the memory and then the formidable past is experienced once again as painful as it once was. Toni Morrison carries Sethe on a kind of journey from being a woman who identifies herself with motherhood, to a woman who begins to identify herself as being a human being. Morrison brings this picture to life by letting Sethe face her past and bring to mind the events that she worked extremely hard to suppress and to forget. It seems impossible for her to remain in denial of the past. In this paper, I argue that the function of memory concerning the past experiences of the main characters in Beloved (especially Sethe and Paul D) depends upon their spatial and temporal relationships. To support my argument, Paul Ricoeur’s theoretical assumptions concerning human memory, together with Daniel L. Schacter’s The Seven Sins of Memory, provide the theoretical background for this analysis.

Keywords

Memory, Toni Morrison, Past, Social Representation, Trauma

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