Revelation of Past and Present in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

This paper attempts to trace how the blacks need united effort to succeed in a white dominated society. A few blacks with their education and wealth changed their lifestyle like that of the whites and believed that they could gain entry into the white society. Morrison’s Beloved is analysed in the light of her class consciousness both thematically and structurally. Any how the blacks could rise up in America culturally and socially only if they could build up solidarity among themselves. In Beloved, Morrison tells the story of runaway slave Sethe and reveals her conflicting attitudes towards nature as a result of the violence she experiences while enslaved on the Southern plantation Sweet Home. Sethe’s past and the history of slavery in America illuminate African-American women’s complicated views of nature and how that has translated into modern day environmental perceptions. Morrison’s unique stream-of-consciousness writing style is especially effective in blurring the boundary between past and present. Invariably shifting between past and present incidents admits Morrison to depict the instability and fluidity of categories and how confronting definition admits for resistance and healing. It is a novel based on memory, history, revisiting past and coming to terms with the present reality.