Toni Morrison

Vanessa Greene

AP Prep English 10

Mrs. Kimbril

28 April 2011

Beloved as a Slave Narrative

In Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved, she presents this book as a slave narrative. The body of the narrative generally includes vague references to the narrator's parents, descriptions of a cruel master or overseer, descriptions of violent abuse, and accounts of slaves being sold on the auction block. Slave narratives have a profound impact on American literature. They were often found dangerous by slaveholders who feared that a slave riot might occur. Even though it is not a slave narrative in true fashion; it challenges the notion that the end of institutional slavery brings about freedom by depicting the emotional and psychological scars of slavery as well as the persistence of racism.

Beloved, Morrison’s fifth novel is more than most early slave narratives, which could not fully reveal the horror of the slave experience either because the authors dared not offend their white abolitionist audiences or could not bear to dwell on the horrors of slavery (Taylor-Thompson). The novel’s treatment of slavery makes clear that the institution perverts the relation between self and other, master and slave, by thoroughly dehumanizing both parties (Malmgren, 68). By personifying slavery as history’s ghost, Morrison reimagines the institution and its legacy as a kind of abnormal excess that finally defy rational explanation, a ghastly figure from out of a nightmare (Malmgren, 66). Morrison’s purpose is not to convince white readers of the slaves’ humanity, but to address black readers by inviting us to return to the very part of our past that many have repressed, forgotten or ignored (Sale, 38).

Morrison constructs history through the acts and consciousness of African-American slaves rather than through the perspective of the dominant white social class (Krumholz, 79). The dehumanizing conditions and lingering effects of slavery become emblematic of the...