In Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the ghost is used to connect the characters’ personal pasts and their culture.
Therefore, this explains the increasing number of cultural ghost stories by contemporary African American writers, such as Toni Morrison, who uses ghosts as vehicles for recovering and reimagining the past in unconventional ways. Īccording to Brogan, the literary representation of ghosts is the fictional vent for any group who actively seeks to reconsider its relationship to the past. Not surprisingly, these stories tend to emerge in the aftermath of times of swift and often traumatic change, when old social bonds have been unhinged and new group identities must be formulated. In her book, Cultural Haunting, Kathleen Brogan indicates that this recent preoccupation of African American writers with ghosts stems – not from a persistent interest in Gothic themes – but from a whole new genre in American literature that she calls "the story of cultural haunting:"Ĭultural ghost stories, which feature the haunting of a people by the ghosts of its own past, represent one way a group actively revises its relationship to the past. In contemporary African American literature, for example, the ghost is used as a way of making social use of a poorly documented and an incompletely erased cultural history. In this literature, ghosts are meant to have a figurative or symbolic meaning and function. In contemporary literature that role has been modified to be more than just a plot device. The most obvious example is the ghost of Hamlet’s father in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet who asks his son to avenge his murder. The plot goes around a malign ghost whose purpose is either to set right an injustice or to take revenge upon the living. In many cases, the ghost is used as a plot device. The use of ghosts and the role they play in literature has always been an issue of debate among writers for many centuries. As a matter of fact, gothic writings started in both British and American literature many centuries ago. These stories of ghosts are as much a part of the culture of many people in Europe and America.
Stories involving ghosts are found in traditional cultures worldwide. Keywords: Toni Morrison, Beloved, African Americans, Ghosts, Slavery, Cultural Haunting Finally, the paper examines the ghost’s cultural role of healing African Americans from the trauma of slavery. To be more specific, the paper argues how Beloved’s ghost is deeply symbolizing both private and collective past, which matches Morrison’s notion about the past. The paper also points out how the ghost’s impact on these characters has been achieved on both personal and collective levels. In discussing this role, the paper examines Morrison’s use of the magic realism and the ghost’s relationship with the other characters, such as Sethe, Denver and Paul D, as well as its relationship with the African American community. Abstract: African American writers’ preoccupation with supernatural elements such as ghosts stems not from an interest in Gothic themes, but in a new genre in American literature termed as "the story of cultural haunting." The objective of this paper is to discuss Morrison’s choice of a ghost to play the part of connecting past with the present in her novel, Beloved (1987).