چکیده:
This paper aims at exploring the search for identity and the ways in which Toni
Morrison has systematically recast the image and reconstructed the identity of African
American women in her novel Beloved. She employs different means such as pure black
writing, love and myth by which she re-opens new doors for the African American
women to achieve and reconstruct their identities in the community of slavery. Drawing
upon womanist and postmodern theories of identity construction, and
incommensurability, this paper argues that African American femininity is relationally
constructed. In essence, black women's relationships with their children (especially their
daughters), their men, and the White community of brutal slavery define who they are,
determine how they perceive themselves, and, largely, dictate their capacity for success
and survival.Though many scholars contend that Morrison's Beloved situates individual
and collective memory as the vehicle by which such self-identification is achieved. It
maintains that it is not until African American women and African American men are
able to put their stories together and to identify new ways of seeing and relating to the
other can they create any real sense of self-worth. Many scholars support this
assessment as Morrison offers it through a reconstruction of personal and community
histories and ancestral reclamation whereby the entire characters move on a continuum
from a repressive slave perspective to an open, accepting, free perspective of self and
environment. Therefore, (re)memory alone is not sufficient. There must be collaboration
to weave the pieces, the fragments of the past into a tapestry that might provide warmth
and security for the future.