Oral Tradition in Beloved
Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931. Morrison was born in the middle of the Great Depression, and her father struggle to make enough money to support the family. Regardless of the family's poverty, Morrison's childhood was not bleak. The family maintained a household atmosphere filled with laughter and music, and a large part of the Wofford family's entertainment was storytelling, especially ghost stories. This tradition storytelling carried on into Morrison's writing. In a 1984 interview, Morrison stated that she strove to maintain an important characteristic of African American art in her literature, "the ability to be both print and oral literature: to combine those aspects so that the stories can be read in silence, of course, but one should be able to hear them as well. To make the story appear oral, meandering, effortless, spoken- ...to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book-is what's important." (qtd. in Harris 1) This black tradition of passing stories along orally served an important role in maintaining black history at a time when there were laws against educating blacks that hindered them in passing their history on by other means. Morrison employs this ora
Morrison's Beloved is an example of this use of folklore and memory as well as the affects of such memories on the psyche of the survivors. Regardless of the fact that slavery has ended, it still affects the present and future lives of those that experienced it. The story began when Morrison read an article about Margaret Garner, a former slave who had attempted to kill her children when the threat of returning to slavery arose. The entire novel focuses on the past and its affect on the characters, especially Sethe, the literary reincarnation of Garner. The former slaves of Beloved face the task of defining their identities in the aftermath of a dehumanizing history. They cannot look to family histories for help because they are so fragmentary. Many of the characters in the novel try desperately to forget their own painful past, but in doing so; they end up forsaking their identity. Both Sethe and Paul D "start the day's serious work of beating back the past" (73). They try to keep the past at bay by not telling their stories. Paul keeps his stories stored away "in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose..." (72-73). He does not want to tell his stories because telling them will force him to will crack the tin box that has protected him from feeling too much emotion. Sethe gives her story up in "short replies or rambling incomp
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 956
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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