The psychological impact of Slavery in Toni Morrison''s Novel beloved .

Toni Morrison's celebrated 1987 novel Beloved elides the representation of sexual assault as a deliberate narratological strategy. In this text, rape is more often mentioned obliquely than portrayed directly, therefore initially appearing to be less prominent an issue. Morrison seeks not to present a comprehensive portrait of the act of rape and its bodily and psychic repercussions, but instead to offer glimpses into the traumatic event as it gradually becomes comprehensible to its survivors. Thus, in Beloved, we do not read detailed descriptions of sexual assault. Instead, the allusions concentrate upon the incomprehensibility of the trauma. This narratological strategy is aptly demonstrated by Ella. She describes her experience of having been locked in a room for a year by a rapacious father and son by saying, “You couldn't think up . . . what them two done to me” (Morrison 119). Ella labels her sexual assaults an abomination, and uses them as a benchmark against which she measures all other abusive behavior. Indeed, this oblique representation underscores the raison d'être of traumatic narrative: to capture a “trace” of the trauma, as the implicit memory of the event is being converted into narrative memory. Petar Ramadanovic writes: “Writing is not a record by virtue of what is remembered in the form of written data in it, nor because of who its author is, but because of what is recorded by it and gets carried over as a trace. Because of what writing counters, parallels, responds to, repeats, negates, and affirms, even if writing does not mark any event external to itself, but solely itself, we who read and write are marked by what text, writing, and language carry over: an (unremembered) memory” (93, author italics).

In my reading of Beloved, I will demonstrate how Morrison evokes the trace of rape experienced during slavery and Middle Passage. In utilizing the trace, rather than the multiple graphic details painted by realism, Morrison effectively evokes not only the trauma of the specific individual, but the collective suffering of the larger community as well. Her presentation of multiple iterations of rape, with victims both female and male, demands that rape be understood as the ultimate signifier of trauma for the black community. Simultaneously, the rapes experienced by the two main characters structure the novel as a recovery text, one that paints both the individual and the communal trauma and recovery from the atrocities of slavery and Middle Passage. The traces of rape in Beloved most often appear in one or two sentences that reveal the existence of the trauma, but offer few other details, as the passage above describing Ella's experience illustrates. These brief sketches encourage the reader to look beyond the information given to imagine more fully the deep suffering of the individual. A description of Sethe's mother offers such an opportunity. Another woman, Nan, tells how she and Sethe's mother “were taken up many times by the crew” during their passage (Morrison 62)

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