Toni Morrison, has been considered the most important and representative contemporary African-American woman novelist. She published her first novel in 1970and her most famous novel, Beloved, in 1987. She has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
This paper will examine, by means of a close textual analysis, the dominant role that the traumatic past plays in the present. I will explore the traumatic & haunting nature of the past by investigating the question of who or what are the subjects and objects of the traumatic haunting. I want to discover what consequences the traumatic haunting has for the protagonists' lives and how the characters deal with, deny or suppress the past. In order to analyse the novel's general attitude towards the past, it will be important to find out how the characters escape the haunting, if at all.
Before venturing into a discussion of the manifestations of traumatic haunting, I will conduct a preliminary investigation into the notion of the past and memory as represented in the novel, in order to embed the specific analyses into a general context