Sacrificing the Disremembered and Unaccounted for The Community’s Welfare: The Counter- Monument of Sethe/Beloved

Year 2021, Volume: 3 Issue: 5, 361 - 374, 01.10.2021

Gülden Kazaz Çelik

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the story of Beloved written by Toni Morrison in 1987 under the arguments of psychoanalytic criticism especially in regard to memory. While the whole story tells how Sethe, a Black mother, suffers from the pain of murdering one of her children when trying to protect them, it also sets a kind of psychological patterns revealing the fluctuations in remembering and forgetting so as to continue living. At first, Sethe pretends to forget or suppress what has happened and thereby continuing living as if nothing happened but then she realizes that this does not work. As a solution, she remembers the past to forget by facing it as a kind of counter-monument. Nevertheless, this is also not that easy. Consequently, affiliating herself with the rest of the community, she sacrifices her beloved daughter as the disremembered and continues to live leaving her behind. In the end, Sethe accepts what has happened in the form of the counter monument of the past unveiling not only her pestering memories but also the past of colonialism and slavery and continues to live.

Keywords

colonialism, slavery, memory, counter-monument

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