Search for Identity and self-realization in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract EN

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.