Abstract
As my introductory chapter observed, the spectral presence of the baby ghost that Beloved opens with is a realized metaphor for emotion. This chapter will argue that this use of realized metaphor is an integral part of the novel’s representation of slavery. Realization is not simply a formal matter of metaphorical referents being posited as textual realities, but is registered in the novel’s represented world, its use of the specter and its discursive use of metaphor. I will show that Beloved exploits the realizing impulse inherent in both metaphorical reference and spectral presence in order to respond to slavery’s legacy of absence. The novel uses both metaphorical reference and the particular metaphor of the ghost to give presence to the immense loss that slavery has bequeathed to the African American community.
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Notes
For a contemporaneous account of this combination of science and the supernatural, see Frederic Engels, “Natural Science and Spirit World,” Dialectics of Nature (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941) 297–310.
“Ghost,” Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
See J. Brooks Bouson, Quiet as its Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) 131–162;
Barbara Claire Freeman, The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women’s Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) 124–127;
Kathleen Brogan, Spectral Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998) 61–92.
David Lawrence, “Fleshly Ghosts and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved,” Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, ed. David L. Middleton (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997) 237.
Toni Morrison, “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison.” Interview with Marsha Darling, Women’s Review of Books 5.6 (1988): 6.
Ibid.; “The Ghosts of ‘Sixty Million and More.’” Interview with Walter Clemons, in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, 46; “The Pain of Being Black: An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994) 257.
See Janet Martin and Rom Harré, “Metaphor in Science,” Metaphor: Problems and Perspectives (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982) 89–105. See also
Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) 186–189, for examples where analogy and metaphor in science are creative rather than just illustrative.
Richard Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change: What is ‘Metaphor’a Metaphor for?” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 356–408, who describes the “generative,” “constitutive,” and exploratory role of metaphor in science. Roger White (307n8, 321n) also discusses the creative use of metaphor in science.
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© 2009 Daniel Erickson
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Erickson, D. (2009). Realizing Absence in Beloved . In: Ghosts, Metaphor, and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619753_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230619753_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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