Revisions, Rememories and Exorcisms: Toni Morrison and the Slave Narrative

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 30, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 429-445

  Hamilton, Cynthia S ^a  

^a MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 85012483953     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875800024890     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. See Andrew Levy, “Telling Beloved,” Texas Studies in ‘Literature and Language 33 (1991), 114-23 for another view of the centrality of the storytelling process in Beloved. Levy focuses on the personal level of storytelling. See also Trudier Harris, Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 164-72.
2. Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 275. Future references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.
3. See also Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, “Daughters Signifyin(g) History: The Example of Toni Morrison's Beloved,” American Literature 64 (1992), 576-8; for Rushdy's analysis of Denver's personal reconstruction.
4. See Harris on the ritual significance of Baby Suggs's preaching in the clearing, 172-5.
5. See Marilyn Sanders Mobley, “A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Toni Morrison's Beloved” in Toni Morrison: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1990), 189-93 for Mobley's assessment of Morrison's debt to the slave narrative. Mobley concentrates on the different narrative technique.
6. For a good discussion of the historical background to the development of the slave narrative, see Marion Wilson Starling, The Slave's Narrative: Its Place in American History, Second Edition (Washington: Howard University Press, 1988), 1-49. For a discussion of the textual politics of the emerging genre see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-186} (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1-31 and John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 10 (1987), 482-51;.
7. Theodore Weld, American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839; “P1-’ New York: Atno, 1968). Weld does devote considerable space at the end of his treatise to what he sees as the endemic violence of the slaveholding states. This dueling and “ruffianism of the slaveholding spirit in the ‘hightest class of society’” (184) is, according to Weld, a natural by-product of slavery which demonstrates the deleterious effects of slavery on the society as a whole, master as well as slave: see Weld, 184-210. Nonetheless, this forms a small part of his argument, the great bulk of which is devoted to the victimization of the slave.
8. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 17.
9. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself, ed. Benjamin Quarks (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960); Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, eds. Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968); William Wells Brown, “Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave. Written by Himself” in Puttin’ On 0/e Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 175-223.
10. Northup, 100.
11. William L. Andrews, “Dialogue in Antebellum Afro-American Autobiography” in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 89-98.
12. Kimberly W. Benston, “I Yam What I Am: The Topos of Un(naming) in Afro-American Literature “in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, J r. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 151-72.
13. Charles Olney, “’ I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and Literature” in The Slave's Narrative, eds. Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 198;), 152-3.
14. William L. Andrews, “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative.” PMLA 105 (1990), 23.
15. Brown, 207-9.
16. Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
17. William Grimes, “Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Brought Down to the Present Time. Written By Himself” in Five Black Lives, ed. Arna Bontemps (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 62.
18. Henry Bibb, “Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. Written by Himself” in Puttin’ On Ole Massa, 80.
19. Jacobs, 3-4.
20. There are very few extant slave narratives written and published by women during this period.
21. Alex Haley, Roots (London: Picador, 1977), 396-7
22. All these narratives are included in William L. Andrews's collection, Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). See Andrews's introduction, defining the genre and linking it with the slave narrative. See also Olive Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, ed. Margaret Washington (New York: Vintage, 199}). The Narrative of Sojourner Truth is both slave narrative and spiritual biography.
23. It was Margaret Atwood's review of Beloved, “Haunted by Their Nightmares,” New York Times Book Review, 13 Sept. 1987, 1, 49-50, which first recognized that Morrison had made significant use of the gothic. See also Carol E. Schmudde, “The Haunting of 124,” African American Review 26 (1992), 409-16.
24. For a fuller discussion of different levels of specificity in genre definition and the possibility of layering formulas, see Cynthia S. Hamilton, Western and Hard-boiled Detective Fiction in America: From High Noon to Midnight (London: Macmillan, 1987), 36-49; for an indication of the wide range of possibilities within the gothic tradition see Hamilton, “American Genre Fiction” in Modern American Culture: An Introduction, ed. Mick Gidley (London: Longman, 1993), 314-16.
25. See also Harris, 1; 1-64 for a discussion of the female as other.
26. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. An Authoritative Text, ‘backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, Second Edition, eds. Sculley Bradley, et al. (N ew Y o r k : Norton, 1978), 50.
27. Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 126.
28. Yellin, 14-15.
29. Yellin, 129-30.
30. Hawthorne, 140.
31. Hawthorne, 76.
32. Michael J. Colacutcio, ‘“The Woman's Own Choice’: Sex, Metaphor, and the Puritan ‘Sources’ of The Scarlet Letter” in New Essays on The Scarlet Letter, ed. Michael J. Colacurcio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 101-3; an “The Footsteps of Ann Hutchinson,” ELH 39 (1972): 459-94.
33. Colacurcio, “‘The Woman's Own Choice,’” 109.
34. See also Toni Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History,” New York Times Magazine, 11 Aug. 1974, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24 and Amanda Smith's interview with Toni Morrison, “Toni Morrison,” Publishers Weekly, 21 Aug. 1987, 50-51.