ALTERNATIVE LITERARY HISTORIES: TONI MORRISON’S A MERCY AND COLONIAL NORTH AMERICA

Abstract

The paper offers a reading of Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy as an alternative history of colonial North America focused on empowering the powerless and giving a voice to those silenced and overlooked in mainstream histories. The theoretical framework is based on Hayden White’s idea of history as inevitably imbued with fictionalized elements, Homi Bhabha’s interpretation and Morrison’s idea of ‘rememory’ and the black feminist idea of acquiring one’s own voice by becoming the speaking subject. The main thesis is that Morrison’s book offers an alternative version of early American history by giving voices to the representatives of various minority groups from the colonial period of North America: white immigrant, African American, mixed-race and Native American women and indentured servants. Using multiple narrators, Morrison not only manages to complement ‘official’ history books but also to use individual narrators as symbols of the collective experiences of their respective groups.