Body Marks of the Past in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

doi:10.24193/mjcst.2021.11.10

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s project of reimagining individual memories of the African American past has been immortalized by the image of the chokecherry tree of scar tissue on Sethe’s back in Beloved. Invisible and dumb for Sethe, the scars have to be faced and interpreted with the help of others in order to process traumatic memories of the slave past. The image questions a presumed opposition between objects of memory as separate from subjects of memory, as the wound, the supposed object is located in the body of the subject, Sethe. Body marks of the past also appear in Morrison’s novels after 2001, which are generally considered sparse compared to her previous texts. Relying on Marianne Hirsch’s method of reading how body marks create a “sense memory” of traumatic experience, the paper explores the webs of meaning invoked by bodily wounds and other extended objects of memory in Morrison’s late novels. The paper claims that although these novels continue to rely on the representation and processing of sense memories, they represent a truncated version compared to earlier novels, in which wounds figure not so much as metaphoric nodes of interaction, but rather as themes.

Highlights

Toni Morrison’s fictional explorations of the African American past have foregrounded questions at the intersection of memory studies and African American studies since the 1970s
The paper examines the role of objects and affect in mapping the memories of the African American past in Toni Morrison’s novels
In the context of posthumanism, a new interest in the materiality and affects of memory has been stimulated in the field of memory studies in the past two decades. This interest offers the chance of reassessing well-mapped areas of memory studies from the perspectives of the crumbling distinction between subjects and objects of memory, the materiality of memory, and the emotional performances of memory

Summary

Introduction

Toni Morrison’s fictional explorations of the African American past have foregrounded questions at the intersection of memory studies and African American studies since the 1970s. The paper examines the role of objects and affect in mapping the memories of the African American past in Toni Morrison’s novels. 1. Morrison’s notion of ’rememory’ and objects of memory In her critical writings, Toni Morrison often discusses diverse linguistic performances of race.

Results

Conclusion