Cultural Memory and Ethnic Identity Construction in Toni Morrison’sA Mercy

Abstract

Through the lens of cultural memory, this article explores the relationships between the representation of cultural memory and the construction of ethnic cultural identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. I argue that in the novel, Morrison highlights and manipulates three media of cultural memory: the architecture, the inscription, and the body, to interrogate and challenge the validity of numerous historical monuments and museums in America that are eviscerated of their complicity and function as tools in the atrocity of instituting slavery. To externalize his values, White colonizer Jacob builds a superfluous mansion, which, with the slave trade involved, actually serves as a profane monument to the slavery culture. To highlight the invalidity of the White cultural memory, Morrison crafts Florens who inscribes in the mansion the collective traumatic memory of the African female slaves, deforming the secular memorial from within. In the same fashion, culturally traumatized, Native American Lina adulterates the White culture by insinuating into it the Indigenous Indian cultural fragments and by performing the remolded Indigenous Indian culture, she sediments it into her body. By historicizing the issue of cultural memory in A Mercy, Morrison invites the reader to reconsider what makes a true American cultural memory.