『빌러비드』에 나타난 외상의 정면통과

Working through Trauma in Beloved

Beloved as a trauma fiction represents the past traumatic experience under the slavery and the way to work through the trauma. The traumatic event and its aftermath haunt the characters in Beloved, especially the escaped slave Sethe. This paper examines three parts of healing the trauma in Beloved. The first part shows the acting out of Sethe's trauma. Since the traumatic event that Sethe murdered her girl baby for fear that her children might be brought back to slavery, she has let the baby ghost, the invisible embodiment of the trauma, rule her present. The second part is about the possibility of weakening the tendency to repeat the trauma by the help of testimony and an emphatic listener. After the arrival of Paul 0 and Beloved, Sethe begins to articulate her past experience and moves forward from the numbed and isolated life. But it was Beloved who makes Sethe testify her suppressed past memories- the infanticide, the rape in Sweet Home and the hurtful separation from her mother-by asking a lot of questions. The third part provides Sethe with a stage in which she can reenact her past trauma and work through the trauma. Beloved, the return of the past trauma, is ironically the trauma itself and at the same time the painful healer.