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Counteracting the Past: Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner Case and Beloved

Beloved is a novel based on the historical Margaret Garner case in which a slave woman, Margaret Garner killed her infant daughter. Morrison was shocked by her calm attitude shown in her news interview which was conducted after she killed her daughter. From her calm attitude, Morrison was able to capture the horrific contradiction of a slave mother who must kill her children to protect them from slavery. This contradiction was reflected in the way the case was represented in mass media: the public document reported and remembered her as a fugitive slave, not as an horrible infanticidal mother. Her internal conflicts and pains were totally ignored and unrecognized by the general public. The tragic event surrounding Margaret Garner makes both black and white people embarrassed and ashamed of themselves. Forgetting is a defense mechanism against such a shame. The whole society wanted to forget this traumatic event of the slavery history. However, the past never disappears completely, but continues to return in a form different from the original in order to possess the community concerned. The event forces the community to confront it and “work through” it. Morrison’s Beloved is such an attempt to work through traumatic history. If she did not retell and thus reinterpreted the past, the internal history of slavery surrounding Margaret Garner’s infanticide would have remained a disremembered history, buried in the actual past of American history, threatening to return to possess the community. Haunted by the frightening absence of Margaret Garner’s internal experience in the public narrative, Morrison took the job upon her shoulder of filling in the omitted lacuna of slavery by probing into the interior life of African-Americans. Morrison through her novel worked through the traumatic past of Margret Garner embodied in Sethe. This working-through, Morrison believed, is a step toward a healing of black sufferings, that is, of the painful and secret legacy of slavery. As such, though Morrison encountered the past over and over again, she did repeat it as happened historically. She reencountered the traumatic past creatively by deploying the counteracting tactic.