흑인 유령의 상품화

The Commodification of a Black Ghost: Reading King's Bag of Bones with Morrison's Beloved

In Bag of Bones, Stephen King creates a black ghost to unfold a provocative plot of revenge, horror, rape, and murder. Sara, a blues singer, is raped and murdered by a white racist gang in 1901, who also drowns her son to death at the same time. The ghost Sara possessed by "the Outsider" curses the rapists to kill their own children. However, King's creation of the black female ghost is problematic because it presents restrained and biased perspectives of black women and reiterates stereotypes of them in a society and culture where the inferiority of black people prevails. The Outsider proves to be a mere superficial label for the Other, subaltern, and the marginalized. The description of rape is too simple and monolithic and it fails to portray the complexity of the tragic incident of black women in context of the history of slavery and racism in the United States. Worse, the rape is depicted sensually and voyeuristically enough to possibly hinder the manifestation of the victim's agony, pain, and trauma from the reader. As a result, the fiction becomes quite appealing to the reader while sacrificing the truth of racial conflict and simplifying the struggles of African Americans. It appears as if King used a racial subject for the popularity of his novel. In order to expose the commodification of a black ghost in Bag of Bones, this essay compares the novel with a traditional African American ghost story, Toni Morrison's Beloved. It investigates the dissimilarities in the presentation of ghosts in the two novels and explicates the significance of them.