복원행위 또는 치유행위로서 토니 모리슨의 기억

Toni Morrison’s Remembering as an Action for Regeneration or Healing

This study discusses Toni Morrison’s remembering in view of the action for regeneration or healing. In Beloved and Home, Morrison shows that remembering not only relives African Americans’ racial identity and consciousness through the reactivation of past experiences but also plays a crucial role in the psychoanalytic cure. In Beloved, when 124 is cut off from its neighbors, Denver needs to go out into the black community to independently change the fragmented world of 124 into a communally holistic world, However, she can not walk down even the steps of their porch because she lacks any defense against the outside world. Then, her remembering of Baby Suggs’s advice encourages her not only to construct her active self but also to move outward beyond her restricted world of 124. Also, it leads Sethe to regenerate friendly relations with the black community. Meanwhile, in Home Frank Money has terrible flashbacks to his childhood and the Korean war. In this context, it is ‘remembering’ that leads Frank to find a healing way. After escaping from a veteran’s mental hospital in Seattle, Frank moves to Atlanta where his sister Cidra is faced with an existential crisis. This journey of his own is one with paradigmatic images directing him to the past that holds the key to his regeneration. Reliving his traumatic experiences throughout the journey, he weans himself off the alcohol he used to numb his emotional and conscious identity. Finally, at the novel’s end, he achieves a whole identity by a return to parental and traditional knowledge through community mothering and by the reburial of a dead black fighter that echoes his successful movement toward black masculinity.