A New-Historicist Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

A Review Article by Marwan M. Abdi

Course; Literary Criticism

Introduction

During the recent decades a great deal of research has been dedicated to the cases of the
marginalized nations such as the African Americans. This renewed interest in the lives of
the Blacks which has been mainly due to the Postmodern and Postcolonial trends; has
brought many black writers into the forefront of the literary and historical representation.
The history of this interest in the blacks' identity and their cultural heritage could be
traced back in the writings of the Harlem Renaissance artists, who challenged the

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Eurocentric and white centered discourse of the earlier literary traditions. Some
predecessors like, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston inspired postmodern writers
such as, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to work on establishing, a black literary
tradition that found its place in the literary canon of postmodern era. Morrison’s works
which aimed at raising the awareness among the black people, were not only concerned
with reclaiming the history and cultural heritage of the African Americans but also tried
to represent the history form black’s perspective. Beloved which is her most famous
novel, deals with issues such as the history of slavery and its hunting presence in the
minds of the traumatized African Americans. Revising the history of the millions of
slaves who were treated brutally by the seemingly civilized whites, is one of the central
issues in this novel which basically centers on the lives of community of female slaves.

Rationale

Due to the ever-increasing recent concerns for the marginalized ethnicities among the
writers and social activists, new approaches in literary studies have emerged which are
primarily concerned with the history and the culture of the subdued Nations. Three major
types of cultural studies which Dobie categorizes as; new historicism postcolonialism and
American Multiculturalism, are some of the postmodern approaches which basically aim
at revising and rewriting the culture and the history of the marginalized Nations (Dobie,
2015, p.178). Although a great deal of study and research have been conducted in the
field of African American literature, but with the ongoing biases and racial prejudice that
are happening in many European or American countries, I believe focusing on African
American writers could be very useful in terms of getting the young generations
introduced to the rich tradition of the black nations that is basically modelled after their
myths and their oral tradition. Hence, through works of writers such as Toni Morrison
and Sylvia Plath, we can unveil the sufferings of a marginalized nation that have been
victimized throughout history.

Research Approach

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For studying and evaluating the following articles, postmodern approaches are applied,
since this work is a meta-narrative that breaks down the traditional conceptions of
historiography and narration. Theories of critics such as Linda Hutcheon in the field of
historical metafiction and other psychoanalytical theories are going to be employed for
the analytical evaluation of the following papers. The major critical approach that is
going to be employed in the following works, is basically a New-Historical approach,
(cultural studies) and psychoanalytical approaches of the French psycho-feminist critics.

Review of the Articles

The articles that are going be discussed in this review article, basically are concerned
with a new-historicist reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A postmodern and
poststructuralist study of the novel which sometimes includes a feminist and
psychoanalytical analysis are some approaches employed by the writers to shed light on
the history of slavery of the African Americans. The articles are discussed according to
the order of their publication; Linda Krumholz's "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical
Recovery in Toni Morrison's Beloved" (1992) describes how history-making from the
perspective of the Blacks has a therapeutic effect. Kimberly Chabot Davis’s artilcle;
"Postmodern blackness: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' and the end of history"(1998) through
a multidisciplinary approach highlights the way Morrison, blurs the boundaries between
history and fiction in order to reconstruct the history of the slavey. Emma Parker's “A
New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison's Beloved” (2001) similar to the
aforementioned articles, studies the traumas of the African Americans from New-
historicist, Freudian, Feminist perspectives.

Linda Krumholz's "The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison's

Beloved" (1992)

Krumholz’s “The Ghosts of Slavery” raises the argument that the act of reconstructing of
the history of the African Americans, in Beloved has a therapeutic effect on characters,
the writer and the reader. After supporting this argument by statements form Du Bois and

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Rampersad , the author adopts the Cultural Poetics and Psychoanalytical approach to
highlight the way Morrison’s Beloved focuses on the history of slavery as a national and
personal trauma and the rituals’ therapeutic effect on the fragmented individuals. Various
techniques such as, repetition, multiple voices and narrative perspectives and the oral
tradition, which makes the story a ritual of healing are discussed. This healing process is
argued to be framed in three major phases, i.e., the traumatized person’s stage of
confronting the past, then her atonement and the final ritual of clearing and rebirth.
Considering these stages as the general framework, the article goes on to analyze the
major female characters including; Baby Suggs, Beloved, Sethe and Denver as the prime
examples of characters who are haunted by their past.

Concepts related to rituals and the spirituality of the African Americans’ cultural heritage
and their curing impact on the characters are represented through Baby Suggs, while
Beloved basically symbolizes the traumatic history or the ghost of slavery which is
haunting the characters and even the readers. The article employs Freudian
psychoanalytical approach to discuss the repression of the traumatic memories of slavery
in Baby Suggs and the way she goes through the process of reconciliation with those
memories. This character’s role as an unchurched preacher who helps people to face their
painful memories is compared to Frued’s method of allowing the patients to narrativize
their traumas and in order to liberate their diverted energy. In this part the writer
interestingly argues that the rituals of the African Americans are deemed to be antecedent
for the scientific theories of Freud and even they transcend the scientific mode of
reasoning in American educational system. The reintroducing and revisioning of the
cultural heritage of the ‘blacks’ is Morrison’s postmodern method to show the possibility
of reconstructing of the past and reconceptualization of the future. This part ends with
the manner which characters in the novel have tried their best to lock away these
memories and emotions for the sake of survival and a call for letting their hearts free
from those painful histories.

The writer then acknowledges that recalling and restaging the traumatic past is always
painful but the only way to get relieved from the psychological burden. Beloved as a
character who symbolizes the past brings into light the writer’s philosophy, i.e., there is a

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need for realizing history in order to forge your future. This new historicist attitude also
draws attention to some critics' viewpoint regarding the way that the rhetorical traditions
of the African Americans have always rejected the White-Centered and the monolithic
voice of the dominant cultures. The character of the Beloved, as the paper argues, fulfils
the task of bringing the history of slavery into life and makes both the characters and the
reader to revisit their history in order to get psychologically released. Beloved is a
character that haunts the present, a strategy used by Morrison to recreate and give life to
the forgotten history of the black slaves.

Sethe’s healing, as a pivotal stage in the healing process provided by the work, is a stage
which highlights the power of the spirituality and communal ties of the women slaves.
Having all their voices rejoined and going through a ritual of purgation provides Sethe
(who symbolizes the traumatized black women) with an opportunity to get cleansed and
free from the psychological burden of the painful history. The final restaging of the
suppressed past and letting the suppressed negative energies an outlet, as the article
argues, in a sense recovers the characters from the dark history. Sethe’s daughter,
Denver is the last character who symbolizes both the past and the future. She is the
voice of the writer and a generation who is concerned with carrying the forgotten history
of the African Americans. Denver's relationship with the past conveys the main idea of
the writer who considers history as a "ritual engagement with a past", in other words
without having a full knowledge of her family's past Denver must remain isolated and
traumatized. As a character she starts to gain knowledge about her past through beloved
and her mother, and after acknowledging those painful histories she's able to find her way
to the future.

The end of the work highlights the article’s overarching thematic concern, i.e., the time
Denver goes beyond her role as a character and takes on the role of the teacher and the
historian and the author. In other words she becomes an authorial voice and takes history
in her hands in order to rewrite it from the perspective of the marginalized black people
that would be very different from the white’s discourse. The pepper’s conclusion
highlights Morrison's critiques of the old historicism and the fact-based system of
thought predominant in the united States, a trend that has always ignored the

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subjectiveness, spirituality and the cultural heritage of the African Americans. Although
all characters suffer from fragmentation, and the task of rememory and recollecting
history sounds to be baffling and difficult but it is essential to African Americans’
recovery.

Taking into consideration that this paper has been written only five years after the
publication of the novel, although it lacks enough references to the critics’ viewpoints,
but it is well structured in terms of developing the article through four major characters'
healing process. The writer strongly grounds his argument from the very beginning and
uses quotes from Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk, and the historical concerns for the black
nation that could be culturally united and the “veil behind which black remained nearly
invisible " (Reilly, J.M. 1994). This draws the reader's attention to a concern for the
recovery of the history of the African Americans which is the central focus of the paper.
Although the paper starts with supporting its arguments with critics’ and historians’
views such as Du Bois, but from the second page the writer depends on her own analysis
rather than other critics attitude towards the history of slavery. For example a brief
reference to Michel Foucault’s conception of History as being subjective “non-linear and
non-teleological” would have made the introductory part stronger (Bressler, 2011, p.189).

Since the article is concerned with four major female characters of the novel, the ideas of
the feminist critics and those who focus on concepts such as trauma and psychology of
the woman would have made the article stronger. Feminists such as Julia Kristeva and
Helene Cixous, who have endeavored to explain the fragmented nature of the woman's
psychology through a Lacanian perspective, have shared crucial insights that could be
employed in such character analysis. Although the paper, frames out a well-structured
discussion through clear-cut ritual stages of healing but referring briefly to the theories
of Sigmund Freud, for the character analysis gives the reader an impression that the
article is an essay rather than at research. Claire Kahani's feminist treatise, Passions of
the Voice which highlights the techniques that are used in texts that deal with hysteric
discourses also I believe would be a valuable source for tackling the traumatic case of
the characters in this novel (Finzi, 2018, p. ).

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Although the writer of this article never mentions, her new historical approach but
comparing and contrasting the African Americans’ history and the monolithic version
that has been dominant throughout centuries is the central concern of the writer.
Reminding the reader of the therapeutic effect of the practice of restaging and revisioning
of the past traumas of any nation is a recurring element that makes the article so useful
and applicable to other researches in the field of new-historicism and trauma.

Although the work does not follow a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach, but
its simplicity in terms of a structure and arguments and the way the writer develops her
ideas in accordance with the developments of the events of the novel, are some qualities
that make the article a trustworthy source for researchers. Having a separate concluding
section which wraps up the whole paper and leaves the reader with open discussions is
another strong aspect of the article which deals with a work that has endeavored to pass
on the true history of the slavery.

Kimberly Chabot Davis’s "Postmodern blackness: Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' and

the end of history"(1998)

This article basically highlights Morrison’s usage of historical fiction as a medium for
revisioning the history of his nation and her aim to cure the injuries inflicted upon the
black people throughout history. From the very beginning of the article the writer
introduces Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction and the post modern
narrative strategies used in Morrison’s Beloved to mix fiction and history. As a meta-
narrative as the writer argues; this work questions the authenticity of history and acts as a
work to keep the forgotten history alive, in order to build a better future for the African
Americans. This kind of relating the novel to the postmodern novelistic tradition that is
used for national awareness raising and even healing the traumas of the victimized
nations is a quality that stands out from the very beginning.

Morrison as a postmodern novelist considered history as fictional and tried her best to
record the history of the African Americans from a new perspective and to manipulate
this revisioning for therapeutic concerns. This revolutionary attitude as Davis argues was

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a subversion of the monolithic attitude of the postmodern academic theories that was
dominated by established hierarchies such as white vs black and man vs woman.
Morrison’s poststructuralist attitude and her attempt to challenge such hierarchies is a
distinguishing quality in this new-historicist study, since it basically draws attention to
how an oppressed nation’s history has been falsified by a “white authority” and the
oppressed nation’s attempt to rewrite their own vision of History.

Although the previous article by Krumholz dealt with the history of the African
Americans but I believe this article which is written during the same decade is better
grounded on postmodern theories concerning, history and narrative and thematic
presentations in novels. This article very interestingly employs Michel Foucault's view of
history in order to highlights Toni Morrison’s Counter-Historical attitude which rejected
the objective and totalizing view of history. In order to clarify on this new-historical
strategy, Davis brings example from Margaret Garner's true story which inspired
Morrison to reframe it and to represent it from the vantage point of the Victim. Drawing
attention to Morrison’s attempt to blur the boundaries between fiction and history which
is a very effective strategy in postmodern meta-narratives is an aspect that is noticed in
this paper but overlooked in Krumholz’s article .

Toni Morrison as a postmodern writer was basically critical of the shallow

representations of African myths, which she called the imagined history and instead she
called for representing a life-like version of history. The metafictional of aspect of
Beloved is discussed and the writer notes self- reflexivity as a technique employed by
Morrison to make the reader aware that texts or historical documents often fail to
represent reality. In other words, unlike a historian, Morrison tries to change the readers’
perception of what is real and what is fictional. This process which Victor Shklovsly calls
“defamiliarization” puts the old into a new “light” and gets the reader to a “field of new
perception” and provokes the audience to reexamine any established presumptions
(Shklovsly cited by Bressler, p. 50). In various stages of the story as the article argues,
Morrison uses such metafictional strategies as inserting para-textual material, (a mix of
factual and fictional documents ) and tries to distort the borderline between fact and
fiction. Morrison attempts to convey a message that African Americans, should not dwell

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in their own past because it can strangle their present. In order to get free from the horrors
and traumas of the past, restaging and reenacting those traumas, is a necessity, as Davis
argues, but it has a limited potential for recovery, since the ending of the work suggests
that the ghost of the past remains and waits to be "resurrected". The limited potential of
revisioning of history in healing the traumas of a nation is an argument that is well
established and supported by critics’ views and textual analysis, while it was briefly
hinted at the end of the former paper. This argument is supported by quoting Linda
Hutcheon, who considers the unavoidable nature of the past, as in essential quality of the
postmodern historiographic novels. This partial recovery and open-endedness, is another
postmodern feature which leaves the reader with an option to get engaged in in rethinking
and imagining history.

This article's various argumentations and the conflicting perspectives of various critics is
a feature that makes it a very trustful source for any future references to a new-historical
analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The writer's multidisciplinary approach and using
Linguistic, Psycho-Feminist, Marxist and even alluding to the Oral African-American
Tradition, to analyze this work is a quality that grabs any reader’s attention throughout
the reading process. Quoting Morrison’s interview to supports his argument, the writer
goes on to say that; Morrison confessed that her work was intended to imitate the " jazz"
which always keeps the listener on the edge and with no close or ending. Such qualities
as, Morrison’s usage of the circular plot which recalls the blacks’ ancestral worldview,
and recalling Julia Kristeva conception of the "woman's time" as non-phallic, is what I
believe to be a turning point of the work. Here Morrison rejection the White-Centered
traditions and we can notice a fully post-modern style of narration comes to exist
somewhere close to the paper’s closure. This quality with the fragmented and elusive
narration which the article regards as distinguishing qualities of Beloved, is the best
medium for portraying the" the unspeakable thoughts" and the psychic traumas of the
African-American slaves.

Morrison’s conception of time is argued to be different from that of the Marxist critic
Fredrick Jameson, since her work blends the modern and postmodern elements and raises
the significance of the 'deep memory',i.e., the connection between past and the present,

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and at the same time it rejects the teleological nature of the postmodern narratives.
Although Morrison favored, a synchronic conception of time (merging between the past,
present and the future), at the same time she could not reject the timelessness of the world
of beloved. In other words although, she rejected the linear view of history, nevertheless
she believed in respecting time (differentiation between past and the present) and this
view is represented through characters who realized that 'life' means, " caring and looking
forward, remembering and looking back"(Morrison,2004 , p.109). I believe, this interplay
of the modern and postmodern conception of time is another overarching aspect of the
research that Davis has framed out to make readers revise their former simplistic views of
Morrison as a postmodern writer who passively accepted all postmodern novelistic
trends. Instead, she was quite conscious that, for recreating her nation’s history she had
to not only subvert the deeply-rooted white traditions but also to invent a fusion of the
African-American, modern and postmodern traditions.

Davis’s ending argument is that, ignoring Morrison’s concept of temporality and reading
the work, in the complete synchronic sense would undermine the text's attempt to
maintain some of the "temporal boundaries". That's to say, Morrison’s strategies in
writing exemplifies the notion that learning from history and past and not to get paralyzed
in it, and creating a synthesis out of scattered segments of history and taking advantage
from both the diachronic and synchronic sense of time is the representational method of
her historiographic novel.

As noticed throughout the paper the writer stars to develop her argument through various
critics from different schools of literary criticism. Although this paper was not structured
in a simplistic manner, but a gradual development of the ideas from new-historical and
psychological analysis to more complicated metafictional aspects of the text and a
philosophical view of history by Fredrick Jameson gets the reader prepared for analyzing
the traumas of the characters from a broader perspective. While the article gets engaged
in various discussions from various perspectives, but the core element that I found
running through the whole paper was the traumas of the African American nation.
Davis’s analysis of the therapeutic effect of art is represented through stages such as;
suppressing the past (trauma); remembering and forgetting the past(hysteria) and

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reenacting the past (curing the trauma). This pattern which also was found in the former
article, I believe could be analyzed through Carl Jung's and Northrop Frye's
mythological criticism which discovers universal patterns in the lives of people
throughout human’s history. This article's postmodern approach to the textual analysis
was an overarching future. In some occasions, for instance, Davis even criticizes seminal
critics as Linda Hutcheon for being biased against blackness. The article’s supremacy of
the African American tradition and their ancestral worldviews at the end of the paper is
so inspiring that gets the modern reader think of comparing works of the Harlem
Renaissance writers with the contemporary ones and conducting more researches on
African American criticism and the cultural studies.

Emma Parker's “A New Hystery: History and Hysteria in Toni Morrison's

Beloved” (2001)

This article which stars with the famous French feminist Helene Cixous, and her
conception of the new history, from the very beginning establishes itself as a research
mainly concerned with a feminist study of history of the traumas of the women in
Morrison’s Beloved. After introducing the concept of the hysteria, Emma Parker clearly
states her approach, that is, drawing insights from psychoanalytical theories and
employing the ideas of the French Feminists about hysteria. Beloved which is primarily
centered on the disempowered, as Emma Parker argues, examines the relationship
between the repression of the pain and the repression of the past, to propose that
Morrison’s work highlights the significance of confronting and transforming history,
which has a healing impact on the traumatized. The writer also argues that Beloved
challenges Freud and French feminist theories in the field of hysteria. From the very
outset, we can notice that this work similar to the former article tries to deal with the
traumas of the characters in Beloved, but its approach is different, since it strictly tries to
ground its argumentation on the theories of the French psycho-feminist criticism.

After this initiation , the paper provides an introduction to Studies on Hysteria, written by
Freud and Breuer, who saw the reason behind the Hysterics’ disorder to be the
reminiscences painful memories. Parker goes on to quote Luce Irigaray, the leading

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French Feminist, who has defined hysteria as a kind of protest against the patriarchal law,
something different from Lacan’s symbolic order (the time that child acquires language
and accepts the authority of the law of the Father). This focus on the psychoanalytical
theories of Freud , Lacan and French feminists, as a basis to analyze the characters of the
novel, makes this article a comprehensive psychological study, that was not represented
in the former papers. Although the former articles to some extent used psychological
criticism, but parker’s analysis is totally grounded on the mentioned theories in a broader
sense.

By introducing this new perspective the writer draws attention to a new interpretation for
hysteria, that is the hysterics who suffer from psychological burden try to mimic the
modes of behavior that the male-dominated society has imposed on her and through
overdoing it and exaggerating it, she tries to undo the male dominated discourse.
Irigaray’s conception of hysteria, which similar to Lacan and different from Freud, views
hysteria from a broader sense, i.e., a result of public and personal repression (social-
historical trauma) is later on challenged by the writer of the paper, since she is mainly
concerned with the feminist perspective and ignores the racial differences. The article
argues that Beloved challenges several aspects of the French feminism and the Freudian
analysis concerning hysteria. In this section the writer sounds to be changing her focus
from merely psychoanalysis and feminist theories to a broader field of research that is the
Cultural poetics and the American Multiculturalism (Dobie, 2015, p. 178). Although a
good background discussion is offered through the ideas of Freud and French feminist,
but the writer seems to be concerned with broader perspective that includes racial
differences as well.

In order to show hysteria as communal phenomenon rather than caused by only familial
relationships, the article discusses the main character, Beloved who exemplifies the
marginalized black women who are suppressed due to their gender and skin color. The
raging power, that the feminist critics such as Helene Cixous and Claire Kahane find in
hysteria has a potential for subverting the hegemony of both the white and male. Another
aspect of the hysteria in the novel which is the characters’ desire for sweet foods, is
explained by Irigaray as a symptom of hysteria marked by excessiveness and obsession

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with something to replace the vacancy of the sweet motherly love. This crave for
sweetness is explained through Freud and feminist perspective and the writer tries to add
the third dimension that is the racial history of sugar, and its association with the slavery
of the black people. Studying the trauma of the oppressed women through this femenist
perspective and considering it as a driving force for subverting any oppressing authority,
is a feature that was not noticed in the previous articles. This subsequent linkage between
the trauma and the long history of colonialism, gets us to think of the imperial policies as
the main cause of the traumas of the African American nations.

Moreover, the obsession with sweet foods and the cannibalistic desire of the Beloved, is
explained as a historical mimicry in which the oppressed tries to mimic and imitate the
logic of the master discourse, something that has been imposed on her in order to
deconstruct that hegemony. Through mimicking and over-acting a ravenous desire for
sugar and flesh, the work reminds the reader of the horrifying history of slavery, sugar
plantations, and the way that the Whites have devoured and consumed the black nations
throughout history. This is a very in-depth analysis that gives the psychotic disorder and
hysteria a broader national and historical dimension. Such an fusion between
psychoanalysis and the colonialists’ exploitation of the slaves who were subjugated and
suffered from a peripheral identity could be more examined through applying Antonio
Gramsci’s theories of ‘subaltern and hegemony’ which basically deals with the way that
a superstructure such as an imperialist system hegemonized nations not only physically
but also psychologically (Bressler, 2011, p.).

The article’s interesting shift to the latent power that exists in hysteria, as a potential for
subverting the dominant Man or White order , could be noted as a turning point in the
research. In this stage, the paper shifts to a historical dimension through discussing the
way throughout history always hysteria have been associated with women's deviance and
with the insanity of the black people, but this trend is subverted by this novel in a sense
that it deconstructs and subverts the white and man-centered biases and discourses of
psychoanalysis and history. In this context no phallocentric theory of Sigmund Freud is
capable of interpretation, since in this novel Father is marginalized, but in the French
feminist theory Beloved's hysteria is associated with mother daughter relations, and a

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desire to return to the pre- oedipal state the time that the child becomes one with the
mother.

Although hysteria as Parker argues could be a driving force against the patriarchal law
but its harmfulness is noted in Kristeva’s terms , when a hysteric retreats to the semiotic
phase and does not move to the symbolic phase. In order to elaborate on this Christevan
theory, Parker brings an example from the book where the chanting woman try to
exorcise beloved which is a symbol of their reaction to the patriarchal authority. The need
for a communal reaction against the dominant discourse is very important to notice, since
Beloved’s trauma is caused by society and her withdrawal and isolation. This call for the
communal struggle for freedom, is represented through Beloved who stands for the
ancestral spirits and millions of victimized African Americans, who have been ill-treated
throughout history. The painful history of a slavery hunting the present causes hysteria ,
but the reproduction of the primary scenes that has caused that trauma, according to
Freud and Breuer, enables the hysteric to revision all those events, which has a curing
effect on their patient. This article's emphasis on the restaging of the trauma actually has
revolutionary purpose, in terms of demand for directing the inward energy to an outward
protest against exploitation and the abuser which is manifest in Sethe's aggressive attitude
towards the white teacher. Therefore, although this work does not explicitly state its new-
historicist and postmodern approach in analyzing the novel, its focus on a liberal and
feminist perpective, I believe makes this article a work that is primarily concerned with
subverting any traditional hierarchal system, no matter if it is social, political or
linguistic.

The shift from causes of hysteria which is associated with the past, and the pain which is
manifest in the present, is a pattern that could be noticed, when the writer tries to link the
past of the slaves to their present. It is disastrous as the paper argues if people fail to
break behaviors that are deeply rooted and accepted as norms in history. Those who are
stuck in the past will not be able to find a place in the present that's to say the symbolic
order. Although anything related to the memories of suffering is vital for surviving as it
is acknowledged by the text that anything dead when comes back to life hurts and the
fact that healing process is always painful, and this is to convey the message that

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improving the present is crucially based on rebuilding the past. The therapeutic aspect of
art and revisioning history which was represented at the background of the previous
papers here becomes a governing motif and all other data and argumentations are
discussed in relation with this issue. Accordingly, Parker goes on to discuss the healing
impact of storytelling, through a mixture of Freudian talking- cure and the French
Feminists’ narrative-cure; through which the ‘hysteric’ exercises some degree of control
over her story rather than being controlled by it. Creating a new narrative from a new
perspective on history as the paper argues is able to create possibilities for the future, and
this concern for a counter-history in novelistic art as noticed earlier was the primary focus
of Davis’s article.

The article’s concluding page basically focuses on the danger of evasiveness and beating
back and ignoring the history and calls for an attention to Morrison’s message which is;
horrifying history of slavery must be revised and retold rather than being repeated. The
conclusion also highlights Beloved's ability in speaking the unspeakable and to challenge
the racial and gender biases which have been dominant in the historical and literary
discourses. Nevertheless, the writer acknowledges that, there is only a chance for a
partial recovery from hysteria, and we must learn how to confront the painful history
without being controlled by it.

Conclusion
The articles evaluated in this review article, all tackled history and the African American
nation’s traumas from different perspectives and employed different approaches, but their
major concern was New-Historicist approached to reevaluate the history of a nation that
has been transcribed by a dominant discourse. Krumhoz's article which started with a
quote from Du Bois, very concisely framed her study around the major characters’
analysis. Including the concept of trickster, which is found in the oral tradition of the
African American literature was an aspect that stands out in this article. I believe
integrating the oral tradition and ancestral myths of the black nations in the postmodern
narratives, enabled this article to cover very significant themes of Morrison’s novel.

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Krumhoz's major focus on trauma and revisioning history, was reflected in Parker's
article that basically employed the theories of the Psycho-Feminist theorists in the textual
analysis. The very unifying aspect of these two articles as I noted, was the fact that the
trauma and the pains of slavery that have been inflicted upon the Black Nations, was the
major concern of these articles' analysis. Therefore, it is clearly noted that novels of
African American writers must be analyzed from the new-historical and the cultural
poetics’ perspective, since these works are imbued with sufferings of the victimized
nation; a quality that has been overlooked by the dominant discourse of history.

Davis's paper was more complicated, because of her adaptation of the multidisciplinary
approach which included arrange of critical theories such as,; Postcolonial Studies,
Marxist Criticism, Feminist Criticism, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Poetics. I believe this
kind of approach is more preferable for analyzing the postmodern narratives because
analyzing such works which have a complicated nature in limited perspectives would not
provide the critics with a through and in-depth understanding of the themes that are
inserted into the gaps of such narratives. A mixture of all approaches, to some extent
could be found in Davis's article, in which she employed the majority of approaches in
order to expose Morrison’s strategies for recreating the history of the oppressed African
American Nations. The outstanding aspect of this article was that the Black Nations'
victimization was traced back in their history and the cause of their trauma was proved to
be factors deeply rooted in their history. This concern for healing the traumas of a nation
through revisioning history and rewriting it on their own hands was the overarching
aspect of the aforementioned articles that I believe needs to be taken into account by the
contemporary scholars. From such studies we can learn how literature has the potential
for revisioning history of the victimized nations which is tainted by stains of imperial
policies.

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