Toni Morrison’s spiritually and historically awakening novel—entitled Beloved—depicts the past and present journey of an ex-slave named Sethe Suggs. Through Mrs. Suggs, Toni Morrison shares the factual and similar experiences of a woman named Margaret Garner. Sethe Suggs has been defied by the world in nearly every way possible—such as the elimination of her unpretentious freedom, the tragic, yet foreseeable loss of Baby Suggs, and much more. Noticeably throughout the novel, Sethe’s constant “rememory” of her preceding and present struggles plague her emotionally, physically, and spiritually. For instance, Sethe and her daughter Denver are persistently haunted—literally—by Sethe’s late baby girl, Beloved. When Beloved was barely an infant, …show more content…
Despite the fact that Sethe’s memories of freedom were held hostage during her years as a slave, occurrences in the novel permit those once ambiguous memoirs to progressively rematerialize through the power of “rememory.” According to Horvitz, an illustration of a disremembered memory of Sethe’s is the physical memory of Beloved— the reincarnation of her deceased daughter and her African mother. Subsequent to the discovery of the mysterious woman outside of Sethe’s home, Sethe’s remembrance of her child allows her to recognize the human manifestation and identity of Beloved’s ghost. Furthermore, Beloved’s exhibition “teaches Sethe that memories about her matrilineal ancestry are life-giving” (Horvitz 1). Deemed as yet another apocalypse of Sethe’s, this ideology encourage and influence Sethe to embrace her “rememory,” rather than be afraid of it. Additionally, while enduring the inhumanities of slavery, Sethe “forgets the words of her mother’s language” (2). Yet again, her rememory agrees to allow the dead language to “exist inside [Sethe] as feelings and images that emerge as a code” (2). This so-called code connects Sethe to her unfamiliar and effortlessly forgotten history, so that she may healthily relive her past to make sense of the present, along with the future. Lastly, at the end of Beloved, Morrison repeats, “This is not a story to pass on” (Morrison 323). Horvitz concludes that Morrison’s relentless repetition suggests that “it is imperative to preserve continuity (…) between generations” (Horvitz 5). This assumes that Morrison is placing the responsibility amongst the generations of readers to “rememory” one’s history and not let it fade into the