The Form of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy
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This paper argues that A Mercy gives articulation to Florens’s voice in its incomplete invocation of memories of her mother and her past, while also demonstrating a marked interest in the recovery of the memories of the ‘white’ slaves. Florens’s voice and the urgent and exasperated tale of her maturity into a visible selfhood are perched on the edge of the voices of anguish and survival of the rest of the Vaark plantation. The text does not seem to privilege the kind of Black Atlantic slave memories that Morrison powerfully conjures up in Beloved. In this respect, A Mercy, at least partially, parts with the ghostly presence of the Middle Passage and the legacy of racialized slavery that we encounter in Beloved, while the unknowable past “festering” to sometimes come back to the present reminds us of the fleeting glimpses of the legacy of slavery, both black and white. It is not a complete ‘abandonment’ of the past, nor a full ‘embodiment’ of the Black Atlantic. The presence of the (black) mother occasionally beckons Florens to memories of the past, but at the same time, Florens’s present embraces a repository of the memories of what Morrison calls the ‘white slaves.’
Abstract
This paper argues that A Mercy gives articulation to Florens’s voice in its incomplete invocation of memories of her mother and her past, while also demonstrating a marked interest in the recovery of the memories of the ‘white’ slaves. Florens’s voice and the urgent and exasperated tale of her maturity into a visible selfhood are perched on the edge of the voices of anguish and survival of the rest of the Vaark plantation. The text does not seem to privilege the kind of Black Atlantic slave memories that Morrison powerfully conjures up in Beloved. In this respect, A Mercy, at least partially, parts with the ghostly presence of the Middle Passage and the legacy of racialized slavery that we encounter in Beloved, while the unknowable past “festering” to sometimes come back to the present reminds us of the fleeting glimpses of the legacy of slavery, both black and white. It is not a complete ‘abandonment’ of the past, nor a full ‘embodiment’ of the Black Atlantic. The presence of the (black) mother occasionally beckons Florens to memories of the past, but at the same time, Florens’s present embraces a repository of the memories of what Morrison calls the ‘white slaves.’
참고문헌 (36)
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