The Subaltern’s Ordeal

Abstract

Recreating the experience of slavery through testimony and dialogism, Toni Morrison attempts to recognise how silencing forces of trauma and oppression have shaped and distorted humanity and how humanity remembers and responds to such events. Even
while Beloved is a ghost, functioning as a symbolic spirit of slavery, Morrison delineates the horrors of slavery with such powerfully proactive poetic imagery that the effect of reiteration, the "rememory" is startling. From Morrrison's perspective, as developed in
Beloved, the institution of slavery remains so devastatingly powerful that even the characters who are free, whether through running away or through emancipation have yet to overcome their mental enslavement.