The Concepts of Memory, Forgetting and the Past in Toni Morrison s Beloved

Abstract

In one's life there has always been a moment or an event that is so shocking and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized, it is very normal to close the memory and for self-defence to suppress the terrible emotional experience. Sometimes this neglecting and abandoning might be the best way to forget, and so do the characters Sethe and Paul D in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Trying to ignore their past and to avoid any related confrontations, they try to forget their terrible memories in Beloved. But, I think this forgetting is very temporary and it lasts only until the smallest event prompts the memory and then the formidable past is experienced once again as painful as it once was. Toni Morrison carries Sethe on a kind of journey from being a woman who identifies herself with motherhood, to a woman who begins to identify herself as being a human being. Morrison brings this picture to life by letting Sethe face her past and bring to mind the events that she worked extremely hard to suppress and to forget. It seems impossible for her to remain in denial of the past. In this paper, I argue that the function of memory concerning the past experiences of the main characters in Beloved (especially Sethe and Paul D) depends upon their spatial and temporal relationships. To support my argument, Paul Ricoeur's theoretical assumptions concerning human memory, together with Daniel L. Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory, provide the theoretical background for this analysis.

“They Took My Milk”: A Psychoanalytic Study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

“…Not only this, the cruel experience of slavery is passed on to the younger generations and they too have to pay the price of being black in a white society. Morrison coins the term "rememory", which means a very heightened imaginative power of the past that represents the past memories in their most accurate ways (Kocabiyik, 2016). Morrison uses it as a tool to express the collective memory of the black people in America who are exploited and racially segregated by white people.…”

“…Nearly two decades ago, the mother, Sethe has killed her baby girl to save her from slavery and rape, but when the novel opens Beloved returns to their 124-a house in Ohio, as a young woman who is bruised in her chin. Critics also argue that Beloved is the symbol of the sixty million slaves who were exploited and raped in The Atlantic Slave Trade in America (Kocabiyik, 2016). Memory or the rememory, as Morrison puts it, has been greatly focused on by the author and Sethe always thinks about her past and intermingles it with the present.…”

Elektroni̇k Tebli̇gatin Yapilmiş Sayildiği Tari̇h

“…1982 tarihli Zustellgesetz 83 (Avusturya Tebligat Kanunu-ZustG), elektronik tebligat imkânını ikili bir tasnife tutmuştur 84 . Bu Kanun'a göre düzenlenenlerin ilki "Tebligat Hizmet Sağlayıcısı tarafından Delil Kayıtlı Tebligat (Avusturya Tebligat Kanunu m. 35)", ikincisi ise "Tebligat Sistemi Tarafından Delil Kayıtsız Tebligat (Avusturya Tebligat Kanunu m. 36)"tır.…”

“…Söz konusu usuller arasındaki fark, öncelikle delil niteliğini haiz bulunan elektronik tebligat sisteminde kendisine elektronik tebligat gönderilen muhatabın tebligata erişiminden önce vatandaşlık kartına ilişkin kimlik bilgilerinin teyidinin istenmesi hususundadır. Bunun yanı sıra belgelerin servis sağlayıcısı tarafından saklanma süresi, muhataba iletilmesine yönelik prosedürler gibi hususlarda da farklılıklar yer almaktadır 85 .…”