『빌러비드』에서의 진정한 정체성의 추구 = The pursuit of real identity in Beloved

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This dissertation examines Toni Morrison's Beloved from the perspective of postcolonialism. In America, slavery was prevalent, albeit the country was presenting itself as a democratic nation. A critic has evaluated America as an 'Internal Colonial' country. Afro-Americans experienced oppression which influenced their lives negatively and remained traumatically in their minds. Even after the liberation, they were freed not in real life but just by law.
Through Beloved, Toni Morrison reveals a history of slavery. She understands slavery as being a crisis of subjectivity and community. She attempts to disrupt what is called 'the national amnesia', which prevented the ex-slaves from generating positive identity. This role of Morrison's through her novel is the same as postcolonial theorists'. Post-colonial theory, which has challenged the discourse of the white dominant colonizer, provides a good basis for the analysis of Beloved in which ex-slaves overcome trauma and rebuild their forgotten history.
In Beloved, although the setting and scope of the novel is primarily slavery in the American South, Morrison wants to recover all facets of the slaves' story from Africa to America. Slave women were never able to be wives or mothers. Escape from the teacher and the killing of her daughter, is Sethe's means of emphatic rejection of slavery's power to circumscribe her motherhood. 18 years later, by Morrison's incarnating the past in the form of Beloved, the characters are enable to confront and remember their past in a manner in which it can be digested. Sethe is on the verge of new understanding that she, as well as her daughters, is a valuable human being. Sethe's process to find her real identity shows the way in which all blacks can escape their own trauma.