REMEMORY AS A STRATEGY OF SUBVERSIVE REPRESENTATION:

A FEMINIST READING OF MORRISON’S BELOVED

ABSTRACT

Toni Morrison reinvented ―rememory‖ in terms of narrative device, representational technique and
perspectival discourse in Beloved. Literary narratives partake of the fundamental characteristic of
narrative discourse, which is to have not only a tale—an underlying sequence of events with a
beginning and an ending—but also a teller. The central concern in studying literary narratives is
the role of the teller in the deployment of the tale. Again, Black Feminist literary theories have
stressed on the need for alternative reconstructions of the past and narrative strategies of
subversive representation in articulating the anguish and trauma of slavery, repressed memories
and tales impossible to tell. This paper contends that though Morrison has in certain instances
denied „feminist concerns‟, a feminist reading of Beloved would reinforce her use of “rememory”
in the “deployment of the tale “as an enabling/empowering strategy of subversive representation
by black women whose historic “triple marginalization” in the United States of America has been
problematized by their painful memories of a trouble-ridden past.

Key Words: Rememory, narrative strategy, subversive reading, feminist perspective.

I am accused of tending to the past

as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
the past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and I with my mother‟s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning language everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
When she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.
Lucille Clifton: ―I am accused of tending to the past…‖

momma
help me
turn the face of history
to your face.
June Jordan: ―Gettin down to get over…‖

You came right on back like a good girl, like a daughter…‖

Toni Morrison: Beloved

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Toni Morrison reinvented memory as ―rememory‖ in terms of narrative strategy, counter
hegemonic storytelling and multi perspectival discourse in Beloved. Literary narratives partake
of the fundamental characteristic of narrative discourse, which is to have not only a tale—an
underlying sequence of events with a beginning and an ending—but also a teller. The central
concern in studying literary narratives is the role of the teller in the deployment of the tale.
Again, Black Feminist literary theories have stressed on the need for alternative reconstructions
of the past and narrative strategies of subversive representation in articulating the anguish and
trauma of slavery, repressed memories and tales impossible to tell. A feminist reading of
Beloved would reinforce her use of ―rememory‖ in the ―deployment of the tale‖ as an
enabling/empowering strategy of subversive representation by black women whose historic
―triple marginalization‖ in the United States of America has been problematized by their painful
memories of a trouble-ridden/traumatic past as well as resistance of the ―margins‖ to be
―centred‖.

A feminist reading of the text would entail a notion of telling the other side of the story, which is
the focal enterprise of feminist criticism and feminist theorizing. The association of alterity—
otherness—with woman, or constructing the woman as other has problemmatized the situation of
African-American women in America in ways that are different from that of the white women.
They have been constructed as the ―othered‖ race, the ―othered‖ class as well as the ―othered‖
gender. Their ―unspeakable‖ stories had not yet been told, their muted voices waited to be
heard— but they would have to tell their stories in a different way. The repressed or suppressed
stories of trauma and anguish, construed as stories of the Other could then become the enabling
conditions for the writing and reading of feminist narrative. Again, a perspectival notion of the
story would imply the preference of a point of view and suppression of alternative voices and
versions. Rememory acts here as a technique of subverting one coherent line of narration by
bringing in multiple (polyphonic) as well as dissenting (antiphonic)voices/strands of narration.1
Beloved is rife with ―mumblings‖—―mumblings in places like 124‖, which disrupt silences and
disturb speech.

A striking form of subversion that finds expression in feminist discourses is the anti-narrative
strategy. It seeks to challenge ordered and coherent narrativity and deconstruct hegemonic forms
and structures of monologic and phallocentric discourses. In Beloved Toni Morrison uses
rememory as a strategy of subverting narrative coherence and order of recorded history by
relativizing the rational metanarrative and putting into perspective the dominant discourses of
recorded history by the whites as well as fugitive slave narratives by black males. Morrison
revisions a history both spoken and written, felt and submerged, coalescing the known and the
unknown elements of slavery—insignificant to the captors but major disruptions of black
women’s experience of nurturing, loving and being. Morrison’s reconstruction of the historical
text of slavery takes into cognizance not only the physical and psychic anguish of slavery but
also the stark reality of slavery defying traditional historiography as well as the fact that the
victim’s own chronicles of slavery were systematically submerged, ignored, mistrusted or
superceded by historians of that era. A complicated interplay between recovered and
remembered events and literary structures could be achieved through a manipulation of narrative
structure. Reclaiming history functions here as thematic emphasis and textual methodology.2

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However, in reconceptualizing and reconstructing American history through the consciousness
of African-American slaves, Morrison also counters the canonical voices/ perspectives of the
black male in traditional slave narratives. Rememory as strategy allows a shift from the locus of
the known and the articulated to a locus of the visual, impossible to name, the unspeakable. In
Beloved Morrison enters the realm of a new historicism that values the individual and fictive
narrative as a truth-telling one. Here she balances the archetypal story (a borrowed slave’s
narrative—Margaret Garner’s story) and a contemporary fictive autobiography to achieve a
subversion of the narrative by focusing on the psychological disintegration and reintegration of
an individual black woman, which is not a representation or a collective text in the conventional
sense but a story that could be appropriated as the collective experience of black slave women.
Rememory or the complex process of recovery of repressed memory allows for a slave narrative
where the narrator is not effaced. Here, Sethe translates, interpretes and provides to the reader a
richly textured psychological and experiential view of personal and historical events. Sethe’s
―rememories‖ become not only the text of her own interior life but also an imaginative re-
construction of the distorted, incomplete, eclipsed narrative of black women’s history during
slavery and beyond. The inclusion of the theme of trauma, omitted from conventions of the
traditional slave narrative allows for the subversive retelling of one woman’s story during and
following the period of slavery. 3

In Beloved silence becomes a protest against assimilationist tendencies. This kind of silence is
different from the dropping of "a veil" that Morrison speaks of in relation to traditional slave
narratives. Whereas old slave narratives exercised a willed omission of trauma as a defensive
armor against humiliating or embarrassing memories, Morrison's strategic silence seeks to
disrupt the very forces of assimilation and cultural hegemony that would lock others into
helplessness and sanctioned ignorance. Sethe's circling around the subject becomes a narrative
problematic of "pinning" down her story:

Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one.
That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn't get it right off
- she could never explain. Because the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-out record of flowered
shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple: she was squatting in the garden and
when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little
hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their
wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. (B,163)

Morrison has confessed that, when she wrote the novel, she feared that it would be her least read
book because "it is about something the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to
remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember. I mean,
it's national amnesia" ("Pain" 120). Sethe couldn't bring herself to talk about her past "because
every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had
agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable; to Denver's inquiries Sethe gave short replies
or rambling incomplete reveries" (Beloved 58). But Morrison turns this very impossibility of
telling for her characters into a possibility of narration. As she turns the self-censuring re-
memories of her characters into a rhetoric of silence which points to the abysmal experience and
missing details in the life of her characters that escape inscription, she demonstrates that
confronting the past is liberating.

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Although Morrison has in certain instances denied „feminist concerns‟, on radio in 1983 Toni
Morrison affirmed that she was a ―valuable‖ as a writer because she was a woman, ―because
women, its seems to me, have some special knowledge about certain things‖. 4 In another
interview with Sandi Russel in 1986 she said:

I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are
not attacking each other, as both black and white man do. Black women writers look at things in an
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unforgiving/loving way. They are writing to repossess, re-name, re-own.

As Peach pointed out, the experiences of reclaiming and repossessing are crucial for black
women writers who write from an especially difficult position.6

The narrative act of reclaiming and repossessing black slave women’s ―unspeakable terror‖ is the
central concern in Beloved. ―That’s all you let yourself remember‖ Sethe had told Baby Suggs
(B,6), but she herself ―worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe‖. Yet her
devious memory threw up fragments of repressed events. The refuge of willful amnesia was
disrupted by the arrival first of Paul D and then Beloved. I would say that Morrison writes for the
black woman in Beloved. One could be contend that the women share narrative space with men
in Morrison’s narrative and Paul D had ―something blessed in his manner‖ who could ―walk into
a house and make the women cry‖ (B,21). However, in his post coital resentment after having
slept with Sethe (which he had been imagining since 25 years) Paul D devalues Sethe’s ―tree‖
(the bunched up scarred flesh on her back that had borne the lash) when he compared it to Sixo
and his tree: ―Now there was a man, and that was a tree…and the tree lying next to him didn’t
compare‖. (B,27) For Baby Suggs and Sethe ―a man was nothing but a man… They encouraged
you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was,
they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children
out and tore up the house‖. (B, 28) Neither women set much store by their men whose
appearance and disappearance reinforced the paradigm of absent black males. The poignance of
their loss was eventually replaced by resignation. She could accept Paul D’s leaving as an
inevitability she had come to terms with. Sethe had no knowledge of the incapacitation and
insanity of her man Hal, (who had witnessed her humiliation at the hands of the nephews but
could do nothing about it) the ―somebody‖ who had fathered all her children and given her a
sense of self through wifehood and motherhood. ―Not knowing‖ spared her another excruciating
pain and loss. The central narrative concern is however Sethe’s ―mother-love‖ that was so
―thick‖ that she could kill her child rather than endure her dehumanization in slavery. The
interpersonal memories of Sweet Home, which she shares with Paul D and her transgressions
into Paul D’s rememories could have helped in the recuperation and healing had not the
overwhelming pain and humiliation of having her ―milk stolen‖ surfaced with her rememory.
The act of murdering her child reenacts and is symbolic of a stolen motherhood, erased identity
and displaced self. It is only with the return of Beloved who is invested with the dual identity of
Sethe’s mother and daughter that the process of exhuming trauma can begin.

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The slave mother's absence has greatly impaired the development of the child's subjective
identity/self. Sethe "didn't see her [own mother] but a few times out in the fields and once when
she was working indigo." What she seems to remember most about her mother is the woman's
absence. Without explicitly saying so, Sethe feels personally affronted by her missing mother
"She never fixed my hair nor nothing," Sethe tells Denver and Beloved "She didn't even sleep in
the same cabin most nights I remember." Sethe "guess[es]" that her mother had to sleep closer to
the "line-up"; however, she suspects that her mother had merely wanted to sleep elsewhere and
intentionally deserted her daughter at night (60-61). Even though Sethe is familiar with the
conditions of slavery, she cannot help but resent her mother's incessant unavailability.

When Denver asks Sethe what had happened to her mother, Sethe suddenly remembers
"something she had forgotten she knew. Something privately shameful that had seeped into a slit
in her mind" (61). John Bowlby defines a form of repression in which "certain information of
significance to the individual being [is] systematically excluded from further processing" as
"'defensive exclusion'" (45). Sethe had defensively excluded the memory of her mother and, in
particular, the events surrounding her mother's death. "When fragments of the information
defensively excluded seep through, fragments of the behavior defensively deactivated become
visible" (Bowlby 65). In recalling the fate of her mother, Sethe brings to the surface feelings of
anger, bitterness, and sorrow. What she remembers is that, while trying to escape slavery, her
mother had been captured, returned to the plantation, and hanged before the rest of the slaves. In
order to reclaim her freedom, Sethe's mother had been willing to leave her child behind. Sethe
finds it difficult to accept the fact that her "ma'am would run off and leave her daughter" (203).
When Nan tells her that she was the only child her mother kept, Sethe initially feels
"unimpressed" and later feels "angry" (62). Sethe infers that Nan wanted her to know how much
her mother had cared about her, that she was loved because she had been the only child not
thrown away. However, being allowed to live and being loved are not equivalent in Sethe's eyes.
To Sethe, love means being "willing to die" for someone and being willing to "give [one's]
privates to a stranger in return for a carving" (203). She would never consider deserting one's
child an act of love.

Foregrounding feminine subtexts like the pain of being black slave mothers constitutes a major
concern of Black feminists. In discussing motherhood in slavery, Barbara Christian reveals that
"the African emphasis on woman as mother was drastically affected by the institution of slavery,
since slave women and men were denied their natural right to their children" (219). She goes on
to explain that "some slave women were so disturbed by the prospect of bearing children who
could only be slaves that they did whatever they could to remain childless" (220). When faced
with the decision of whether to kill her children or relinquish them to a life of slavery, Sethe
races her children into the shed and quickly slices open her two-year-old's throat with a handsaw.
According to Wyatt, Sethe's maternal subjectivity ―is so embedded in her children that it . . .
allows her to take the life of one of them" (476). In killing her own child, Sethe insists upon her
subjectivity.

Sethe was the girl with the iron face in Paul D’s memory – the girl who could endure intolerable
pain and had a reservoir of strength that was intimidating. For Sethe, the cowhide used on her
back was insignificant compared to the enormity of the violation – both physical and

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psychological—of her motherhood. The potency of Sethe’s rememory of the stealing of her milk
is achieved through reiteration:
―They used cowhide on you?‖
―And they took my milk.‖
―They beat you and you was pregnant?‖
―And they took my milk!‖
It is Sethe’s mother-love that makes her want to compensate for Beloved’s lost childhood. With
Beloved mysterious appearance, from the irrational realms of a magical supernatural world,
Morrison collapses the framework of rational narrative to make space for the lost selves of dead
black women. Beloved speaks in fractured sentences. Her fragmented rememory of a past
mingles with Sethe’s rememory as well as Denver’s, who is at last able to participate in
memories of Sweet Home. Beloved’s primal memory of captivity in a slave ship hold or womb
interplays with Sethe’s primal memory of the slitting of her child’s throat and the feel of warm
blood soaking her fingers, which in turn draws in Denver in its intricate web of nurturing and
being as she takes her mother’s milk mixed with Beloved’s blood. The threesome exist in a
virtually alienated world of reliving the past. Sethe comes to terms with her guilt but Beloved,
symbolic of a recuperated past threatens to consume her. It is Denver who breaks out of the
charmed circle of rememoried past to bring in the present in the form of help from the
neighbourhood.

Lorraine Bethel in Some of Us Are Brave writes that at the core of Black feminism lies ―Black
women-identification‖ and that
Black feminist literary criticism ... is most simply the idea of Black women seeking their
own identity and defining themselves through bonding on various levels --- psychic,
intellectual as well as physical--with other Black women... Black women-identification is
black women not accepting male --- including Black male --- definitions of femaleness or
Black womanhood… 7

bell hooks, speaking from her personal experience, says that black women "who live daily in
oppressive situations, often acquire an awareness of patriarchal politics from their lived
existence, just as they developed strategies of resistance..."8 The joy of being together and the
bondage of sisterhood may be new to the white, middle-class burgeoning feminists but to black
women like her, "sisterhood" was nothing new for "(she) had not known a life where women had
not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply..."9
She expresses her intention to "enrich, to share in the work of making a liberatory ideology and a
liberatory movement", and points out the peculiar dilemma of black women, who, she contends,
must "recognize the special vantage point (their) marginality gives (them) and make use of this
perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist sexist hegemony as well as to envision and
create a counter hegemony.‖
As Angela Davis asserts, slavery constructed an alternative definition of womanhood for the
black women that included a tradition of "hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, a legacy of
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tenacity, resistance and an insistence on sexual equality" Black womanhood therefore, in its

6
essence became an antithesis of white womanhood therefore, in that they achieved it through a
12
combination of ―grit, shit and mother wit‖ , all of which entailed a tremendous capacity to
endure pressure, hardships and toil. Sethe’s journey from captivity to freedom is a celebratory
reiteration of a memory of excruciating physical pain and psychological anguish, which
however, brings her to her children and her ―home‖ where Baby Suggs and other black women
tend to her and partake of her pain. The idea of women bonding naturally cuts across racial
barriers when Mrs. Garner sheds tears of helplessness in her inability to protect Sethe or the
―Whitegirl‖ Amy Denver who had helped to birth Denver.

Morrison employs the strategy of using black cultural tropes of resistance to resignify the
logocentric world through the use of black women’s ritualistic performances of the Spirituals --
through Baby Suggs's preaching in the Clearing, and through the women's choral singing.
Beloved, through her ghostly presence, represents the spirit of "the disremembered and
unaccounted for". The inscription of "Beloved," carved on the headstone as the trace of Sethe's
"mother-love," haunts the text with meanings that speak to the terror of slavery.

Morrison's intimation of unspeakable thoughts is often suggested through Sethe's "picturing"

things. For instance, Morrison describes Sethe's rememories as "pictures" drifting in front of her
face. Remembering "Sweet Home," Sethe tells her daughter Denver: "'Places, places are still
there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place - the picture of it - stays, and not in my
rememory, but out there, in the world'" (Beloved 36). Such a language bears no pretense to
universal or essential human experience. It points to its limit of expressiveness, implying that
experience exceeds the violence of language.

Through the portrayal of Schoolteacher, Morrison indirectly voices her critique of modernity and
Enlightenment thinking. Schoolteacher is represented as a caricature of rationalistic thinking,
going around with "a notebook" in his hands, in which he writes things about the slaves with the
very ink that Sethe mixes for him, and advising his nephew" 'to put [Sethe's] human
characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right' " (193).

Schoolteacher is worried about the deplorable state Sethe and her children are in only because
his selfish interests are at stake: "There was nothing there to claim." He also regrets and
reprehends his nephew for having maltreated Sethe, because she had ―cut and run‖ and Sweet
Home is being deprived of "at least ten breeding years" from Sethe. The prose here is
dehumanizing, denying Sethe her human subjectivity. Morrison is acutely aware of her position
as a black American woman writer using an imperial language as a means of expression,
Morrison uses it to unsettle the arrogant, imperial domain of language use. Sethe's simple,
monosyllabic words - no, no, no - ring deeper than Schoolteacher's bombastic speech. The
repetition of the single sound expresses the inarticulate but protective response that compelled
Sethe to attempt taking her children's lives rather than allowing Schoolteacher to force them back
into slavery. Calling attention to an unknowable - i.e., incommensurable - reality, Sethe's words
re-mark her own cultural difference.

Morrison undertakes narration as a communal act, deftly manipulating the voices around her
subject. Morrison's narrator does not subsume other voices into a single, univocal, and
authoritative voice, but instead acknowledges the possible differences among members of the

7
community. In Beloved, Morrison introduces oral narrative techniques - repetition, a shifting
narrative voice, interactive re-memory, and an episodic retelling of the past - that contribute to
the shaping of the aural/oral and participatory dynamics of ritual black folk culture within the
private, introspective form of the novel. Through the depiction of Baby Suggs, who acts as a
spiritual guide for others, Morrison launches the book's major choral aspect and introduces its
ritualistic dimension. Here religion is elevated to ritual and spiritual healing. Baby Suggs's
healing rituals in the Clearing, where she becomes an "unchurched preacher" (87), offer
members of her community advice and help without making it static or rule-bound. Her morality
is based on love rather than on rigid moral dictates. Baby Suggs rejects the definitions of formal
religions, preferring the guidance of perceptive imagination:

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell
them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She
told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if
they could not see it, they would not have it. (88)

The group of women who gather as a community outside of Sethe's house at the end of the novel
reiterate the ritualistic dimension of the Clearing. "In the beginning was the sound," Morrison
writes of this gathering, "and they all knew what that sound sounded like" (259). Alerted by
Denver to Sethe's suffering, they have come together to help Sethe cast out the trauma of her
murdered baby, Beloved. Sethe experiences a repetition of the Clearing ritual when the women
burst out in song:

Morrison's struggle, as can be seen from all this, is for a kind of "writing" that can be
"indisputably black" without the vestiges of essentialism. It is a struggle for a mode of writing
that can "shape a silence while breaking it." The language she uses is speakerly/conversational,
familiar as an idiom to black communities, and is particularly indicative of women conversing
with one another, suggesting a "conspiratorial" tone. For Morrison, this phrase 'Quiet as it's
kept'from The Bluest Eye has "a female expressiveness" – a conspiratorial tone. In Beloved this
"feminine subtext" is sustained throughout the narrative, and is most eloquently captured in a late
chapter which describes Stamp Paid approaching 124:

Almost. Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to
Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken. (B,199)

This sentence, written from the external perspective of Stamp Paid, preserves the feminine
subtext as a mark of difference. It hints at the "unspeakable thoughts" of the women of 124
without invading and preempting that difference. The language here exemplifies Morrison's
notion of that "stirring, memorializing language," a "seductive, mutant language" that she
identifies with women's "own unsayable, transgressive words" ("Nobel" 6). Such is the language
of the women of 124 and of the blind woman whose story with the aggressive visitors Morrison
relates as a part of her Nobel Prize Speech.

Morrison's use of rememory as subversive narrative strategy facilitates the engagement of

literary text in a cultural critique through what Michel Foucault has referred to as "the re-
appearance of . . . these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges" once

8
suppressed "within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory" (Foucault 81-82)
Morrison's narrative project is a non-hegemonic practice in which the creative tension among the
different kinds of power/knowledge that discourse can wield is recast as a part of changing ways
of looking and thinking, which is the project of feminist reading/writing.

____________________

References

1. Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist
Narratives. Cornell University Press  1989.
2. Holloway, Karla F.C. ―Beloved: A Spiritual‖ Callaloo, Vol.13, Summer 1990, The John Hopkins
University Press. Pp 516-525.
3. Koolish, Lynda. ―Fictive Strategies and Cinematic Representations in Toni Morrison’s Beloved:
Postcolonial Theory/Postcolonial Text‖, African American Review, Vol. 29 No. 3, Autumn 1995
Indiana State University Press.
4. 1983 Radio Interview quoted in Peach. Toni Morrison. 1995. p. 14.
5. Mackay, Nellie Y. Ed. Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Boston: G.K. Hall and Company.  1988, p.
54 and 46.
6. Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. p. 14.
7. Bethel, Lorraine. But Some of Us are Brave. Eds. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara
Smith. Old Westbury, New York: The Feminist Press, 1982. p. 184.
8. hooks, bell. ―Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory,‖ Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.
Boston: South end Press,  1994. p.10.
9. ibid. p. 11.
10. ibid. p. 15.
11. Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class. New York: Random House, 1981. p. 29.
12. Davis, Angela. ―Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves‖, The Black
Scholar 3 (December 1971) p. 7.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin, 1987.

-----. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Penguin, 1993.
-----. "The 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature Speech." Dictionary of Literary Biography: Yearbook 1993. Ed.
James W. Hipp. New York: Random, 1993.
-----. "The Pain of Being Black." Interview with Bonnie Angelo. Time 22 May 1989: 120-22

Bio- Note:
Dr. Madhumita Purkayastha
Associate Professor & Head, Department of English,
D.H.S.K. College, P.O. Dibrugarh, Assam
PIN: 786001
E-mail: jobapurkayastha@yahoo.co.in
Phone: 0373-2324736(R) +91 9435330309
Postal Address: C/O Dr. Partha Ganguli, Padumnagar 2, Niz Kadamoni
Gaon, P.O. Dibrugarh, Assam 9
PIN: 786001
 DECLARATION

I hereby declare that my paper titled ―Rememory as a Strategy of Subversive Representation: A

Feminist Reading of Morrison’s Beloved‖ is an original work and has not been sent for
publication elsewhere.

Dr. Madhumita Purkayastha

Associate Professor & Head, Department of English,
D.H.S.K. College, Dibrugarh, Assam.

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