Deconstructing Historical Discourse And Reconstructing Historical Truth

As the first African-American female writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison and her works have drawn widespread attention in academic circles. Up to now, it's easy to find that Morrison's recapturing of American reality is rooted in her deep reflection of the African-American history. Beloved, as the representative works of Morrison, is especially famous for its intense historical consciousness.Although critics have noticed the intense historical consciousness reflected in Morrison's Beloved, critical attention mainly concentrates either on the historical elements like the Middle Passage, the institution of slavery reflected in the novel or on Morrison's question towards the historical metanarratives, or the African-American literary tradition Morrison employs to reconstruct the historical truth. Few critics have noticed that the excellence of this novel lies in its perfect integration of historicity and ahistoricity as well as its tendency to deconstruct and meanwhile reconstruct history. By this means, Morrison gives her reflection over the colonial past as well as the future of the African-Americans.With regard to the relation between history and literature, Morrison happens to share her views with that of the new historicists. Morrison refuses to distinguish history from fiction and she regards artists to be the"truest of historians". Meanwhile, the new historicists are also devoted to the deconstruction of the traditional view which favors that history is a set of objective facts while literary works are marked with its fictive nature. For those new historicists, history is reduced into a sort of historical narratives rather than a set of objective facts. History, like literary works, is marked with its narrative nature, for the former also contains the imagined and fictive elements.This thesis intends to interpret Beloved from the perspective of new historicism. By analyzing the intertexuality between Beloved and its pre-texts, the author of this thesis argues that on the one hand, Morrison questions the traditional historiography. According to her, historiography is reduced to the product of power. While the slaves are deprived of discourse and are disciplined and punished physically, the slaveholders construct the internal colonial history by means of self-contained"master narrative"(print media, ethnology data) as so to speak in defense of the internal colonization. On the other hand, Morrison aspires to recapture the historical truth. Through the application of multiple ahistorical narrative strategies (reversal, call-and-response and slave songs), rewriting slaves'bodies and the narration of ordinary women's lives by story-telling, Morrison deconstructs the traditional Western binary opposition of black/white, men/women, self/other and center/margin, privileges the incorporation of the Others'voices in historiography and reconstructs the African-American history marked by multiplicity and polyphony. The surface inconsistency in Morrison's view towards history is harmonized in her deep reflection of history as well as her concerns for the present fate of African-Americans.