‘Made the absence shout’: paradox as iconoclasm in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
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Brendon K. Vayo
Abstract
In 1856, Margaret Garner murdered one child, and attempted to murder three others, rather than return them to slavery. Despite the impact traumas like Garner’s had on abolition, history largely forgets or ignores these gruesome details. In their place come racialist markers that obscure Garner’s likeness. Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s The Modern Medea, for example, depicts Garner with a head wrap and wild eyes. Visual cues such as these perpetuate an undifferentiating representation of Garner, categorized as something between asexual “mammy” and angry “slave.” I argue that Toni Morrison recovers Garner by reconfiguring what Hayden White terms the “historical account” with icons to connote paradoxical significations. Like paradoxes, these icons simultaneously embody complementary and yet oppositional significations without one privileged over the other. Morrison’s historiography thus produces in simultaneity a history told and repealed, which functions iconoclastically not only to engravings such as The Modern Medea but also to the linguistic system that structures an incomplete and surreptitious “historical account.”
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the Library of Congress for access to the image of Noble’s The Modern Medea. Thank you to the Library of Congress and to the Liljenquist Family Collection for access to the image of Private Gordon. And a special thank you to April Schultz for permission to reprint the Fleischmann Trade Card.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Possible worlds theory, accessibility relations, and counterfactual historical fiction
- ‘Made the absence shout’: paradox as iconoclasm in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
- How do characters perceive their world? Representation of perception from traditional past-tense narrative to contemporary present-tense narrative
- Embodiment in the diversity of literary experience: a reply to Wolfgang Teubert (2021)
- Book Review
- Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison and Louise Nuttall: New directions in cognitive grammar and style
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Possible worlds theory, accessibility relations, and counterfactual historical fiction
- ‘Made the absence shout’: paradox as iconoclasm in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
- How do characters perceive their world? Representation of perception from traditional past-tense narrative to contemporary present-tense narrative
- Embodiment in the diversity of literary experience: a reply to Wolfgang Teubert (2021)
- Book Review
- Marcello Giovanelli, Chloe Harrison and Louise Nuttall: New directions in cognitive grammar and style
