MOMENTS OF BEAUTY AMIDST SUFFERING IN TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED: A REFLECTION OF EDMUND BURKE’S SUBLIME

Abstract

Through the story of the ghost called Beloved, Tony Morrison presents the story of the black mother who committed infanticide with the hope of preventing the enslavement of her daughter. Though Beloved is the harrowing story of one single black African family, yet, it represents all the black Africans who suffered and died on their way in the Pacific to America to find food and shelter there. The date of the story in the beginning of the novel goes back to 1873, which marks the aftermath of slavery and the Civil War. It encompasses different phases of past from the slave ship called “Middle Passage” on the Pacific Ocean and the sufferings of the slaves on board the ship and afterwards as they reach the “hosting” country. It reveals the traumatic story of the black where Morrison depicts different means of suffering especially raping. She reveals how they were abused and were forbidden from any feeling of body pleasures like love, sex, and baby feeding. Although Morrison’s novel treats different themes, the present paper is an attempt to study the moments of beauty amidst suffering in Morrison’s Beloved orienting it to Edmund Burke’s Sublime revealed in his treatise called Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757, which as Landow puts it, “deals with deriving beauty from pleasure and sublimity from pain” (Landow, 1971, p. 23).