Destruction of Self and Rememory - Beloved
Throughout Morrison's Beloved , we see the effects of slavery and the toll it takes on the characters in the book. Even after Sethe has escaped slavery and the brutal horrors associated with it, she still suffers mentally and emotionally. Even the ghost of Beloved itself is a disturbing memory of slavery and Sethe's guilt for killing her children. Rememory is an interesting concept in which we see the devastating effects that slavery has on Sethe's psychological state. Sethe explains this concept of rememory in the way that "if a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world" (Morrison 43). In the same way, the baby that Sethe killed (as a result of her resilience to the idea of a life of slavery) never really died. It's still out there in the world and eventually this memory physically manifests itself under the name "Beloved." The guilt of killing her baby haunts