For my American Horror Story midterm paper, I want to research and write about how the traumatic memories of individuals become living manifestations of hauntings. In order to do this, I will have to pull from multiple texts that we have read and analyzed in the course thus far, Beloved being my main source. I will argue that these traumatic memories that haunt us shape and form our identities. I will use the essay The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma by Van der Kolk and Van der Hart to help in supporting my argument. I will use their essay, in combination with Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sharon Patricia Holland’s “Bukulu Discourse: Bodies Made “Flesh” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” to further argue the effects of a traumatic past.
The works I have chosen to utilize will provide evidence for my larger argument, detailing how when traumatic experiences are left unprocessed or dissociated, they can return intrusively as hauntings. These haunting can be encoded in our memory as ghosts. Van der Kolk and Van der Hart argue that our traumatic memories must be integrated with our existing mental schemes and be transformed into narrative language in order to heal. We see Morrison do this in Beloved, when she takes the traumatic past of an entire culture and represents it in narrative language. In doing this, she is able to portray a traumatic past as a haunting through her work of literature. I will argue that in order to attempt put to rest the hauntings and ghosts of a traumatic past, individuals must return to the traumatic memory to process and complete it. I will use the hauntings of Sethe and Paul D to illustrate the effects when individuals fail to return to these traumatic memories, when they choose to neglect and isolate their past traumas instead of confronting them head-on. Sharon Patricia Holland’s “Bukulu Discourse: Bodies Made “Flesh” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” will assist me in illustrating the traumatic past of slavery and how this past has come back as a manifestation of trauma as illustrated by the character of Beloved herself. I will highlight Holland’s point that Morrison, through the character of Beloved, allows words to become flesh. I will argue that in the same way, she allows a haunting and traumatic past to become flesh as well. I will also capitalized on her argument that Beloved stands for every African woman whose story will never be told. This will tie in beautifully with my earlier point that it is healing and therapeutic for traumatic memories to be transformed in narrative language.
1 Comment
11/17/2017 02:25:41 pm
I think your thesis is very interesting, because, (at least for me) it brings up the image of an open wound, where when left unattended, the host can become sick. Although I haven't read your paper, I'm sure it provides extensive description of the haunts of one's past. I think that the image of an open wound is especially relevant considering one of the biggest themes in Beloved is the use of flesh. Fantastic post!
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