The Historical Trauma of Slavery in the Film Version of Toni Morrison's Beloved

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The Historical Trauma of Slavery in the Film Version of Toni Morrison's Beloved

The film Beloved was released in 1998 to mixed reviews. The movie, based on Toni Morrison's novel, tells a ghost story from an African American perspective. It takes place only a few years after the abolishment of slavery, with the traumatic scars still fresh and unable to be healed. In the film the protagonist, Sethe, is revisited by the ghost of the daughter she murdered eighteen years earlier. I shall argue that her daughter, Beloved, is the embodiment of the trauma of the African American experience of slavery. In order to support this claim, I will explain what constitutes historical trauma in film, how historical trauma is specifically represented by the character Beloved, as well as how this film becomes a teaching device for the American nation about this trauma as a whole.

Beloved is the story of Sethe, a woman escaped from slavery. Shortly after her escape, members from the plantations on which she worked came to take her and her four children back to the plantation. In desperation, Sethe kills her young daughter by cutting her throat, and attempts to murder her other three children in order to prevent them from returning to slavery. The majority of the film is about the revisitation of the ghost of the daughter she killed, named Beloved. The ghost returns in the form of a woman who would be the daughter's age if she were alive at the time, approximately twenty years old. Throughout the rest of the film Beloved begins to absorb all of the attention and energy of those around her, especially her mother. This continues to the point where Sethe has lost her job and spent all of her money buying things to please Beloved. Ultimately, the...

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Rosenstone, Robert. "JFK: Historical Fact / Historical Film." American Historical Review. 97.2 (1992). 24 Nov 2003. <http://search.epnet.com/direct.asp?an=9205110376&db=aph>

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