2. Literature Review

After Morrison got Nobel Prize in Literature, her novels began to attract national and even global recognition. “In 1985, the very first book devoted entirely to Morrison was published: Bessie W. Jones and Audrey L. Vinson’s The World of Toni Morrison: Exploration in Literary Criticism.” (Wang Langlang, 2010: 10) In china, there are some extremely excellent studies about Morrison. One of them is “Wang Shouren and Wu Xinyun’s monograph Gender, Race and Culture: A Study of Toni Morrison’s Novels”. (Wang Langlang, 2010: 16) The book is based on specific studies of all Morrison’s published novels and overall examination related to social, political contexts, and it mainly explores Morrison’s ideas on gender, race and culture.

Since its publication, Beloved has attracted so many readers and critics. The American literature world has a high praise for this novel. Elizabeth B. House says that, “throughout Beloved, Morrison’s theme is that remembering yesterday, while not being consumed by them, gives people the tomorrows with which to make real lives.”(Zhao Na, 2006: 3) William L. Andrews believes that, “Her theme in Beloved revolves around the wish to forget and the necessity to remember, to reject and to reclaim, and to elide the boundaries between past and present.”(Zhao Na, 2006: 3) A large quantity of scholars have studied this novel from various perspectives, including feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial, cultural, theme, language, narrative strategy studies, etc.

Many scholars have studied Beloved from the Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. However, at home only professor Tian Yaman has studied Morrison’s novel from this perspective. This paper tries to interpret Beloved in the light of trauma and healing by the employment of Freudian psychoanalysis. 

3. A Brief Introduction to Freudian Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic method of psychiatry, is considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconsciousness and the defense mechanism of repression, and he is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life. 

In Greek the word “trauma” is related to the word “wound”. It originates from a verb which means pierce. In the earlier stages of Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, trauma is basically seen as excessive influx of excitations. Freud views that trauma is a deep thorn in unconsciousness, which can make people do something strange and hysteric. Meanwhile ego will act as defense, protecting consciousness from the hurt of external stimuli. However, when the defense is broken, the ego will collapse and at that time those external stimuli swarm into, which will hurt people’s perception of happiness. This is the basics of the traumatic theory. Freud considers “trauma as a triggering factor in neurosis…as essentially sexual terms; overflow of the libidinal energy that the organism cannot bear […] something happens for sure but the real trauma is inside the psyche.”(2001: 180)   

The term “hysteria” is also a word from Greek, and it means “womb” in Greek. At first, hysteria was viewed as a nervous disorder related to women, because it is a disease that is linked to women’s reproductive organs. And it is the hysteria theory that asserts the direct link between pathology symptoms and women’s reproductive organs. Later, Freud published Studies on Hysteria, in which he holds that “Hysteria is a product of traumatic events that is subsequently excluded from consciousness.” (2006: 132) So those repressed memories which unsolved traumas have caused turn into body symptoms very easily. In the book Freud also makes his remarkable opinion, “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.” (2006: 83) Because the main character Sethe suffers mainly from reminiscence, the hysteria theory can be a useful concept to analyze this character.