Text and Context in the Art of Toni Morrison (continued)

Toni Morrison fills in all these omitted spaces and as Ashraf H.A. Rushdy suggests, presents a different order of signification altogether.³⁰ Beloved is about maternal narratives and the writing of the postcolonial text in the interruptions, dislocations, ellipses and the breakdown of the mother –daughter symbiotic relationship. The rewriting of the history of slavery and colonialism as a woman’s narrative, serves to put gender as the focal concern of the novel, as much as it is about reinstating the black voice and black presence experiencing history. In “Maternal Narratives: ‘Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood’” Marianne Hirsch posits that although feminist scholarship had explored motherhood and mother–daughter relationships from a variety of personal and disciplinary perspectives, “ most of these perspectives belonged to “daughters.”³¹ Beloved in that context becomes the “great unwritten story” of the mother herself, told in her own voice. ³²

In her article “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, “ Elaine Showalter claims that although women’s writing may emanate from the “wild zone”³³ or the  spatial, experiential and metaphysical space which carries the “symbolic weight of female  consciousness”³⁴ making the “invisible visible and the “silent speak”³⁵, in “reality women’s writing is a double voiced discourse that always embodies the social, literary and cultural heritages of both the “muted” and the” dominant.” ³⁶