Going Home or Going in Exile: The Conception of Home in TM’s Dichotomy North-South Reflected in Beloved

Abstract

While reading Toni Morrison’s works, geography and history are defining factors that foreground the writer’s fictional and critical writings. The spatial and temporal settings play a significant role in the portrayal of the painful horrors that alienate the human condition of the African American community. Morrison’s choice and design of locales uncovers the unknown realities of the past that divided the American society through time. This paper on Beloved explores Morrison’s depiction of home for the black slaves who are torn between space and time in a land that seeks to deny them. In this paper, we argue that both the South and the North in Morrison’s Beloved are initially idealized as home for the deprived slaves despite the socio-cultural and political threat that demeans the slave community. The migrations from the South to the ‘free’ North to experience a new life are only an act of survival that does not sever the freed slave from his socio-cultural and psychological belongingness to the Southern land where he saw himself born and grow to adulthood.