Graduation Year
2024
Document Type
Campus Only Senior Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
English
Reader 1
Thomas Koenigs
Reader 2
Michelle Decker
Terms of Use & License Information
Rights Information
© 2023 Hannah P. Eliot
Abstract
As Ronald M. Radano notes in “Jazz, Modernism, and the Black Creative Tradition,” in the famous opening chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the narrator finds “In the acutely perceptible clamor of Black music—embodied in a recording of Louis Armstrong—he discerns sounds beyond White imagination, which he names a ‘poetry out of [the] invisible’” (671). In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a story about the struggles to deconstruct the White imagination of slavery and “raise ‘real’ or authentic African American history in its place” (Davis 245), to say the unsayable to make the “invisible” visible, Morrison turns to the expressive potential of the “musicalized” Black oral tradition. Across her novel, slave songs, humming, hollers, and murmurs are words transformed: words attached to visceral sound rather than historically codified definitions. In formally and thematically rooting her narrative in the distinctive sound and rhythmic patterns of the Black oral traditions, Morrison highlights their subversive, expressive potential as unintelligible cultural productions of the enslaved. The expression of these cultural productions by characters not only allows them to overcome individual traumas through communal redemption, but also allows Morrison’s narrative to transcend the generic structure of the traditional slave narrative and its limited possibilities for historical representation.
Recommended Citation
Eliot, Hannah, "A Love Supreme: The Roots of Black Oral Tradition in Toni Morrison’s Beloved" (2024). Scripps Senior Theses. 2331.
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2331
This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.
