Daughterly Haunting and Historical Traumas: Toni Morrison’s ＂Beloved＂ and Jamaica Kincaid’s ＂The Autobiography of My Mother＂

In this paper, I begin by reading Toni Morrison's ”Beloved” as a ghost story that thematizes transgenerational haunting. Morrison writes this acclaimed novel, I argue, neither simply to reclaim a lost identity, nor to construct an empathetic community, but to ”disorient” the readers so that we can think otherwise about and act differently towards a traumatic past. To advance my argument, I turn to Jacques Derrida's notion of the ”specter” to foreground my discussion of the tales of daughterly haunting. Derrida's proposal that ”spectrality” is ”a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” nicely encapsulates Morrison's vision that to purge ourselves of traumatic experiences we have to conjure up the dead rather than chase them away. In the second half of my paper, I consider two women writers' radically different uses of the spectral aesthetic to argue that while transgenerational haunting makes possible the memory and transmission of historically traumatizing events and secrets, not all instances of haunting are equally effecttive in acting out and working through historically inherited debts and guilt. As the ghost returns to haunt the living, some people hear their wailing and begin to describe their ghostly return. Some writers use the return of the ghost as a literary strategy to activate the constitution and consolidation of identities, cultural, political, or gender. Writers such as Jamaica Kincaid deploy haunting as a gesture for social and political critique, speaking in the voices of the dead to call for justice and recognition. Other writers, such as Toni Morrison, however, do not seem to believe traumas can be exorcised once and for all, and offer a cautionary strategy to describe our ambivalent relations to historical traumas.