(Re)memory and (Re)construction: Imaginatively Constructing Histories in Toni Morrison's Beloved and George Eliot's Silas Marner

Abstract

This essay discusses the imaginative construction of history in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and George Eliot’s Silas Marner (1861), focussing in particular on the reconstitution of places and people. As emblematic of problematic historical reality, places are reimagined in different ways and for different ends. Morrison’s ‘rememory’ of place, reflective of the Freudian uncanny (das Unheimliche), resurfaces the continual trauma of slave history. Contrastingly, Eliot’s altered environment highlights nineteenth-century historical developments, in line with realism’s aims to be ‘responsive to the changing nature of reality’ (O’Gorman 118). Characters from both texts are imaginatively recast to redefine personal histories and to reconnect with shared histories. Additionally, this essay argues that Eppie and Beloved generically represent the interface between imagination and history. Eppie’s characterisation engages with romance tropes in an otherwise realist text. Similarly, Beloved embodies both the Gothic ‘return of the repressed’ and a reincarnated slave baby, yoking together the imaginative and the historical.