再現美國黑奴歷史: 福克納《下去吧，摩西》和摩里森《寵兒》中的記憶與種族主義

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩士論. 文. Master Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 再現美國黑奴歷史: 福克納《下去吧，摩西》和摩里森《寵兒》中的記憶與種族主義. Representing African American Slave History: Memory and Racism in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 指導教授：何文敬. 教授. Advisor: Dr. Wen-ching Ho 研究生：凃奕岑 Advisee: I-Tseng Tu 中華民國一百零二年六月 June 2013.

(2) Representing African American Slave History: Memory and Racism in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A thesis submitted to The Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. I-Tseng Tu June 2013.

(3) 摘要本文旨在探討福克納《下去吧，摩西》與摩里森《寵兒》中美國黑奴歷史之再現。筆者將兩部作品並置閱讀，並檢視兩位作家「再現美國黑奴歷史」之異同。經由互文比較，兩本小說揭示了奴隸制度與種族主義下的殖民生活，遺留下美國南方的核心問題。為探索奴隸制度帶來的種族問題，筆者試圖以再現美國黑奴歷史、記憶及種族主義為主題，分三章討論。第一章探索兩位作家再現美國黑奴歷史的方式，並比較福克納與摩里森對歷史描述的關注，並以此為根源對十九世紀美國黑奴歷史文本再現之相異處。第二章著眼於記憶與論述之主題。筆者欲檢視遍及於兩部作品中的記憶所扮演之角色與作用，及兩位作家對記憶於「再現美國黑奴歷史」之題材與論述技巧上的運用。第三章討論種族關係與種族歧視。福克納對麥卡斯林家族史之再現，強調在白人父權文化下分歧的黑白種族關係。兩種文本皆反映出種族差異，白人至上和霸權的種族主義心態，作為一種普遍深植於南方的種族意識型態。然而，摩里森的人文關懷打破這些長久以來，歷史上對黑人剝削及壓迫合法化的種族主義思想和假設。透過諸多主角的回憶做為一種特殊論述，兩部作品重溯在「中間航程」和美國南方殖民生活下被刻意遺忘的奴隸經驗，並藉此審視令人不安的種族議題。也就是說，這兩部小說同時作為南方歷史的記錄以及作為與奴隸制度和種族主義的邪惡和其後果對抗之歷史著作。. 關鍵詞: 《下去吧，摩西》，《寵兒》，美國黑奴歷史，記憶，種族主義.

(4) Abstract This thesis aims at exploring the representation of African American slave history in William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. My comparative reading of these two texts seeks to examine the similarities and discrepancies between the two writers’ representations of African American slave history. Through intertextual comparison, both novels dramatize the central problems of plantation life under slavery in the American South, including the legacy of racism. Here I try to compare and explore the themes of representing African American slave history, memory and racism in the three main chapters respectively. Chapter One centers on both writers’ representations of African American slave history, and compares their preoccupation with the historical accounts as a crucial source for fictional representation of 19th-century African American slave history. Chapter Two focuses on the themes of memory and narrative. I would like to examine the pervasive influence of memory, the role memory plays and its effects, and also both writers’ manipulations of memory as the subject matter and as a narrative aesthetic that wraps up the whole novel. In Chapter Three I try to discuss the racial relations and racism in both texts. Faulkner’s representation of the McCaslin family history foregrounds the notion of race and racism with dichotomous white-black racial division in the white patriarchal society. Both texts reflect racial difference and white supremacy and domination over the black based on the white’s racist mindset, a pervasive ideology imprinted in the South. Morrison out of human concern unflinchingly undermines the racial ideology and assumptions that have historically legitimated the exploitation and oppression of the black people. Through memory of fictional characters as a specific form of narration, both novels restore the disremembered slave experience during the Middle Passage and on the plantation in Southern culture, thereby interrogating the.

(5) disturbing racial subjects. That is, the two novels serve as a record of Southern history and a confrontation with the evils and consequences of slavery and racism in the Deep South.. Keywords: Go Down, Moses, Beloved, African American slave history, memory, racism.

(6) Acknowledgement I have always been extremely fortunate in the three-year academic research, especially in writing my Master thesis. I would like to express my deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Wen-ching Ho, whose supervision, attentiveness and expert guidance have benefited me very much. I should thank Dr. Susan Jung Su for her professional suggestion in my thesis proposal and Dr. Jessie Yuh-Chuan Shao and Dr. Tung-Jung Chen for their expert advice. I should also thank Anitata Liu for the kindness and generosity in allowing me to view her paper for reference. Ultimately, my parents deserve of more acknowledgement than I can say in support..

(7) Table of Contents Abstract in Chinese. iii. Abstract. iv. Acknowledgement. vi. Introduction. 1. Chapter One. Representing African American Slave History. 19. Chapter Two. Memory and Narrative. 38. Chapter Three. Narratives of Racism. 60. Conclusion. 79. Works Cited. 83.

(8) Tu 1. Introduction William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) are strongly engaged with memory and the past of black slaves by locating the reader in the process of re-writing black American history from the Middle Passage1 across the Civil War to the Postbellum era. Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses introduces deep-Southern plantation history from the 1830s through to the early 1940s by situating it within a peculiar mixture of presentation of time and episodes of the inextricable relations and aftermath of the McCaslin family. The fictional present of Morrison’s Beloved, set in postbellum America, delineates the experience of black slaves whose myriads of memories narrate what is remembered in order to reveal their life under slavery in the southern United States. Both novels share similarities as well as mark down discrepancies. These two novels are concerned with constructing monuments to the past and using a familial history as a trope for larger social and cultural trauma, slavery and racism. Moreover, both texts are deployed and unfolded through memory as a method for representation or re-construction of slave history. However, Go Down, Moses tends to represent the southern plantation life with relatively more historical records by a white southerner, yet the slave stories in Beloved appear to be so re-constructed that Morrison has come to undermine the narrative truth by revising a historical event. Categorized by the conventional definition of southern literature, Go Down, Moses is often characterized in southern literature by a strong sense of place and 1. The Middle Passage was the triangular route of slave trade, starting from the west coast of Africa, where the Africans were obtained as slaves, across the Atlantic. The slaves were sold or traded for goods such as molasses, which was used in the making of rum. The Middle Passage did not simply refer to the transportation and sale of slaves; it was rather the longest, hardest, darkest, and also most horrific journey of the slave ships. With extremely, tightly packed loads of human cargo that stank and carried both infectious disease and death, the slave ships traveled west across the Atlantic on an unbearable journey lasting at least five weeks, and sometimes as long as three months. The abominable and inhuman conditions which the Africans were faced with on the route clearly disclosed the evils of the slave trade..

(9) Tu 2. history on the basis of memory, insularity and a history of defeat in the Civil War. Furthermore, Southern literature, shaped by oral traditions, expresses the values of honor and manhood and is often presented within the social, political, and economic contexts of the American South. When it is called Southern literature, the text would obviously involve the racialization of black and white, and is often presented with reference to race, gender and slavery. Synthesizing these characteristics, Faulkner’s text grows out of southern elements with references to the categorical division of race as well as to slavery and its subsequent aftermath in the Deep South. The figure of the mulatto demonstrates this racial force through generations in Go Down, Moses. Tomey’s Turl is the son of the white McCaslin patriarch, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, and his mulatto daughter. He is a descendant of miscegenation. He embodies a genealogy that directly leads back to the beginning of American southern history to “illuminate the mutually constitutive nature of race and gender ideologies in the South and also to illuminate how that intersection generates the story of the South” (Ladd 1631). This racial force of black and mulatto figures are often presented in Southern texts, and are more apparent after the Emancipation Proclamation of the 1860s. Scholars of southern studies often maintain that Faulkner’s texts illustrate a strong sense of place, making a case for the South as one part of “plantation-postplantation” cultural zone of the Americas. For example, Barbara Ladd asserts that “the new southern studies is in many ways a project of recovery and reinterpretation” (1634) and the southern literary studies and historical studies tend to be more complex through multi-faced discourses, such as folklore studies, anthropology, and postmodern reading practices, and so on. Morrison’s Beloved echoes this recovery and reinterpretation as it deploys memory as discovery, invention and embodiment, and applies to the typical southern commitment to history and retrospection. More importantly, it seems to conceive of this tradition with more.

(10) Tu 3. authorial intentions and responses in her literary re-creation. Memory in both novels plays a vital role. With a complex interweaving of the past and the present in Beloved, Morrison’s writing back into history not only retrieves the past memories in an attempt to restore a denied past, but also suggests the necessity of active engagement with past experiences to recall attention to what has been oblivious in the present. Memory is employed by Morrison not only as content of the whole novel but as a way of narrative. The characters are forced to rememorize as the progression of the novel corresponds to the return or recuperation of the characters’ repressed memories which they have tried to keep at bay. Their recollections become denser when the embodiment of the past gradually induces them to repossess their memories and recount their stories. Memory of one’s life is not a simple psychological capacity, but can be re-organized through rituals of storytelling as the slaves narrate and restore their life stories, by which Morrison’s historical rememory represents slave experience. In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner’s management of the story line also corresponds to the character’s memories, most of which center on his most history-haunted protagonist Ike McCaslin in order to represent a fuller picture of family genealogy. Memory shows a significant effect throughout both novels, as it is deployed both as a way of narration and as the inner working of the characters. Memory takes the reader to come across several individual stories and even survive several generations as they repeatedly recollect and narrate what is transmitted. Some historians are critical of the use of fiction to understand history, since they hold the belief that the factual accounts shall be the foundation upon which history is built and read. For such historians as Deborah White, the fictional accounts and scenes referential to history in novels are relatively unreliable, because Beloved, for instance, rewrites factual records of slave experience and re-structures historical.

(11) Tu 4. events under slavery. Furthermore, “the historical record,” as Deborah White claims, “regarding female slavery is sparse,” and the “[p]lantation records offer little insight into the lives of slaves, and many slave narratives that exist today were authored by men” (qtd. in Fuston-White 469). She then suggests an alternative that turns out to “accept the absence of sources and, consequently, the historical absence of black women in the antebellum South” (469). However, this remark may be inappropriate if it is applied to Go Down, Moses and Beloved, since the plantation accounts in Go Down, Moses mainly center on a Leak Diary as a primary, historical source about southern slave history. The Diary provides relatively reliable, historical reference to southern history as well as insights into the South’s socio-economic situation under the institution of slavery. And Beloved reconfigures slave narrative with black slaves recounting the trauma of slave experiences from the Middle Passage to a Kentucky plantation and to freedom, loosely on the basis of a historical event concerning Margaret Garner, a female slave. Morrison in interviews admitted her knowledge of the consequent fate of the run-away slaves, yet she revised the denouement of the Garner incident and further uses it as a trope for a larger social and cultural trauma, which sheds light on her attempt to uncover a lost, collective slave history. She once mentioned her reasons for being interested in and moved by Faulkner’s subjects are actually associated with her desire “to find out something about [America] and [about the] artistic articulation of its past that was not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but sometimes history refuses to do” (Fowler and Abadie, Faulkner and Women 296). Morrison’s remark unveils her reason for unearthing the past in an artistic articulation of the country’s past as an access for her project to reclaim erased or lost African-American history. For Morrison, fiction offers her opportunities to reclaim a lost history; therefore, in Beloved, she seeks to expose a theme about the impossibility.

(12) Tu 5. of articulation, which deforms and disfigures slaves in the past. Through Beloved, her effort to represent a denied black past comes to the fore and the knowledge of slave history that is forgotten comes back and demands to be reckoned with and recounted. Morrison’s approach to represent slave history transforms the content into the technique and the form as a method of narration. Although Morrison claims that her novel is only partly based on and inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, Beloved departs from the factual, historical account and, instead, deploys its route to a purposeful re-construction and representation of slave history. In reclaiming African-American history, Morrison invents Margaret Garner’s life and rewrites the sad story through the technique and form of memory. She reveals in interviews the facts that Margaret Garner was actually not indicted for killing her child, but rather tried for the crime of running away, upon which the abolitionists meant to intrigue against the Fugitive Slave Law as a testing case through an intricacy from a run-away slave to a murder. Similar to “the legal maneuvers employed by the abolitionists in order to use Garner’s infanticide as a test case for the Fugitive Slave Law” (Kodat 190), Morrison follows this ground and develops it to a larger scheme for recovering the country’s past disallowed in history yet accepted in fiction. As her belief in the core of composition in her novel shows, “what makes in fiction is the nature of the imaginative act” (Morrison, “The Site of Memory” 71), Morrison adopts the historical remains as fabrics fueled with imagination as ingredients to re-structure a literary history. Acknowledging that her work comprises her exertion of memory and imagination, Morrison explains, “One of the things that’s important to me is the powerful imaginative way in which we deconstructed and reconstructed reality in order to get through” (Darling 252; emphasis mine). Hence, for Morrison imagination accounts much for her representation and reconstruction of slave experience. Only through this reconstructed reality upon which slave history is built can the black.

(13) Tu 6. slaves remember it and negotiate with it in order to get through. In comparison with Morrison’s deployment of historical truth in fiction, Faulkner recounts the southern slave experiences with relatively more historical descriptions centered on factual record as a primary source. His reference to the old Leak Diary appears obvious in Go Down, Moses. Faulkner provides a model of the operation of the slave-based plantation society as the text accounts the plantation life with much of the related vocabulary. Such plantation vocabulary and everyday items associated with plantation life and farming are explicitly listed in the Leak Diary and then adopted by Faulkner in rendering the contours of the lives of the slaves in fiction. Yet Go Down, Moses is not simply a typical southern text adopting plantation vocabulary, it also records more emotional responses of the characters since Faulkner “weaves not only their names but many of the situations of their lives into his novels and stories” and this “suggests his deep empathy for their plight” (Wolff 31). Faulkner modifies a few details of the recorded incidents and intertwines the historical materials together into the novel by adding affective scenes to depict the slave’s grief and despondency under slavery. From the characters’ names, plots, to setting and theme, we may claim that Go Down, Moses marks the clearest delineation of the use of historical materials in representing the slave experience in the Deep South. From this respect, the plantation novel is historically grounded and regionally specific. With relatively more historical source, Go Down, Moses not only represents slave life realistically, but also demonstrates Faulkner’s inquiry into the southern plantation with the representation of enormity under slavery in southern slave past. Faulkner puts into the centerstage the inextricable relations within a southern family and community, and specifies the propensity of incest and miscegenation, racial and gender transgression as well as intersection, as “a metaphor for the racial and class narcissism of the plantation elite” (Matthews 198). In contrast with Toni Morrison’s artistic and imaginative.

(14) Tu 7. representation of African American history in Beloved, Go Down, Moses proves a relatively more realistic plantation novel that clearly exposes racism and miscegenation deeply imbedded in the southern history of slavery. It is obvious that memory goes inextricably with narrative in both novels. In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner’s narrative finds its illustration in the fact that the novel begins at the end when Uncle Ike is presented at his old age, and the narrative moves with the characters’ memories, through Ike’s, Cass’s, Lucas’s and Roth’s flashbacks, and still recedes further in time until the reader is led toward the central part of the novel, “The Bear,” and gathers all the historical debris of the McCaslin genealogy, to which Faulkner keeps returning to reveal the three main lines of descent in the family. Thus, Faulkner’s novel intends to gather toward a center rather than diffuse to all directions. To be sure, time sequence is a significant element in understanding Faulkner’s presentation of the family stories. Faulkner departs from the pattern of linear time and “scramble[s] chronology and sequence” (Kenney 49). Presumably, he complicates and obscures the actual causes and consequences of historical events. The retrospection is a confused, broken and layering retelling, without a specific opening and ending, that develops with fragmented, non-linear and multi-voiced narrative. This narrative technique suggests its postmodern characteristics. Susan V. Donaldson perceives Faulkner’s narrative as “fragmented, multi-voiced, often unpunctuated, sometimes disoriented in its chronology” and it is a narrative that “recounts and critiques the making of sameness and otherness in the master narrative of southern history” (11). The individual memories of the various characters, including Native Americans, black slaves, and the whites, present the reader with alternative voices that resist the white dominant writing of American history. In Beloved, the story line revolves mainly around Sethe and Paul D as two main narrative voices, who recount the slave story through memory, hearing and non-linear.

(15) Tu 8. time sequence. In this narrative, “the sequence of events is non-chronological and it takes the reader repeatedly from freedom to slavery and backwards” (Palladino 55). In presenting the scene of Sethe swinging her infant toward the wall, Morrison ushers the reader into varying perspectives, each preceded and represented by different witnesses. With her African style of artistic storytelling, Morrison further renders the female protagonists voicing their stories and desires. In the middle of the novel, the reader is given chapters of explicit, direct discourse in which Sethe, Denver and Beloved, through Sethe’s narration, Denver’s stream of consciousness to Beloved’s monologue, give voice to the horrors of their slave experiences and desires. Starting from Sethe’s recollections of her life under slavery and at Sweet Home to the murder of her daughter, the discourse develops progressively from a solo play and moves “more technically challenging and culminate[s] in a dense fugal interplay of all three voices that achieves its effects through liberal use of verbal compression, fragmentation, and juxtaposition” (Kodat 185). The discourse of the slave mother first addresses the reader directly. It later moves to the two daughters’ respective articulations, and further integrates into the mixed speeches of the three women as a “choral moment,” “comprising Beloved’s speech and the ensuing chorus with Sethe and Denver [as] the most technically dazzling and reader-resistant pages” in the novel for unveiling the hidden past during the Middle Passage (Kodat185). Brad Hooper specifies the characteristic of Morrison’s narrative which shows a propensity for “the chorus method of storytelling, wherein a group of individuals who are involved in a single event or incident tell his or her versions of what happened, the individual voices maintaining their distinctiveness while their personal tales overlap each other with a layering effect” (5). And this layering effect resonates with the individual voices in Morrison’s narrative. Having pieced together the stories of the unbearable scene, each individual voice tells his or her own versions of the murder of.

(16) Tu 9. the baby. Morrisonian scholars and critics, such as Brad Hooper and Catherine Gunther Kodat as two among many, have identified Morrison’s style of “choral” presentation, in which Morrison uses a fragmented and juxtaposed narrative method through her storytelling for a close and pressing effect as an effort to reconstruct a literary slave history. This kind of unconventional multi-voiced narration is so presented as to form a non-linear movement through the novel, in which several slaves’ stories are intertwined, overlapped and eventually untwined. Thus Morrison’s text is developed as a series of fragments of the past which is unearthed piece by piece throughout the novel. These historical debris are the pieces disremembered and submerged that would be brought up to the surface and integrated into the text through Morrison’s historical rememory as well as imagination and literary integration. As Go Down, Moses centers on the social and cultural trauma, slavery and racism in the Deep South, it manifests the relationship and tension between the dominant white and the “inferior” black by presenting the imbalanced relation of supremacy and oppression under racism in the South. In the Southern states, the black slaves under slavery are forced into a subordinate position on the plantation, but this can be read as a response to the social and economic forces at work in the Southern region. In the Southern society practicing enslavement, African Americans are treated as chattels while the whites those who obtain supremacy. As Michael Banton observes: “[u]nder the slavery regime, individual Whites had been allowed to exploit individual Negroes in any way they wished provided it did not threaten the social system”(138). However, after the Civil War, a different racial relation turns to illustrate “the ideology of social distance and racial difference” (Banton 138). As the walls between the two races become higher from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, there is more racial hatred of the white for the black than ever before. The racial.

(17) Tu 10. prejudice and hostility of the white are often shown in the exertion of violence: lynching. Michael Banton states that “[l]ynchings in the South increased rapidly from 1882 up to 1890, and showed a further sharp rise in the early nineties when the white South began to legislate the subordination of the Negro” (Banton 140). Lynching was not a way appropriate and effective for preventing the black from crimes, yet it was used by the white “as a sanction reinforcing all sorts of everyday exploitation and intimidation” (141). Rider’s case in Go Down, Moses illustrates this racial exploitation and power relations. In commenting on the nature of racism and its relation to culture, Frantz Fanon writes in “Racism and Culture” that “[t]he vulgar, primitive, over-simple racism purported to find in biology […] the material basis of the doctrine” (Toward the African Revolution 32). Robert Miles furthers this idea and explains that “the primitive racism grounded in biological claims corresponded to a past phase of colonialism” (62). To put it simply, Fanon suggests that racism is rather a consequence originated from colonialism, for the colonialists were racists who oppressed and gained power from the exploitation of other group out of biological referent, which makes those oppressed inferior. But it is important to note that biological difference indeed does not entirely explain racism; instead, social and political factors also affect the development and solidification of racism in the South. Lucius Outlaw similarly expounds the concept of race: “‘race’ is not wholly and completely determined by biology, but is only partially so. […] the definition of ‘race’ is partly political, partly cultural. […] The biological aspects of ‘race’ are conscripted into projects of cultural, political and social construction. ‘Race’ is a social formation” (Outlaw 68; italics original). Therefore, to understand the workings of racism, it is significant to incorporate cultural, political and social factors into the historical context in order to examine racism often presented and understood as the dichotomy.

(18) Tu 11. of white-black racial relation. The dichotomous demarcation clearly specifies the two categories of racial differences. The story “Was” explicitly demonstrates this sense of racial relations in that the card games are actually white men’s games. Unlike Faulkner who mainly represents poignant racial relationships by exposing white oppression and exploitation under the brutality and appropriation of slavery, Morrison intends to show the possibility of mutual understanding and compassion through Amy Denver and Sethe, thereby reducing the racial demarcation and hostility illustrated in Go Down, Moses, in an attempt to bridge the gap between the white and the black. It is important to recognize, though, that in Beloved, Morrison presents the racist ideology of the white men, including that of the schoolteacher, as a sign of white racism, who view black slaves as property and equate them with inhumane animals, as they regard the slaves are those who “needed every care and guidance in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred” (Morrison, Beloved 177). This animalization of the black demonstrates the racial prejudice of the white. Morrison refuses to present only the black slaves as chattels or sub-human animals without humanity, she also presents Amy Denver as “the evidence of white exploitation of white, class repression, and the marginalization of women within the white patriarchal culture” (Coonradt 182). As Nicole M. Coonradt puts it, Morrison “emphasizes the need to reach beyond the community and, at times, beyond self to either seek or render aid” (181-2). Sethe’s daughter Denver eventually sheds the shame she felt while living on the margins by reaching beyond the community, and establishes her presence in a world that has all but forgotten her before. This thesis explores the representation of slave history in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Morrison’s Beloved. Under this main scope of representing slave history, both Go Down, Moses and Beloved can be read in terms of memory, narrative and racism through comparative reading. This thesis then will be divided into three main.

(19) Tu 12. chapters and a conclusion. I would like to juxtapose these two texts to examine the similarities and discrepancies of the representations of slave history. Through intertextual comparison, both novels reveal central evils of plantation life under slavery, with consequences lasting until modern time. Chapter One centers on both Faulkner’s and Morrison’s representation of slave history, and compares both authors’ preoccupation with the historical accounts as a source for fictional representation of crucial 19th-century American slave history. I begin with Faulkner’s representation of southern plantation life revealed through the McCaslin family ledger. Isaac McCaslin’s reading of the familial ledger uncovers the economics as well as the social and cultural legacies of slavery on the southern plantation: racism and miscegenation. In Ledgers of History, Sally Wolff through interviews and fieldtrips to Faulkner’s familial acquaintance, Dr. Francisco III, unfolds Faulkner’s obvious drawing from a southerner’s private diary as a source for several of his novels. According to Dr. Francisco’s recollections, Faulkner made frequent trips to Holly Springs to visit his good friend Edgar Francisco Jr., Dr, Francisco’s father, and asked to see the Leak Diary, an antebellum plantation diary, in which Dr. Francisco’s forebear held and recorded southern plantation life. He reported that Faulkner actually “was aware of the Leak Diary as early as the 1920s” (Wolff 16), and was so preoccupied with it that “[he] appears to have turned to the Leak Diary as a source of information and ideas for his fiction” (17). Consequently, it is worthy to note that in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner adopts and manipulates the historical materials from the Leak Diary to recount slave transactions and to represent southern plantation society and slave history. In Beloved, Morrison restructures the disremembered history on the basis of a real family “catastrophe” with the fuel of imagination in an attempt to re-address the powerful impact of slavery on the blacks and to re-discover and reconstruct black.

(20) Tu 13. history. In an interview with Marsha Darling, Morrison unfolds that “in fact Margret Garner escaped with her husband and two other men and was returned to slavery” (Darling 250); moreover, “she was not tried for killing her child. She was [tried] for a real crime, which was running away […], [the abolitionists] did not want her tried on those grounds, so they tried to switch it to murder as a kind of success story” (251). Morrison follows this ground and develops it not only to invent her story further, but also to recover the country’s past disallowed in history yet accepted in fiction. Unlike Go Down, Moses, Beloved can be regarded as Morrison’s revision of a historical incident, which she has transformed into a family catastrophe for the sake of re-constructing and representing the slave experience. Claiming that her work does not take the private exertion of her imagination that only attends to her personal ends, Morrison expounds that “the work must be political” (“Rootedness” 64) and a work of art shall carry political attention and influence. If we apply this belief to her work, Morrison’s political attention imbedded in Beloved appears more apparent that her representation of slave life aims to reclaim and re-construct slave experience through individual, personal experience and make it a collective slave past disremembered by the white and the black in history. Chapter Two focuses on the theme of memory and narrative in Go Down, Moses and Beloved. I would like to examine the pervasive influence of memory, the role memory plays and its effect, and also both writers’ manipulation of memory as the subject matter and as a narrative aesthetic that wraps up the whole novel. Both novels are structured by the memories of many characters, the white and the black. In “The Site of Memory,” Morrison explains her role as an writer is not to “drop a veil over [the] proceedings too terrible to relate,” yet to “rip that veil drawn over proceedings too terrible to relate” (Morrison, 70). To this purpose, while restoring the past of her black characters, Morrison depends heavily on her own recollections and imagination..

(21) Tu 14. She asserts that “memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin and in what I find to be significant” (71); moreover, she adds that “[the] ‘memories’ within are the subsoil of my work. But memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of imagination can help me” (71). Morrison’s remarks suggest that memory is deployed in Beloved as a foundation for the novel’s core, while her use of imagination provides its substance. In accordance with this idea, Morrison must create a form through memories and her imaginations so as to unfold the slave experience as well as to create Sethe and invent Beloved’s life. As she explains, “I just imagined the life of a dead girl which was the girl that Margret Garner killed. […] I just imagined her remembering what happened to her, being someplace else and returning, knowing what happened to her. And I call her Beloved” (“Interview with Gloria Naylor” 208). The subject of memory in both novels becomes a project of narrative that emanates from various voices of the protagonists. In its most striking characteristic of narrative voice— the recursive use of fragmented, multi-vocal narrative, Beloved illustrates Morrison’s imaginative manipulation of an artistic, creative link between the spirit of Beloved and the African Americans silenced in the Middle Passage. The horrible slave experience is manifestly voiced through Beloved and the “Sixty Million and more” nameless slaves who suffered and died under slavery. While Morrison’s typical presentation of history is often called the “‘chorus’ method of storytelling” (Hooper 5), Faulkner’s novel also grows out of memories of different characters. In Beloved Morrison pieces together the female slaves’ voices to reveal their stories, fear and desire as a layering and resonant effect of narrative, yet in Go Down, Moses the voice of the white patriarch seems more obvious and embedded at the heart of the narrative than the voice of the black slaves. This can be seen first from the master-slave relationship. The playfulness of the “chasing rituals” in the prelude story.

(22) Tu 15. “Was” is established from the white patriarch’s perspective through the chase of Tomey’s Turl, a slave of the southern white McCaslins. The reader is brought into the white McCaslin’s mind as memory recedes through Isaac McCaslin who narrates the story told to him by Cass McCaslin who actually provides the story with an elusive tone in the narrative. The white dominant voice then can be read throughout the novel. This is made particularly clear and complex in the story, “Pantaloon in Black.” This story has none of the playfulness of the previous stories as in “Was” and “The Fire and the Hearth.” Faulkner first reveals Rider’s story through Rider’s memory of his dead wife Mannie, then through the indifferent, unaffectionate voice of the white, having a white sheriff’s deputy retell, in a twisted version, Rider’s grief and his subsequent murder of a white man. Through a white Southerner’s point of view, Faulkner casts a light on a racial tragedy, illustrating the way the whites deny a black’s grief and refuse to step into the black’s heart until they find a racial outlet in his murder. This reveals the racial wounding in the South’s racial history, as Adam Long makes clear that “history, here, becomes the history of blacks and women at the hands of white Southern men” (70). In Go Down, Moses, both white patriarchs and black slaves transcend the present with stream of consciousness and recollections to their pasts. Throughout the novel Ike McCaslin’s flashbacks bring to the fore the familial anecdotes of hunting as well as the pieces of the McCaslin family history neglected and unacknowledged by its members. And Lucas Beauchamp’s stream of consciousness restores part of the family history in that his recollection extends far back to his childhood and to his relationships with members of the Edmonds family, exposing the inextricable relationship that ties the white patriarch and the slave together on the plantation. Faulkner’s management of flashback along with his fragmented, multi-voiced and alternative representation of history is comparable to Morrison’s method of.

(23) Tu 16. multi-vocal presentation as a choral performance in Beloved. Both writers unsettle the concept of time as a straight line in time span; rather, they treat it as fluid and psychologically grounded. They also break down the notion of memory as a linear process and represent historical experience with layered memory and multiple points of view. Memory’s effect serves not only as a narrative form transcending several individual life stories and generations for representation, but also as a formal concern for Faulkner to explore the unresolved racial problems for black slaves themselves and to reflect what slave history has left to them. For history is never simply in the past, as Faulkner expounds, “no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his or her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment.” (Faulkner in the University 84). The significance of the representation of slave history lies in the process, since the proceedings from slavery to freedom force black slaves to recall from memories their past experiences again and again as a long-deferred confrontation with the cruelty of slavery. Both Faulkner and Morrison restore the historical context through memory as a specific form of narrative. This subversive narrative method illustrates the relation of history to the slave and interrogates the traditional accounts of slave experience and conventional slave narrative. Their texts often suggest self-reflexive meditation on and authorial response to the inhumanity of slavery. In Chapter Three I try to explore how Faulkner represents the Deep South as a land that undergoes white racism. Among the racialzed characters, those of which are African, Indian, and mixed-raced descendant, Faulkner’s representation of McCaslin family history foregrounds the notion of race and racism with the dichotomous white-black racial division in the white patriarchal society. Faulkner’s text magnifies.

(24) Tu 17. racial difference and demarcation in the systematic imbalance of power relations. In particular, it demonstrates that white supremacy and domination within the historical and economic condition in the Southern region is impervious to any attempted constraints on the desire of the white. The imbalanced relation between supremacy and subordination under racism finds its poignant expression in many stories of Go Down, Moses. In “Was” Faulkner’s characters in the tableau of the card games become the racial subjects. Either Uncle Buck and Hubert Beauchamp in the first or Uncle Buddy and Hubert in the second poker game, these three white men, as plantation owners and slaveholders, are active and dominant in the white social, political and economic world of the antebellum South. As they stand in a relatively higher social position, the winning of the land and the slave is ultimately the white men’s game. The subordinate situation of the slaves in poker game can also be illustrated in Rider’s suppression as a victim in gambling. In “Pantaloon in Black,” Rider was borne down, lynched, and described as subhuman without normal human feelings and sentiments by the sheriff’s deputy. The white deputy’s biased reading of the murder reflects not only his own twisted “theory” of black sub-humanity, but also a cultural and social interpretation of the black as Other through “biological heterogeneity.” As Lucius Outlaw defines that race is a social formation, the racial tension is associated with the cultural, political and economic factors in framing the conception of race. And Go Down, Moses, given its social, economic and historical contexts, provides a window for observing and examining this formation of race and racism through the repetitive representation of interactions between the white master and the black slave. Thadious M. Davis notes that Faulkner’s representation in Go Down, Moses suggests a “racial ideology” that echoes James Baldwin’s remark: “America became white… because of the necessity of denying the Black presence and justifying Black subjugation…. It is the Black.

(25) Tu 18. condition, and only that, which forms the consciousness of white people” (qtd. in Davis 209). Accordingly, in Faulkner’s text, the white patriarch maintains an absolute domination, literally and figuratively, over the black slave by denying the black presence, since the South is a region where “‘subordination’ and paternalism typify relations between white and black” (Godden 120). The South is a labor market place that carries repressive labor relations, in which black slaves such as Tomey’s Turl and Tennie, who “retain the status of property” and also remain “the objects of the [white men’s] game and of the social bargaining” (Davis 71) made explicitly on southern economic underdevelopment and racism. In comparison with Faulkner’s representation of racial relations and tensions, Morrison in Beloved highlights the extent to which the white men regard the black slaves as Other in a patriarchal society by exposing the racist mindset through schoolteacher, a scientific racist. The white man is represented as a caricature with rationalistic and scientific thinking, and his physical scrutiny of Sethe’s body reflects the white man’s animalization of the black slave. Schoolteacher’s racism covered by scientism and rationalism specifies the domination and surveillance of the white through language and knowledge. However, Beloved also tends to explore and through Amy Denver, a compassionate poor white girl among the white characters, to bridge the gulf between the black and the white. As racism often makes clear division and pits the white and the black against one another, Amy and Sethe manifest the possibility of racial reconciliation through compassion and love, since Amy ignores racial differences and prejudice to give a hand to Sethe. Throughout the text, Morrison not simply represents racial oppression and exploitation of the slaves. More importantly, she gives hope and manifests humanity to undermine the racial dichotomy for those African Americans like Sethe who survived slavery..

(26) Tu 19. Chapter One Representing Slave History William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses formulates American South in the 20th century as a region undergoing changes and portrays the lingering effects of the Civil War and the violent legacy the protagonists encounter under the paternalism of the South’s entrenched white families. While tracing the roots and branches of the family tree, the novel not only restores a genealogy of the interracial McCaslin clan, which is a microcosm of the history of American South itself, but also represents the role of the black slaves in the making of the Southern plantation through the exploitation of the slaves in the antebellum era. With a series of related short stories, Faulkner tends to create the disturbing effects unfolded by these stories, in which many of his protagonists not only witness the misery marked by the plantation system but also get caught up in the destructive legacy caused by slavery. Faulkner in Go Down, Moses implicitly seeks to delineate the history of the white family and the slave life in the South. He “unflinchingly” restores what it means to have been forgotten and left in slavery, and confronts what it needs to restructure the past for the South, since the legacy of slavery and racism lingers and haunts the southern descendants as ripples have made to the surface of a lake. In many of his novels, including Go Down, Moses, Faulkner historicizes racism and miscegenation through factual historical source. Traceable and inferable from the stories is Faulkner’s attempt to seriously research into the historical development, problems and transformation of the southern plantation society. His fictions actually provide recognizable references, upon which southern history is recorded and depicted. Sally Wolff’s interviews with Dr. Edgar Francisco III reveal that many of Faulkner’s novels are clearly based on a private farm diary: the Dairy of Francis Terry Leak, which is an antebellum plantation diary of Dr. Francisco’s forebear. Francisco.

(27) Tu 20. rememorized his childhood as Faulkner made frequent trips to Holly Springs to visit his father, Edgar Francisco Jr. and reported that Faulkner actually “was aware of the Leak Diary as early as the 1920s” (Wolff 16), and was so preoccupied with it that “[he] appears to have turned to the Leak Diary as a source of information and ideas for his fiction” (17), since the similarities of the details between the real farm ledgers and his fictional ledgers are highly inferable and recognizable. As Francisco recollected and observed, Faulkner studied the farm ledgers in the 1930s and “was always scribbling” and “did a lot of note taking” (16). Comparably, the real farm ledgers from the Leak Diary record the “meticulous details of plantation life from 1839 to 1862” (16), and Go Down, Moses covers a longer time span, which was about to be situated far from the antebellum period in 1830s across to the early 1940s to portray southern plantation life in American history. Faulkner’s reference to the old Leak Diary appears obvious in Go Down, Moses. The ledgers in the novel are described similarly to the Leak Diary as large volumes of old ledgers “clumsy and archaic in size and shape” (Faulkner 245) with the binding of “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” (250). As a wealthy plantation owner, Francis Leak needed considerable quantity of necessities and foods for the support of his black slaves and carefully recorded every item of purchase for the management of his plantation. Running a plantation and farm requires the expenditure of “farm implements and machinery such as plows, hames, harrow teeth, and trace chains” (38) as well as food and clothing, such as “meat, bread, flour, sugar and coffee,” and “shoes, coats, pantaloons, blankets” (38). The plantation vocabulary and everyday items associated with plantation life and farming are explicitly listed in the Leak Diary and adopted by Faulkner in rendering the contours of the lives of the black slaves in fiction. In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner provides a model of the operation of the slave-based plantation society and the text accounts the plantation life with the.

(28) Tu 21. items of “the barrels and kegs of flour and meal and molasses and nails, the wall pegs dependant with plowlines and plow-collars and hames and trace-trains” (Faulkner 245). And these words about plantation life in the Leak Diary cover even longer lists of the materials along with quantities and prices on it than the vocabulary Faulkner extracted for the same details in his fiction. In the historical accounts of the diary, Leak not only records the materials bought for the plantation use, but also inscribes the transactions and transportations of slaves in his dairy. He goes into details and “carefully notes the ages, gender, health of his slaves and the price he would pay or receive as they are bought and sold” (Wolff 42). From Leak’s correspondences with his neighbors and acquaintances in the ledgers, his acqusition of slaves in each transaction is written down as entry goes like: “the price of ‘negroes’ had changed ‘from $100. to $200. &…the number for sale was large’” or “…sell to me a lot of ‘negroes’ consisting of a man 28 to 30 years of age, a boy about 16, a woman about 27 with a son about 9, & a girl about 16 with her first child about 4 months” (42). The black slaves are called “negro” by Leak in the antebellum time and appear to be acquired easily. These entries exemplify how a plantation owner and slaveholder marked down the purchases and conditions of his slaves. Faulkner’s fictional ledgers of the McCaslin family echo such entries which account for the transactions of slaves, for instance, Eunice Bought by Father in New Orleans 1807 $650. dolars. (255). Apparently, Leak regards the black slaves as pieces of property and commodity being purchased and sold through the transformation of human beings into monetary value for plantation economy. The transaction of slaves written in the ledgers thus illustrates that “equivalency is at the heart of the slave system and the violence perpetrated by that system against its victims” (Dussere 333). In this way, the ledgers testify to the violent, contentious legacy of slavery..

(29) Tu 22. Faulkner’s representation of slave transaction in the South is so disclosed as entries in the Leak Diary through Isaac McCaslin’s reading of his family history recorded in the farm ledgers. The family ledgers Isaac read charges the expenses for the slaves carefully: … the slow, day-by-day accruement of the wages allowed him and the food and clothing—the molasses and meat and meal, the cheap durable shirts and jeans and shoes and now and then a coat against rain and cold—charged against the slowly yet steadily mounting sum of balance. (Go Down, Moses 255) In addition to the slave expenses and slave transactions, many of characters’ names in the novel are traceable and recognizable from the Leak Diary, such as: “Caruthers, Moses, Isaac, Sam, Tomey, Mollie, Edmund, and Worsham” (Wolff 31). These are the crucial characters, many of which are slaves, whose names are drawn in Go Down, Moses. In crafting his fictional characters and deploying their stories, Faulkner seems to incorporate his personal emotions so as to represent southern slave life as well as to suggest his own reaction towards it. In order to illustrate how the whites and the slaves lead their lives on the Mississippi plantation, Faulkner gives the names of the Leak slaves Sam, Isaac, and Tomey, for instance, to his protagonists with personality and identity, describing slaves’ daily lives and works on the plantation—“making bricks, working the land, plowing the fields” (31), celebrating holidays, and raising their children, and so on. It seems that by detailing the slaves’ daily lives and activities, Faulkner bears witness to their plantation lives and memorializes these forgotten, unnoticed black people. In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner actually not only puts emphasis on slave life and history, but also portrays Native American life in the wilderness. In the novel, Sam Fathers is presented as a slave with the ethnicity of African American, Native.

(30) Tu 23. American and Caucasian heritage, who shares the similar physical feature and slave heritage with the slave Sam working on the farm of Francis Leak, and, more importantly, Sam Fathers becomes Isaac’s mentor by ushering the boy into a spiritual relation to the wilderness. Faulkner’s Sam Fathers represents American dispossession of Native American land and heritage the same as black people undergoing the transaction into slavery in white plantation society. Faulkner’s most history-haunted protagonist, Isaac McCaslin, mirrors the “southern biblical naming tradition” (Wolff 32), and through Isaac as an evocative figure of the southern past, Faulkner’s efforts intend to “bestow [his] powerful vision to understand the sins of the past” (32) in order to restore and represent southern slave experience. Faulkner’s personal response and commentary on slavery can also be seen through his management of the plots in the novel. In foregrounding the repression and circumstances of female slave life, Faulkner brings the enormity of slavery to the fore by crafting incest and miscegenation into the stories of the white McCaslin family as the effect and legacy of slavery in the Deep South. He “fuels the complexity of the owner/slave relationship with incest and miscegenation” (Wolff 35) to draw on both the white patriarchal power, which takes absolute domination over his slaves on the plantation, and the interracial force of black and mulatto figures often presented in the Southern texts. For instance, Faulkner’s fictional slave Thomasina, nicknamed Tomey, led a tragic life of racial and sexual exploitation and died in childbirth. As a counterpoint to the factual female slave Toney, Tomey embodies the racial transgression and sexual appropriation made by the white, patriarchal progenitor. And Tomey’s Turl, the son of the white patriarch Carothers McCaslin and his own daughter Tomey, illuminates the effect of racial intersection which characterizes the Southern text. Yet not simply as a typical Southern text, Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is added.

(31) Tu 24. with more emotional response to the characters. Seeing the names of the slaves in the Leak Diary, Faulkner “weaves not only their names but many of the situations of their lives into his novels and stories suggests his deep empathy for their plight” (Wolff 31). Faulkner charges affective scenes to depict slave’s grief and despondency under slavery. He slightly modifies the historical accounts and intertwines the details together to represent the lives of slaves. Taking the female slave Eunice for instance, by mixing a story up together with the fragments of a factual ice pond in the plantation and a drowned slave, Faulkner with affection edits Eunice’s life through a suicide with a devastated body and mind in reflection to the cruelty of slavery as a slave and a mother exploited by her white master. While a slave-owning planter obtains absolute control over his land and slaves, Faulkner gives voices and personalities to his characters, both the whites and the plantation slaves, as Lucas Beauchamp claimed himself of being the founder’s descendant, if only through the unrecognized black line. Lucas dwelled on a parcel of land set aside for him at the center of the plantation, and regarded it as his own land. Living on the private property, Lucas farmed the land intermittently, and failed to meet Roth Edmonds’ agricultural demand for cotton on his plantation, since he stole Roth’s mule to purchase a metal detector and even risked his marriage of forty-five years for his gold-hunting dream. Lucas’s gold-hunting scheme characterizes his personality as a black McCaslin with resilient and courageous determination. Not only the whites but also the blacks on the plantation are shaped by Faulkner into lifelike people in contrast to Leak’s lifeless and emotionless accounts of his slaves. As a slave-owning plantation elite, Francis Leak usually “efficiently and without apparent emotion maintained the accounts for the buying and selling of slaves to work his plantation” (42); however, Faulkner’s representation of slave life with alterations departs from this factual, lifeless records on the real ledgers by providing his.

(32) Tu 25. protagonists with personalities and spirits. Buck and Buddy McCaslin are the two among the main characters with their own spirits and thoughts. As opponents of slavery in the South, the white twins Buck and Buddy refused to face a slave suicide under the paternalism of the South’s entrenched white family, neither did they openly discuss the patrimony bequeathed by their father to a “slave” Tomey’s Turl on the ledger. They allowed the slaves to pay for their freedom and only pretended to “play” the chasing game to seize the runaway slaves as fugitive slaves like Turl who escaped to meet his lover each time. In the chasing scene of the prelude story “Was,” Tomey’s Turl outwitted his white owners by “successfully influencing a hand of poker” (44). In characterizing slave’s personality, Faulkner again gives the slave courage, wisdom and endurance to outwit his masters, which is unseen through the runaway slaves recorded in the Leak Diary. The abolitionist twins, unlike their father, did not attempt to take control over the slaves on their plantation as to depart from their roles as plantation heirs and slave owners. In the pages of the familial ledgers, the twins carried on conversations with each other while accounting the slaves. This is similar to the Leak plantation ledger, in which “Leak wrote some of his entries to someone in particular, or so that someone else (not named), would read them. He [used] the word ‘you’ on numerous occasions” (44). In Go Down, Moses, Faulkner keeps this form of conversations between the ledger-writers, Buck and Buddy. Their communicative style identifies the way they record and what happens on the plantation yet with disfiguration or abbreviation so as to be ignored and unnoticed. The entries below illustrate their communications with different handwritings recognizable by Isaac. Buddy wrote: 29th of Oct 1856 Renamed him Curiously, Buck asked two days later: 31 Oct 1856 Renamed him what.

(33) Tu 26. Buddy later responded, simply by asserting his naming: Chrstms 1856 Spintrius (Faulkner 254) The cryptic style of accounting can be seen through the twins’ evasive yet defensive attitude towards the unacknowledged “crime” of their father. Buck wrote: 23 Jun 1833 Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self (256) No explanation of the thousand-dollar patrimony to the son of a slave girl with simply the old Carothers’ will: Turl Son of Thucydus @ Eunice Tomy born Jun 1833 yr stars fell Fathers will (257) They did not question the unexplained suicide that puzzles Isaac, yet instead their evasive engagement with it presumably recognized incest and miscegenation in the past. In addition to their communicative form, one thing noteworthy is the spelling errors carried in the twins’ handwritings. As a slave owner and planter elite, Francis Leak “nonetheless spells some words incorrectly, such as ‘burried’” (42). Faulkner imitates this orthographical error as “burid” and “burd” in drawing the entries from the Leak ledgers. This demonstrates Faulkner’s careful delineation close to a real, historical model. For Isaac, the twins’ records of the ledgers help him reconstruct the circumstances of his remote family history. And Faulkner’s representation of southern slave history is based on these pieces of historical accounts and fragments of slave-master relationship to restore the unexposed knowledge of plantation reality. The contour of southern plantation society becomes clearer not only through the entries but also via the debate concerning southern slaves in the Leak ledgers. In the fourth section of “The Bear,” a discussion between Isaac and his cousin Cass McCaslin for his relinquishment of the birthright carries many pages in the novel. A resemblant debate about the settlement and displacement on the “Arkansas.

(34) Tu 27. bottomlands” was marked down between Francis Leak and his brother. Faulkner, however, changes the subject of the debate in the novel to a related topic of dispute over a cursed land upon which lies God’s purpose for human beings. Moreover, the debate also reveals Faulkner’s personal contemplation on whether God intends human beings to obtain private land. In the fictional dispute, Isaac’s explanation for his repudiation of birthright approaches to God’s Creation itself. He expounds his vision of purification of the land cursed by slavery and exploitation due to plantation economy. Faulkner dose not provide answer or implication to Ike’s argument, but he seems to accept the truth of owning the land as private property by human beings. With alterations Faulkner presumably seems to “have taken inspiration for the fictional debate” (45) between Ike and Cass from the conversation in the Leak Diary and there exists so many resemblances, as discussed above, between the novel and the real ledgers. It is recognizable that the Leak plantation ledgers, providing much historical information, serve as a foundation upon which Faulkner searches for both ideas and details for many of his novels. As Faulkner had actually read the Leak Diary many years before Go Down, Moses was published, he must have scrutinized the ledgers and conceived of the scope for the representation of southern slave life and plantation society for a long time. More importantly, he must have pondered over the extent to which the black slaves account for the force of race, gender and class in the making of the history of the Deep South. By drawing the historical sources explicitly from the diary, Faulkner represents the discrediting of antebellum plantation society marked by slavery about how a planter elite manages farms and plantation, and dominates over his slaves. He also portrays the subsequent social changes triggered by the Civil War over generations. For instance, the novel demonstrates that racial prejudice and oppression still exist in the fictional present of the 1940s. The situation illustrates his.

(35) Tu 28. strong belief that the past lingers on and saturates the present. Presumably, Faulkner’s purpose is to “create a vibrant fictional place and time closely aligned with both personal and regional history” of the South (Wolff 63). Although the Leak Diary records the mastering of southern slaves and the management of plantation owners, Faulkner’s story turns out as a poignant exposition of plantation history, during which the legitimate inheritor Isaac McCaslin appears to have no heart in it but only tends to retreat from it. The ledgers not simply serve as a constellation of figures in Go Down, Moses but as an alternative account of the events. They are the chronological, historical texts of slavery for Faulkner, just as slave life and plantation society in the South recorded in the Leak Diary provide the historical contexts for the account of his native region. With the ideas and details generating from the real diary, one can see Faulkner’s attempts to represent the fullness and details of plantation life in southern history and his efforts to force the violence and enormity of slave experience off the entries in the ledgers so as to bring them into the foreground. The slave’s predicament in the fiction thus vividly scores the human sufferance, and the reader is initiated by Faulkner into the legacy and consequences entailed in slavery. The characters’ names, plots, setting and theme mark Go Down, Moses as a plantation novel which clearly delineates the use of historical materials in representing slave experience in the Deep South. From this respect, it is historically grounded and regionally specific, as the novel historicizes racism and miscegenation in order to uncover not only the unearthed individual history of the white McCaslin family, but to render a larger historical context of the South primarily through the mediations and intrusions of unnoticed knowledge and voice that the reader is propelled into rethinking about the act and reason for representing a history marked and thus influenced by slavery and the Civil War. Since Faulkner laments on this.

(36) Tu 29. southern history tainted by slave system and still understands that the burden of history has its oppressive and overwhelming force to ripple through the contemporary reader as the past always lingers to the present. In the interviews Dr. Francisco gave, he recollected that Faulkner sometimes expressed his indignation and grumble to the diary he read as his response to the diary keeper. Faulkner’s repugnance and repulsion to the ledgers suggest that he seemed to “[argue] with a time and a place in American history that is almost inaccessible now” and is likely to “engage in heated debate with the long-dead diarist because of the diarist’s proslavery stance, his readiness to secede from the Union, and his willingness to offer substantial financial support to the Confederate State of America at the advent of the Civil War” (17). It can be inferred, then, that Faulkner’s strong disapproval of slavery kindles his inquiry into the questions of racism and miscegenation entailed in slavery in the southern past. However, the details of the past might not always be easily accessible. In order to initiate the reader into the seeming “inaccessible” history, Faulkner brings the reader to come into possession of such historical truth with the enormity of the past and to “confront” with it. Go Down, Moses demonstrates Faulkner’s inquiry into the southern plantation with the enormity of slavery in southern slave past. In exposing the inextricable relations within a Southern family and community, Faulkner specifies the propensity of incest and miscegenation with racial and gender transgression and intersection, as “a metaphor for the racial and class narcissism of the plantation elite” (Matthews 198). Following this point, Faulkner represents the interlocking relations of gender, race and class in a vast interracial family as model for larger historical context, and further forces the contemporary reader to encounter the origin of these entangled relations in plantation history. As John T. Matthews observes, “both incest and miscegenation are secondary manifestations of a more fundamental social deformity” (198)..

(37) Tu 30. Faulkner’s representation of slave history in fiction can be viewed as a long, deferred confrontation with the cruelty of slavery and also as his disavowal to the proslavery stance of such slave-owning planter as Francis Terry Leak. Go Down, Moses proves a southern plantation novel exposing the notion of property that is deeply imbedded in the southern history due to slavery, since in the South “any potion of nature—a human body or a piece of wilderness—might be brought under title, and become subject to rights of use, purchase, and sale, and even destruction” (Matthews 198). In a broader sense, the southern cultural and social trauma, racism and miscegenation become more of a transgressive possession of many kinds. Like many other Southern writers obsessively preoccupied with the past, Faulkner in Go Down, Moses reconstructs what has been forgotten in the past as a result of the lingering effects of the Civil War. Indeed, the novel confronts with the specters of slavery and racism that continue to haunt the modern southern descendants. While Faulkner’s representation of slave history from a Southern planter’s diary as a historical source, Toni Morrison’s representation of African-American history in Beloved appears more artistic and imaginative, since Morrison’s text contains more hidden meanings than what it explicitly draws and says. Set in the postbellum years, Beloved deals with the disremembered history of African-American slaves on the basis of a real slave family “catastrophe.” Morrison attempts to represent the legacy of slavery and its violent consequences as well as to “recover” slave experience in American history for both races so as to confront and get through it. Morrison’s depiction of the slave escapees in Beloved creates meanings not only out of the anti-slavery sensationalism and consciousness across historical time and space but also portrays the inner worlds and values of the slaves by recreating the fictional ex-slaves and restructuring their terrible slave experiences during the Middle Passage and under slavery. Accordingly, as Beloved brings the slave “catastrophe” back into.

(38) Tu 31. memory and knowledge, a representation of the Garner incident brings the African-American slaves into presence in American literature and history. It “challenges previously conceived and simplified images about nineteenth-century African American mother-woman in slavery” (Reyes 56) and also underscores the significance of witness to slave experience for reclaiming a lost history. Beloved is loosely based on a nineteenth-century real incident involving a fugitive slave woman named Margret Garner, who failed in her road to freedom, and consequently murdered her little daughter rather than allowed her to be returned to slavery. Margret Garner actually escaped with other fugitive slaves. In January of 1856, a group of seventeen slaves escaped from the border of Kentucky into Ohio, nine of whom continued to flee north to Canada. But the rest of the eight slaves, the Garner family, including four adults and four children, were later apprehended under the Fugitive Slave Act.2 It was reported that with a butcher knife Margret Garner in desperation killed her three-year-old daughter and then attempted yet failed to kill her other children and herself. The critic and spotlight were at that time on Margret Garner, and her murder was described as a sensational horror of slavery. And the Abolitionists were working on this sensational case to demonstrate and bring the terrible conditions of the slaves to the international fore. Morrison’s recreation of the slave escapees together with their excruciating journey to freedom in Beloved is initiated from this Garner case. Morrison in many interviews mentioned that her idea for the novel came from the Garner case, since she was “obsessed by two or three little fragment of [the Garner] stories” (Naylor 206). While assembling the Garner story for her representation of slave experience, Morrison tends to create her own characters and their lives leading a road from. 2. The Fugitive Slave Act was passed by the United States Congress on September 18, 1850. It declared that all runaway slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters..

(39) Tu 32. enslavement to freedom rather than setting them back into slavery. Although Morrison notes that the Garner incident is an inspiration of her novel, she seems to learn more than the fragments of the contemporary reports. In a 1988 interview, she unfolded that “in fact Margret Garner escaped with her husband and two other men and was returned to slavery” and, “she wasn’t tried for killing her child. She was tried for a real crime, which was running away” (Darling 250-1), because the slave owner would rather take his property back to Kentucky than letting them stay tried for murder in Ohio. Moreover, “the abolitionists were trying very hard to get [Garner] tried for murder because they wanted the Fugitive Slave law to be unconventional. […] so they tried to switch it to murder as a kind of success story” (Darling 251). According to the contemporary reports,3 Margaret Garner escaped with her parents-in-law and while being shipped from Ohio back to Kentucky, she jumped (or fell) overboard with her child, and she was saved yet her little daughter drowned. She was later reported by local newspaper Cincinnati Chronicle that she and her husband worked in New Orleans and then on a southern plantation in Mississippi until she passed away in 1858. No matter what Garner’s fate is in reality, her story was so recreated to be endowed with a new life in Morrison’s writing. Morrison in fiction finds a way out as her imaginative recreation for those fugitives. In Beloved, Morrison rewrites the Garner case by turning Margret Garner to Sethe and the murdered girl Mary to Beloved in order to represent their horrible experiences under slavery. Indeed, the fact of a past under particular historical conditions is important to the story, but Morrison tends to “invent” the characters’ own lives. As she expounds in an interview with Marsha Darling, “I wanted to invent [Beloved’s] life, which is a way of saying I wanted to be accessible to anything the 3. For more details of the descriptions of Margret Garner’s complexion, her court hearing reports and the legal proceeding of this Garner case, see Angelita Reyes’s essay “Taking Flight and Taking Foot: From Margaret Garner to Beloved.”.