Beloved as an Oppositional Gaze

Abstract

This paper studies the strategy Morrison adopts in Beloved to give voice to black Americans long silenced by the dominant white American culture. Instead of being objects passively accepting their aphasia, black Americans become speaking subjects that are able to cast an oppositional gaze to avert the objectifying gaze of white Americans. Further, the novel as a whole becomes a voicing artifact that constitutes an oppositional gaze toward the silencing tendency upheld by the dominant white American culture. In this way, the black Americans manage to work out a strategy of collective coexistence in a white supremacist society.