Annotation for Beloved

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Koolish, Lynda. “ ‘To be Loved and Cry Shame’: A Psychological Reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” MELUS 26.4 (Winter 2001): 169-196. Web. Academic Search Elite. 18 Dec 2012. In this scholar essay, Lynda Koolish indicates that the struggle for psychic wholeness runs through the whole book and discusses the Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) of different characters. Koolish thinks that much of the novel explores the extraordinarily anguishing interlude of time of all the protagonists, and she regards them as MPD in a state of dissociation and denial. They cannot endure the endless succession of losses and deaths any more. The consciousness of Sethe, Denver, Paul D and Beloved are filled with a truncated and disrupted chronology, which is Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) or disassociative states. Beloved was born in America, but she knows the scene on the boat during Middle Passage. Denver and Paul D frequently do not know if they are dreaming or awake. Denver is almost unsure if she is alive, breathing, in her own body; Paul D does not know if it is mud or his own tears that are the moisture on his face. Not only these four characters, but also all the black characters in the novel who believes the person that comes out from the water is Beloved, experiences Beloved as a fractured aspect of Sethe’s psyche or a kind of doppleganger. Many psychologists have described schizophrenia and other mental illness as coping strategies, which is a special strategy that a person invents to live in an unlivable situation. The lives of the characters in Beloved have been so devastated by the unspeakable abuse of slavery that they exhibit clinical signs of MPD. Their struggles turn from individual wholeness to ancestral healing. For healing to occur, dissociation must give way to those people who have wounded self or denied self as part of the core of one’s being.

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