Psychological Realism versus Magical Realism: A Critical Study of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987)

Toni Morrison’s much-acclaimed fictional work, Beloved (1987) is studied much both for the presentation of the psychological realism of the past inhuman slavery and its revelation in the experimental magical realism. Magical realism was made popular by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, who used it extensively in the novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Midnight Children (1981) respectively. Morrison seems to be very much influenced by this Latin American genre of novel writing, since her Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Beloved has followed the traditional blending of realism and fantasy in the story as a cure for national amnesia, regarding the shameful history of African-American slavery. The two dominant characters in this novel are Sethe, the black slave woman whose mind is haunted by her horrible deed of infanticide, and her resurrected daughter, Beloved, who is killed by her twenty years ago. The plot of the novel is non-linear; the thoughts, emotions and complexities of human psychology are expressed by a series of flashbacks, interior monologues in fragmented speeches and the fluctuations of mind by stream-of-consciousness. One of the primary themes of the psychological novel is the burden of the haunting past memories which makes the present crippled without any hope for future. This research-paper intends to highlight the intertwining between psychological realism and magical realism that makes this novel both realistic and fabulous.