『빌러비드』: 거듭남을 통한 영의 구원

Abstract

Beloved can be read both as a ghost story and as a love story. While Beloved’s return to 124 lets Sethe remember her horrifying past and make her final redemption from her past possible by curing her trauma through various discourses of piecing their past together, it also bestows her a hope to proceed toward her future with Paul D by their mutual cure and the help of the African American community. While Morrison suggests that racial conflicts caused by slavery can be solved through the solidarity of black community and the restoration of African culture, she also implies that the true reconciliation between blacks and whites can be realized only through mutual forgiveness, which is well proven by her frequent uses of Christian values and Biblical fables. Thus, this study focuses on analyzing how the death and rebirth of Beloved works in the process of curing the trauma of main characters by using psychoanalytic theories, and how Christian idea of redemption and other values work in their recuperation from their past trauma by examining the novel’s Biblical backgrounds.