Comparing the Role of the Ghost in Morrisons Beloved and Kingstons No

The Symbolic Role of the Ghost in Morrisons love and Kingstons No address Woman The eponymous ghosts which haunt Toni Morrisons beloved and Maxine Hong Kingstons No Name Woman (excerpted from The Woman Warrior) embody the consequence of transgressing societal boundaries with adultery and murder. While the wider thematic concerns of both books differ, however both authors map the ghost figure to represent a repressed historical past tense that is awakened in their narrative retelling of the stories. The ghosts facilitate this retelling of stories that give voice to that which has been silenced, thought-provoking this repression and ultimately reversing it. The patriarchal repression of Chinese women is illustrated by Kingstons trading floor of No Name Woman, whose adulterous pregnancy is punished when the villagers raid the family home. Cast out by her humiliated family, she births the baby and then drowns herself and her child. Her family exile her from memory by performing as if she had never been born (3) -- indeed, when the narrators mother tells the story, she prefaces it with a strict cease and desist order to secrecy so as not to upset the narrators father, who denies her (3). By denying No Name Woman a name and place in history, release her forever hungry, (16) the patriarchy exerts the ultimate repression in its attempt to banish the transgressor from history. provided her ghost continues to exist in a liminal space, remaining on the fringes of memory as a cautionary tale passed down by women, hardly is denied full existence by the men who do not sine qua non to hear her name (15). Kingstons narrator tackles this repression when she sympathetically frames No Name Womans story as one of subjugation, pointing out that women in the old Ch... ... The Woman Warrior as a Search for Ghosts, Sato examines Kingstons symbolic use of the ghost figure as a means of approaching the dramatic structure of the text and appreciating its thematic search fo r identity amidst an often-paradoxical bicultural setting. Sonser makes this argument through a comparison of Beloved with Nathaniel Hawthornes The Scarlet garner. Her essay, The Ghost in the Machine Beloved and The Scarlet Letter, draws strong parallels between the two female protagonists, Sethe and Hester, who challenge the oppressive frameworks of their societies. disrespect the ideological incongruity of Hawthornes patriarchal Puritanism and Morrisons racist slavery, Sonser still finds a dual-lane thematic intersection of subjectivity and social power (17) that resonates in the stories of two womens attempts at self-definition from the margins of society.