Вестник ТГПУ им Л.Н. Толстого №3 2005

№ 3, 2005 ВЕСТНИК ТГПУ им. Л. Н. Толстого "More it hurt, more better it is. Can‘t nothing heal without pain, you know". In the process of “rememorying” healing takes place and people begin to learn from the past but not being paralyzed by its lessons, and forgive a loose and flexible synthesis out of the fragments of history. It’s not surprising that as soon as Sethe fully understands her guilt over a murder of her daughter Beloved appears. She is experienced by everybody in the novel as the ghost of the "crawling already? Baby," but is also an alter ego, a shadow, a darker and more authentic version of the self. Morrison describes the African woman as the "original self—the self we betray when we lie, the one that is always there. And whatever that self looks like ... one measures one's self against it". “Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me”. It appears that Sethe subconsciously summons the disembodied spirit, and, later, the apparently incarnated Beloved, in order to displace onto a shadow self the knowledge of feelings too painful to otherwise allow to surface to consciousness. One final piece of evidence that suggests that Beloved does indeed function as an alter in the novel is that as Sethe and other characters begin to reintegrate through the healing process of "rememorying," Beloved disappears since the integrated self is by definition the end of the alter self or selves. To achieve psychic wholeness, each person must come to accept his or her memories. When each begins to remember and acknowledge their alter selves as part of their core self, they reintegrate. But this process of healing cannot be done without understanding the importance of the community and in a more general way the necessary complement between self and other. One cannot accept his past dealing only with his own memories, because the past is a projection ofmany people’s thoughts and memories. The reader can’t blame Sethe for the murder of her daughter because the ultimate culprit is not the individual who committed infanticide, but the system that created the conditions for it, the “peculiar institution.” This “peculiar institution” is slavery, that transgressed theLaw ofLife and Growth, the Law of the Tree. Sethe definitely understands it but can’t accept it. That’s w'hy it’s so difficult for her to overcome personal prejudices against white people and the whole community in general as it doesn’t want to understand the reason of her transgression. The meeting of Sethe and Amy Denver is the focal point of Sethe‘s building trust in people around. From that point on Sethe doesn't see all white people as devils, nor does she trust all of them, but by having Amy Denver help deliver her baby and thus bonding, she knows that there are many different people with different ways of behaving. Sethe also begins to build trust in people from her local community and at last finds a way to love when she accepts her memories, as well as they accept her deed, and with the help of all women from the village exorcise-Beloved. There’s no more place for Beloved as Sethe has -become a full-fledged person. The scar from the past in the form of a beautiful chokecherry tree will forever remain with Sethe along with her memories: "It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry' tree. See, here’s the trunk-it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got amighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dem if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom.” But the tree also draws attention to the principle of division and extension, growth and transformation, thus conjuring up the image of the genealogical tree that represents the family and the whole community in broader sense.