Toni Morrison’s Beloved Re-Membering The Body As Historical Text

Abstract “Things too terrible to relate” were most often the sexual exploitation of slave women by white men. Convention allowed, indeed almost demanded, that these violations be named but not described. Morrison continues, “But most importantly-at least for me-there was no mention of their interior life” ( emphasis added). The writer’s “job”-as Morrison sees it-”becomes how to rip that veil drawn over proceedings too terrible to relate,” to “find and expose a truth about the interior life of people who didn’t write it,” to “fill in the blanks that the slave narratives left, to part the veil that was so frequently drawn,” and, finally, “to implement the stories that [she has] heard” (no-13).