Toni Morrison's discredited magic - Magical realism in beloved revisited

Abstract

The article is an attempt to estimate the extent to which Toni Morrison's Beloved is representative of magical realism. A number of literary critics and theoreticians contend that the novel is magical realist. Morrison believes that this classification is an overgeneralization of her work. Therefore, the posited inter-connectedness between Beloved and magical realism deserves a more complex treatment. In the following, it is argued that Beloved, while indeed manifesting certain features and subject matters typical of that literary mode, on the other hand redefines the concept of the magic by using it as a marker for the characters' extraordinary powers of endurance and resistance, thereby insisting on the uniqueness of the African American experience.