Lay Sion Ng, Ruzbeh Babaee
International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies 3(1) 63-71 2017年1月31日 査読有り
<jats:p>Cannibalism is a meta-discourse in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Alan Rice’s “Who’s Eating Whom,” Beloved’s dream of “exploding and being swallowed” has been critically linked to the cruel practices of slavery, yet it is important to note the way in which the dream of “being swallowed” is largely unexplored. This paper concentrates on the latter aspect, stating that in Beloved, cannibalism and slavery relate not only to the domination of black slaves by white masters, but also to the black mother-child relationships between Sethe and Beloved, Sethe and Denver, and the black sister-sister relationship between Denver and Beloved. This paper argues that the whites designate themselves as the ones who represent civilization through implanting the image of cannibalism into the black Other. Ironically, the system of slavery precisely deconstructs the images that they have built of themselves, making them something no more than cannibals. </jats:p>