외상적 경험의 공간적 접근: 토니 모리슨의 『빌러비드』

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how traumatic memories are spatialized by their haunting at and through specific spaces. Trauma studies has paid much attention to the temporal nature, rather than the spatial one, of trauma since trauma refers to an event which is only belatedly assimilated or experienced through its compulsory repetition and the return of the repressed. Sigmund Freud and Cathy Caruth explain these temporal nature of trauma through the traumatic experience of Tancred and Clorinda in Tasso’s epic Gerusalemme Liberata. Drawing on their analysis on the epic, I argue that they overlook the significance of the space in which Clorinda disguises herself and as a result, dies. The two characters’ experience implies in itself both temporal and spatial aspects of trauma. Thus, this paper employs their story as an allegory of trauma, and investigates the temporal and spatial nature of trauma represented in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, primarily by the persistent intrusion of the past and the residential space of 124 Bluestone Road. With a main interest on trauma’s space, this paper explores the residence 124 as a space that remembers the traumatic memory and as the architectural uncanny that leads the characters back to their once familiar but long-buried past. As the place of the trauma, 124 becomes the site in which the traumatic memories are repressed, spatialized, denied, reexperienced, and acknowledged.