Thing Narrative: A Reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved from the Perspective of New Materialism

Abstract

: Different from the dominant anthropocentric research paradigm of existing studies on Toni Morrison’s Beloved , which marginalize natural imagery as mere rhetorical ornamentation, this paper adopts a new materialist framework centering on material agency, intra-action, and material hybridity to reinterpret the novel’s diverse botanical narratives. Through close textual reading, this study explores how key plant images, including sycamores, chamomile, boxwood thickets, woodland clearings, and wild roses, function as independent non-human narrative subjects rather than passive scenic backdrops. It demonstrates that botanical matter first serves as enduring material archives that preserve the obscured racial violence and gendered bodily trauma of chattel slavery beyond fallible human memory; second, realizes individual psychological healing for Denver and communal spiritual liberation for marginalized Black communities through equal, voluntary two-way intra-action between humans and plants; and finally, subverts colonial binary opposition via the unique life-death hybrid thingness of wild roses, reconnecting African Americans with fractured West African spiritual traditions and reconstructing their disrupted cultural identity. This paper reveals Morrison’s profound ecological ethics of interspecies equality and symbiosis, offering a fresh non-anthropocentric theoretical perspective to enrich academic interpretations of the novel’s racial trauma and spiritual redemption themes.