Overview of Topics and Plans

I had some trouble nailing down what I wanted to say in my paper. I started with something very broad, and getting to a specific point of coherence, particularly finding a “so what” was difficult, especially when, upon doing research, many of my ideas were already written about by many other scholars. In an effort not to sound like them or imitate their papers and work, I kept searching until I was inspired by a song by the Cranberries titled Zombie. They compare the experience of PTSD caused by war to a zombie, returning from the dead to terrorize the mind of those afflicted. This metaphor I found to be really compelling, and it inspired me to think about this metaphor in the context of Beloved. I thought about the novel’s concept of “rememory”, a sudden and violent thrust of the stories narrative back to the past, bringing the characters with it. These felt like zombies to me, memories and history that won’t die, that may never have died, and they keep coming back. Most importantly, I thought about the ghostly figure of Beloved herself, a literal example of a zombie coming back to haunt and, following the metaphor, infect her mother Sethe, asserting her control, hypnotizing her and corrupting her present as a physical manifestation of her infected past.