a story about happiness or healing or the success of women escaped from slavery. Rather Morrison delivers the past experiences of enslaved African American women, a past which is often forgotten. In the novel, Morrison brings to life the events and the stories that become permanently imprinted on the readers conscious. Morrison communicates these images through a maze of emotions that accentuate the pain and suffering left by the remains of slavery. Morrison wants the reader not to remember the characters; instead it is their experience that she wants the reader to remember. Throughout Beloved, the past is continually brought forth in the present, both physically and mentally through visual images, particularly those relating to slavery. The life at sweet home is all too real to escape for Sethe, her family, and all the others who once lived there. Sethe is continually brought back to Sweet Home through her rememory, against her own will to forget. Physically, Sethes body bares her memory of Sweet Home; the choketree that is on her back, a maze that Paul D describes as a decorated work of an ironsmith too passionate to display (17). Yet, it is not the physical markings that cause the most pain to those who survived the bonds of slavery, as the story strongly points out, it is the mental images that haunt them along with past emotions of fear, horror, and regret, that manifest themselves physically with vengeance. Morrison uses the word rememory to mean the act of remembering a memory. This rememory is when a memory is revisited, whether physically or mentally. Yet the word is not a verb but a noun. It is an actual thing, person or a place that takes on the existence of a noun. When Sethe explains rememory to Denver, she states, If a house burns down, its gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around there outside my head. I mean, even i...
