In Beloved, Jazz and Paradise, Toni Morrison negotiates ways of individual and collective identity formation through figurations of space and trauma. In geographical spaces that are public and private, open and closed, inclusive and exclusive, space of the past and spaces of the present, Morrison writes discursive spaces in which to create individual and communal African American history and identity, based on the traumatic hi-stories at the core of the Black American experience: the Middle Passage, slavery, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, just to name a few. In the three novels, Toni Morrison subscribes to a postmodern notion of space and place, presenting it as relative to the individual- frame of mind. Places are used as metonymies for the protagonists" traumatized minds and their different ways of dealing with trauma. Trauma that is not worked through and transcended is presented by Morrison as impacting the protagonists- ability to fashion a home out of a vast and often hostile space. The physical and mental space of Morrison- protagonists is occupied by historical traumata that disables the protagonists to find a place in the present without revisiting the places of their troubled past. While this burdens their lives, it also opens up a historical and metahistorical discourse that allows the revision of mainstream historiography to include minority histories of oppression and trauma. Morrison reconfigures the American historical landscape by emphasizing the subjectivity of any history and offering alternatives to historical grand narratives through her historiographic metafiction. All three novels explore the possibility of reconciliation between past trauma and present life. Doing so requires Morrison to send her protagonists on strenuous journeys through time and space in order to visit the past trauma that keeps them from making a home in the here and now. The protagonists venture back to the primal scenes that bear major significance for their lives but have been suppressed for being too painful to remember. Their pain thus awakens anew, but out of it grow the possibility of a life in the present and the hope for a future. The pasts Morrison thus digs up serve as anchors to situate the African American place in the American historical landscape. Those primal places have a geographical as well as a historical and psychological quality, as places in Morrison- novels are often used as metonymies for the protagonists" traumatized minds, containing the memory of the traumatic past. By spatializing time, Morrison makes history accessible to a communal working through, thus countering the modernist impulse to treat memory as a private faculty embedded in the individual- psyche. This makes it difficult, for African Americans with individual recollections of slavery and racist oppression for example, to use traumatic memory as the basis for a common sense of identity. Morrison uses spatialized time as a forum to discover this basis, to allow for the establishment of a common historical bond. At the same time, she warns against instrumentalizing a common history to exclude those who do not share it. Any history, for Morrison, should be open and flexible enough to accommodate different perspectives. Essentially, Morrison suggests that western historiography is a discursive construct. By allowing, in all three novels, a polyphonic weaving of different equal histories to destablize a single, authoritative, hegemonic historiography, Morrison gives African Americans the power to construct her own past, her own present, and thereby claim back her identity. Moreover, Morrison destabilizes the duality of private space and public space that has long served to distinguish subjective individual memory from objective communal history and thus to legitimize certain accounts of history at the expense of others. The gendered as well as the racial other, by virtue of being excluded from the public sphere, have been excluded from their own historicization. By opening up the private sphere of personal trauma and loss, Morrison spatializes personal memory in a way that it forms a parallel public sphere in which African Americans may negotiate their historicity, move out of the timelessness of the private into the historicized public. By opening up the traditionally private sphere of the home to the public and turning it into a deeply political place, Morrison redefines home in a way that it does not necessarily conform to the classic view of a closed-off shelter but rather a transient place with flexible boundaries that allows for the formation of liberated individual and communal identities out of (hi)stories of pain and trauma.
As the oldest genre in New Zealand literature written in English, poetry always played a significant role in the country's literary debate and was generally considered to be an indicator of the country's cultural advancement. Throughout the 20th century, the question of home, of where it is and what it entails, became a crucial issue in discussing a distinct New Zealand sense of identity and in strengthening its independent cultural status. The establishment of a national sense of home was thus of primary concern, and poetry was regarded as the cultural marker of New Zealand's independence as a nation. In this politically motivated cultural debate, the writing of women was only considered on the margin, largely because their writing was considered too personal and too intimately tied together with daily life, especially domestic life, as to be able to contribute to a larger cultural statement. Such criticism built on gender role stereotypes, like for instance women's roles as mothers and housewives in the 1950s. The strong alignment of women with the home environment is not coincidental but a construct that was, and still is, predominantly shaped by white patriarchal ideology. However, it is in particular women's, both Pakeha and Maori, thorough investigation into the concept of home from within New Zealand's society that bears the potential for revealing a more profound relationship between actual social reality and the poetic imagination. The close reading of selected poems by Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, Lauris Edmond and J.C. Sturm in this thesis reveals the ways in which New Zealand women of different backgrounds subvert, transcend and deconstruct such paradigms through their poetic imagination. Bethell, Stanley, Edmond and Sturm position their concepts of home at the crossroads between the public and the private realm. Their poems explore the correspondence between personal and national concerns and assess daily life against the backdrop of New Zealand's social development. Such complex socio-cultural interdependence has not been paid sufficient attention to in literary criticism, largely because a suitable approach to capturing the complexity of this kind of interconnectedness was lacking. With Spaces of Overlap and Spaces of Mediation this thesis presents two critical models that seek to break the tight critical frames in the assessment of poetic concepts of home. Both notions are based on a contextualised approach to the poetic imagination in relation to social reality and seek to carve out the concept of home in its interconnected patterns. Eventually, this approach helps to comprehend the ways in which women's intimate negotiations of home translate into moments of cultural insight and transcend the boundaries of the individual poets' concerns. The focus on women's (re)negotiations of home counteracts the traditionally male perspective on New Zealand poetry and provides a more comprehensive picture of New Zealand's cultural fabric. In highlighting the works of Ursula Bethell, Mary Stanley, Lauris Edmond and J.C. Sturm, this thesis not only emphasises their individual achievements but makes clear that a traditional line of New Zealand women's poetry exists that has been neglected far too long in the estimation of New Zealand's literary history.