Author(s)

Qian Zihan ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Department of English Language and Literature, Southeast University, Nanjing, China

Corresponding Author

Qian Zihan

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.

KEYWORDS

Beloved; Toni Morrison; New Materialism; Thing Narrative; Racial Trauma; Cultural Identity Reconstruction

CITE THIS PAPER

Qian Zihan. Thing Narrative: A Reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved from the Perspective of New Materialism. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2026). Vol. 9, No. 2, 1-7. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2026.090201.

REFERENCES

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[2] Bennett J., (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things in Life. Duke University Press.
[3] Brown B., (2010) A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. University of Chicago Press.
[4] Hartman S., (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press.
[5] Morrison T., (1987) Beloved. Vintage Books.
[6] Moten F., (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press.
[7] Nilsen J., (2016) Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life. Stanford University Press.
[8] Nixon R., (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
[9] Serres M., (1995) The Natural Contract. University of Michigan Press.
[10] Wardi A.J., (2021) Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color. University Press of Mississippi.

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