Combating Historical Amnesia:The Memory-individual as the Living Memory in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead

In Marilynne Robinson's Gilead,the first John Ames is the memory-individual whose personal memory serves as the living memory to combat the collective historical amnesia of Iowa’s antislavery movement.For all his efforts,memory is framed by the present.Gilead has forgotten its abolitionist root and anti-racial discrimination tradition.The individual effort to resist collective historical amnesia fails.Through the first Ames’s failure,Robinson presents the politics of memory,particularly the struggle between individual memory and collective historical amnesia.The historical amnesia of abolitionism over Gilead is Robinson’s criticism of the present societal betrayal of the pursuit of racial equality as epitomized in the historical antislavery movement.Robinson’s memory writing in Gilead is also her literary endeavor to remember the forgotten history and to reflect upon the racial issue pervading present American society.