Based
on a true story, Beloved by Toni
Morrison is a novel that tracks the life of Sethe, a mother who happens to be
an ex-slave, and the people in her life who have been affected by the way that
memories of slavery threaten her ability to love freely. The novel encompasses
many themes, such as power, love, memory, community, and morality of slavery,
and it also sheds light on the ways that “free” life for slaves was still
dictated by the power that white people did not relinquish even after legal
emancipation.
Sethe
is first introduced at her house in Ohio, referred to as 124. It has been
haunted for eighteen years, ever since Sethe killed her baby in a shed in its
backyard. The event sounds monstrous and cold-blooded at face value, but as
readers learn of the complexities of Sethe’s experience with slavery at Sweet
Home and the horrors that she had to endure leading up to the point of her
child’s death, it becomes more understandable as to why she could do such a
thing to her own child whom she loved so much.
Sethe’s
life at 124 starts to change when Paul D, another ex-slave from Sweet Home,
arrives at her door and continues to reside at the house. As Paul D makes
himself more comfortable in their home, the spirit that lingered in 124
diminishes its presence. One day, after Denver, Sethe’s only remaining child,
Paul D, and Sethe spend a day at the fair, they come home to find a young woman
sitting on a tree stump outside the house. From then on, memories of slavery
and the journey to freedom start to pile up for the adults who lived through
its terror, and Denver starts to learn more about the truth that has been only
slightly revealed to her through bits and pieces of stories that Sethe can
hardly bear to tell. This addition to 124 turns out to be Beloved, the child
that Sethe killed when her slave master, Schoolteacher, came back for her and
her family eighteen years ago. As each character’s relationships with Beloved
develop, the themes of the book become richer and all bend toward the same
major points—that love has the power to consume or take your life, that
processing grievous memories of pain makes the present a still difficult place,
and that community has the power to heal.
Love
is a sticky subject for slaves and ex-slaves alike, because in slavery, nothing
could belong to them to be loved. This is a problem for free life too, because
characters such as Sethe and Paul D must learn to love things again. When Paul
D tries to accuse Sethe for doing the wrong thing in killing her daughter, his
justification is that her “love is too thick” (193). She tells him that “love is or it ain’t,”
which is something that Paul D cannot understand, because for so long he has
shut down any emotion, especially love, just so he can simply survive (194). The
book went from no sense of love at all in haunted 124 to an ending with a lot
more love that the reader just does not understand. This is relevant to today’s discussion of the
African American experience from slavery and beyond because it shows the
fundamental healing that so many individuals had to undergo as an aftereffect,
even when emancipation finally happened. For the characters, love consumes life
or can take it away from you, which is why Sethe kills her child and why Paul D
has turned himself off from the emotion so completely. Because slavery made it
okay for white people to degrade slaves’ love, it is something that causes as
much pain as it does beauty.
In
general history classes, students are taught that ex-slaves’ lives became
instantly better after emancipation, and that the problems that existed in
slavery did not pervade and pervert what was supposed to be free life. Beloved proves this to be true because
it gives gripping examples of how memories of slavery are as horrific as the
events of abuse themselves. Morrison uses the word “rememory” on multiple
occasions to show how the characters (and ultimately all ex-slaves in real
life) had to relive so many horrible events, and how slavery did not truly end
when the Emancipation Proclamation was announced. Even after slavery has been
abolished, the institution has left physical and psychological scars. All ex-slaves
deal with the forever-lasting trauma of slavery; however, for characters like
Sethe, Paul D, and Halle, it drew them to a point of insanity. Beloved, the
physical representation of the lasting trauma of slavery, eventually renders
Sethe powerless and so unlike herself that Denver fears she has “lost” her
mother (314). For Sethe’s memory, “no misery, no regret, no hateful picture”
was “too rotten to accept” (83). Slavery continues to overrun her life because
her memory was “loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left no room for
her to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (83). In Sethe’s lives and
the lives of real ex-slaves after emancipation, slavery still dominated and
their identities and memories were not theirs alone.
A
hopeful element does shine through Beloved,
however, and it applies to lives of slaves in a nonfiction setting as well.
At the end of the novel, the personified Beloved has stopped making amends with
Sethe and actually begins to eat away at her, causing more guilt and more loss
of identity as a mother and an ex-slave who has been through so many terrors.
When the rest of the black community of Sethe’s rural Ohio town hears about the
haunting that continues in 124, they approach the house and the family in song
to drive away the “devil-child” (308). The community helps drive away the
domination that memories of slavery has pressed on Sethe’s life: “Building
voice upon voice until they found [the key]…It broke over Sethe and she
trembled like the baptized in its wash” (308). This proves that communities
could band together to support one another in light of all the terrible things
that slavery and its memories and distortions of love wreaked upon ex-slaves.
Toni Morrison uses literature to
show readers, even centuries after slavery, that its effects run rampant even
after freedom and that the institution complicates the most basic human
emotions.
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