A Symbolic Devices In Toni Morrison's Beloved

 In the novel Beloved, the author, Toni Morrison, attempts to promote a variety of different themes and ideas by symbolizing them in minor events and situations.  This symbolism is evident throughout the entire novel and is very crucial to the understanding and analyzing of the text.  A good example of this is the ice skating scene.  Morrison uses this scene to represent the slow, but consistent, deterioration of the family living in 124 and to foreshadow the ultimate demise of the family unit.  Morrison writes repeatedly, “Nobody saw them falling,” yet in all reality they were falling, and falling fast (Morrison 174).  There are a number of details, including the setting, Sethe’s emotions, the choice of

Sethe has lived an unthinkable past as a slave. Although she is no longer a slave physically, she is not entirely free. She cannot erase her horrible

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison spins an intricate web between names and numbers for the reader to unravel. The deep connection that lies between names and numbers is a direct correspondence to the identity and worth of black people during slavery. Beloved begins with the identity of the house which is characterized by a number. The house is given a temperament as if it is a living, breathing entity and yet it still referred to as a number. The significance of this is symbolic to the plight of the black slaves. Regarded as little above the common animal, slaves were defined by their selling price, essentially they were reduced to a number. Viewed as nonbeings they nevertheless feel and suffer their place in the south. The character Beloved is similar in this regard as well. All that defines her is an age and a name that remains unfluctuating through time. In an insufferable and cruel world, names and numbers play a critical role in understanding the identity of black existence in the South. To uncover the implications and nuances that names and numbers play will be instrumental to delving into the lives of black slaves. Beloved contains a vast amount of names and numbers and the connections between them deepen the novel and provide mammoth insight into understanding and interpreting Morrison’s work and purpose for juxtaposing such elaborate bonds between names and numbers.

Even after she acknowledges Beloved's identity, Sethe shows herself to be still enslaved by the past, because she quickly succumbs to Beloved's demands and allows herself to be consumed by Beloved. Only when Sethe learns to confront the past head-on, to assert herself in its presence, can she extricate herself from its oppressive power and begin

When Sethe first meets Beloved, she welcomes her with a suspiciously large magnitude. Furthermore, it is clear that Sethe never revealed her past experiences to Denver, yet the moment Beloved asks about her lost earrings, it was “the first time she had heard anything about her(Sethe’s) mother’s mother”(61). This proves that Beloved, and not anyone else, is pulling Sethe to the past, by making her recollect of her days as a slave. In addition,“it is clear why she holds on to you(Sethe), but I just can’t see why you holding on to her,” Paul mentioned(67). This shows how Paul realizes that Sethe has taken in Beloved without much reasoning, and when Beloved hums a song that Sethe happened to make up, Sethe fully but blindly embraces Beloved as family. In fact, she “had gone to bed smiling,” anxious to “unravel the proof for the conclusion she had already leapt to”(181). This shows how consumed by Beloved she is.

In this chapter, we learn that Sethe was already pregnant with Denver when she ran away from Sweet Home. By the time when Sethe collapsed her feet in the woods, a white girl Amy Denver had found Sethe. Due to Sethe’s fear about Sweet Home, she told Amy Denver a false name- “Lu”, because if she were caught, she would be returned to Sweet Home, and she would continue experiencing her previous painful daily life again. Amy Denver helps Sethe by massaged her feet and release her pain. Later, Sethe gave birth to her baby successfully with Amy’s help and Sethe also naming the child after Amy Denver.

Sethe understands that her history, filled with the pain of slavery, grief over losing her children, and guilt over Beloved's death, and tries to hide from all the anguish. However, she admits that the past seems to "always be there waiting," thereby emphasizing the idea that past horrors of life continue to haunt forever. It appears as though the power of her experience in slavery influences her so greatly that the memory triggers great pain, causing the horrifying incidents to "happen again." Even though Sethe understands that she cannot ever fully escape her history as it will come back to trouble her, she still tries to avoid them and thus attempts to shield her daughter from the horrors of history: "As for Denver, the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered" (45). It seems as though Sethe tries to deny the fact that history does not simply disappear. She still tries to protect Denver "from the past" even though history "waits," prepared to cause trouble and inflict the pain Sethe tries to repress. It appears as though Sethe continuously tries to fight against her memories and ignore her past in part one. For example, after she wakes, she begins "Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's

Sethe lives in the shadow of her act of infanticide throughout the entire length of the book. This is because its legacy pervades itself throughout the entire novel, showing events leading up, and ways the future has been affected. The novel begins as such: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. (Page 1)” This baby refers to Beloved, who became a ghostly presence in Sethe’s house and continuously terrorizes the house

It was the trauma Sethe suffered as a slave and during her attempts to escape slavery that damaged her psyche. Firstly, the damage on Sethe’s unconsciousness due to her traumatic experience as a slave is evident in her and other characters’ physical depiction of herself. Secondly, Sethe’s emotional responses to stressful situations and the remembrance of her past show the dissociative and regressive effect of her traumatic past on her emotions. Sethe suspects that her mother abandoned her when she tried to escape and was killed. Also her mother also worked long hours, thus spending less time with Sethe, causing an emotional distance between herself and Sethe. This is probably what led to Sethe sacrificing her identity as a person and becoming part of her children’s dental. The lack of love from her mother led Sethe to become overly loving to her children in a depremetal way, thus stopping her from connecting to her on an emotional level. The schoolteacher’s views on slaves further dissociated Sethe to her own identity, by influencing the way she feels about herself. Lastly, Sethe’s hazy and fragmented memories, show the result of leading her to have her past life interjected into present moments of life. For example, when Sethe was running across the field to wash the chamomile sap off her legs, she would have

Through character development, the story also portrays the theme of escaping the past. Sethe’s actions are influenced heavily by her dead child, Beloved. When the “human” form of Beloved arrives while sleeping

The main character Sethe struggles with her haunted legacy of slavery, from her threatening memories and in the form of her dead daughter. Sethe’s existence in the present is a struggle in which she struggle in the past and the painful experiences she had to endure of her daughter’s death and at Sweet Home. Slavery would destroy the victims’ traditional family structures, or from forming. Slaves in the book, and in history were often deprived of the foundations of their identity aside from being servants to their master. Slaves were not able to get married because both of them would give a contract to one another. And slaves are already contracted to their owners, so there is not a sense of freedom. Sethe’s past has damaged her life and hoped to bring the pieces back together. Denver, Sethe’s fourth daughter, is very isolated from the black community that it prevents her from forming her own identity. In chapter five, it happened that Beloved seem to be a manifestation of Sethe’s infant daughter which was killed in order to be free from slavery. It was not clear if Beloved was an incarnation of the infant, spirit of a dead baby, or just a ghost. People assumed that she was the dead infant in a grown woman’s body. She represented as a baby in many ways, cannot walk, impaired

Morrison and Twain each present freed slave mothers as self-sacrificing. Each woman 's traumatic experiences as slaves create a deep fear of her children 's enslavement. In Morrison 's Beloved, Sethe is so distressed by her past; she murders her child to save her from slavery. Morrison uses Sethe 's drastic sacrifice to comment on slavery 's psychological effects. Meanwhile, Twain 's Pudd 'n Head Wilson portrays Roxy as a sacrificial mother to create sympathy for black people. From a cultural perspective, Roxy counters all of the propaganda about black people in the nineteenth century. Roxy plans to kill her son and herself, but figures out a different way to save her son from slavery. Both characters are selfless mothers, but the authors use this sacrificial behavior to prove different points about slavery. Morrison uses her characters selflessness to show the distress slavery can cause, while Twain capitalizes on the sympathy it creates to humanize black people in the public 's view.

does so by demonstrating how Sethe, a former slave, both copes with experiences from her past

Sethe is a murderer of her own daughter Beloved, simultaneously, she is also a huge victim of slavery. However, by mainly portraying Sethe as a criminal, Morrison shadows an precedently unrevealed perspective on how a dark past could gain possession of one’s present - throughout the story, Sethe struggles hard at beating back the long dark past by keeping Beloved from taking over her present. Moreover, the killed Beloved’s desire of coming back to claim retribution for what was taken from her further unveils the hideous history of slavery. Apart from that, the lovers, Sethe and Paul D, who engage in the hopes of a mutual healing and of a future together, assert that “We need some kind of tomorrow” (Morrison, 273). Regarding Paul’s suggestions of a “vague futurity” (Rody, 103), I wonder what this possible transformation reveals about the “history” they experienced together, and how could they reconcile the tension between the past and the

Her actions have far-reaching repercussions for those around her, even years after the death of Beloved. The introduction of the preternatural in the form of both the ghost of Beloved and the appearance of a young woman who is uncannily like the daughter that Sethe murdered presents an element of stigmatisation to the lives Sethe and her family. Reincarnated as a representation of Sethe’s inability to let of what she did to her infant daughter, Beloved becomes a symbol of hope for Sethe, but also a symbol of the necessary violence she tries so desperately to forget. This has a lasting impact on her position in the black community which noticeably shuns those who resort to the very same violence that the white oppressor used to control black slaves. Sethe rebels against these “social mores that suggest mothering is nonviolent” (Putnam, 2011: 38) and takes drastic measures to ensure their freedom: even freedom in death. Thus, violence begets violence, becoming a perpetuating cycle out of necessity for