Memories In Toni Morrison's Beloved

In the book Sethe states, "When I put that headstone up I wanted to lay in there with you, put your head on my shoulder and keep you warm, and I would have if Buglar and Howard and Denver didn't need me, because my mind was homeless then." (241) I can't even begin to imagine the tremendous amount of pain she felt when murdering her first child. As the story goes on Sethe is blinded by love and grants Beloved's every desire. Beloved would consume every resource they had to the max and she wouldn't care if her mother or sister ate, "But the pain was unbearable when they ran low on food, and Denver watched her mother go without-pick-eating around the edges of the table and stove: the hominy that stuck on the bottom; the crusts and rinds and peelings of things." (285) Sethe was practically eating the little bit of leftovers Beloved left behind whole Denver starved. Denver has grown up to be an only child ever since Howard & Buglar ran away. So when she met Beloved she automatically got attached and poured all her love into her until she decided she had enough. One day she decided to get out of the house and seek for

Although this event is repeated several times, it is never repeated for the some reason or in the same way. We go from meeting Amy before Denver is born, to the actual birth on the boat, and finally the story of naming the baby after she is born. This sequence of events, and the use of the story over and over again, show its significance in Sethe’s life so far. Not only was it the start of a wonderful relationship with her daughter, but it was also the start of some pretty horrible memories. This is referring to Sethe’s sudden urge to try to kill her children as protection from future slavery. While she thought this was a good idea at the time, it turned out to be yet another horrible memory in her life. Using this story a number of times in the text shows the overbearing weight Sethe must carry with this

Sethe says she believes she won't even have to explain her motives for killing her (a love so great she can't let her be taken into a life of slavery). "I don't have to remember nothing," Sethe tells herself on page 183. "I don't even have to explain. She understands it all." Sethe believes the one true way she will find restitution and understanding with Beloved, is by knowing the mark she has left on her daughter. "I only need to know one thing. How bad is the scar?" Sethe feels that by knowing the scar, by touching the "memory of a smile under her chin," she can feel her daughter's pain and connect with her.

Stamp Paid, a former slave who ferries Sethe and Denver across the Ohio River, tried to take Beloved’s corpse from the mother’s clinging hands and give Denver to her. A mother killing her own child is an act that subverts the natural order of the world. A mother is expected to create life, not destroy it, but with Sethe’s case, she was insane and out of control at that specific moment when she imagined that her child might face the same assault in future. Thus, she prefers to put an end to this situation. On the other hand, we notice that she was very anxious about the feeling of Beloved, her murdered child. She stated, “Do you forgive me? Will you stay? You safe here now”

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

Morrison uses the voices of two people, lost from each other in remembrance, and brings them together by juxtaposing memory against memory until finally their recollections converge in the same episode. After a sexual encounter, Sethe and Paul D reflect on their shared experiences in slavery at the Sweet Home plantation. It is against this backdrop that both characters struggle to tackle their feelings of inadequacy. Although Sethe and Paul D share their memories, there is only so much that they are willing to divulge since "[s]aying more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from" (Morrison 72). While Paul's coping mechanism is to place all of his painful memories in the tobacco tin buried in his chest, Sethe's coping mechanism is prevention. The characterizations of Sethe, Paul D, and Sethe's daughter Denver continue through the use of flashbacks. By juxtaposing memory with scenes from the present, Morrison offers a better understanding of Denver and her reaction to Paul D. Lonely and troubled, she finds solace inside her own small world and connection to the memories her mother has shared with her regarding her birth. Denver feeds her hunger through these memories as well as through perfume and the boxwood arbor. It is in this first trimester that Morrison begins to connect imagery with the retrieval of past events. For all, the baby ghost acts as a catalyst for remembering the past.

Sethe is not simply attempting to kill her children just for the sake of doing it; she sees no other option for the betterment of their lives. Sethe is attempting to take the lives of her children out of pure love and the opportunity to not drag them through a life of suffering.

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

Toni Morrison brings another surprise to the story of Beloved. The addition of character Beloved conceals whole meaning Morrison tries to conduct to the readers. So far, character Beloved is portrayed as an innocent, pure, yet egotistic girl. Beloved also presumably the incarnation of Sethe’s dead baby, whose tomb is engraved Beloved. Morrison offers supernatural element in the story to create mysterious and spooky atmosphere, which raise curiosity and excite readers even more.

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

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

Sethe is continually brought back to Sweet Home through her rememory, against her own will to forget. Physically, Sethe’s body bares her memory of Sweet Home; the choketree that is on her back, a maze that Paul D describes as a “decorated work of an ironsmith too passionate to display” (17). Yet, it is not the physical markings that cause the most pain to those who survived the bonds of slavery, as the story strongly points out, it is the mental images that haunt them along with past emotions of fear, horror, and regret, that manifest themselves physically with vengeance. Morrison uses the word rememory to mean the act of remembering a memory. This rememory is when a memory is revisited, whether physically or mentally. Yet the word is not a verb but a noun. It is an actual thing, person or a place that takes on the existence of a noun. When Sethe explains rememory to Denver, she states, “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around there outside my head. I mean, even if

Repression of memories is a psychological concept that has haunted modern psychology for years. Repression of memories also known as “rememory” defined by the mind pushing away traumatic or shocking experiences into a dark corner of a person’s unconscious. As this idea developed and began to be studied more thoroughly, slavery became an institution in which researchers saw promise in drawing conclusions about the dangers of repressing memories. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the character narratives of Paul D and Sethe exemplify the dangers of repressing memories. Both disconnect from and push away unwanted emotional traumas or experiences from their past. However, this effort doesn’t pay off and their repression of memories is not successful. Through the use of symbols such as Paul D’s tobacco tin and Sethe’s scars and lost child, Morrison demonstrates how repression of the past isn’t effective and how it always comes back to haunt a person who doesn’t correctly cope with their trauma. Paul D and Sethe live unfulfilled lives as a result of repressed memories.

Sethe, a mother, who only wants the best for her children allows her idea of freedom to be affected, and by having her daughter back Sethe is given a second chance at emotional freedom. In the novel Morrison shows how a desperate

“I won 't be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I 've got a lot out of it, I have to admit I 'll welcome the chance to rest—to stop and think and remember. I 'm sure it 's at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I 've been getting this urge to order all these old memories” (Ishiguro, 34). Over the course of the novel, and as the film unfolds, the whole story is told in a series of flashbacks as Kathy reencounters her life. Kathy stumbles over every difficult memory as she grapples with her life while trying to gear up for donations. Living in the past may be easier to do rather than digest that her life has reached its peak. She has outlived Helsham, her best friends, and now is alone to watch over the dying and wait for her time to complete. The only way that she can go back and indulge in a time when things were somewhat easier is by reliving her memories. There she can experience her time with Tommy on repeat, and learn to muddle through all the things that she has lost and all that she has left. Kathy balances on the line of experiencing her past and living in it. Although she claims that when her time to complete is upon her she will welcome it and will comfort the rest from her memories, but it seems that she uses the past as a coping mechanism. The past is easier, she lived it, she had a good life and reliving it gives her a distraction from her impending fate. It may have been nostalgia at first but then