Pregnancy and Sweet Home Essay

is a firm believer that too much love is bad for a person. In order to keep his brutal past behind him, he believes that one should only love a little. After Sweet Home, Paul D. attempts to kill his new owner and is forced into a chain-gang in which he is performs oral sex on white men. He realizes that even a rooster has more importance than him to white men. He has trouble committing to a woman who offers him shelter and eventually finds himself at 124, where he discovers Sethe’s overwhelming love and madness and Beloved’s presence. He keeps his memories and feelings in a rusted tobacco tin. When Beloved has sex with him, possibly in a vision or dream, the past comes rushing back to him. “He didn’t hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn’t know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, ‘Red heart. Red heart,’ over and over again” and then wakes himself up with his screaming (138). Beloved is both Sethe’s daughter and a symbol for the past generations of slaves. She opens Paul D. to love again, a cruelty in an already cruel world. Keeping love at bay has helped Paul D. and others like Ella feel safe from their pasts. At the end of the novel, when Beloved is gone, Paul D. goes back to 124 to help Sethe. Morrison shows the human capacity to love after so much has been taken or removed from the human

We are spoiled to be able to live in the United States in the 21st century where slavery has died, and everyone can be free. For a long time in early America, life for all was not this easy. Sure, our lives now might not necessarily be “easy,” but considering the tragedies and pain in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we do not even know the definition of a “hard” life. Morrison’s style of writing uses many different ways to compel the reader to feel and believe the tragedies that Sethe and her children went through, but one that is used in a way above all others is the use of repetition. Morrison uses repetition to convey a sense of insanity and the overlying theme of a past that never passes.

Sethe divulged to Paul D the catastrophic events that caused her to run away from Sweet Home, and then she surrendered her sons and daughter to a woman in a wagon because she was worried about the family’s future under the Schoolteacher’s reign. Her description of the assault was straight forward. She told Paul D and very succinctly the roughness and cruelty of those white people especially the two white boys who beat her while she was pregnant with Denver injuring her so badly that her back skin had been dead for years. She refers to the situation as

Morrison’s frantic tone and syntax portray the long-term, overwhelming effects of rape. In Beloved, after Paul D discloses to Sethe that Halle had witnessed Schoolteacher’s nephews rape her, Sethe expresses her frustration with her memories. Time may pass to dull the clarity of traumatizing experiences, but time may not prevent memories from continuing to harbor, if not increase, the emotional impact of

Sethe’s relationship is in a balance at the beginning. She has the two poles of attraction, Paul’s desire to settle down and start a family, and Beloved’s desire to draw Sethe back into the past. Throughout the novel, acts of cruelty wind into her life and alter the outcome of her days. Cruelty in Beloved affects both the perpetrator and victim in that the perpetrator becomes consumed by such acts, and the victim simply devolves to be more and more vulnerable to such acts. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Beloved’s acts of cruelty reveal how one’s inner desires can overcome the perpetrator, and dehumanize victim in the long term.

Morrison represents the past of African-Americans from her own perspective drawing attention to what slavery can do to individuals and their families. Because of the experiences of slavery, most slaves repressed their memories in an attempt to forget the past. When they repressed their memories of the past it causes them to lose a sense of self and their true identity. Sethe, Paul D. and Denver, all experience this loss of self, which can only be remedied when they all accept the past and their memories of self. Beloved serves as a reminder to these three characters of their buried memories, eventually causing them to rebuild themselves.

Sethe and her friends and family both witness and experience the atrocious institutionalized wrongs and unethical societal norms of slave culture. However, Sethe eventually escapes Sweet Home plantation, hoping to provide a better life for her and her children. She finds a home at 124 Bluestone Road with her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. Like Sethe, Paul D escapes Sweet Home, but he subsequently suffers jail time and further mistreatment. Morrison explains how slavery destroyed Paul D’s ability to love and express himself, “Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut” (Morrison 86). The metaphorical replacement of Paul D’s heart with a rusted tobacco tin illustrates how slavery removed a human quality from him, almost giving him attributes of a machine rather than a person. Slave owners, Mr. Garner and Schoolteacher, reduced Paul D to a worker without a heart. However, Paul D finds an escape from this with Sethe at

Krumholz argues that Beloved is a mind healing recovery process that forces the characters to remember and tackle their past. In her essay, “Toni Morrison”, Jill Matus regards Beloved as a form of cultural memory that analyzes vague and possibly removed history. Furthermore, in his book, Fiction and Folklore: the Novels of Toni Morrison, Trudier Harris focuses on the issue of ownership and slavery in Beloved. In all, historical background is a huge player in understanding Beloved. Morrison set the novel during the Reconstruction era, after the Civil War, which sets the entire tone and plot for the main character, Sethe.

The primary locations in this novel is in Sweet Home, a small farm containing slaves in Kentucky, and 124 Bluestone Road on the edge of Cincinnati, Ohio. Although the novel starts out in the home of Sethe and her daughter, Denver, Sweet Home is where Sethe’s experiences to the past begins. In Sweet Home, the slave system was taken over by Mr. and Mrs. Garner, a kind couple who treated their slaves like human beings. 124 becomes personified through the paranormal activities in the house, and through the chapter names; 124 was spiteful, 124 was loud, and 124 was quiet. Mr. Bodwin, the owner of 124, tells how the house has a history of paranoia, "Women died there: his mother, grandmother, an aunt and an older sister before he was born" (259).

Throughout Beloved, the past is continually brought forth in the present, both physically and mentally through visual images, particularly those relating to slavery. The life at sweet home is all too real to escape for Sethe, her family, and all the others who once lived there.

More often than not, Beloved, as a complete text is seen as a novel that demonstrates the probable damage of repressing memories. By using symbols like a tobacco tin, Morrison is able to demonstrate how the repression of traumatic memories is ineffective in living a full life. One

In the first few pages of the novel, Morrison uses Sethe’s forgetfulness of Beloved’s soul to parallel the forgetfulness of slavery in the average United States citizen. The narrator states, “Counting on the stillness of her own soul, she had forgotten the other one: the soul of her baby girl.” (5). The wording, “the other one [soul]”, implies that the soul of Beloved and that of Sethe are one, inseparable. Yet, Sethe seems to strive to place a barrier between the two souls in the interest of her inner “stillness”. For the modern reader, this sought-after “stillness” derives from the tendency

124, a spiteful, grey and white house on Bluestone Road, a home where many reminisce details of their brutal and inhumane treatments. Many in which are unable to accept their past and look into their future. Toni Morrison concludes the novel “Beloved,” with an inconclusive phrase, “It was not a story to pass on...This is not a story to pass on,” suggesting the path of the characters to come. Throughout the novel, Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered daughter and a representation of slavery, forces the characters to recognize the pain from their past before they can work through it. Her presence causes Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. to come to terms with themselves before she disappears. These characters might try and forget Beloved but the

 Toni Morrison’s powerful novel Beloved is based on the aftermath of slavery and the horrific burden of slavery’s hidden sins.  Morrison chooses to depict the characters that were brutalized in the life of slavery as strong-willed and capable of overcoming such trauma.  This is made possible through the healing of many significant characters, especially Sethe.  Sethe is relieved of her painful agony of escaping Sweet Home as well as dealing with pregnancy with the help of young Amy Denver and Baby Suggs.  Paul D’s contributions to the symbolic healing take place in the attempt to help her erase the past.  Denver plays the most significant role in Sethe’s healing in that she brings the community’s support

When Chelsie was 17, she moved out to Denver, Colorado to be with her mother. This was a significant time in her life due to absences that her mother had taken throughout Chelsie’s childhood, and adolescent years. Once she arrived in Colorado, Chelsie enrolled in a new high school to complete her senior year. Half way through that year, she met a man named Gavin, who became the love of her life as they developed a relationship together that they would forever cherish. After earning her high school diploma, Chelsie decided to seek employment. Soon after, Chelsie was faced with a life changing decision, when she realized that she was pregnant at 18. Supportively, Gavin and Chelsie stuck together, knowing how drastically both their lives were about to change.