Toni Morrison's Beloved

Taylor Greer has lived in Kentucky all her life. Yet, the life available to her in Kentucky is not what she always dreamed of: "none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife" (3). Living with her mother, Taylor becomes more independent and striven to find a better life. Taylor's father disappeared before she could even remember

Beloved is seen as the resemblance of Sethe’s dead baby. Beloved is portrayed as a teenage girl, however she is different from other black teenager, “…and younger than her clothes suggested – good lace at the throat, and a rich woman’s hat. Her skin was flawless except for three vertical scratches on her forehead so fine and thin they seemed at first like hair, baby hair before it bloomed and roped into the masses of black yarn under her hat.” (Morrison 62). Beloved unexpectedly came to 124, the house where Sethe, Denver, and Paul D lived. However, Sethe became attracted to her, “Sethe was deeply touched by her sweet name; the remembrance of glittering headstone made her feel especially kindly toward her. Denver, however, was shaking. She looked at this sleepy beauty and wanted more.” (Morrison 63) represent Sethe’s fascination towards Beloved, because she made Sethe recall her dead baby, which also has the word Beloved engraved in the gravestone. The name Beloved itself makes Sethe sentimental from

At the center of the novel is Sethe, a former slave who escaped to the North before the Civil War. When the novel begins, a dark, terrible secret hangs over Sethe that keeps her apart from the rest of the people in her neighborhood. As the novel progresses, the story of her life emerges in a complex patchwork. Sethe's life for the most part, had been relatively sheltered; at fourteen, she was sold to Sweet Home, where she was a domestic servant rather than a plantation worker. She also had the "amazing luck of six whole years of marriage to that "somebody" son who had fathered every one of her children"(29) - a rarity for a slave in the South.

Beloved is a novel by Toni Morrison based on slavery after the Civil War in the year 1873, and the hardships that come with being a slave. This story involves a runaway captive named Sethe, who commits a heinous crime to protect her child from the horrors of slavery. Through her traumas, Sethe runs from the past and tries to live a normal life. The theme of Toni Morrison’s story Beloved is how people cannot escape the past. Every character relates their hard comings to the past through setting, character development, and conflict.

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.

Beloved is about a lady they call Sethe who lives in Bluestone with her daughter Denver and her mother in law Baby Suggs. Fifteen years before the story starts, Sethe kills her baby because she was trying to keep her kids from being brought into slavery. The community knew about her killing her baby and judges her. Her sons Buglar and Howard left fifth teen years before the book started.

Stamp Paid confronted the wickedness of having a fellow black live in a empty lonesome cellar, another example of the pain the community inflicts upon itself. They not only alienate Sethe and her family, but Paul D for having relations with them. The community “was longing for Sethe to come on difficult times” (155 Hinson), and Paul D was only another target for the community’s anger. Hajer Ayadi theorizes here that instead of taking care of a fellow ex-slave Paul D, the community once again “fails to perform its role” (Ayadi, 265).

There are always multiple interpretations of a text that depend on the reader’s experiences. Words work the same way yet, readers want to find the “correct” interpretation. Toni Morrison writes in her foreword for Beloved that in order “to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way” (xix). The foreword sets up the reader to grapple with the fact that Morrison wants them to view the text through more than one lens, lenses that may not come from their personal experiences but still valid lenses, and to experience the text through these many perspectives. Morrison comments on a reader’s desire for a singular lens through Sethe, Paul D, Baby Suggs and Denver’s different meanings of the word tree.

“Good for you. More it hurt more better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know”(Morrison 92). Healing is a prominent theme throughout Beloved; a novel about the life of an ex-slave, Sethe, and the repercussions of her past mistakes. She murdered her baby in order to prevent her from becoming enslaved. However, years later, the ghost of the baby haunts the family in their home on 124 Bluestone Rd. The ghost is filled with resentment towards her mother, therefore she becomes spiteful and seeks revenge. She feels unloved, betrayed and alone, so, in order to heal those feelings, she manifests herself in human form. The ghost becomes Beloved, a 19-year-old woman with a duplicitous grudge. She slithers her way into 124 and the hearts

Morrison’s writing style change throughout the book. By the last chapter, the narrator takes on an outsider perspective. The author uses voice, tone, sentence structure and diction to communicate with the readers on her stances about issues in the black community. Throughout Beloved, the narrator is omniscient and speaks informally to reflect the character’s individual voices.

Critics and also Sethe describe Beloved as the “reincarnation” (Perkins 43) of her dead daughter. Symbolically Beloved is the epitome of pain and struggle from Sethe’s past. Ironically the ghost’s name is Beloved the same word engraved on the Sethe’s baby’s tombstone. Beloved is also the age Sethe’s daughter would be if she was alive (Napierkowski). Beloved is clueless as to why she is here or from where she came, however, she manages to ask Sethe questions that originate from her past like,

“But Ms, Riley, I swear I turned that assignment in!” Throughout my elementary school days and even my middle school days, I found myself saying this a lot. I would be angry and/or upset (I do not remember) at the slim yet emotion-inducing “O” in the gradebook. Of course, me being me, there was no way I turned my assignments in. The days in elementary school passed by, then middle school came and nearly nothing has changed, but one thing is for sure. Each time a zero was filled in, I got less and less frustrated with the teacher, and more and frustrated at myself. Frustrated that I was frustrated, I sought a change by focusing what I would do next time to avoid the zero, and now, assignments slip every once in awhile but it definitely

The main focus of Beloved is the death of Sethe’s eldest daughter. When Sethe noticed the arrival of the four white horsemen, she made life-altering decision. The choice she made forever drove a wedge between Sethe and her children. She thought she was choosing the lesser of two evils, while her children were left to fear that their own mother would eventually kill them. The life of a slave was not something Sethe wanted her children to endure, so much so that she thought death would be an easier fate than slavery. The pain and suffering of slavery led Sethe to do the unthinkable, kill her own

Sethe is the heroine of the story. She is a black slave who lost her mother at a very young age. She was brought to the Sweet Home Plantation as a slave where she marries Halle Suggs and bears four children with him. She suffers the most atrocious behavior at the plantation by the white masters. She is whipped pitilessly and milked like a cow.

This trauma is caused by the invasion of Sweet Home into the healing space that once was 124. Sweet Home is the location in which slavery occurs; therefore, marking it as a site of trauma that inhabits the memories of Sethe and Paul D. As Jesser mentions, “Sweet Home is the reference point through which Sethe makes her decisions about the future. It is also the place that they ‘belonged to’ and that ‘belonged to them.’ For Denver, it is a site of exclusion. She challenges their attachments to each and to the past” (Jesser 329). While Sweet Home was once considered a place of “nice slavery,” it now houses the memories of trauma for those who witnessed and experienced it. For Denver, who has no actual memories of slavery for herself, she is still affected by slavery because it traumatizes those around her.