Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987)

Extract

[...] The novel tells of her spiritual journey to overcome her traumatic past and get rid of fears, insecurities that seem ingrained in the Afro-American psych. Such insecurities are to be found in Paul another Sweet Home former slaver, whose life as a slave and as a part of a chain gang has left him so distressed that he is now wary of feelings but unable to resist the appeal of Beloved. Such as Sethe, he embodies the difficulty of establishing a sense of self-worth out of the traumatizing experience of slavery, which, as the ending suggests, shall be made possible by forgiveness and a self-evolved sense of resilience. [...]

[...] Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987) The novel is about the horrors of slavery and how its trauma is bequeathed from generation to generation. Former slaves, such as Sethe, Paul or Baby Suggs seem unable to let go of a past when their identities were shattered at the core, they were treated as mere animals or conveniences, deprived of self-confidence and dignity. Beloved embodies the ghost of slavery, the haunting and the trauma which ensued and still hovers over on every character's life, making them somehow helpless. [...]

[...] Denver is almost the only survivor among Sethe's children, since her two brothers ran away, frightened by the ghost of their dead sister. Secluded and lonely for the most part of her life, she is forced by Beloved's aggressive behavior to find shelter in the community and escape the endlessly repetition of the past. [...]

[...] This is a double-edged love as she killed her child because she wanted to spare her a life of slavery and all the miseries that slaves had to suffer. Thus, guilt, resentment and love vie with each other, only for the latter to prevail at the end in the different relationships described in the novel, with Denver finally finding her place in the community and Sethe freed of her obsession for the child that she killed and forgiven by Paul who seems ready to take care of her. [...]

[...] Beloved is replete with symbols. The savagery lashed upon slaves is made at first conspicuous by the scar on Sethe's back, which is in the shape of a chokeberry tree and, as such, represents the deceitful allure of Sweet Home, the plantation where she used to be a slave. The colors for instance play an important role : when Baby Suggs learn that her daughter-in-law killed her child, she takes permanently to her bed and finds solace in colors such as blue and yellow, while Paul D when he first arrives at 124 (the absence of 3 in the series of number beckoning to the killing of the third child, known as Beloved), is made hesitant by an ominous "pool of red light", which reminds him of the open cuts of slavery, that in his mind are symbolized by the violent behavior of a rooster with a bright red comb named Mister the comb. [...]