Toni Morrison\'s Beloved Through the Exquisitely Penned

¶ … Toni Morrison's Beloved

Through the exquisitely penned prose and evocative storytelling weaved within her novel Beloved, author Toni Morrison manages to depict the spiritual damage inflicted on African-Americans throughout the darkest period in our nation's history. Rather than confine her penetrating perceptive abilities as a writer to the external conditions of slavery, Morrison delves deeply into personal experience and cultural heritage to expose the insidious internal consequences of human bondage on the individuals involved. The tale of escaped slaves Sethe and Denver, a mother and daughter fiercely devoted to one another, and the spiritual upheaval within their Cincinnati home on 124 Bluestone Road, portrays the suffering of an entire people through the prism of a single family struggling to cope with unspeakable tragedy. By beginning the novel with the simple declaration that "124 was haunted. Full of baby's venom" (1987, pp.1). Morrison immediately establishes her thematic purpose, juxtaposing youthful rage and the repression of adulthood, while challenging the reader to consider the import of her mysterious epitaph. By touching on the plight of infancy, the helplessness and frustration of those unable to fully fend for themselves, Morrison alludes to both the fates of characters to come and the overarching societal circumstances imposed on slaves in spite of their supposed freedman status.

Again and again throughout the text of Beloved, Morrison returns to the subject of infantilization and indeed, "a wounded, enraged baby is the central figure of the book, both literally, in the character of Beloved, and symbolically, as it struggles beneath the surface of other major characters" (Schapiro, 1991, pp.195). By comparing the forcible dominion by master over slave to the maternal reliance of infant and mother, Morrison manages to expose the sinister secret buried beneath America's subconscious avoidance, showing with terrible clarity that most lasting wounds inflicted by slavery's legacy are not made by the lash but by the loss of one's sense of self. As a woman who has personally felt the sheer degradation and denial of identity that slavery exacts on one's soul, Sethe's seemingly atrocious sin of murdering her own daughter Beloved becomes more than a simple crime, and instead stands as a desperate act of rebellion and refusal.

Knowing firsthand the horrors which await her daughter as a slave toiling for the sadistic Schoolteacher, Sethe makes the most agonizing decision imaginable for a mother, saving Beloved by ending her life before it can be brutally ripped from her grasp by the cruelties of subservience. The opening line of the novel is evoked once again through Sethe's conflicted grief, as she herself is haunted and filled with the venom of her baby's demise. When she quietly declares that "if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her" (Morrison, 1987, pp.200), Sethe reveals the depths of the sadness felt by an entire people.