Beloved Toni Morrison\'s Novel Beloved

Beloved

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved analyzes the effects of slavery on the lives of the African-Americans in a very interesting way. Instead of telling a story about the violence of the white slave masters and about the sufferings of the black people, Morrison reviews the way in which slavery affects the sense of selfhood and identity in the African-Americans. Thus, the text investigates the perpetuation of violence and possessiveness after the liberation of the slaves has taken place. The climax of the novel is indeed an extremely violent moment- Sethe, a runaway slave from the Sweet Home plantation attempts to murder her own children in order to protect them from future slavery. She only has time to kill her baby daughter, Beloved, before the white men stop her. The black slave thus turns the violence that was done to her against her own children in two ways: first of all, Sethe kills her daughter because she thinks death would be better her than a life of slavery. However, this violent reaction of the mother has another meaning as well: she acts as if her children were her own possession, as if she were a white master herself. Morrison therefore reveals the violence of white people indirectly, through this violent act of Sethe, which is obviously a remnant of master and slave relationship.

Thus, first of all, Morrison shows the way in which the bond between the white masters and the slaves affects the sense of selfhood in Sethe and her family. The dominance of the white culture and the idea that the black slaves are the possessions of their masters left the African-Americans with the sense that they do not have an identity of their own, and that they only exist in the definition that the white give them. The physical possession of the slaves is, at the same time, a psychical possession. Sethe feels that the white people are capable of taking everything away from her, including her whole self. She suggestively emphasizes that this kind of ownership was not reduced only to the power that the masters were able to exercise over the life of the black slaves, but would extend to their own selves that were "dirtied" to the point that the slave could no longer relate to his own identity: "Anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. And though she and others lived through and got over it, she could never let it happen to her own. The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean."(Morrison, 251) Thus, even when the masters were somewhat mild and allowed more freedom to the blacks, like Mr. Garner of the Sweet Home plantation, the slaves inevitably felt as if they were toys or mere objects that he played with: "Mr. Garner acted like the world was a toy he was supposed to have fun with."(Morrison, 139) as Carl Malmgren comments in his study Mixed Genres and the Logic of Slavery, according to the logic of slavery the African-Americans were objects or animals, whose sense of self had been completely atrophied by the dehumanizing ownership: "Slaves as animals, slaves as objects, slaves as commodities -- the common denominator here is the denial of the selfhood of the slave, the conversion of the Other to Object, the reduction of human beings to checker pieces, counters, or commodities."(Iyasere, 198) the slaves only existed in the way in which they were defined by their white masters. Paul D. stresses the fact that the humanity of the slaves was consistent only so long as the master chose to treat them as men: "Garner called and announced them men -- but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not?... Did a whiteman saying make it so? Suppose Garner woke up one morning and changed his mind? Took the word away." (Morrison, 220). Selfhood for the black people was thus reduced to the definition of the white men. The motive that the whites used to justify the slavery of the blacks was always the fact that the latter were savages. Morrison deftly inverses this statement, and points to the fact that the jungle was actually created by the white people, who annihilated the sense of selfhood and humanity in the slaves: "Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.... But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread....The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (Morrison, 198-199)

The strong bond between Sethe and her children reflects this ownership of the slaves by their masters. The jungle that was planted by the white people in the blacks through slavery is mirrored in the Sethe's violence. The murdering act of Sethe can thus be explained: she does not know herself and mistakes her own identity with the fate of her children. Unable to see herself as an independent person, Sethe clings to her role as a mother and becomes extremely possessive. She mistakes her own identity with her motherhood, and thus, in a way, reenacts the violence of the white masters against her. She feels she has no power over her own self because the white people had crossed all the boundaries and not only taken everything she possessed physically, but everything she had dreamed as well: '"Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,' she said, 'and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.'"(Morrison, 89) it is obvious that the "whitefolks" are "bad luck," that is, for the black slaves they were the instruments of destiny itself, trough the power have over their lives. Thus, when Sethe kills her infant daughter, she obviously acts, although out of love, as a white master would. As Malmgren remarks, Sethe's violent act against her own child is actually a perpetuation of the logic of slavery: "Sethe so identifies her Self with the well-being of her children that she denies their existence as autonomous Others, in so doing unconsciously perpetuating the logic of slavery."(Iyasere, 200) Morrison's novel thus reflects the violence of the white race against the black one indirectly, showing how weak the theory that the African-American are less than human has proven over time. The white people are actually the ones who took their humanity by treating them as objects or animals.