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ENG3UP1
10 January 2018
Beloved: Toni Morrison’s Use of the Elements of Fiction
Beloved, by Toni Morrison, is a tale about slavery. The reader is ruthlessly thrown into an alien environment which, is a shared experience with the book’s characters. Morrison’s use of symbolism and figurative language exposes the cruel aspects of the human condition, making the novel one of the most powerfully convincing depictions of slavery. The central character Sethe was raised motherless in a system of slavery. The plantation she worked on, Sweet Home, was owned by a cruel man called the “School Teacher”. Having endured a childhood of violence and abuse, Sethe and her children escaped to Cincinnati to house 124, and to her mother-in-law, via the Ohio River. When she reached Cincinnati, Sethe was ostracized by her community for being too loving and was criticized for having love that was too “thick”. After experiencing a few days of relative peace, the School Teacher, along with a group of slave catchers, returned to 124 to capture Sethe and her children. When Sethe was faced with the trauma of having to return to slavery at Sweet Home, she attempted to kill her children. She succeeded in killing her baby daughter, Beloved, by cutting her throat with a hacksaw. While taking another human’s life is never justifiable, Toni Morrison uses the elements of fiction to show that Sethe’s killing of Beloved was, instead, understandable considering her past. She also uses these elements to analyze the dehumanization that slaves were subjected to when working in an institutionalized slave system.
Growing up in the latter half of the 19th century, Sethe was born into a system of slavery. While most people associate slavery with shackles, chains, and back-breaking work, the psychological and emotional bondage is never truly understood. Morrison uses multiple points of view to shed light on one of the most significant and prevalent topics in the novel, dehumanization. After Beloved’s death, Sethe partook in a sexual act with the engraver to pay for Beloved’s tombstone. “She thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite new” (Page 5). The key aspect of this graphic scene is the nature to which the son and engraver contribute to the dehumanization of Sethe. By describing the son as, “looking on”, Morrison creates a sense of spectatorship, almost as if Sethe was an interesting object to gaze upon. The engraver is also described with the words “anger” and “appetite”. This image evokes an animalistic feeling, indicating an almost primal instinctual need for satisfaction. Furthermore, the word “rutting” in this context is defined as sexual acts of farm animals, mainly deer. The repetition of this word shows that the engraver and his son see Sethe as non-human and instead as an animal of little importance. The notion of dehumanization, through Paul D’s point of view, is consistently brought up throughout the text. The violence and abuse that Paul D was subject to at Sweet Home, reduced his personhood to animality. “Mister, he looked so … free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Son a bitch couldn’t even get out of the shell by himself but he was still king and I was… Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was” (Page 86). When Paul D describes Mister, a rooster, as superior to him, the emotional trauma of slavery is evident. By not being able to say what he wants and to be what he is, Paul D’s abilities that define him as human are taken away. He reflects on how Mister, an animal who can’t even hatch on its own, is stronger than him, better. The dehumanizing qualities of slavery have degraded him so low that he considers the rooster as “king”. Furthermore, Sethe’s recollection of slaves being forced to wear bits, devices commonly used on farm animals, emphasizes these qualities. “She already knew about it, had seen it time after time in the place before Sweet Home. Men, boys, girls, women. The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back. Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye” (page 84). Morrison’s use of diction with the words “yanked back” and “wildness” evokes the image of taming wild animals. The way slaves were treated can be compared to taming a horse. This practice, called “breaking”, involves using a bit to remove the independence and identity of the horse to serve their master. This method was also used on the slaves as a means of control. Morrison uses plot, diction, and point of view to show the different perspectives on which the characters in Beloved experienced slavery. With an emphasis on dehumanization, Morrison repeatedly used ‘animalistic’ type language to describe scenes of abuse and effectively shed light on the horrors of institutionalized slavery.
Having experienced a lifetime of abuse, Sethe was permanently scarred emotionally and physically. She was born motherless, any close friend, family, or relative she knew was either hanged, bought, or sold out as property. The horrifying atrocities of slavery and her experience with it led Sethe to kill her daughter, Beloved, to save her. This choice that Sethe made is the axis around which the novel revolves, and the question arises whether Sethe acted out of true love or selfishness. As seen through the plot, Morrison emphasizes Sethe’s past to show why Sethe’s killing of Beloved was understandable. While at Sweet Home, Sethe overheard the school teacher instructing his nephews on how to treat her. They were told to divide, meaning physically and symbolically, on paper by listing Sethe’s human characteristics on one side, and her “animalistic” characteristics on the other. “And no one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper. No. Oh no. Maybe Baby Suggs could worry about it, live with the likelihood of it; Sethe had refused – and refused still” (Pg. 296). Having overheard the School Teacher’s conversation, the idea of resisting and escaping the slave system was permanently cemented into Sethe’s mind and was one of the reasons why she killed Beloved – to keep her human. Due to slavery, Sethe never got the chance to be a daughter; she was nursed by a stranger. However, when she became a mother, her mother's love was incomprehensible to everyone else around her. “Why I did it. How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her” (Pg. 236). In Sethe’s mind, Beloved and the rest of her children are the only good and pure part of who she is and therefore must be protected from the cruelty and “dirtiness” of slavery that Sethe grew up to. In this respect, Sethe acts out of love, but her selfishness lies in her refusal to accept personal responsibility for Beloved’s killing. The motivation behind the murder is dichotomous, she displays her strong mother-love by mercifully sparing her daughter from a lifetime of slavery, however, she refuses to acknowledge that her act of mercy was murder.
The act of killing her child is at first not easy to understand and to be justified; however, the circumstances in which Sethe had to live and the brutality that she had endured as a slave on Sweet Home were what drove her to commit infanticide which is perhaps one of the worst things a mother can do to her child. Sethe’s fear of slavery and its effect was so terrible that she did not want her children, under any circumstances, to experience the same difficulties.
In Beloved, Morrison intends to show the reader what happened to individuals in an institutionalized slave system, specifically, the dehumanization they were subject to. She used the elements of fiction to show that Sethe killed Beloved due to her strong mother's love and her past as a slave, illustrating that the killing was understandable. Narrating the story from multiple points of view, Morrison focuses on the dehumanizing effect of slavery by emphasizing the sufferings of slaves. The novel shows what happened to Sethe and her family on the Sweet Home plantation. It was seen that Sethe was abused and raped. After she tried to escape from the plantation, she killed Beloved to save her because of the trauma she faced as a slave. After killing her baby, Sethe continued to suffer. She felt regret and pain and had to live an isolated life for a long time in the black community. Her brutal past fostered a new type of love that was incomprehensible to those around her. At the end of the novel Sethe became mentally and spiritually exhausted and had no energy left to live a meaningful life.
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