Nearly every character in Toni Morrison’s Beloved has a rich background story and battles with which they struggle internally. For each character’s conflict, heavy themes are brought into the power of this story; Sethe has her inner turmoil over Beloved, Paul. D is weighed down by his emotional baggage, Denver struggles with independence, and Stamp Aid deals with the horrors of his past by helping others years later. This novel uses the ghost of Sethe’s murdered daughter to personify these more respective, micro levels issues along with embodying more macro level concepts such as slavery and motherhood. Beloved symbolizes individual character’s personal struggles such as Sethe’s past and Paul D.’s freedom, as well as representing motifs specific
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Denver hasn’t left the house since her mother killed her sister, thinking that whatever “happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again…Whatever it is, it comes from outside this house…So I never leave this house and I watched over the yard, so it can’t happen again and my mother won’t have to kill me too”. (Morrison 242). Over the years, Beloved’s spirit made it possible for Denver to not leave the house and still feel like she had friends. She’d play and talk to Beloved in the creek, her sister the only confidant and “secret” she had. When Beloved physically came back, Denver was entirely obsessed with her and fought for her attention and love. However, Beloved is similarly obsessed with Sethe and neglects her role as a sister, becoming increasingly cruel and even alienating her towards the end. Beloved plays a joke on Denver acting as if she’s gone, leaving Denver in tears. “…She is crying because she has no self. Death is a skipped meal compared to this…’I thought you left me. I thought you went back’” (Morrison 145). Beloved signifies Denver’s tremendous loneliness as well as her total dependency. The dynamic of their relationship, however, shifts profoundly as Beloved became exponentially more malevolent. Beloved and Sethe focused only on …show more content…
This is evident in the infanticide Sethe committed to “save” Beloved. Sethe was placed in the most horrifying position a mother could face: kill her child or allow her child a lifetime of torture and misery. Sethe defends killing Beloved by saying, “…if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her” (Morrison 236). Another tragedy she experienced was her breast milk for Beloved being stolen, leaving her “no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left. I’ll tell Beloved about that; she’ll understand. She my daughter. The one I managed to have milk for and to get it to her even after they stole it” (Morrison 236). These two quotes are powerful examples of the way Beloved symbolized the brutality with which slavery inhibits women to be mothers. Sethe murdered her own child, however ethically sound she was in the situation, to save her from a life of pain. Much like Harriet Jacobs observes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, women in slavery had no way to live by the cult of true womanhood. It’s obvious that Sethe loved her daughter immensely, so much so that she killed her rather than see her go through the hardships she did. She had to go
Denver hasn’t left the house since her mother killed her sister, thinking that whatever “happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again…Whatever it is, it comes from outside this house…So I never leave this house and I watched over the yard, so it can’t happen again and my mother won’t have to kill me too”. (Morrison 242). Over the years, Beloved’s spirit made it possible for Denver to not leave the house and still feel like she had friends. She’d play and talk to Beloved in the creek, her sister the only confidant and “secret” she had. When Beloved physically came back, Denver was entirely obsessed with her and fought for her attention and love. However, Beloved is similarly obsessed with Sethe and neglects her role as a sister, becoming increasingly cruel and even alienating her towards the end. Beloved plays a joke on Denver acting as if she’s gone, leaving Denver in tears. “…She is crying because she has no self. Death is a skipped meal compared to this…’I thought you left me. I thought you went back’” (Morrison 145). Beloved signifies Denver’s tremendous loneliness as well as her total dependency. The dynamic of their relationship, however, shifts profoundly as Beloved became exponentially more malevolent. Beloved and Sethe focused only on …show more content…
This is evident in the infanticide Sethe committed to “save” Beloved. Sethe was placed in the most horrifying position a mother could face: kill her child or allow her child a lifetime of torture and misery. Sethe defends killing Beloved by saying, “…if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her” (Morrison 236). Another tragedy she experienced was her breast milk for Beloved being stolen, leaving her “no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left. I’ll tell Beloved about that; she’ll understand. She my daughter. The one I managed to have milk for and to get it to her even after they stole it” (Morrison 236). These two quotes are powerful examples of the way Beloved symbolized the brutality with which slavery inhibits women to be mothers. Sethe murdered her own child, however ethically sound she was in the situation, to save her from a life of pain. Much like Harriet Jacobs observes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, women in slavery had no way to live by the cult of true womanhood. It’s obvious that Sethe loved her daughter immensely, so much so that she killed her rather than see her go through the hardships she did. She had to go