Dehumanization In Beloved Research Paper

In Beloved by Toni Morrison, cruelty causes the theme of dehumanization because Whites have treated Black slaves as animals so much that Black slaves start to independently act like animals. Cruelty reveals that the victim, Sethe becomes murderous in an attempt to protect her children and avoid the treatment of a slave-animal. Arriving at the house of 124, schoolteacher and his nephews find “two boys bled[bleeding] in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest”(Morrison 109), and schoolteacher realizes that the nephew overly, corporally punished Sethe. Even though Sethe is not originally murderous of her children, Sethe’s dehumanization reveals that Sethe cannot think rationally and therefore, attempts to murder her children as a form of “thick love.” Thus, the nephew’s overuse of corporal cruelty on Sethe reveals Sethe murderous only because she wants to save her children from cruelty. Furthermore, not only does cruelty cause dehumanization in slaves, but cruelty disillusions Sethe into viewing all Whites as nemeses. …show more content…
Thus, when the nephews arrived with schoolteacher at 124, they find Sethe attempting to murder all her children, and the nephews questions, “What she go and do that for?”(Morrison 150) with a naive logic. Therefore, the nephews’ perpetual logic that Sethe is overreacting to a corporal punishment reveals the nephews are desensitized because the nephews’ over abuse of Sethe causes the nephew to treat a beating as a normal occurrence. Furthermore, the nephews think that “he’d[nephews] been beat a million times and he was White”(Morrison 150) reveals that the nephews’ freedom as Whites desensitizes the nephews causing them to display ignorance towards the severity the pain when whipping