Painful Memories In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Suppressing painful memories can bring about temporary relief. Once that relief subsides however, the raw emotions that remain are as powerful and real as the moment in which they were experienced. Rather than dealing with these uncovered emotions, the natural response is to lock away these memories in a vain hope that they will not resurface. Exposing the open wounds of memory and extracting moments from the past bring with it the former pain and anguish. In the most dire cases, even the promise of death is more alluring. In William Carlos Williams’ “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”, a despondent woman yearns to escape the clutches of her past memories. In her final confession, we learn that she wishes to succumb to her depression by “fall[ing] into those flowers and sink[ing] into the marsh near them.” (Williams, line 27-8). The prospect of dying is more appealing than dredging up the memories she shares with her husband. To her, ignorance is the only way of relieving the heartache that plagues his death. Though the widow longs for the sweet release of death, the protagonist in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” is “suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of …show more content…
The seemingly continuous reminders of Sethe’s past keeps her endlessly occupied. This is done in such a way that Sethe is no longer able to focus any of her attention on her present life circumstances. Faced with reminders from her past, her mind was “loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day,” (70). When taking all of her attention away from Denver and her present, both men revive feelings in Sethe that had been buried in her mind as scars of her past. Morrison includes their storylines within the novel to provide more examples of how recovered memories can influence a person’s state of