Analysis Of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye And Beloved

Morrison has made a constant effort to bring to the consciousness of her readers the history of black slaves in America. Her texts The Bluest Eye and Beloved vivdly portray this. Rushdy asserts to this thus: ‘Beloved is the product of and a contribution to a historical moment in which African American historiography is in a state of fervid revision’ (44-5). In a bid to bring these experiences to the consciousness of her readers, Morrison traces Beloved to the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who killed her child in order to avoid them being killed by the slave owners. For the slaves in America, killing themselves and their children was a better option than being slaves. Coffin explicitly states Margaret’s motivation for doing that: ‘The slave mother … killed her child rather than see it taken back to slavery’ (557). These slaves saw death a better alternative than slavery and for the love they had for their children, they preferred killing them than allowing them see the dehumanizing institution of slavery. This is evident in the novel, Sethe kills her daughter Beloved and Stamp Paid said she did it because she ‘was trying to outhurt the hurters’, she …show more content…
Sethe, the main female protagonist, tells her experience of slavery and this enables her recover from slavery and reclaim her identity. Sethe, after escaping from Kentucky plantation, attempts to kill her children to prevent them from getting into slavery. She succeeds in murdering only one of her four children, an 18-month-old “the crawling-already? girl” (Beloved 110). This brutality takes place in the woodshed when Sethe sees Schoolteacher, who treats and abuses the slaves as animals, coming to take Sethe’s children to Sweet Home. This event makes the society reject her. Sethe then finds a place of refuge in her house at 124 Bluestone Road, where she isolates her daughter Denver from the