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Bondage In Toni Morrison's Beloved

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In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, both Sethe and Paul D escape their physical bondage as slaves; however, a comparison between Sweet Home and 124, both places of torment and suffering, reveals how emotional bondage can also enslave a person sometimes without them even noticing.
As we learn from piecing together flashbacks the characters share, our two main protagonists Sethe and Paul D begin their story at a farm called Sweet Home, where they are slaves to the Garner family. Although these particular slave owners are kind to their slaves in comparison to other white slave owners, they still do grueling work and are abused by the other white men the Garners have hired. Not only have they been forced to work, but the ones they love are frequently killed. At one point Sethe is also sexually abused by the sons of a man Mrs. Garner hired. This place gives Sethe and Paul D no hope or insight of a better future. Later when Sethe is finally able to escape, the first thing that comes to her mind when she remembers Sweet Home is how beautiful it is and how nice the Garners were to her. When looking at her life at Sweet Home, Sethe recalls that “It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too...Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her-remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could …show more content…
One being a place of torture, and the other being a safe heaven. Yet, because of the memories that Sethe associates with each place, thoughts of the past determine how they feel rather than how safe they are in the present. The memories that have haunted Sethe all those years and continue to haunt her mean that she can never truly find a place where she will feel safe or have peace of

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