Memories In Beloved, By Toni Morison

Memories serve as an anchor to our lives. They define who we are and what we have been through. They measure our lives thus far. We hold onto all memories, good and painful ones. The traumatizing memories we bear serves the purpose of reflection and caution. In Toni Morison’s Beloved, memory is shown as a haunting self-imprisonment of the human mind. Sethe suffer through the past of her life on Sweet Home and the death of her loved ones. In Shirley Ann Williams’s Dessa Rose, memory of the past and death unfolds as Dessa tries to make a life for herself and her baby boy Mony. It is apparent that in both novel the theme of memory of the past and death plays a significant role in the character lives. However, this theme is shown for different …show more content…
Memories to Sethe are immortal, waiting for you, they become powerful enough that they affect the present and others. On page 43 Sethe comments, “even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place it happened”, Sethe affirms that memory is not just psychological however physical and haunting. Which is why she tries to protect Denver from it, “To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The “better life” she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that the other one… the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered” (51). As stated earlier Sethe stated the past affects presents, however now she is adding in that the past affects the future. As Sethe tries to protect Denver from the past, she becomes obsessed and under involuntary control of the past. This obsession occurs through her interaction with Beloved. Sethe slit Beloved’s throat as baby. Sethe tries to make sense of killing her child by remembering torture and cruelty she endured at Sweet Home. Sethe throughout the book brings up her stolen breast milk, the two boys held her down and stole her breast milk while school teach watched and wrote. Sethe cried after repeating the story, this even robbed her of her motherhood, the relationship she shared with her daughter. Another memory was school teach and their nephews listing her human characteristics and animal characteristics. Sethe justified killing her daughter was for her own good. As soon at Beloved entered the world she was a slave. On page 26, Sethe explains what worse than killing her daughter, “what it meant---what it took…make her realize that worse than that--- far worse… That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind… not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you…she could never let it happen to her own. She committed infanticide to protect her