The Role Of Heroism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Ronald Reagan famously said in his inaugural speech in 1981, “Those who say that we're in a time when there are no heroes, they just don't know where to look.” This was during the peak of Toni Morrison’s active years as a fiction writer. The protagonists Morrison writes about are almost all heroes. It is oftentimes difficult to determine this, however, because their heroism is masked by unconventional qualities, making them anti-heroes. Confronted with conflict, they eventually come to a point where they self define themselves as successful. In Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved, the main protagonists’ oppressive living situations, including their relationships with family members and the conditions and environment of their …show more content…
In The Bluest Eye, Pecola has an overwhelming desire to have blue eyes to be beautiful according to society, which ultimately overpowers her and drives her to insanity. Sula examines the rise and fall of two good friends, as Sula continuously behaves in ways which are considered unethical by their community. Sethe faces conflict in Beloved as she ignores unspoken societal expectations and tries to meet the needs of a supernatural representation of her deceased daughter. In each of the three stories, female characters are faced with difficult decisions. The oppressive environments depicted in Morrison’s novels impact and shape these characters’ views of …show more content…
At the end of “The Bluest Eye”, Claudia reflects on the differences between she and her sister, Frieda, and Pecola. She explains that the two siblings "had defended [them]selves since memory against everything and everybody...Nobody paid [them] any attention, so [they] paid every good attention to [them]selves," (Morrison Bluest 191). Unlike Pecola, who quite literally goes insane by the end of the novel, Claudia and Frieda can adapt to their environment, preserving their sanity and achieving success. Sethe and her daughter Denver are similar to the two girls because their house “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom…by 1873 [they] were its only victims” (Morrison Beloved 1). The supernatural aspects of the novel are made prominent from the beginning, as this quotation starts the book. Sethe and Denver are confined within the home and encumbered by the supernatural character Beloved. In addition to being burdened by their living environment - which is consistently emphasized throughout the novel - they are also oppressed by their community’s social standards. An example of this is in Sula, where “Nel and Sula’s estrangement offers Morrison an opportunity to examine women’s lives in and out of marriage,” (Furman par. 30). The fact that there are differences between the two women when they are in a relationship