The Role Of Slavery In Toni Morrison's Beloved

In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the character Beloved serves as a manifestation of the past’s effects on the psyche, revealing the traumatizing impact of slavery on characters’ perception of love and gender. Toni Morrison presents Beloved as an anthropomorphized representation of slavery through both her reality and her unfulfilled potential. Morrison primarily depicts the reality of slavery through Beloved’s ghostly form. Showcasing Beloved’s ghost as a figment of the past, Baby Suggs claims, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief” (Morrison 5), which demonstrates that, like in many other similar contexts within the time period, Beloved’s ghost is a symbol of the concrete events that occurred …show more content…
A large portion of our culture revolves around gender roles: women must be tender and obedient; men must be assertive and dominant. As a result, any deviations from these gendered parameters frequently leads to a sense of failure and lost identity. Projecting the emasculation Paul D endured, Morrison discloses that he had nearly been sexually assaulted by a racist prison guard (126), which would have invalidated his masculinity as it is perceived that the ability to be raped lies in direct opposition to male gender roles, causing him to feel detached from the constructs of his own gender. Further reinforcing his sense of lost masculinity, before his violation at the hands of Beloved, Paul D claims that he “trembled like Lot’s wife” and “felt some womanish need” (117), proving that he associates his lack of sexual autonomy with feminization. During these sessions, Beloved resurrects within him his torturous recollections of the past. This concept is mainly showcased through Paul D’s declaration “Red heart. Red heart. Red heart” (117) when he was violated, which proves that the tin box that had safeguarded his heart from the horrors of slavery has been eliminated, and that he is now as exposed and vulnerable with Beloved as he was during those times. Even outside of sexual contexts, the damage inflicted upon Paul D’s sense of masculinity extends to his daily perspective. Conveying his lingering emasculation, Paul D laments, “It shamed [me] to have to ask the woman [I] wanted to protect to help [me] do it” (127), which reinforces his own sense of feminization through both his failure in his masculine duty to protect Sethe and his acquirement of a traditionally feminine role of needing care and guidance. Therefore, because Beloved raping Paul D removes his agency, a quintessential