Beloved by Toni Morrison
“The people of the broken necks of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons. What a roaring.” This quote from Beloved by Toni Morrison sums up the tone of this novel; a haunting desperation that only has release through death. Sethe’s story poetically and tragically shows the sufferings of slavery without turning it into an after school special with the image of a whipped slave, which many have become almost desensitized to. Instead of focusing of the physical it shows the psychological instead. The fact that Sethe feels that the best way to save her children is through killing them, says more than a million pictures. For a mother, a loving mother at that, to slit her two-year old daughter’s throat because she think that is the only way to make them safe, it shows how afraid the system has made her. When Beloved returns in human form, she begins to enact her own form of revenge against her mother. In an attempt to atone for her past sins, Sethe is willing to give up her own life in order to keep her daughter with her.
Sethe herself is a very complex character to understand as she has shut herself out from the world and her own family. Due to her guilt she has created a very sheltered life for Denver, which keeps the girl from growing into a full woman. Denver even feels fear towards her own mother because the horrible things she has done, yet when Beloved threatens to destroy her mother, she looks to the very community that she was kept from for support. This skewed mother-daughter relationship could also be the result of Sethe’s own lack of maternal guidance. Due to the nature of slavery, mothers were often separated from their children and Sethe does not even remember her own mother’s face. The only female guide in the novel is Baby Sugg, but she dies early on with her own demons in tow.
Beloved is about rebirth and learning to let go of guilt. It is hard to look at a woman responsible for the death of her child and want her to move on, but Sethe did suffer for her “crime.” Everyday she carried the pain of not being strong enough to let go, to allow herself to become a fuller person until the weight of everything transformed into the “human” form of Beloved. Reading this book was a somewhat difficult read, because almost every passage is filled with immense symbolism and imagery that overlooking something can lead to confusion. But, when it was finished I felt like I had experienced a very powerful message about how we not only create our own demons, but fight them.