Beloved The Human Condition
Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, reveals the effects of human emotion and its power to cast an individual into a struggle against him or herself. In the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the main character, Sethe, as a woman who is resigned to her desolate life and isolates herself from all those around her. Yet, she was once a woman full of feeling: she had loved her husband Halle, loved her four young children, and loved the days of the Clearing. And thus, Sethe was jaded when she began her life at 124 Bluestone Road-- she had loved too much. After failing to 'save' her children from the schoolteacher, Sethe suffered forever with guilt and regret. Guilt for having killed her "crawling already?" baby daughter, and then regret for not having succeeded in her task. It later becomes apparent that Sethe's tragic past, her chokecherry tree, was the reason why she lived a life of isolation. Beloved, who shares with Seths that one fatal moment, reacts to it in a completely different way; because of her obsessive and vengeful love, she haunts Sethe's house and fights the forces of death, only to come back in an attempt to take her mother's life. Through her usage of symbolism, Morrison exposes the internal conflicts that
Tragically, she would live in guilt for the rest of her life, forever distrusting love, and finally giving up everything for a chance to make right what she'd done wrong. She seemed tranquil sitting near Sethe, as the older woman prepared breakfast in the morning. She could never forget the terror of the schoolteacher robbing her of her nurturing juices, she crawled on bleeding limbs to fill her baby's mouth with her milk, and finally, she immortalized that grim summer day when she fed Denver her breast milk-- mingled with blood. Beloved, on the other hand, was a sad and angry spirit who fought death in order to return to life so that she could assuage her vengeful, obsessive love for Sethe. Sethe was a woman who knew how to love, and ultimately fell to ruin because of her "too-thick love" (164). And the great depth of Sethe's maternal love is expressed through the course of all events: she loved her children so much she was willing to die with them, so much she would rather kill them than have them suffer, and so much that after that one fateful afternoon, her entire life's happiness dwindled away to near-nothingness. Most importantly, Beloved's true intention is revealed: to utterly and completely take possession of Sethe. Towards the closing of the novel, Sethe's eyes "[were] bright but dead, alert but vacant, paying attention to everything about Beloved" (242-243). Much like the symbolism of breastfeeding, Beloved slowly suckled away all of Sethe's life, all of her natural juices. In the beginning, Beloved longed to receive Sethe's attention. Sethe lost in the game of love by killing her daughter out of instinct; she lost again in the game of live by forever suffering for it. Although Beloved wanted and needed her mother, albeit to a disturbing degree, her bitterness quickly turned into revenge when Sethe began to indulge her; and by slowly draining the life out of her mother, Beloved could truly possess Sethe, both body and soul.
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Acceptance Essays
