Toni Morrison's Beloved
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 complete!ly 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
In the beginning, Beloved longed to receive Sethe's attention. By contrasting those individuals, she shows tragedy in the human condition. 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. It wasn't until the day in the Clearing, when Beloved's fingers "had a grip on [Sethe] that would not let her breath" (96), that the reader could see how conflicted she was between love and hatred for her mother. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**. [She] collected every bit of the life she made. In this way Morrison captures the tragedy of human emotion: one love so powerful it always loses, and one love so powerful it consumes everything. Both mother and daughter seemed to have loved too much; while Sethe wanted to save her child from pain, Beloved wanted to satiate her own ravenous love. 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. Morrison uses breast milk to symbolize how strong Sethe's maternal desires were. 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 afte!rnoon, her entire life's happiness dwindled away to near-nothingness. One woman was killing herself trying to make the other understand, while the other was selfishly destroying everything in her way of happiness. Within Sethe was the power of unconditional love for her children-- she had "milk enough for all" (201).
Common topics in this essay:
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Bluestone Road--,
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Clearing Beloved's,
Clearing Sethe,
sethe woman,
loved children,
sethe's maternal,
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schoolteacher sethe,
human emotion,
lost game,
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Acceptance Essays
