Essay on Beloved
Present paper discusses the novel “Beloved”, created by the well-known author Tony Morrison. “Beloved” is a sensational story of slavery and racism in America. It is clear from tony Morrison’s enthusiasm that she tries to hold the social document prospective of the story. This reception of the story’s strength to shape opinion really frees her to do all she wishes artistically – novelists who avoid social issues limit their subjects to human beings relations. Morrison had her own theory – an image of slavery and black/white ties in the USA – that was maybe old-fashioned, but provocative and unanswered. The job was to remake the old tale in a forceful way.
“Beloved” is still popular, despite Morrison was a product of her time as any other writer. The novel seems quite current. One ground for that is that racist attitudes in the USA alter extremely slowly, and another is that the author is very delicate in the description of her ideas. Morrison describes each incident with such solid expressiveness that any booklover easily takes it as a truth. She is very accurate in the assertions – similarly about the identity of the ghost as about the faults of the whites. No part of the tale is presented as assumption. With a story, the booklover is asked to delay distrust completely and at once. The extra bonus of the story form, for Tony Morrison, is that she is also tapping into an extremely imperative black folklore that enriches her style as well as her book (Smiley, 2006).
The novel “Beloved” is one of the few stories from the USA that takes every real aspect of the story form and exploits it systematically, but in balance with the other aspects. So, as a result, we may enjoy a solid but not a very long, dramatic but not melodramatic, outrageous but reassuring novel, which is likely to alter a booklover’s sense of the world.
Not too many readers will actually ignore the experimental style of the book “Beloved”. It is not a linear story, told from the beginning to the very end. This is a tale combining different levels of the past, from the slavery to community and to the present. The past sometimes is told in flashbacks or in stories of the main characters. The novel is basically written in fragments for the reader to place all the pieces together. The combination of past with present strengthens the concept that the past is living in the present. In forcing the booklover to put back all pieces, Morrison forces us to consider each of them.
The author also enriches the world of “Beloved” by a supernatural element. Supernatural phenomena are combined with a realistic framework. Furthermore, the protagonists in the book do not hesitate to accept supernatural events as true. For them, poltergeists and hallucinations are methods of understanding the importance of the globe around them. Such incidents stand in contrast to schoolteacher’s wicked hyper-“scientific” and experiential studies. The structure of the tale is enriched with an always changing opinion. Every character, even the dead people tell fragments of the story. At one point, Paul D and Sethe switch over flashbacks that eventually make the whole. The variety of the opinions evolves a tapestry of human beings joined by past or present. Also, the usage of correlativism needs to be noted. The usage of Biblical allusions and blurred symbolism makes the climate filled with strength and drama. The book is meant to be more then a narrative – it is a history, and it is people’s life.
Made in the Reconstruction era in 1873, the novel concentrates on the notions of memory and history. For the ex-slaves in the narrative, the past is a burden that they dreadfully and deliberately try to forget. But for Sethe, the main character of the story, memories of slavery are unavoidable. They carry on haunting her in the spirit of her departed child. Eighteen years ago, Sethe had to kill her daughter in order to save her from slavery.
It should be mentioned that Tony Morrison borrowed these events from the actual story of life of Margaret Garner, who was a slave in Kentucky. She escaped, but decided to kill her child when slave catchers found them. The author eliminates the border between fiction and history. From the life of one family, the author makes a strong commentary on the historical and psychological heritage of slavery.
Morrison recovers a story that had been lost due to the negative effects of forced silences. Morrison writes the story with the voices of populace who have been left without the power of language. “Beloved” contains a didactic aspect as well. From Sethe’s experience, we get the chance to understand that before a steady future may be reached, people have to confront and realize the “ghosts” of the past. The author offers that, like Sethe, modern American booklovers need to face the history of slavery to deal with the heritage that manifests itself in constant racial discrimination.
Tony Morrison said that she wanted to assist in evolving a standard of black work, asserting that black novelists usually have to pander to white readers when they should focus on the business of writing. Many scholars think that Morrison’s story goes a lengthy way toward her envisioned tradition. The elegant style of the author’s writing in “Beloved” panders to no one (Gioia). Tony Morrison asks us to accept her on her terms.
The Main Themes of “Beloved”
The key themes of the novel are the issue of race and impacts of slavery. The story concentrates on several ex-slaves and how they try to live after the slavery. The story questions what the dissimilarity is between a man and a beast. In its bright portrayal of the community of human beings, complete with their wishes and worries, the book asserts that a colored person is like any other human being. The novel addresses the anxiety of whether it is better to bear the injustices or to struggle against them.
Strongly tied to the subject of race is the theme of the past. Every character has endured an awful past, complete with the most terrible horrors we can imagine. Sethe was raped and had to murder her child, Stamp Paid had to give his wife away to be a sex toy. Every member of the community has a terrible story to share. Many of these people prefer to repress the past. Other people were against it. Nevertheless, no resolution takes place for any character until everyone learns to accept and deal with the past. Only then a future may be found.
One more central theme in the novel is the banality of evil. Slavery is more than an institution. It is a philosophy that is far-reaching in its results. Such as, Garner treated their workers well. But, as Paul D later understands, “The whole thing rested on Garner… with no Garner each of theirs fell to pieces.” Even if treated well, the slaves were no more than toys to be played by the Garners. Moral vagueness plays a huge role in the story. The question of “Was the murder meant to be?” appears many times. The answer attained is that it was meant to be, but Sethe did not have the actual right to do it. Had Sethe not murdered her daughter, all children would have been sold to be slaves. Yet, after the crime, she was avoided by the members of the community and placed at the kindness of a spirit.
The story also addresses what means to be actually free. Was Paul D free when he was not allowed to love a person he wished to love? Was anyone from the community truly free if people had to wait at the back of the store for white people to be served first? Freedom, the author tells us, is more than simply not belonging to one master. The idea of loving family also arises in the novel. The majority of the slaves have lost their families very early, and there is little hope in finding anyone of relatives.
Hence, it should be said that the results of this loneliness may be noticed in Sethe, who is jealous of her own kids or Paul D, who does not love anything too much.
Ghost of the Past
Sethe, the protagonist of present account, is a proud and decent woman. Her most outstanding feature is her devotion to her kids. Unwilling to give up her kids to the spiritual, physical and emotional trauma she tries to murder them to protect. Her memories lead her to understand that past misery can never be forgotten – it carries on existing in the present. So, she spends her life trying to avoid encounters with her pas life. Maybe, Sethe’s fear is what leads her to pay no attention to the facts that Beloved is the spirit of her daughter. Even after she realizes that, Sethe expresses herself to be enslaved by the past life, as she submits to ghost’s demands. Only when Sethe understands how to confront the past face-to-face, to assert herself in its present life, can she remove herself from its cruel power and begin to live freely and peacefully.
And Beloved’s indefinable, complex identity is imperative to booklover’s understanding of the story. Her narrow linguistic ability, extremely soft skin could all be explained by a life in imprisonment. But these characteristics could also support the hypothesis that Beloved is the ghost of Sethe’s deceased daughter. There is one more theory that she could be Sethe’s mother. Beloved is depicted as an allegorical figure. Whether she is a daughter or a mother of Sethe, or an image of all slaves, Beloved symbolizes the past returned to haunt the present life. The tie between ghost and Sethe is given a special attention in this narrative. When Sethe responds ghost’s aggressive passion for her, two women get locked in a harsh, parasitic relationship. With Beloved Sethe is paralyzed in the past. Paradoxically, Beloved inspires Sethe to discuss the tales she never tells – stories about her own feelings of loneliness and about her grounds for murdering her child. By coping with the past, Sethe starts to learn about herself and the degree of her capability to exist in the present. Beloved inspires the development of other protagonists in the book as well. For instance, although Paul D’s disgust for Beloved never disappeared, their strange sexual meetings open his “tobacco tin” heart, letting him remember and love again.
Though Beloved vanishes at the finale of the narrative, she is never actually disappearing – her clothes and her account, forgotten by human beings but preserved by the story, remain. The ghost represents painful past, but she also tells of the possibility to obtain a nice future. She provides the whole community with an opportunity to engage with the recollections they have concealed. Through conflict, the community can recover and learn from its forgotten memories.
The Results of Slavery
The most hazardous of slavery’s impacts is its terrible impact on the ex-slaves’ senses of self, and the tale comprises cases of self-alienation (Boudreau, 1995). Paul D, for example, is alienated from himself so much that in a certain period of time he can’t tell whether the crying he hears is his or not. Slaves were called subhuman and were traded as goods for money. Slavery has limited Baby Suggs’s self-conception by devastating her family and taking away the chance to be a wife, sister, daughter and mother. As a result of their incapability to believe in own lives, Baby Suggs and Paul D become upset and tired. Paul D’s tiredness is emotional and Baby Suggs’s tiredness is spiritual. Other slaves – Aunt Phyllis, Jackson Till and Halle – went insane and suffered a total loss of self.
But these are not all the results of slavery. Stamp Paid noted that slavery causes whites to become “changed and altered… bloody, silly, worse than they ever wanted to be.” The dangerous impacts of the slavery affect not merely the identities of the black victims but also white people who maintain it and the cooperative identity of Americans. In the place where slavery occurs, everyone suffers a loss of humanity and sympathy. That is why Tony Morrison believes that our country’s identity, like the story’s protagonists requires to be healed. The future of the nation depends on its realization of the past: just like the protagonist Sethe should come to terms with the past life before she can protect a future with daughter and Paul D, before people can address slavery’s heritage in the modern troubles of racial discrimination, people should face the dark corners of the history. It is important that the author writes history with the voices of a actual slaves – people denied the strength of language, and “Beloved” recovers an old history – either with the help of willed lack of memory (as in Sethe’s oppression of memories) or to forced silence (Paul D’s iron bit).
Conclusion
One of the key grounds “Beloved” is an astonishing account is that it is filled with sensations and meaning. The author knows for sure what she wants to do and how to do it right. The characters are extremely complex. The story is dramatic and the past and the present continually alter each other. “Beloved” demonstrates the degree to which human beings require the support of their communities to survive. Sethe initially starts to develop her sense of self during her 28 days of freedom, after she becomes a member of the community. In the same way, Denver discovers herself when she leaves community and becomes a member of the society. They are literally chained to each other, and Paul D asserts that “if one lost, all lost.”
Especially one thing is worth of our attention. This is the author’s style, which is explicit and evocative. Even though Morrison denies realism, using a sensitive diction and a lyrical narrative method returning to certain images and events, the booklovers never doubt the reality of what Tony Morrison reports. Like Sethe recognizes Beloved toward the finale of the tale, and understands that she has known who she really is, the booklover is surprised at the pain of the black people and the cruelty of white human beings, but realizes that cruelty is not merely logical but also representative of many other terrors that go unspecified in the book and have gone unspecified in American history.
