Beloved - Being a Human

Being a human means to have emotions and to have control on how people feel and what they feel about, being able to make decisions for themselves, being free and doing anything one please. When everything is taken away, only being able to work, take orders from other people, being treated like an animal, feeling lesser than a human, is called dehumanization. Some of the characters in the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison are treated this way. By stripping slaves of their human qualities, slave owners dehumanized their slaves in such gruesome ways. White people are represented in a novel as cruel, and heartless, that take everything without asking and not having respect for blacks.

There were many instances where a slave was demoralized, degraded or abused. The first example is when Sethe arrived at the plantation and how the men would turn to calves to satisfy their sexual needs which was a last resort. The men where not allowed t have sex with the woman unless they were reproducing, desperate they would turn to animals for pleasure. As the men's bestial thoughts and actions are in how the slaves are treated in Sweet home, as if they were life stock not human beings. For example in same chapter, Sethe tells Paul D how Schoolteacher's Boys (the plantation owner and his workers) sucked the milk from her swollen breasts during her pregnancy as if she were a cow.

"After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That's what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. [. . .]Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still" (Morrison 17).

Sethe is a poor slave who is not able to give her children many luxury items, but the one thing she can give her is milk to support her, and the one thing she does have is taken away they also beat her and give her a tree like scar. Sethe's mammary rape is an act of dehumanization from the white men which is cruel act of violence.

Baby Suggs another slave, who lost all of her eight children except one. She was also treated as an animal, after having her first three children sold away and a fourth fathered by the man who sold them. She was treated as a dog, only used to reproduce and then sell her children. In Sweet Home they would always say "it is dangerous to love something to much because it will be taken away". Ella, another slave, refuses to nurse her baby born from forced sex with her white master. In slavery, the basic value of a woman is her role in the reproduction of her master's commodities, as well as in his sexual pleasure.