Morrison’s Lesson About Slavery and Its History

Graciela Colon

Mrs. Harrison

AP Literature and Composition

11 April, 2016

Morrison’s Lesson about Slavery and its History.

The true story based novel, Beloved, follows an African American woman who had to make the hard decision of taking away her baby girls life to save her from the tragic destiny of becoming a slave, and the suffering of being judged because of the idea of Racism. Toni Morrison utilizes an abundance of character development, point of view and symbolism in the novel, Beloved, to illuminate the ideas of social change and to bring the reader to the realization about the willful ignorance of slavery and racism in previous historical events that have marked many lives of the Black/African American Society.

 Morrison conveys the meaning of the work as whole through the usage of women’s character development as slaves throughout the novel. In the article “Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’ by Terry Paul Caesar, he stresses the overview of Beloved by another author Marianne Hirsch. She explains that Sethe “cut her throat”, because of “an anger handed down through generations of mothers who could have no control over their children’s lives, no voice in their upbringing”, this meant that women felt horrible when they understood that their children will become as miserable as them because they would have no education at all. Besides they would still become slaves to people who wouldn’t treat them right.

She also did it because she grew up in the same position and she as well was denied a parental relationship with her own parents. In the novel Sethe explained that slave mothers had little control over their children and over her own life they were never stable:

“In all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethes’s own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anyone Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers what she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children” (Morrison, p.23).

This meant that she knew this people didn’t care much about their “property” they just knew they needed them, and she thought that no matter how much she wanted her children to become more than just property, more than just slaves, their whole life they will have to spent it living like the checkers game forever. In the article it also states that “Morrison is not merely writing about slavery, or slave mothers”, she barely wrote the book about this. Her purpose for writing Beloved was to show how people needed to undergo a change of thoughts regarding such events that occurred in history, especially those involving them. This events should become experiences to learn more about slave history because if people don’t learn about it, history always tends to repeat its course. Life would become more socially advantaged where people would understand the suffering of others and be more sympathized about how others felt and feel to this day about such happenings in the past.

 The theme of love is a very special source and also a symbol of the novel as it is stated in the Article “The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” by Barabara Schapiro, because it’s mostly about the slave mothers and what they needed to do to keep their children safe from the horrid situations of slavery. The mothers of Beloved know that they are not just existing for themselves they are also existing for another creature which are their children, but the characters of the novel because they are slaves and their children become the properties of others “there is no reliable other to recognize and affirm their existence.” When Sethe herself was a child she couldn’t recognize her mother another child pointed her out for her because of the slave system there were no relationships between parents and children so it was something difficult for someone to be able to exist for another someone. But Sethe knew how this would turn out and she thought that if she didn’t kill her baby girl she would have died in the hands of slavery and racism she did it out love she even replies to Denver’s comment saying, “No more powerful than the way I loved her”(Morrison, 4) when they were talking about Beloved’s ghost. The power of the baby’s ghost rage is linked to Sethe’s love for her and the theme of love is asserted throughout the novel but this love of Sethe to Beloved is the murderous type of love and it is also very destructive even though is very powerful and strong. The reader could also understand that Sethe had a hunger for love because she wasn’t able to have that with her own parents but, “the love hunger, the boundless greed, that so determines the life of the characters also threatens to destroy” her because she wasn’t reliable and she wasn’t affirmed for her own existence. Slavery caused her to have that hunger and to commit the atrocity of killing Beloved but reliving those memories also caused a big change because she was able to move on to the future thoughts and to change the peoples view of how they treated others based on ideas like racism.

In the Article “Identity, Knowledge, and Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’: Questions about Understanding Racism” by the author Susan E. Babbitt she influences the readers of Morrison’s Beloved and other novels that have brought about social change to understand the meaning of social racism through her overview of Drucilla Cornell’s suggestions of “a Social Unconsciousness”. This created a character development of Sethe and also a myth that becomes a symbolist subject to Beloved. In Part One of this article Susan E. Babbitt asks the readers a question “What could a ‘social unconscious’ have to do with questions about ethical and political theory development?” Meaning, what does all of the social unconsciousness have to do with social change and racism or ethnic groups being judged around the world for not having the same culture or the same style of living or same beliefs as others around them? Babbitt’s overview of Cornell’s suggestion is about the people understanding why the society acts the way it does towards some theoretical subjects such as Slavery or Racism. What Cornell suggested is that “we need to examine and retell the myths, or background stories” and this will help many understand why is society so judgmental, it will explain “our seeing and understanding of some things and not others”. In Beloved Sethe attempts to kill her children because she felt that they will be protected from slavery and many other things that will take away their autonomy. Cornell uses the retelling of “the myth of Medea” and she states that this myth will help understand the reality of slavery and it symbolizes the mother’s love and sense of protection over her children. The “Medea myth” is the retelling of “a mother killing her children to protect them from the father” so the mother didn’t kill the children because she felt like she wanted to or out of anger or revenge but she killed them because she loved them and she wanted them in a safer place where they couldn’t be hurt emotionally or mentally. Sethe, in the novel, Beloved, she attempted to kill her children for the same reason, out of love and protection because she grew up in slavery and she had understood that her children will go through awful times knowingly that she was allowed to conceive the child and to deliver it but she wasn’t able to raise the child and they wouldn’t live an autonomous life and this concludes the reality of slavery.