Essay on Symbolic Healing in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Sethe’s consciousness is always working, always a part of her decisions affect her children, the best things in her life. She is indeed, ambivalent too what would destroy her mothering. As strong as Sethe is, she cannot stop her children from leaving; and her strength is what scares some of them.

Sethe says she believes she won't even have to explain her motives for killing her (a love so great she can't let her be taken into a life of slavery). "I don't have to remember nothing," Sethe tells herself on page 183. "I don't even have to explain. She understands it all." Sethe believes the one true way she will find restitution and understanding with Beloved, is by knowing the mark she has left on her daughter. "I only need to know one thing. How bad is the scar?" Sethe feels that by knowing the scar, by touching the "memory of a smile under her chin," she can feel her daughter's pain and connect with her.

Stamp Paid, a former slave who ferries Sethe and Denver across the Ohio River, tried to take Beloved’s corpse from the mother’s clinging hands and give Denver to her. A mother killing her own child is an act that subverts the natural order of the world. A mother is expected to create life, not destroy it, but with Sethe’s case, she was insane and out of control at that specific moment when she imagined that her child might face the same assault in future. Thus, she prefers to put an end to this situation. On the other hand, we notice that she was very anxious about the feeling of Beloved, her murdered child. She stated, “Do you forgive me? Will you stay? You safe here now”

When Sethe first meets Beloved, she welcomes her with a suspiciously large magnitude. Furthermore, it is clear that Sethe never revealed her past experiences to Denver, yet the moment Beloved asks about her lost earrings, it was “the first time she had heard anything about her(Sethe’s) mother’s mother”(61). This proves that Beloved, and not anyone else, is pulling Sethe to the past, by making her recollect of her days as a slave. In addition,“it is clear why she holds on to you(Sethe), but I just can’t see why you holding on to her,” Paul mentioned(67). This shows how Paul realizes that Sethe has taken in Beloved without much reasoning, and when Beloved hums a song that Sethe happened to make up, Sethe fully but blindly embraces Beloved as family. In fact, she “had gone to bed smiling,” anxious to “unravel the proof for the conclusion she had already leapt to”(181). This shows how consumed by Beloved she is.

In this chapter, we learn that Sethe was already pregnant with Denver when she ran away from Sweet Home. By the time when Sethe collapsed her feet in the woods, a white girl Amy Denver had found Sethe. Due to Sethe’s fear about Sweet Home, she told Amy Denver a false name- “Lu”, because if she were caught, she would be returned to Sweet Home, and she would continue experiencing her previous painful daily life again. Amy Denver helps Sethe by massaged her feet and release her pain. Later, Sethe gave birth to her baby successfully with Amy’s help and Sethe also naming the child after Amy Denver.

Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, allows for one to experience slavery through three generations of women. The complex development of the horrors of black chattel slavery in the United States intertwined with a story a freedom helps the reader to understand the ongoing struggle of the Afro-American population after emancipation. Denver, although never a slave, is at first held in bondage by her mother's secrecy about her past and only sets herself free when her mother is forced to cope with her memories.

We learn a lot about the healing process of Sethe due to what Beloved has done to her. Beloved forces Sethe to confront her past so much that she is

Sethe hears beloved humming a song she made up for her children and realizes that it's her baby that she killed

Sethe understands that her history, filled with the pain of slavery, grief over losing her children, and guilt over Beloved's death, and tries to hide from all the anguish. However, she admits that the past seems to "always be there waiting," thereby emphasizing the idea that past horrors of life continue to haunt forever. It appears as though the power of her experience in slavery influences her so greatly that the memory triggers great pain, causing the horrifying incidents to "happen again." Even though Sethe understands that she cannot ever fully escape her history as it will come back to trouble her, she still tries to avoid them and thus attempts to shield her daughter from the horrors of history: "As for Denver, the job Sethe had of keeping her from the past that was still waiting for her was all that mattered" (45). It seems as though Sethe tries to deny the fact that history does not simply disappear. She still tries to protect Denver "from the past" even though history "waits," prepared to cause trouble and inflict the pain Sethe tries to repress. It appears as though Sethe continuously tries to fight against her memories and ignore her past in part one. For example, after she wakes, she begins "Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day's

     Just as Paul D desires a better life after slavery, so does Baby Suggs.  As a slave, Suggs was suppressed and did not experience the type of life she desired.  Morrison indirectly demonstrates this by purposely leaving out any descriptions of color in Suggs's life when she was a slave.  Morrison uses this absence of color to express that Suggs had lived the life which she had longed for.  She did not experience independence, freedom, safety nor a sense of community when she was a slave.  However, after she was sold, she searched for color, or the life that she had wanted.  For, "she had never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before" (Morrison 201). Enjoying every color that she could, trying to compensate for the time wasted as a slave,  Suggs retreated to her room and concentrated on color.  It "took her a long time to finish with blue, then yellow then green"  (Morrison 201).  Making explicit the absence of color while Suggs was a slave and then describing the way she relished the colors of her newly acquired freedom, Morrison conveys Suggs's fulfillment of the life she had longed to have when she was a slave.  Finally, as her life ended, Suggs was happy with the freedom, sense of

Sethe lives in the shadow of her act of infanticide throughout the entire length of the book. This is because its legacy pervades itself throughout the entire novel, showing events leading up, and ways the future has been affected. The novel begins as such: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. (Page 1)” This baby refers to Beloved, who became a ghostly presence in Sethe’s house and continuously terrorizes the house

Through character development, the story also portrays the theme of escaping the past. Sethe’s actions are influenced heavily by her dead child, Beloved. When the “human” form of Beloved arrives while sleeping

Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Beloved, is a historical novel that serves as a memorial for those who died during the perils of slavery. The novel serves as a voice that speaks for the silenced reality of slavery for both men and women. Morrison in this novel gives a voice to those who were denied one, in particular African American women. It is a novel that rediscovers the African American experience. The novel undermines the conventional idea of a story’s time scheme. Instead, Morrison combines the past and the present together. The book is set up as a circling of memories of the past, which continuously reoccur in the book. The past is embedded in the present, and the present has no

 Sethe learned the value of motherhood from an early age.  Not wanting the children of the white men that raped her, Sethe?s mother, Ma?am (as she is called in the book), threw all the unwanted children away.  But, Sethe?s father was a black man whom Ma?am loved, and so she kept Sethe.  Recalling the story, Sethe thinks back on what Nan (the woman who knew Sethe?s mother and raised Sethe, herself) said, ?She threw them all away but you.  The one from the crew she threw away on the island.  The others from more whites she also threw away.  Without names, she threw them.  You she gave the name of the black man? (Morrison, 62).  Thus having an identity because of her mother, ?Sethe learns Ma?am?s history and grounds her personality in motherly-love? (Kubitcheck 123).  Kubitcheck also says, ?mother-love offers the strongest defense against slavery.  When Nan tells Sethe that her Ma?am chose to conceive and bear her, Sethe acquires the base on which to build feelings of self-worth? (135).  She could also identify with her mother by the mark branded below Ma?am?s

When the sheriff got closer to Sethe and her baby, Sethe decided it was time to keep her baby sade. Sethe thought that killing her baby would be better than sending the baby into slavery. “She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time…” (pg. 85) When this occurred Sethe let her past block her mindset of the future. Even though Sethe was scared no for herself but for her baby, she still wanted nothing to do with her past. This shows how tragic Sethe’s past was when she was a slave and she doesn’t want anyone able to bring it back to her.