Sethe, the protagonist and a former slave on the plantation
of sweet home lives with her 18-year-old daughter Denver in a house on 124
Bluestone Road, 20 years after killing her child to avoid slavery. The
neighbours do not visit her because of her troubled past and because of the
speculations that her house is haunted. Paul D, the former slave companion of
Sethe on the sugar plantation visits her house and decides to stay with them.
Sethe and Paul D live like husband and wife. Paul D performs an exorcism and
makes the ghost live the inhabitants of the house alone. Sethe longs for her
child whom she killed twenty years ago. She wants her back so that she could
justify her actions. When a mysterious girl in her 20s who goes by the name of
Beloved appears at the door, Sethe immediately recognizes her to be her child.
She tries to please her through motherly affection but she develops an uneasy
relationship with her mother. Beloved lives to the detriment of her mother's health.
When Denver realizes that her mother is dying, she goes out of the house to ask
for help. The neighbours come to help them and finally Beloved disappears.
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This novel, written by Tony Morrison is an attack on
slavery and the resultant racial exploitation of the African Americans. Being,
an African American herself, she understood the plight of the former slaves and
their descendants. She has depicted the way slaves were treated through the
characters of Sethe and her family. Morrison got her inspiration for writing
this novel from the true story of Margaret Garner. Margaret was a slave who
killed her child to prevent the child from becoming a slave. Death seemed more
attractive and comforting to Sethe and her real-life inspiration Margaret than
slavery. Slavery meant in those days living a life worse than an animal.
Slaves were brought to America as a result of the
Atlantic slave trade. They were bought from Africa by the Europeans and brought
to America to work on sugar and tobacco plantations. Slaves were regarded as
the property of their masters. They had no rights. When they reproduced, it
meant more money for their owners. Therefore these slaves preferred death over
living in slavery.
Through the novel, Morrison has reflected on the lives of
slaves and the effects of slavery after the civil war and its formal abolition.
In Beloved the slaves working on the sweet home plantations
are brutally tortured, beaten and treated as if they are beasts deserving no
compassion. Through the life of Sethe, Morrison has brought to the fore the
conditions of the female slaves in which they were forced to live and work.
Sethe is abused and mistreated to the point that she is forced to flee and kill
her child. Through this novel, Morrison has discovered and presented the long
ignored and overlooked lives of slaves. Beloved, based on the true story is a
re-invention of the past and history of slavery.
The novel is set a few years after the civil war. The
plantation of Mr.Garner and Mrs.Garner has a couple of slaves working on them
including Sethe, Paul D, Baby Suggs. Mr.Garner treated his slaves with respect
and empathy. Although, he bestowed on them certain human rights, the
constitutional rights of free men were not available to them. Everything turned
for the worse when Mr. Garner died and the plantation was handed over to the
school teacher. He was a vindictive man. He tormented and hammered them with
whips. The slaves were dehumanized and treated with contempt. He maligned them
for literally everything they did, be it eating or talking. Such cruelty
ultimately led to the death of slaves on the plantation and the eventual escape
of Sethe.
Though everyone had their share of violence perpetrated against them it was sethe who had to endure the most. She was abused and raped. The school teacher usually whipped her through his nephews so that he could cherish her torment. In the novel, Sethe mentions how her child was deprived of her mother milk in infancy as her masters took away her breast milk. She could bear the physical pain but the incident of taking away of her breast milk by the nephews of the school teacher after raping her traumatized her emotionally.
Such mistreatment led her to commit infanticide. It is not
easy for a mother to kill a child. It cannot be justified in any way. But the
life of slavery had such a traumatic influence on Sethe that she did not want
her children to go through what she had been through. Sethe, though killed her
child not because she was a psychopath but because the experience of slavery
drove her to commit this crime. Her anguish and frustration led her to kill the
child. She did it out of motherly love.
After the incident, Sethe was imprisoned. Ironically, she
fled slavery to end up in prison. But Morrison wanted to shed light on the fact
that even after running away she cannot escape her fate. She is black and she
has to live the life of one. Even after the formal abolition of slavery, the
lives of the former slaves could not get better. In the case of Sethe, she was
banished from society. Regarded as an outcast for killing her child, she had to
live with the memories of the past and the guilt of killing her child. She is
entangled in the past and she cannot escape from it as the memories still haunt
her. She cannot be comfortable thinking about the misdeeds that happened to her
and the crime that she committed.
Sethe feels guilty for killing her child and longs for the
day when she would justify her actions to her. When Beloved appears, Sethe
feels happy that finally, she has a chance to justify her horrible action as
she believes her daughter is understanding enough to forgive her. But even
then, she cannot get rid of the psychological torment that she has been facing
for years. Her motherly love is so intense that she can even die for her.
However, peace is an impossible dream for her.
Her whole family has been destroyed by slavery. Her husband
Halle lost his mind and went insane after hearing what happened to his wife.
Her mother-in-law could not tolerate such humiliation. Even Paul D left her
home when he came to know that she has killed her daughter.
Through Beloved, Morrison presents to us the
various ways in which humans were reduced to animals in the slavery system. By
narrating about the lives of the slaves in the Sweet Home, Tony Morrison
emphasizes the dehumanizing effects that slavery had on the lives of
African-Americans.
Even after the formal abolition of slavery, the memories of
the past did not let the former slaves live in peace. They were boycotted,
chased, subjected to racist slurs and discriminatory laws as they were thought
to be somehow children of a lesser god.
The article is written by Asif Abbas, a member at the School of Literature.
