University of Bucharest

Romanian – English
Ţicleanu Elena Alexandra
III-rd year, group 4

Beloved

By Toni Morrison

- Essay and text analisys -

Toni Morrison is the first black author who obtain the Nobel for literature. One of her
well-known novel is Beloved. This illustrates the abhorence about the period of the
american slave system. Morrison’s novel represents not only just a simple story, but for
the story of afro-americans who start living their own lives in freedom. The past is not
overrun and shadow of the past opress under their consciences.
In the middle of the novel is situated Sethe, a mother who prefered to kill her
daughter than seeing her back to that sclavagism which keeps her away from freedom.
The action of the novel opens with the image of Sethe and her second daughter, Denver,
living in the house where, the protagonist commits the murder, long time ago. House is
not an usual one, is a haunted house by the memory of Beloved. The first fragment with
which the novel opens denotes this: „124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The
women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite
in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims (...)”
Author presents another character, Paul D. This men shares with Sethe the experience of
being slave in the house called „Sweet Home”. Paul D. seems to throw the gost away,
but not for a long time because the last one reapears in the middle of the family. For this
time the gost reappears under the image of a young lady who has the same age with

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Beloved, if the last one would have been in life. This misterious present, who came from
nowhere, determines Paul D. leaving Sethe and Denver. This is what the gost wanted and
for now it starts to twinge Sethe. At the end of the novel, the entire comunity brings
together around the Sethe’s family and through a incantation throw the Beloved’s gost
away and in this manner, Sethe recovers her freedom and her boyfriend, Paul D.
Morrison’s novel is a story of dramas which happened on two directions. First of all,
is the story of an entire generation of slave and its tortures. The exponent of this
generation of slave is Sethe, a chieldren who had 13-years old at the moment when she
arrived to the plantation of Kentucky and become slave. The drubbing creates on her
loins a „cherry” and, in the same way they are the testemony of a „sweet” behaviour that
she endured. The abuses provoke her lesions that she will not be able to forget. These was
the moral facts that push her to commit the murder. In my opinion she was and was not
entitle to murder her daughter. Firstly, she was not capable of seeing her daughter,
Beloved, living the hell that she beared and she was thought that is better to kill her than
letting her suffer. Secondly, nobody has the right to order somebody’s life, more than that
to kill someone because this contradicts the human nature and the principle of God.
In the other hand, the story presents the Sethe’s drama provoked by the memory of
the past. Even if she is not a slave anymore, she is still captive of her own regrets, past
and emotions. Also, Denver is captive in a haunted house without being guilty. Maybe
her blame is being dauther of a mother who commit a sin trying to do something good.
Beloved is not just a gost is that present which successfuly subjugates its mother
presence.
Thinking about Beloved, I would say that is not just a ghost, but also she can be the
exponent of an unnamed society composed by the slaves who were torn from their homes
in Africa and brought to America in the cramped and unsanitarity holds of slave ships.
Also, she define herself through Sethe’s experiences and actions, and in the beginning,
she acts as a somewhat positive forces, helping Sethe face the past by repeatedly asking
her to tell stories about her life.
Refering to the freedom and salvery they say „The expansion of the canon of
“classical” American philosophy to include more than white men opens up new
possibilities for feminist intersections of continental and pragmatist philosophy. Cynthia

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Willett's The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (2001) is a good example
of one such possibility. In this book, Willett critically intersects G.W.F. Hegel and Luce
Irizarry (among others) with the “visionary pragmatism” (2001, 175) of African-
American thinkers such as Toni Morrison and Patricia Hill Collins to present an account
of freedom based in social bonds. Rejecting modernity's and psychoanalysis's account of
separation as crucial to the formation of subjectivity, Willet draws on accounts of slavery
to show how the destruction of erotic connections through the violence of separation
results in social death. With this account, Willett suggests how an expanded
understanding of American pragmatism that includes black women can combine with
continental philosophy to produce a feminist and anti-racist libratory theory that
appreciates the constitutive role that desire plays in social relationships.”
(http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-prag-cont)
A problem developed in the novel is the condition of the slaves which escaped with
success from the slave system. Harder is for a single woman with children, as Sethe, to
survive. If she is one of the lucky people who work to assure her life and Denver’s life
also, not the same thing we can say for all women. “One of the philosophical problems
raised by the housework debate is how to draw the line between work and play or leisure
activity when the activity is not paid: is a mother playing with her baby working or
engaged in play?” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-class/). To the same source
we found that “one solution to this problem is simply to take all household activity that
could also be done by waged labor (nannies, domestic servants, gardeners, chauffeurs,
etc.) as work and to figure its comparable worth by waged labor necessary to replace it.
(Folbre, 1982, 1983)” (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-class/) This can be
correlated with Denver’s decision to get a job when her mother was under the control of
Beloved.
In the end, we can consider that <African American feminists have expressed deep
concern over the trend of turning to African American women's literature—such as Toni
Morrison's Beloved—to uncover gender and racial formation in psychoanalytic terms.
Ann duCille writes—expressing a deep ambivalence over this trend—“[w]e become
objects of study where we are authorized to be the story but have no special claim to

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decoding that story. We can be, but someone else gets to tell us what we mean” (1997,
34) (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/femapproach-continental/)

The fragment I choose belongs to the second part of the novel, when Sethe
realizes that beloved is her first daughter, who she chose to murder being afraid that her
little girl will be slave, as her mother.

“I didn't have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She
had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back
now. I knew she would be. Paul D ran her off so she had no choice but to come back to
me in the flesh. I bet you Baby Suggs, on the other side, helped. I will never let her go. I'll
explain to her, even though I don't have to. Why I did it. How if I hadn't killed her she
would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain
it she'll understand, because she understands everything already. I'll tend her as no
mother ever tended a child, a daughter. “

My questions are:
1. Why the ghost is called “Beloved”?
I think the name is not accidental and it can be correlated with the actions of Sethe,
who, for to much love, chooses to kill her daughter than seeing her to suffer as slave and
being forced to support all that harassment.

2. Why thinks Sethe that Beloved will be in safe just being death?
As Sethe oneself affirmed “it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I
put her where she would be.” Seethe was young and scared of the life that she had.

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Planning to escape, she realizes that nothing is sure and everything can happen anytime.
As the plane goes wrong, she considers that the only salvation for her daughter is death.