Beloved, By Toni Morrison

How do we live with our inescapable pasts? Toni Morrison’s Beloved seeks to find out through the experiences of Sethe, a former slave living in 1870s Cincinnati. She is traumatized by her past of slavery and having killed her own baby. “But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (Morrison 83). Sethe does not think she can be forgiven for these atrocities in her life. Beloved alternates between past and present events, blurring the line between the two, it even shifts points of view because of its deliberately scattered structure. The lingering past of slavery is a driving and influential force in Morrison’s Beloved; her use of symbolism and imagery suggest that no one can escape their past.
When Paul D arrives, he soon sees the scar. “And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate to display” (Morrison 21). He perceives the scar as something with a certain beauty to it, hinting that beauty can come out of the most heinous experiences. After Sethe and Paul D go upstairs, they separately recall their times at “Sweet Home”. He sees the scar again and thinks that it's “not a tree… Maybe shaped like one, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting” (Morrison 25). It’s odd resemblance to a tree reminds Paul D of the deceptively beautiful landscapes of “Sweet Home”. Not only does the scar stay with Sethe, so did the horrible memories. It is an image of slavery's ruthlessness that Sethe endures; It is the mark of her past and forces the reader to struggle with the juxtaposition of beauty and the abyss of