Dehumanization In Toni Morrison's Beloved

During the period of slavery, blacks were ranked lower than animals and forced to leave behind their former identities and gain a new appropriate identity for their slave masters. Toni Morrison manages to capture the dehumanization of the slaves within her novel Beloved, as the characters who were once former slaves, try to gain a sense of ownership in their new lives. She used human thresholds that guided them through hardships that helped claim their identities. Slavery had caused many slave masters to treat their slaves as property and not human beings. Morrison shows as Sethe reclaims her identity, she is forced to go through her memories of Sweet Home the plantation and the Schoolteacher, “Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work. Clever,
Not allowing human rights, Morrison goes further to show that the slaves were indeed animals to the slave masters when Sethe recounts another memory of schoolteacher, “No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right” (Morrison 228). The use of zoomorphism is seen throughout the novel to portray the degradation of slaves by characterizing them as animals first then human beings as they try to gain ownership of their identities again. Morrison conveys the horrors of slavery through characters and events within the novel with the extensive use of important figures. The freed slaves were fighting for a chance to be themselves and they were not trying to let the past define their
The freed slaves could feel free and the pain and suffering that they endured was not alone. They could love the parts of their body and mind that were deprived from them for so long. Morrison allowed for Baby Suggs to be a human threshold due to the power she had within the community, that allowed her to help shape the new identities that the African Americans were making. She also uses this speech to show to the readers the use of dehumanization that the slaves faced. Being beaten, tied up, dismembered, and moved around like a herd of sheep. Morrison encompasses this as well in a memory of Paul D being in a work camp where the soldiers would make them kneel and provide sexual services or die before they started strenuous work. In yet another memory Paul D states, “They put a three-spoke collar on him so he can’t lie down and they chin his ankles together” (Morrison267). This pushed Paul D, to be better by going to find freedom for himself because of deprivation of human rights and dignity. However, the circumstances though, the community persevered and reclaimed their identities within time and hard work. They did it