How Does Toni Morrison Use Cruelty In Beloved

Cruelty, the “deliberate and malicious infliction of mental or physical pain,” appears in innumerable examples from human history (Legal Dictionary). Cruelty has played enormous roles in shaping social and political structures, with the most relevant and prominent example of institutionalized cruelty in American history that has contributed significantly to social order and hierarchy being the practice of slavery. The novel Beloved captures the story of freed slaves struggling to reconstruct their lives after the cruelty they experienced from slave owners. The author, Toni Morrison, presents cruelty as a method of asserting power and shows the dehumanizing effects of cruelty on not only the victim, but also the perpetrator.
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Slavery in the 19th century was a business like any other, and slave owners found that by treating slaves cruelly to increase productivity, their business became more financially productive and lucrative. Owners often employed rape as acts of cruelty to control slaves. Instead of being committed to achieve sexual satisfaction, rape is a form of assault performed by the perpetrator to establish a dominant position over another individual. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Schoolteacher’s nephews rape Sethe outside, behind the stable because “it was too nasty to stay in with the horses” (114). The nephews commit their “nasty” act to dehumanize Sethe instead of gaining sexual pleasure. By raping her and taking her milk in that setting, the nephews emphasize that she lower than the cow to them. This is an example of the recurring motif in the book of comparing slaves to animals in order to remove slaves’ autonomy and make them more obedient
Convinced in their own superiority, slave owners did not comprehend neither how the savagery they saw in slaves was caused by their own cruelty, “the jungle whitefolks planted in them,” nor how that cruelty “spread . . .Changed and altered them . . . made them . . . worse than even they wanted to be” (113). Morrison employs the analogy between cruelty and a jungle to emphasize the twisted, malignant effects of cruelty’s nature. The “screaming baboon,” a symbol of insanity, savagery, and irrationality “lived under [the slave owners’] white skin,” signifying that these traits become a part of them that they are unable to remove (114). Because of their own cruelty that “spread, until it invaded the whites that made it,” slave owners lost the essence of humanity: rational thought (113). In the case of Sethe, when she chooses to kill Beloved as an act of both cruelty and love to stop Schoolteacher, she loses her identity as a mother. Her children grow up “scared of her because of it,” and her two sons run away (116). Toni Morrison uses magical realism, the ghost and rebirth of Beloved, to manifest how Sethe’s choices returns to torment her, and illustrates how cruelty comes back to destroy a person’s