Human Emotions In Toni Morrison's Beloved

The novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison, examines both the distinction and commonality between the characteristics of humans and those of animals. Thorough her poignant description of slavery: a machine that operates on the basis familial destruction and dehumanization, in which women and children are treated like cattle and calves, Morrison illustrates its distortion of the line between man and beast, driving Sethe and those chained within its influence through the full spectrum of the human emotions even long after they have escaped. Sethe struggles to classify herself after escaping slavery and crossing the Ohio river to the relative safety of the North; after all, “definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” In Beloved the past isn’t
really the past; it can’t be forgotten or locked away.
When Beloved, the physical embodiment of the infant Sethe killed to save from slavery arrives at 124, she immediately exhibits an intense attachment to Sethe.
Denver, Sethe’s (living) daughter is at first delighted that she no longer has to be alone, but as Beloved becomes increasingly obsessed with Sethe, Denver grows concerned for her mother’s safety. As Beloved becomes more and more attached to Sethe, she begins to consume Sethe’s life, devouring her stories and attention while growing larger and larger. At the same time, Sethe wastes away, becoming frail and decrepit, constantly devoted to convincing her long lost daughter that she killed her not in an episode of animalistic barbarity, but rather a moment of intense caring. Beloved takes advantage of Sethe’s need to dispel her own doubt that she is no better than an animal by refusing her apologies and refuting her justification. Through these actions, Beloved becomes a literary vampire, extricating the life force and Sethe consuming it in the entirely selfish interest of revenge. In actuality, Beloved, as a result of her merciless manipulation of Sethe, is the one who crosses the line between man and beast, highlighting the vindictiveness of death and the tendency of tough decisions to pry at one’s conscious until they are put to
rest. A tree grows across Sethe’s back; a tree with leaves of dying skin and branches of scar tissue. Sethe may have escaped slavery, but she still caries its disfigurement on her back both physically and metaphorically. Morrison marks Sethe in this way not only to demonstrate the atrocity of slavery, but also as a means of juxtaposing the beauty and tranquility of the tree with the violence and abuse of its origins. Moreover, Sethe’s wounds also symbolize the emotional scars that slavery has left on her. By equating physical deformity with moral deformity, Morrison both alludes to and provides a basis for Sethe’s gruesome decision to murder her children rather than let them be recaptured. In addition, similar the practice of branding cattle, Sethe is marked on her back in a manner reminiscent to bovine ownership. By comparing these two forms of possession, Morrison suggests an intimate relationship between the practice of slavery and the dehumanization of the slaves. It is this animalization that Sethe seeks to shed in her freed life, but she is stuck under the shadow of the tree on her back. When Sethe’s former slave-owner materializes on the road in front of 124 to recapture her family, Sethe, overcome by terror, resolves that the only way to keep her children from being returned into slavery is to kill them. Although she only succeeds in murdering one of her four children, an act that leaves her captors so utterly disgusted and confused that they turn and leave without taking her or her family, Sethe is exiled within her community the heinous act of violence she commits. “If I hadn’t killed her, she would have died,” states Sethe paradoxically, attempting to explain that her violent actions were manifestations of an unfathomable love. “You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” states Paul D., a declaration that delves poignantly into the contrasting of human and animalistic behavior. Through this juxtaposition, Paul suggests that Sethe’s decision to murder her children had crossed the line between man and beast; she had failed to break the shackles of slavery and was still the animal they had showed her she was. “Your love is too thick,” Paul continues, adamant in his conviction that Sethe did not have the right to decide whether her children should have a future or not. “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all,” she replies, equally steadfast in her belief that she acted out of intense devotion and not savagery. Perhaps, Morrison suggests through this dialogue, these two apparent contraries are synonymous; when the division between human and animal is contorted so momentously by the sin of slavery, maybe they mean the same thing. Sethe wants nothing more than to be free; as she puts it, “to get to a place where you could love anything you choose–not to need permission for desire–well now that was freedom.” In order to reach this place, however, she needs not to travel physically, but rather, she needs to come to terms with her past and the atrocity inflicted upon her. “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another,” she mentions. Like her the tree on her back, Sethe’s past isn’t going anywhere; she can’t forget it, but at least she can accept it. After all, to be human is to forgive and move on. As Paul D. reiterates, “Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”