Repression In The Sweet Home

keep this fierce experience in the box of memory, therefore, they reluctantly repress it as something dead that should be forgotten since "anything dead coming back to life hurts. A truth for all times,….( Morrison :p.68) Relatively ,Morrison's readers could observe that the characters who use repression most are Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Sucks. Those characters, though thinking that they recently acquire freedom in 124 Bluestone, find repression is the best means to cope the traumatic memories of slavery . They feel these memories, like a ghost, haunting them everywhere and anytime. Sethe, Baby Suggs, and Paul D all run from Sweet Home just to free themselves from thrall or any atrocities they have
Concerning Paul D, Shelby (2007) says that he" has, like Sethe, struggled under the harsh conditions of slavery. He has suffered severe psychological tragedies that have forced him into a state of repression, keeping him from healing properly."(p.2). According to Paul D, repression is not only way to escape painful memories, but to change place either; to him, one's ego must obtain its own control over individual's movement. He assumes that " if a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up" (Morrison- p.10), he believes that a slave has to free himself physically, while to Sethe, rationally freedom is more concerned. According to Baby Suggs, another slave who is used to practicing repression to escape the nastiness of present and past; since the present is as bad as the past which makes no difference, no sense. Therefore, for the three characters, the desire or wish of freedom must be repressed since the ego hasn't achieved it yet. Though the concept of freedom among them is oscillated between rational and physical, however, they agree to let their egos postpone achieving this desire, since there is a requisite " need to overcome the pain that they have worked so diligently to repress."(Shelby: 2007)