Scars In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Scars are often seen as a blemish, an indication of imperfection and a reminder of a painful past, but in the rights hands scars can also be made beautiful. Sethe, the female protagonists of Toni Morison’s novel and a former slave living in post civil war Ohio, is forced to reopen her scars as well as her traumatizing past when a mysterious young woman arrives on her porch. Inexplicably the woman, who claims to be called Beloved, is infatuated with Sethe and has the characteristics of Sethe’s daughter who has been deceased for eighteen years. The events of eighteen years prior are retold as members of the community continue to question Sethe’s choice and the actions leading up to Sethe killing her own daughter in order to save the young girl from the torment of slavery. While in Beloved’s company, Sethe is able to express her own past and the past of her mother. In this passage, Beloved shares with her sister Denver and Sethe the details of her own voyage back to her family at 124 Bluestone. This passage suggests that the ghost of Beloved is a symbol for the haunting sufferings of the African American community. Morrison incorporates setting, repetition and word choice into Beloved’s stream of consciencenous in order to create an ambiguous embodiment of slavery and its repercussions.
“The little hill of dead people...the men without skin push them through with poles… they fall into the sea”(249).
“she opens the