Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include :Character Analysis of Beloved in the Novel by Toni Morrison • Jazz by Toni Morrison : The Symbolic Significance of the Title • Slavery in America’s South : Implications and Effects
Through her embodiment of generations of pain, slavery and the obliteration of personal identity, Beloved actually seems to help characters in the novel find themselves among the wreckage of their history as she herself is a character with a combination of identities.. For instance, Denver, who is an intense and self-absorbed girl is nothing without Beloved by her side at when she thinks Beloved leaves her, she cries because she suddenly “has no self” and can feel her “thickness thinning, dissolving into nothing” 145). Beloved, through her knowledge of history and everyone’s past is able to create identities where none were able to exist before, mostly because the pain was far too great. When Beloved is around, the “tobacco-tin” box of Paul D’s heart finally opens again around Beloved, Ella is able to understand her own past pain in the context of another person, Stamp Paid begins to recognize that despite his claim to be about no one other than himself begins to come into question, Sethe is finally able to recall her past and piece together the intense pain and even Denver is allowed to reclaim her own identity by the end.
While at this stage of the novel by Toni Morrison Beloved represents symbolically one of the most horrifying aspects of the legacy of slavery as she is a testament to the fact that a mother would rather commit the worst crime against her in order to save her from such a horrible life, she also represents the healing power of truth. Her presence makes characters in the novel consider their histories, past pain, and even responsibilities in a way that did not happen before. Before she arrived, history was cyclical; the women were all living in a house haunted by an overwhelming sadness and angry ghost and willing to do so because that was what they knew. Beloved’s presence creates a new paradigm for the characters to exist in simply because through her intervention via recognition of the past she is able to force out these harmful patterns and create a new understanding of the possibility of the present.
Beloved is a novel full of contradictions and impossibility but this seems appropriate given the yet-unrealized impact slavery in all of its horrifying detail. Beloved represents these generations of past and current slaves in the novel by forcing them to remember that which “should not be spoken of” in the community in “Beloved” by Toni Morrison that is trying to move forward. The reader is not only a witness to the severe and often crippling damage caused by generations of slavery but is implicated at the end when, despite the absence of Beloved, as the narrator states in one of the important passages from “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “There is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It’s alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place” (323). This is clear reference to Beloved and history as it suggests that history is not something that can be placated merely by rocking it or soothing it. It must be something actively remembered, even if slavery is “not a story to pass on” (324).
Neither the reader nor anyone left behind in the Cincinnati community can forget since the footsteps of the past can always be heard echoing. By the conclusion of the novel it is clear that Beloved’s presence as someone who was present on the borderline between slavery and freedom and an extractor of pain and memory is exactly the position the reader is meant to occupy. Like Beloved herself who enacted an intervention through her invoking of remembrances, even when “remembering seemed unwise” (324) the reader must digest this story, despite how painful it is to read and consider, and should interpret it not as a story of the supernatural or even as just a story at all, but a testament to the potent nature of memory and history—especially a history that is almost too difficult to accept or internalize.
In this strange and gripping way, even though the novel has dealt with, in excruciating and uncomfortable detail a horrible history filled with great pain and some of the most unimaginably cruel and complex forms of degradation of an entire people, the ubiquitous and rather bi-polar presence of this ghost character actually creates fertile ground for healing and this completes the character of Beloved. The extraction of memory and purging of history is almost like a “slash and burn” tactic to clear new ground for building a future. In this way, the novel can be seen as hopeful and oddly optimistic. By becoming the physical manifestation of the past, Beloved forces all of the characters to consider their identity within a painful history that worked so hard to obliterate identity. She embodies the most dreadful aspects of a history of slavery, especially in terms of what slavery did to destroy families and what might have been normal relationships but she also embodies a youthful and childlike spirit that yearns for happiness and the closeness with one’s identity that all human beings deserve and desire.
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 1987.
Spargo, R. Clifton. “Trauma and the Specters of Enslavement in Morrison’s Beloved.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 35.1 (2002), 113-131.
