Beloved: Showing The Dehumanizing Effect Of Slavery On Sethe Essay

Beloved: Showing the Dehumanizing Effect of Slavery on Sethe

In the nineteenth century, most printed black literature consisted of slave narratives. These narratives showed true stories of slaves' escapes to free states or countries. These stories were mainly published by white abolitionists to educate whites about the evils of slavery. Toni Morrison is a black African American novelist and also her novels show and record the history of African American. Toni Morrison has written a historical trilogy Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Beloved deals with slavery, Jazz continues this exploration into the 1920s, and Paradise extends the examination of history into the 1970s. Morrison's novels have been a major contribution to black literature.

Henderson notes that also Morrison is among the writers who tried to show what happened to African Americans in the past and tries to show what has been forgotten or is being silenced:

Yet, in many respects, these writers were limited in their efforts to fully depict

the physical and psychological suffering of African American peopleToni Morrison seeks to signify on those silences imposed by publishers and editors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, Williams and Morrison extend the efforts of their predecessors by developing creative responses to those calls centered on the wounds of the African American body. (12)

In her novel Beloved, Morrison intended to show the reader what happened to slaves working in an institutionalized slave system. The slaves working on Sweet Home experience violence, brutality, and are treated like animals. In the novel, Sethe is mostly affected of these severe conditions of slavery. Sethe gets tortured, raped and mistreated. As a result, Sethe attempts to run away from Sweet Home and later she is driven to kill her two-year-old baby.

Morrison shows us what it means to live as a slave and what can happen because of slavery in Beloved. Morrison shows the painful past of African Americans and reveals the buried experiences for a better understanding of African American history. In Beloved Morrison takes a real life event from African American history and gives special importance to the horrors and tortures of slavery to remind the reader about the past. In Beloved Morrison reinvents the past and wants the reader not to forget what happened in African American history:

Morrisons critically acclaimed novel Beloved probes the most painful part

of the African American heritage, slavery, by way of what she has called

rememory -- deliberately reconstructing what has been forgotten.

( Kubitschek 115 )

In Beloved Morrison focuses on the dehumanizing effect of slavery and as a result of this she emphasizing what African Americans had to suffer in history. By reinventing the past, Morrison tries to keep the history of African Americans alive:

Beloved represents a working out of subjectivity through the representation of

history, a history so brutal and dehumanizing that it is unrepresentable, a depiction of community, which is often torn apart by the circumstances of slavery,

and a construction of identity. ( Fuston-White 463)

Morrison believes that African American history is erased and romanticized. Spargo cites Morrisons ideas about African American history:

We live in a land where the past is always erased and America is the innocent future in which immigrants can come and start over, where the slate is clean.

The past is absent or its romanticized. This culture doesn't encourage dwelling

on, let alone coming to terms with, the truth about the past.

( Spargo 113)