Reaction to Beloved

Knowing how terrible the life as a slave could be, Sethe attempted to take the lives of her children in order to spare their innocence. She only succeeded in killing her oldest daughter, a two year old girl we presume to be named Beloved. Beloved is told through the perspective of several characters, particularly Sethe and Paul D. Their testimonies to the occurrences with Beloved are based around a few themes including slavery, death, love, anger, and jealousy. Slavery is the most obvious theme in the book as the characters’ lives revolve around the fact that they are considered property. This had severe emotional and psychological effects on the slaves, particularly Sethe.

She was the oldest daughter of Sethe but sadly was murdered by Sethe herself and this act was committed by Sethe because she believed she was protecting Beloved from slavery. She is the one who brings change in the lives of Sethe, Paul D, and Denver but also the community. She first haunts her mother as being an infant ghost in their home but once fled away by Paul D; she comes back in a form of a young woman who starts to live with them. She feels betrayed by her mother due to the fact that she was murdered so therefore she is demanding for her mother’s emotions. But at the end she disappears and becomes a painful past of African Americans.

Her love and commitment to protecting her children is so deep that she, unwilling to surrender them to the physical, sexual, spiritual, and psychological abuse of slavery, attempts to murder them. This single act haunts Sethe (literally and figuratively) for the rest of her life. Baby Suggs, Sethe’s ‘mother-in-law’, a spiritual woman who preaches to the black community is likewise affected by Sethe’s actions. Sethe and Baby Suggs are both mothers and former slaves. Both women have been negatively affected by the experiences of slavery.

Toni Morrison’s book “Beloved” is a true story based on a woman in the slave life. This book demonstrates the destructive potential of a mother's love and the impossibility of the former slaves ever forgetting their experiences in segregation. In SIRS Renaissance, Toni Morrison’s novel is based on a fugitive slave, Margaret Garner, who had run away with her four small children sometime in 1856 from a plantation in Kentucky, used the Underground Railroad. When her Kentucky owner arrived in Ohio to take Margaret and the four children back, she tried to murder her children and herself. She killed her two year-old daughter and severely injures the remaining three children before she was arrested and jailed.

comes to know about the haunting ghost, he expels it from her house. Sethe is so relaxed to get liberated from the ghost that she invites Paul D to live along with her. On the other hand, Denver is very sad, who had no playmates or siblings considered the ghost of her dead sister as her best friend. She is jealous of her mother and Paul D having shared a past life and assumes that Paul D. is stealing her mother away from her. In Beloved, Morrison expresses the impact that slavery has on the black community.

Beloved developed from a baby to monstrosity due to her murder. In the novel, Beloved, the author Toni Morrison allows the reader to indulge in the life of the former slave mother, Sethe, and her family’s fight in the path to free themselves from their past lives. Throughout the novel, Sethe reveals that she had done the horror of killing her child Beloved because she did not want Beloved to live the life of slavery as she did. Beloved eventually haunts her being, from becoming a small figure that shakes the household to a real 19-year-old woman who wrecks havoc amongst the community and terrorizes those who come across her path in wanting to be with Sethe. Sethe and Denver, Sethe’s other child, both contribute to the horrors of Beloved by

She managed to kill her two year-old daughter and severely injure the remaining three children before she was arrested and jailed. Toni saw this opportunity to write this particular article into a novel to show people how the days of slavery were and the sacrifices those that had run away would make if they stood a chance to be recaptured. The novel also introduces us to the spirits of the souls that were lost and how they never rested in peace until they finished what they had left behind. Toni really captures the audience’s attention in this particular novel. Therefore, although this story may seem facetious, it is really based on an article that Toni Morrison found in nineteen hundred and seventy-four.

For 28 days Sethe and her children happily live with Halle’s mother, Baby Suggs, but she is soon found by the slave-owner who had come to retrieve them. To avoid a return to slavery, Sethe decides to kill her children and herself. She is only able to kill her toddler, later known as “Beloved”. At the novel and films opening, which takes place after slavery has been abolished, the entire family is tortured by the ghost of the baby girl haunting the house, and the Black Community has turned their back on Sethe for her seemingly horrendous actions. Observations The character Sethe is presented as a former slave woman who chooses to kill her baby girl rather than allowing the child to be exposed to the physically, emotionally, and spiritually oppressive horrors of a life spent in the confines of slavery.

Worse still, many a husband discovered that his wife had fled from slavery years ago, and as “the child follows the condition of its mother,” the children of his love were liable to be seized and carried into slavery” (155) Extremely pity, sorrow, and shame is projected throughout Jacob’s book which covers not only her life, but also the common misfortune of many victims of slavery. Undoubtedly the women slaves were repeatedly abused, discriminated, and harassed not only by the society but also by the sadistic masters becoming the most mistreated of a slavery society.

Beloved is the daughter of a slave known as Sethe. Sethe escaped slavery with the help of runaway slaves and a woman named Denver who helped her when her feet were too swollen to even walk. Sethe was a slave tortured and raped by her schoolteachers and his sons. Sethe had to escape to keep her kids from being in a hellhole of slavery. When Sethe’s schoolteacher showed up at her mother in laws house, Sethe murder her baby girl Beloved because she would have rather killed herself and her children then go back to slavery and take her kids with her.