The Contrasting Nature Of Love Explored In Toni Morrison's Beloved

1381 Words3 Pages

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison explores the paradoxical nature of love both as a dangerous presence that promises suffering and a life-giving force that gives the strength to proceed; through the experiences of the run-away slave Sethe. The dangerous aspect of love is revealed through the comments of Paul D and Ella regarding the motherly love of Sethe towards her children. Sethe's deep attachment to her children is deemed dangerous due to their social environment which evidently promises that the loved one of a slave will be hurt. On the other hand, love is portrayed as a sustaining force that allows Sethe to move on with her life. All the devastating experiences Sethe endures do not matter due to the fact that she must live for her children. Although dangerous, Sethe's love finally emerges as the prevalent force that allows her to leave the past behind and move on with her life.

The dangerous aspect of Sethe's love is first established with the comments of Paul D regarding her attachment to Denver. At page 54, when Sethe refuses to hear Paul D criticize Denver, he thinks: "Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous(…)" he deems Sethe's attachment dangerous because he believes that when "(…) they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack (…)" having such a strong love will prevent her from going on with her life. Paul D's remarks indicate that evidently the loved one of a slave is taken away. Mothers are separated from their children, husbands from their wives and whole families are destroyed; slaves are not given the right to claim their loved ones. Having experienced such atrocities, Paul D realizes that the deep love Sethe bears for her daughter will onl...

... middle of paper ...

...at has been denied and not passed on. She reminds us of the inclination to forget the past and the impossibility of dealing with a silenced history. Morrison intends to ensure the sensitive and responsible conveyance of a history of suffering and to this end her use of parallelism between Paul D and Ella, the symbolisms and the employment of a loaded language, explore the two aspects of love. The contrasting aspects come together at the end to emerge as a united statement underlying the life-giving force of love. The powerful display of the role of love in the lives of the characters, the role it plays in keeping them going is intended to add to the impact of the novel. As a universal concept, love constitutes the best device to communicate the atrocities the negro slaves have faced and serves Morrison's intention to make the reader never forget this shameful history.

Show More
Related

  • The Importance Of Sacrifice In In Beloved

    1920 Words  | 4 Pages

    During the short space of time (which is 28 days) Sethe embraces the dominant values of idealised maternity. Sethe’s fantasy is intended to end upon recover, however, it doesn’t, on that ground she declines to give her family a chance to be taken from her. Rather she endeavours to murder each of her four kids, prevailing the young girl whom she named Beloved. Sethe’s passion opposes the slave proprietor’s- and the western plot line's endeavours at allocations, for better or in negative ways.

    Read More

  • Themes And Cruelty In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1274 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sethe describes her actions to Paul D, arguing, “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (Morrison 164). Here Sethe reveals the extent to which she will go to protect her children from the horrors of slavery; she is willing to personally kill each of them if it means slavery will not have them. Her love for her family and personal experiences as a victim of slavery have caused her to go to cruel lengths to ensure her children’s safety. Sethe does not wish for her children a life under slavery’s influence, which she herself suffered from at the hands of the schoolteacher and his nephews. Although Sethe and Schoolteacher come from opposite spectrums of slavery as well as race, they both are willing to achieve their ends through brutal actions.

    Read More

  • Destructive Love in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

    1770 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Song of Solomon, through many different types of love, —Ruth's incestuous love, Milkman and Hagar's romantic love, and Guitar's love for his race, —Toni Morrison demonstrates not only the readiness with which love will turn into a devastating and destructive force, but also the immediacy with which it will do so. Morrison tackles the amorphous and resilient human emotion of love not to glorify the joyous feelings it can effect but to warn readers of love's volatile nature. Simultaneously, however, she gives the reader a clear sense of what love is not. Morrison explicitly states that true love is not destructive. In essence, she illustrates that if "love" is destructive, it is most likely, a mutation of love, something impure, because love is all that is pure and true.

    Read More

  • Healthy Confusion In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    742 Words  | 2 Pages

    What is a healthy confusion? Does the work produce a mix of feelings? Curiosity and interest? Pleasure and anxiety? One work comes to mind, Beloved. In the novel, Beloved, Morrison creates a healthy confusion in readers by including the stream of consciousness and developing Beloved as a character to support the theme “one’s past actions and memories may have a significant effect on their future actions”.

    Read More

  • Similarities Between Beloved And One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

    1913 Words  | 4 Pages

    Theme of Love in Beloved and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest       In the book, Beloved, by Toni Morrison and the movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, featuring Jack Nickolson, both share a common theme of love and loving oneself. Morrison’s character, Baby Suggs, is the source of love for her people. Similarly, Jack Nicholson’s character McMurphy tries to give the men confidence, so that they can love themselves.

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Love In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1585 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, love proves to be a dangerous and destructive force. Upon learning that Sethe killed her daughter, Beloved, Paul D warns Sethe “Your love is too thick” (193). Morrison proved this statement to be true, as Sethe’s intense passion for her children lead to the loss of her grasp on reality. Each word Morrison chose is deliberate, and each sentence is structured with meaning, which is especially evident in Paul D’s warning to Sethe. Morrison’s use of the phrase “too thick”, along with her short yet powerful sentence structure make this sentence the most prevalent and important in her novel. This sentence supports Paul D’s side on the bitter debate between Sethe and he regarding the theme of love. While Sethe asserts that the only way to love is to do so passionately, Paul D cites the danger in slaves loving too much. Morrison uses a metaphor comparing Paul D’s capacity to love to a tobacco tin rusted shut. This metaphor demonstrates how Paul D views love in a descriptive manner, its imagery allowing the reader to visualize and thus understand Paul D’s point of view. In this debate, Paul D proves to be right in that Sethe’s strong love eventually hurts her, yet Paul D ends up unable to survive alone. Thus, Morrison argues that love is necessary to the human condition, yet it is destructive and consuming in nature. She does so through the powerful diction and short syntax in Paul D’s warning, her use of the theme love, and a metaphor for Paul D’s heart.

    Read More

  • Use of Violence in Beloved by Toni Morrison

    675 Words  | 2 Pages

    As much as society does not want to admit, violence serves as a form of entertainment. In media today, violence typically has no meaning. Literature, movies, and music, saturated with violence, enter the homes of millions everyday. On the other hand, in Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison, violence contributes greatly to the overall work. The story takes place during the age of the enslavement of African-Americans for rural labor in plantations. Sethe, the proud and noble protagonist, has suffered a great deal at the hand of schoolteacher. The unfortunate and seemingly inevitable events that occur in her life, fraught with violence and heartache, tug at the reader’s heart-strings. The wrongdoings Sethe endures are significant to the meaning of the novel.

    Read More

  • Confronting the Past, Living the Present, and Enjoying the Future in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

    1337 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...from slavery as well as the misery slavery itself causes her. Ultimately, Sethe makes a choice to let go of the past as she releases Beloved's hand and thus moves on to the future. In the very last segment of the novel, the narrator notes that finally "they forgot [Beloved]. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep" (290). Sethe no longer represses history but actually lets it go. As a result, Beloved becomes nothing more than "an unpleasant dream," suggesting that she does not exist as a real person, but rather has no substance as a mere fantasy or hallucination which has no value to the community or to Sethe, Denver, or Paul D. Sethe moves on with her life as she has already faced the past, tried to make amends for her mistakes, and finally realizes her own value in life.

    Read More

  • Beloved: Analysis

    7004 Words  | 15 Pages

    From the beginning, Beloved focuses on the import of memory and history. Sethe struggles daily with the haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories and also in the form of her daughter’s aggressive ghost. For Sethe, the present is mostly a struggle to beat back the past, because the memories of her daughter’s death and the experiences at Sweet Home are too painful for her to recall consciously. But Sethe’s repression is problematic, because the absence of history and memory inhibits the construction of a stable identity. Even Sethe’s hard-won freedom is threatened by her inability to confront her prior life. Paul D’s arrival gives Sethe the opportunity and the impetus to finally come to terms with her painful life history.

    Read More

  • Beloved: The Human Condition

    962 Words  | 2 Pages

    Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, reveals the effects of human emotion and its power to cast an individual into a struggle against him or herself. In the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the main character, Sethe, as a woman who is resigned to her desolate life and isolates herself from all those around her. Yet, she was once a woman full of feeling: she had loved her husband Halle, loved her four young children, and loved the days of the Clearing. And thus, Sethe was jaded when she began her life at 124 Bluestone Road-- she had loved too much. After failing to 'save' her children from the schoolteacher, Sethe suffered forever with guilt and regret. Guilt for having killed her "crawling already?" baby daughter, and then regret for not having succeeded in her task. It later becomes apparent that Sethe's tragic past, her chokecherry tree, was the reason why she lived a life of isolation. Beloved, who shares with Seths that one fatal moment, reacts to it in a completely different way; because of her obsessive and vengeful love, she haunts Sethe's house and fights the forces of death, only to come back in an attempt to take her mother's life. Through her usage of symbolism, Morrison exposes the internal conflicts that encumber her characters. By contrasting those individuals, she shows tragedy in the human condition. Both Sethe and Beloved suffer the devastating emotional effects of that one fateful event: while the guilty mother who lived refuses to passionately love again, the daughter who was betrayed fights heaven and hell- in the name of love- just to live again.

    Read More

  • Beloved Symbolism Essay

    964 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...nd her strength. From the kiss on Sethe’s neck, to her new born child reenactment, Sethe succumbs to the job of a mother and tends to her, unaware of the fact that she is losing her health and strength in the process. Beloved is given the best of things from her mother such as food, and when there is nothing else left to give, “Beloved invented desire” (Kochar). Beloved at first seems like the victim in the novel due to the idea that she is supposedly the reincarnation of Sethe’s murdered child, but towards the end of the story Sethe becomes victimized by Beloved and her numerous desires. Sethe grows thin and weak while Beloved grows pregnant and healthy. Although Beloved may be portrayed as only the antagonist in the novel, she also symbolizes an intervention since she leads the characters to understand their pasts and in the end exposes the meaning of community.

    Read More

  • Rememory in Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1241 Words  | 3 Pages

    Morrison characterizes the first trimester of Beloved as a time of unrest in order to create an unpleasant tone associated with any memories being stirred. Sethe struggles daily to block out her past. The first thing that she does when she gets to work is to knead bread: "Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to the day's serious work of beating back the past" (Morrison 73). The internal and external scars which slavery has left on Sethe's soul are irreparable. Each time she relives a memory, she ...

    Read More

  • Universal Themes in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

    969 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, Morrison uses universal themes and characters that anyone can relate to today. Set in the 1800s, Beloved is about the destructive effects of American slavery. Most destructive in the novel, however, is the impact of slavery on the human soul. Morrison’s Beloved highlights how slavery contributes to the destruction of one’s identity by examining the importance of community solidarity, as well as the powers and limits of language during the 1860s.

    Read More

  • Slavery in Beloved, by Toni Morrison

    1972 Words  | 4 Pages

    For Sethe, slavery is not over, at least not in. her mind, and beloved serves as a form of therapy by drawing out the painful. memories and giving Sethe a second chance to right her wrongs. During the last few days at Sweet Home, Sethe was made to suffer more than. any human being should have to.

    Read More

  • Love in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

    648 Words  | 2 Pages

    The relationships Sethe had with her children is crazy at first glance, and still then some after. Sethe being a slave did not want to see her children who she loved go through what she herself had to do. Sethe did not want her children to have their “animal characteristics,” put up on the bored for ...

    Read More

More about The Contrasting Nature Of Love Explored In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Open Document