Beloved' by Toni Morrison Reflection Essay

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Beloved’ by Toni Morrison Reflection Essay

Beloved, classified as a historical fiction and a gothic horror story demonstrates Toni Morrison’s skill in penetrating the unconstrained unapologetic psyches of numerous characters who shoulder the horrific burden of slavery sins. Morrison chooses to marvel that slaves were brutalized beyond endurance. Slavery is a condition in which one human being is owned by the other and is considered as a property of his own by law who was deprived of most of the rights which ordinary people have. In Morrison’s Beloved, it has been reflected that the morality of the individuals at the time of slavery is complex. Slaves were put in a unique de-humanized state which allowed them to express some, but not all human instincts.

An effect of dehumanizing slaves was that a freed slave was never truly free, psychological and societal effects of being a slave continue to plague their lives. Sethe is evidence that the expression of feelings by anyone affected by slavery became extremely ‘risky, thought Paul D., very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything dangerous, especially if was her children she had settled on to love. Expression of emotions was a weakness of the slaves. The novel gives a realistic picture of slavery. Marriage and the slave family were seldom recognized by the slaveholders. When the slaves married, they were always threatened with separation according to the economic needs of the slaveholders. They did not receive any medical care and their diet was usually inadequate for their health. Slave women were frequently not allowed the opportunity to develop attachments with their children due to separation and working for excessively long hours. The use of slave women for sex was a common practice. Children born out of these unions were also thrown into slavery. Slavery had limited Baby Suggs’ self-conception by shattering her family and denying her the opportunity who she wanted to be, i.e., a good wife and mother. Baby Suggs is not only the main character to hint that slavery was an experience that could never be known exactly for what it truly was. Morrison seems to be risking the loss of her main characters to a past that can never be seen nor controlled. She uses Sethe to depict the border between slavery and freedom and unexpectedly does not allow Sethe to grow and escape that painful border in the novel. Through fragmented ‘memories’, we see that Sethe was frequently treated as an animal during her time as a slave. Sethe loses her sense of self, and the experiences continue to haunt her through the novel, using flashbacks most of which are a result of Beloved’s presence. Slavery’s destruction of identity is present throughout the novel, and Paul D. is another example of how slavery destroys any sense of self.

Slavery has a huge psychological impact. Most slaves repressed the memories of their past experiences of slavery in an attempt to forget the past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D., and Denver, all experience this loss of self. As a result of suffering, the ‘self’ becomes subject to a violent practice of making and unmaking, once acknowledged by the audience becomes real. Beloved is a novel that reflects sentimentality and sensationalistic depiction of the horrors of slavery, including its characterization of the slave trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Morrison does this through her underlying symbolic references to the destructiveness of slavery and the connections between the characters themselves.

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