How Does Morrison Use Memory In Beloved

In the novel Beloved, memory plays a key role in the lives of multiple characters. Toni Morrison introduces us to Sethe, an escaped slave living in the 1870s with her daughter, Denver. The focus of this paper is to show that Morrison’s use of memory contributes to the main core of the plot of the storyMemory reveals Sethe’s reasoning for trying to kill her children in an attempt to “put [her] babies where they’d be safe.” Sethe endures the tyranny of being imprisoned by her memory and she is obsessed with them. Using Sethe as the focal point in this narrative serves two purposes. For one, it centers in the mind of the main character and frames our understanding of motivation through her so called “rememory.” Sethe’s recollection of a motherless,

At first, there is the memory Sethe has of her own mother, we learn that Sethe’s mother killed children of her own at one point, but saved her. Morrison writes, “She threw them all away but you.” This idea of destroying lives in order to somehow “save” a child from slavery, now didn't only apply to Sethe as a mother. All memories have the ability to control our future behavior.It’s ironic that this secret regarding her mother, would later relate to her own actions toward her own children. Another memory we see is the attack on her in the Sweet Home barn, where she tells us “they took my milk!” Although she was beaten and abused she is unable to go into detail about her attack because she buried these memories so deep in her mind. By taking her milk, which symbolized her motherhood, she was robbed of her true self. And since “milk was all I had,” this argument seems reasonable, that the attackers took everything, and she would never allow that to happen

Even though readers can’t know exactly what happened, they understand it was bad, bad enough to leave permanent scars all along Sethe’s back. Sethe’s experience of being a scared, pregnant runaway slave is another one we see. In her memory, she recalls being “tired…scared…lost,” and that pursuing her were things like “dogs, perhaps; guns, probably” and the “mossy teeth” of men who would do anything to anybody. She was told by Amy, the white girl who eventually delivered her baby, that “You gonna die in here, you know. Ain’t no way out of it.” The fact that Sethe did find a way out suggests that she found the inner strength and power she needed in her responsibilities as a mother for the safety of her