How Does Toni Morrison Use Flashbacks In Beloved

Coren Bracey
Amy Popp
AP English Lang
9 January 2023
Toni Morrison: Beloved for a Reason Toni Morrison’s Beloved tells the story of Sethe and her relationship with the mysterious woman who may or may not be a reincarnation of the baby she killed, Beloved. Morrison writes in a unique style during the book, combining several perspectives with flashbacks to speak about the horrors of Sweet Home as they are brought up by conversations between Sethe and Beloved. These instances of flashbacks, labeled ‘re-memory’ in the novel, have caused debate over whether Beloved is worth reading and teaching. Beloved has also experienced backlash for being forced upon students because it was written by an African-American author. However, Beloved is a modern

According to the reports of several college students and professors, Beloved is not fit to be taught in a classroom, due to the fact that it is not a classic and not entirely comprehensive of its subject matter. One such argument, coming from a college senior, states that “forcing ideological garbage in place of truly great literature has ABSOLUTELY no place in a University '' (UST). Beloved is labeled that way because it is a modern piece that bothers with being “politically correct” instead of just telling a story (UST). Beloved has been described as having an “animus towards whites and males” (Beloved Woke Liberals). The book takes a stance against white people by largely portraying them as slave owners and deplorable people. In addition to bearing ill will towards white people, Beloved has a bias against men, describing them as “weaklings governed by their sexual desires” (UST). Morrison chooses to tell of the men’s sexual undertakings, about how they “fucked cows” and how they laid “dreaming of rape, thrashing on pallets, rubbing their thighs” at night (Morrison 11-20). Morrison portrays these men as lesser because they cannot control themselves sexually. The portrayal of white men negatively leads to an issue in the reading and teaching of Beloved, because white men don’t want to read a book that paints them in a negative

Beloved challenges the ideas that people have about slavery because it represents slavery at the level of the individual, while slavery is typically presented at the level of the institution. When slavery is taught at the level of an institution, from a birds-eye view with numbers and statistics, the people teaching it are “ignoring the parts of the story we don’t want to tell.” (Reckoning with Beloved). Those parts of the story are the ones where white men are the antagonists. Beloved tells a story about slavery from the perspective of an escaped slave. All of the horrible things that the white men who owned Sweethome did to Sethe are present in the book. The idea that a person could subject another person to the things that happened to Sethe is a shock. When learning about historic tragedies, it’s important to view things from all sides so that you can truly understand what happened instead of just a textbook