Analysis Of Beloved, By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison, the famous and leading contemporary African-American writer, awarded highest honour for letter when she was named the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature. Her constant focus on the life of the black and revival of their past make her literary discourse to reproduce a true history of the black people that was overlooked by the mainstream society as Morrison argues that “There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United State” (Morrison, 5). Through her work, she tries to heal the suffering of her

Morrison is concerned with the omitted and unspeakable past of the black slave women. Recollecting her past, Sethe remembers that once upon a time her house 124 had been “a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed” (Morrison, 86). The main concern of Morrison in Beloved is to re-establish the connectivity between women to face the physical as well as psychological survival in the era of slavery. Discussing about the relationship between two women, Morrison says:

We read about Ajax and Achillies willing to die for each other, but very little about the friendship of women, and them having respect for each other, like it’s something new. But black women had always had that, they have always been emotional life support for each other.”(Morrison, xvi)

When Sethe arrived with her daughter, Baby Suggs “kissed her on the mouth and refused to let her see the children. They were asleep she said and Sethe was too ugly looking to wake them up in the night . . . bathed her in sections, starting with her face and cleaned the eyes of newborn with its mother’s urine” (Morrison, 92). Sethe learnt female rites from Baby Suggs which brought her close to her ancestor. Baby Suggs is a powerful cultural mentor for Sethe who has awakens her desire to know her past and to love herself as a

In addition to recollection, she relies on picture and the feelings that accompany the picture. In her fiction, sensuality is embedded in the past and sensual descriptions explode the effects of alienation and repression. Sethe’s remembrance of girlhood sensuality at Sweet Home coincides with her Womanhood in Cincinnati. Both are metaphorically condensed with the alienation she experiences as a black emigrant and social outlaw in Ohio. Morrison’s metaphorical language “he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display,” (Morrison, 17) produces the effect of pain, cruelty and alienation. Indeed, the image of chokecherry tree evokes the poetics of surrealism while the language reveals the historical process through which the image is produced. Paul D’s desire to learn Sethe’s sorrow, to share it with her, produces a liberating effect: “He rubbed his cheek on her back and teamed that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches” (Morrison, 17). And Sethe’s back skin which had been dead for years, feels the hurt it ought to. She remembers things with the hope that the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank. As Paul D dropped twenty-five years from his recent memory to share bed life with Sethe, she remembers her first experience with her husband, Halle,