Category: Beloved

We are products of our past, but we don’t have to be prisoners of it. In the book Beloved by Toni Morrison, the traumatic history of the characters collectively drives the story and shapes their characters’ respectively. Morrison’s use of flashbacks and events of the past displays the impact history has had on the main characters of this novel.

The novel’s protagonist, Sethe, had arguably the most trying past as recounted throughout the novel. As Morrison builds these anecdotal accounts, she reveals the context for which the present happenings are based around. While Sethe strives to hide from this past, she remains haunted by it in the form of her returned child, Beloved. Beloved brings back horrible memories and guilt in Sethe and leads her to go off the “deep end.” This past returns to her in an almost literal form of “rebirth” when Sethe’s water uncontrollably falls from her “breaking womb” (Morrison 61). It is soon revealed to the reader that Sethe had murdered her own child to protect her from the same terrible fate which she had endured. Her rationalization behind this action is explained through Morrison’s telling of the horrors Sethe faced under her old master such as sexual abuse and torment.

Her enslavement, abuse, and even the deaths of her friends led her to believe that not only her own death but the killing of her children was the only way to protect them from such a fate. After successfully killing one child, Sethe is with irreparable grief as seen when she reaches for one of her children “without letting the dead one go” (Morrison 179). Morrison uses this regret to explain Sethe’s willingness to oblige to Beloved’s requests and demands and abandon her rebuilt life. This guilt and her failure to let go of what has happened later leads not only to Sethe’s mental deterioration but to the loss of her job and wasting of the family savings. Overall, the cause of Sethe’s eventual downfall was her past.

Another character who was affected by the past, but less directly, was Sethe’s daughter Denver. Due to the trauma surrounding her life, Denver scarcely leaves 124 and leads a very immature, secluded life. She faces ostracization from the town around her for her mother’s actions and past, which explains Denver’s reclusive lifestyle. Yet when Beloved arrives, and Sethe begins to derail, Denver’s attitude changes drastically. As she observes her mother slowly withdrawing from the world and sanity, Denver begins to go “off the edge of the world” and venture into a new lifestyle (Morrison 286). Denver’s character growth through this time not only supports the family and 124 through her efforts to find financial stability but ultimately saves them all from the evil Beloved. Without Denver’s efforts, Beloved would have likely carried out an act of terrible revenge and harmed the family. Denver’s past affected her initially, but in reality, it is the effects of Sethe’s past which more directly affects her by the end and while Morrison reveals limited information about Denver’s past, what is revealed plays a role in her character development.

Another character greatly affected by their past is Paul D. Paul’s life on Sweet Home was hard and he eventually lost his sense of self as many he considered family were sold or killed. As a wanderer, he faced many unspeakable horrors such as being forced to sleep in ditches and being sexually abused. But when Paul D escapes and eventually finds 124, he “dropped [those] twenty-five years from his recent memory” as he instantly works to reignite an old flame between himself and Sethe and declare himself the head of household (Morrison 24). Paul D’s presence in the household is shoved out by Sethe’s obsession with Beloved, however his continuous love for Sethe pushes him to continue to persist and attempt to show Sethe her worth after Beloved left he broken. Ultimately, Paul D has been severely scarred by his past experiences, but Morrison uses this to create personal growth for Paul D so that he can create a guiding force for the story as a whole.

Morrison utilizes the past to convey the trials and tribulations of the characters. She connects the histories of each individual and how each relates to their present and shapes them throughout the novel. Without an understanding of the past events in the characters’ lives, the reader would not be able to understand the context of each characters’ actions nor be able to see the growth which came from it.

Abstract

This paper is an endeavor to present a reading of Beloved by Toni Morrison and Wise Children by Angela Carter from the perspective of magic realism. By giving examples from both of the stories, we will try to explain our approach and also try to show the aspects of magical realism in both of the stories.

Magic realism is a literary genre that blends mythical or fantastic elements with realist fiction. Although it is often associated with Latin American literature, it rapidly gained considerable attention in World literature. Many writers who are considered to be magic realist fiction writers make use of this genre to examine, or inquire about the “reality” of the “real world”. By “reality” and “real world”, we mean the status quo or the given social norms of a particular society or culture. Hence, one of the most crucial features when defining magic realism is the distinction between the ordinary, familiar world and the unconventional, unfamiliar world. But in a magic realist text, this distinction can not be made, though this distinction and its aspects can easily be followed by examining the examples in aforesaid stories. Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that “in the magical realist text, characters encounter elements of magic and fantasy with the same acceptance that they meet those settings and figures commonly associated with ‘reality’ and ‘fact’” (Murad, 2006).

We can first of all put forward that the ghost is arguably the first magical element in Beloved. One can observe this by taking a look at the first appearance of the ghost as a human: “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat.” (Morrison, p. 50). As stated in the introduction, in magic realism, the characters treat otherwise abnormal things as if they are normal things in everyday life. Accordingly, we see the ghost being friends with Denver, or we see her violent and vengeful tendencies like slamming one of Sethe’s children to a wall, but all of these show us the magical realism aspect. Because, as distinguished from the genre of horror, the character’s reaction to the ghost is not different from an everyday acquaintance. Unlike horror, they(especially Sethe) seem to accept the fact that a ghost has haunted their house and even try to reason with her: “Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help.” (Morrison, p. 4).

Another important aspect or element to consider when examining a magic realist story is that of the mystical and mythical, almost ritual-like atmosphere as well as the significance of colors and light(like Emerald light). As Maggie Ann Bowers says about Morrison: “Her narratives are influenced by African American oral culture and mythology adapted from West African culture.” (Bowers, p. 55). Therefore the black culture and its myths, rituals, legends, and beliefs play a quite significant role in Beloved. In this way, Morrison and other authors who challenge the present norms, by making use of magic realism, can subvert history and re-imagine it from a different perspective. While presenting the ordinary, they can introduce the unnatural within that scope, and allow the assimilated past or history to be re-written again, just like post-colonial writers do. One reflection of African American heritage can be seen in the following passage from the book, where Denver is giving a “magic birth”, and she is compared to an antelope: “Her leg shaft ended in a loaf of flesh scalloped by five toenails. But she could not, would not stop, for when she did the little antelope rammed her with horns and pawed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves.” (Morrison, p. 30).

Thus, in her novel Beloved, Morrison, “takes the advantage of both realism and magic to challenge the assumptions of an authoritative colonialist attitude and so can be alleged as a powerful and efficient method to project the postcolonial experience of African-American ex-slaves in the United States. It can also provide an alternate point of view to Eurocentric accounts of reality and history to attack the solidity of Eurocentric definitions and as a consequence to portray the hidden and silenced voices of numerous enslaved generations of African Americans in the history of the United States.” (Razmi & Jamali, 2012). So the ghost can be seen as a representation of both Sethe’s past and a historical embodiment of slavery that has to be dealt with, in other words, Morrison by bringing the ghost, wants the readers to face the wicked heritage of racism. Another example is the house itself. Besides its symbolic meaning, the representation, and the significance of the number “124”, the house itself seems to be one of the elements of magic realism in the story. That is to say, the personification of the house, the way it seems to act and react by itself, paints a mystical and gloomy picture. For instance, in the following passage, the house is portrayed as if it is another living being: ‘So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted, for her.’ (Morrison, p. 4).

Just like Morrison, Angela Carter uses both fantastic and realist elements while constituting a magical world. The story of Wise Children takes place in nineteenth-century England. From the very beginning, we are drawn into a fairytale-like atmosphere with the narrator’s words, “Once upon a time, you could make a crude distinction.” (Carter, p. 19). We see similar words at the beginning of chapter two as well: “Once upon a time, there was an old woman in splitting black satin pounding away…” (Carter, p. 63). Throughout the book though, the narrative switches back and forth between fantastical and realist mode. This allows us to approach and evaluate the story of Wise Children as a magic realist work.

The first example of magic realism in Wise Children is the ghost of Grandma Chance. She visits twin sisters Dora and Nora who are described as “two peas”. They are celebrating their seventy-fifth birthday. Dora, the narrator of the story, talks about a coincidence saying that the twenty-third of April -the birthday of Shakespeare- is also the birthday of their real father Melchior, and his brother Peregrine. It is also worth mentioning here as an aspect of magic realism that there are so many twins in the story and this is just accepted as a coincidence. So coincidences like these, play a rather absurd role in the story as an enrichment of magic realism. As mentioned above, before the twin sisters go to the birthday party of Melchior, Grandma Chance’s ghost visits them. This can be given as one of the elements of magic realism in the story. Towards the middle of the second chapter, we hear a memory that can be regarded as the second magic realism aspect in the book: “And then, hup! he did a back-flip out of the window with us, saving us. But I know I am imagining the back-flip and the flight.” (Carter, p. 79-80). As we can see in this passage, Carter blends the magical (which comes from “a backflip out the window”) and realism (reminding the reader that the narrative can not be that reliable due to her age).

Furthermore, at the end of the same chapter, we encounter a rather absurd and chaotic scene. The house was set on fire because of an accident caused by a simple mistake by Genghis Khan. While everyone is running for their lives and forced to leave the house, Dora and the boy continue to have sexual intercourse during this chaotic situation. It is also noteworthy to add that a similar scene happens in the final chapter as well. Although scenes like these reflect more the carnivalesque side than magic realism, the writer blends them very well. Additionally, just like the coincidences that were mentioned before, the amount of coincidental connections with Shakespeare and his plays (especially in chapters two and three), empower the role of coincidence as an absurd side of the story and enriches the magical realism.

Perhaps the last element that stands out in the book as an example of magic realism is the character: Peregrine. He is an adventurer and a magician, and he truly embodies the blending of magic realism and carnivalescence. Carter depicts his physical appearance as follows: “The trowelful of freckles flung over his nose never faded and he was bigger than ever, the size of a warehouse.” (Carter, p. 115). Besides his physicality, almost everything about him is out of the ordinary. He represents both magic realism and carnivalesque through his disappearances and his magic: “Here today and gone tomorrow, not so much a man, more of a traveling carnival.” (Carter, p. 161).

Considering what has been presented thus far, we can conclude by putting forward that both Morrison’s Beloved and Carter’s Wise Children -although the intentions of the writers may differ- successfully reflect the characteristics of magic realism in their way. Magic realism as a genre with its various aspects, allows the story to be diverse in its metaphoric narrative. Thus, we may argue that while the story of Beloved makes use of magical realism to take a critical approach and put the ideas of slavery and racism into question, Wise Children can be regarded as more of a story that blends the absurd, carnivalesque, and magic realism.

Works Cited

1. Morrison, T. (1998). Beloved. Plume. Retrieved from https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=0A021E225077FBCEF41A21036DF6CA81
2. Carter, A. (1993). Wise Children. Penguin Books. Retrieved from https://book4you.org/book/4779581/e50f46
3. Murad. J. (2006). Magical Realism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/61300
4. Bowers, M. A. (2004). Magic(al) Realism(The New Critical Idiom). Routledge. Retrieved from https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=598353D013EA319157A036B7B9D5BDB0
5. Razmi, Mehri & Jamali, Leyli. (2012). Magic(al) Realism as Postcolonial Device in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science. 2.

“Beloved,” was written by Toni Morrison in 1987 and it is based on a true story. This difficult and gruesome novel tells the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother, who escaped from slavery. She was arrested for killing one of her children, attempting to kill all, rather than let them return to slavery. In her twisted way, she demonstrates her love for her children by wanting to end their lives rather than return them to life-long misery. Through the effective development of characterization and point of view, the author reveals the main theme to be the psychological impacts of slavery.

Now, each character is developed based on their traumas of slavery or their pasts. Sethe’s presence is a clear influence, and the catalyst, that recovers the repressed pasts of all those around her. From a historical perspective, the experiences of slavery triggered most slaves into repressing their memories in an attempt to forget their pasts. It is easy to tell that this is the case with Sethe. She is haunted and fears her past; however, she is completely devoted to her children and believes that “keeping her [children] from the past that was waiting for [them] was all that mattered” (Morrison 51). While reading this novel it is easy for the reader to question Sethe’s actions. Progressively, it becomes clear that Sethe’s “actions have caused others to respond, both physically and psychologically, therefore complicating their lives” (Larrick 1). The question also arises as to whether Sethe’s actions can be justified due to the physical and psychological scars of slavery that she bears. Sethe lives by constantly attempting to repress the memories that haunt her, “she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe” (Morrison 6). Her experiences were so horrifying that she could not physically or mentally withstand the memories. For this same reason, Seth refused to allow her children to go through the same thing that she did. She believed that slavery and all the traumas that come with it are worse than death itself. Seth reveals it herself in an attempt to justify her actions by stating that “if she hadn’t killed [Beloved] she would have died and that is something [Sethe] could not bear to happen to [Beloved]” (Morrison 236). In Sethe’s mind, killing her children was a way of freeing them through death and the ultimate expression of a mother’s true love.

It has been argued that motherly love has challenged the horrors of the institution of Slavery. Examine Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) in light of this view.

Toni Morrison illustrates Beloved as ‘reflecting the harrowing legacy and long-term effects of Slavery as it chronicles the life of a Black woman’. Morrison’s description reflects the dehumanization of African American slaves and how it continuously affects descendants of Slavery as shown through Paul D, who was treated like an animal when fastened with iron cuffs. Morrison aimed to illustrate motherly love as a force that challenged slavery. For instance, Sethe’s killing of her daughter demonstrates how the deepest act of motherly love can prevent her children from further enduring the horrors of the institution of slavery. Similarly, Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrays black women as trustworthy and courageous. Their moral actions influence their children and husbands, and are willing to make sacrifices to protect close ones.

Both Beloved (1987) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850) illustrate the struggles that African Americans experienced. Harriet’s novel aimed to expose the injustices that happened during slavery, especially against black women. The themes within reflect the conflict between the evil of slavery and the good of Christian love shown by the mothers, similar to Morrison’s novel where various characters were affected by the burden of Slavery. The point of view in Harriet’s novel is that of an omniscient third-person narrator. Stowe’s narrator uses this insight to tell us things about the characters and events, rather than showing them through action. Readers because of this, would have a deeper understanding of the suffering endured. Despite Harriet’s limited knowledge of slavery, it moved her deeply and she felt the need to share some of these experiences through this point of view. In Morrison’s words ‘these women were not mothers but breeders’. The novel educates readers on how slavery denied black mothers the right to feel maternal love, leading them to feel uncertain about their offspring. I hope to examine how different audience readers might interpret these characters, eventually demonstrating how motherly love challenged the horrors of the institution of slavery, even after death.

Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is composed of memories, flashbacks, and nightmares which break up the chronological flow of the story. The audience would feel more connected to the characters as this effectively provides a deeper insight into their lives. Beloved demonstrates Toni Morrison’s ability to expose the unapologetic effects on the many characters who faced the horrors of slavery. We learn how maternal morals have an impact on the novel and foreshadow decisions. Sethe is haunted by the memories of her slave past and the death of her daughter. She has also been disturbed by the fact that white people only see her as an animal and nothing more. In her philosophy ‘nothing ever dies,’ which elaborates how past events can occur not only in one’s memory but somehow in the real world. Sethe believes that it is possible to collide into past events again, which makes her main priority to shield her children and Denver by any means necessary, even if death is an option. In her mind, the ending of her child’s life was her form of expressing maternal love. Much of her decisions derived from her mother’s abandonment. Whether her mother was trying to escape or not, it deeply affected her mentally and physically.

Morrison’s novel also substantiates how motherly love can have an impact even after death. Morrison uses the character Beloved as a representative of the spirits of multiple people who passed away because of slave labor. She is a microcosm of Morrison’s dedication to the ‘sixty million and more’ including Sethe’s unnamed child and the unnamed masses who died and were forgotten. They were all beloved, such as how a child is a mother’s beloved one. Sethe’s maternal love for her dead daughter may have resulted in Beloved’s ‘return’. Beloved may have been a reincarnation of Sethe’s dead daughter who came back to comfort and heals ‘her mother’. She, however, ‘haunts’ Sethe which results in her going into an unhealthy and obsessive relationship, reflecting her pain of loss due to her sacrifice. The haunting could be symbolic of slavery that haunts families such as hers. Despite this, we still see how motherly love can aid a person in times of need.

Harriet Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1850) illustrates the problem of a specific evil: the enslavement of human beings as property. Harriet’s novel tells the story of the protagonist Uncle Tom who is a devoted Christian. While on his way to a slave auction, he saves the life of Eva. Eventually, however, Tom ends up with a new owner after the previous owner’s death. Simon whips Tom to death after not revealing the whereabouts of runaway slaves. Symbolically, the evil morality of slavery is shown to eventually eat up the Christian good inside someone. However, the novel also illustrates many aspects of motherly love being able to combat this evil as shown through the character of Eliza.

Harriet Stowe shows slavery as ‘harmful and harmful to individual slaves, physically and emotionally,’ knowing that this would have a distressing effect on her audience now and potentially back then as the true horrors of the institution are shown. The brutal whippings endured by Tom, George, and Prue to Eliza’s painful journey away from her home reflect Harriet Beecher Stowe’s thoughts on slavery as a whole.

Paul D’s tobacco tin can be seen as a symbol of him repressing memories and holding back emotions. Sethe and Paul D connect through their mutual pain of being slaves. Paul D has suffered as a slave, so much that there is a “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be” (86). He has locked away his memories and feelings deep within him to protect himself from the trauma. Every time he feels his emotions coming out, “one by one, [he buries them] into the tobacco tin” choosing to suppress them because he cannot cope with what has happened to him (133). The tin is where Paul D stores and collects all his feelings and memories important to him. Paul D has been damaged severely from his time as a slave that when he arrives at 124, “nothing in this world could pry [the tobacco tin] open” (133). He purposefully isolates himself from others by preventing himself from opening the tobacco tin.

Paul D. faced many traumatizing events while he was a slave at Sweet Home and a prisoner in Alfred, Georgie. As a slave, Paul D was treated like an animal, “shoved […] into” a wooden box with a “cage door” separating him from other slaves (126). The events he endured have broken him and left him to “keep the rest where it belonged” in his tobacco tin (86). Morrison uses the symbol of a tobacco tin to show how Paul D. believes he is overcoming the pain of his past but is disillusioned and metaphorically trapping himself in another box. He has even begun to push Sethe away believing “saying more might push them both to a place they [cannot go] back” to, referring to their time at Sweet Home and being in slavery (86). Morrison characterizes Paul D who is damaged by his time as a slave to show how Sethe, another former slave, cannot help nor save him from the emotions he is running away from. Another symbol that reflects the tobacco tin is the iron bit. The iron bit was used when Paul D was a slave to restrict him from being able to speak. The iron bit is a crucial piece to Paul D’s tobacco tin because “it put a wildness where before there wasn’t any” referring to how the iron bit took a piece of his identity (84). The tobacco tin represents the harsh emotions that Paul D has suppressed as a result of the horrors of slavery. Morrison uses the iron bit to suggest Paul D has been changed by being enslaved and the “wildness” will remain for a while.

In Song of Solomon and Beloved, Morrison alludes to biblical references, which gives her novels a spiritual side.

Toni Morrison’s fifth novel Beloved is a heart-rending story, inspired by a real-life incident in the life of an ex-slave, Margaret Garner, who killed her two children with a shovel in an attempt to run away from the bondage of her slave master. The story is not of a black woman or other black characters but centers on the astounding courage of a black mother, who hurts herself in her attempt to outhunt the master. The pivot of the novel is the spirit of a black woman who decides to kill her daughter to provide her a peaceful life in the grave, rather than letting her suffer in the inferno of slavery if she is allowed to live.

The protagonist is Sethe, an ex–slave, and the other main characters are her two daughters Beloved and Denver, her old slave companion Paul D, and her motherly mother-in-law Baby Suggs. The strands of selfish love, courage, revenge, guilt, regrets, disassociations, confessions, unconditional love, and communal bonds, all move through one another’s weave to design the fabric of Beloved.

Sethe’s love proves harmful when it possesses her mind in such a powerful grip that she restricts her vision of herself to her motherhood. Defined only as a mother, Sethe presents another dark side of the power of blackness, if loved and respected by black people. Her relations with her daughters prove that white forces can crush the body of slave women, but not their spirit, which always preserves the spark of maternity in them. The pattern of human relationships stretches through all the major novels of Toni Morrison.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the character Beloved not only signifies the child murdered by Sethe but also symbolizes that as an act of ramification of slavery. Enduring slavery, rape, and the loss of family is quite a lot to bear and would cause detrimental effects to one’s sanity which is indeed the case for seethe and slaves alike even after escaping slavery, these actions would preserve the slave mentality. This is evident in the way Sethe is constantly in a state of fear and worries about what’s around the corner.

It is also evident in how she reacts when the School teacher comes with his two sons and a slave catcher for her and her kids. This novel Beloved is widely known for its openness to violence, gritty, infanticide, and sexuality.

Trace of Victimisation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Toni Morrison is one of the leading 20Th century African American women. Novelists have endeavored to express the problems of partiality and discrimination through her works. Being African American women, Morrison boldly expresses the problems that were faced by African women in their society. The main focus of the

The novel is about the plight of black girls being maltreated and sexually exploited at home. African American culture is one area that indicates that the oppressed individual does not simply accept the dominant ideology. The self, with the help of the community, responds uniquely, accepting some aspects of ideology as given and choosing among other available elements in the construction of individual subjectivity. Morrison’s representations of black subjectivity–in–process thus enable us to assess the African American lives during and after slavery and, more generally, the lives of the dominated in societies marked by profound racial and ethnic stratification.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved pours with violence. Morrison, claims that “aggression is not as new to black women as it is to white women; there’s a special kind of… violence in writings by black women- not bloody violent, but violent nonetheless. Love, in the Western notion, is full of possessions, distortion, and corruption. It’s a slaughter without the blood”. Toni Morrison writes that the secrets of violence are safeguarded within the African American communities.

Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio where Sethe a former slave, has been living with her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver. Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs lived with them until her death eight years earlier. Just before Baby Suggs’s death Sethe’s two sons, Howard and Buglar ran away. Sethe believes they fled because of the malevolent presence of an abusive ghost that has haunted their house at I24 Bluestone Road for years. Denver, however, likes the ghost which everyone believes to be her spirit.

On the day the novel begins, Paul D, whom Sethe has not seen since they worked together on Mr. Garner’s sweet home plantation in Kentucky approximately twenty years earlier, stops by Sethe’s house. His presence resurrects memories that have been buried in Sethe’s mind for almost two decades. From this point on, the story will unfold on two temporal planes. The present in Cincinnati constitutes one plane, while a series of events that took place around twenty years earlier, mostly in Kentucky constitutes the other.

“124 was loud” B (199)

This line starts in Chapter 19, and this signifies that the house is haunted. The word loud represents the Beloved that haunts the house ever since her death, causing chaos and fear throughout the house. Once Paul D arrived at 124, he was able to chase the ghost away, however, it returned physically later on.

This latter plane is accessed and described through the fragmented flashbacks of the major characters. These flashbacks are been frequented in the novel several times, sometimes from varying perspectives with each successive narration of an event adding a little more information to the previous ones.

In her stream-of-consciousness chapter, Sethe talks about how intertwined a mother and child are and emphasizes that a mother’s responsibility is to protect her child. She ruminates on her mother, who was hanged, believing she didn’t try to escape because a mother would never voluntarily leave her children. Similarly, Sethe made the difficult decision to kill her children. The fact that Sethe lacked any good options when faced with eminent capture emphasizes the perversion of the family and the normal bonds of love.

“Those twenty-eight happy days were followed by eighteen years of disapproval and solitary life” B (204)

Baby Suggs stayed with Sethe and Denver for twenty-eight days before she died. In those twenty-eight days, she was a support system for Sethe, always there when she was in need. She was happy at that point in her life, but it only lasted until Baby Suggs passed away. After that, she was left alone in 124 with Denver, where no one wanted to visit because the house was haunted and her two sons had fled. She was left lonely and in solitude.

In Beloved, the personal narrative-when it is told, and how, and to whom is central to the novel’s plot. And as it has been shown, the act of speaking the tale carries great risk. When Paul D, finally hears Sethe’s story it leads to more fragmentation and alienation, via yet another displacement away from a stable family. His commitment to making a life with her is best summed up when Morison writes, “He wanted to put his story next to hers”(299). He longs to form the connection with them that he had never been able to have, had never been allowed to have, and locates the mutual healing in resolving their past as putting their stories together. But unable to bear the pain of her narrative, he questions her registration to her fate, exemplified by her refusal to leave the haunted house at 124 Bluestone Road. This questioning, couched in a statement to dehumanizing Sethe that they literally cannot move forward together, leads to Paul D leaving the house, thereby abandoning her to Beloved’s subsequent reign of terror. This disintegration of their newly formed household is remedied by the novel’s end, but it is emblematic of the larger, direr disunity between Seethe and the black community in Cincinnati which betrayed her and her children, and caused the “Misery”.

The novel Beloved unmasks the horror of slavery and depicts its aftermath on African Americans. The story is perfect for all who did not experience nor could imagine how it was to be an African American in the American crises of the 1860s. Beloved lends a gateway to understanding the trials and tribulations of the modern African American.

Mentioning about the Sweet Home in this novel is the plantation owned by Mr. and Mrs. Garner is the place where Sethe experienced a petrified life. Garner is good to his slaves and the good will of him dies with him. Then the slaves underwent Suffering and struggles and it was brutal.

Beloved explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual devastation wrought by slavery, the devastation that continues to haunt those characters who are former slaves even in freedom. The most dangerous of slavery’s effects is its negative impact on the former slaves’ senses of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Paul D, for instance, is so alienated from himself that at one point he Cannot tell whether the screaming he hears is his own or someone else’s.

Slaves were told they were subhuman and were traded as commodities whose worth could be expressed in dollars. Consequently, Paul D is very insecure about whether or not he could be a real “man”, and he frequently wonders about his value as a person.

The novel has many things that occur that are very striking, most of it has to deal with the treatment of African Americans. The book as a whole is very disturbing and even shows what lengths African Americans were willing to go to avoid enslavement of themselves or their children. In this novel, the most extreme case of someone avoiding enslavement comes from the main character when she attempts to kill her children.

“She was spinning. Round and round the room…Paul D sat at the Table watching her drift into view then disappear behind his back, Turning like a slow but steady wheel…Once in a while, she rubbed Her hips as she turned but the wheel never stopped”(187).

It is a rhetorical strategy that Sethe knows is inadequate for the task of accurately explaining why she killed her child:

“Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, The subject would remain one. That she could never close in, pin It down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right Off-She could never explain”(192)

For Sethe, re-engaging the past through her memories and her life story yields dubious rewards while demanding much emotional risk and effort. As Sethe says. It’s hard work beating back the past. killing her children was the ultimate sacrifice this fugitive mother, Margret Garner, was prepared to make since she was unwilling to have her children suffer as she had done. It was in this atmosphere that slave narratives

became recognized as a distinct form of literature and a promotion of the cause of abolition. The removal of children from their mothers, between whom there was a special bond, was one of the most devasting but effective implements of slavery.

The main character, Sethe is not willing to let her children end up re-enslaved and would rather see them dead and in heaven than in an earthly hell of being slaves. This is to be believed that Sethe was justified in her actions. Slavery is a very harsh and horrible way to live, and living in chains and without freedom is not as like a human life. Slavery degraded African Americans from humans to animals. They were not treated with any respect or proper care.

Even in this modern day, criminals who have murdered large numbers of people are treated more humanely than the average slave ever was. The life that the children would have lived would have been one of complete servitude, they would have never known what it was like to live on their own and make their own decisions.

The fact that the slaves were treated like animals and were traded and sold like cattle is well depicted in the book. This is not a shock, but the ideas in the book that shocked to do with their living conditions, and the punishments that were put through, referring to it in particular are the living conditions at the work camp in Georgia.

The fact that the men were in a little cubby hole in a trench in the ground is very disturbing. They squatted in muddy water, slept above it, and peed in it was very shocking and unpleasant to read and imagine the worst situation they had gone through. The other thing that was disturbing at the same camp was the breakfast. This was disgusting and at the same time seemed very weird. The white men considered the African Americans to be animals, yet they still made them perform oral sex on them.

This was quite possibly the most bothersome and abhorrent item that occurred to the slaves in the book. The treatment of the slaves has a lot to do with the current African Americans and the many situations they face. In this book, there is no such thing as a family the slaves cannot be married nor are they allowed to be “mothers” or “fathers” to their children. This carries over to modern America in that some African Americans still have problems with family structure and slavery can be held accountable for this, another reason this book is helpful is that it explains why African Americans attempt to remove themselves from the book Beloved, has many key points about

Slavery brings to light many things that are not well known. The book helps to show the roots of African Americans and how those roots still affect their lives today. This helps the reader to better understand African Americans and how they relate to their past. It also brings to light the many cruelties inherent in slavery and the effect this had on an entire race of people and their development in the US.

The novel Beloved has a large focus on the horrors of slavery. Morrison offers no other explanation for Sethe’s haunting except to establish that the horrors of slavery were so severe that they would influence a mother to kill her child in an attempt to protect her from its atrocities. The treatment of slaves varied by time and place. At those times it was common. But the struggles they went through were more pitiful.

Utilizing and reconstituting the tropes of the slave narrative genre, Morrison Deliberately sought to give voice to those aspects of the experience of slavery that Were rendered unspoken, unspeakable, and unacknowledged in the traditional Enslavement narrative she states in a 1994 interview with Angles Carabi in Belles Lettres,

“With Beloved, I am trying to insert this memory that was Unbearable and unspeakable into the literature. Certain things are repressed because that is unthinkable and the only way to come free of that is to go back and deal with them…So it’s Kind of a healing experience”(Carabi 1)

This “unbearable” memory must be given voice and acknowledgment, or else it will rise, unbidden, an angry ghost never at rest. Although charged with the responsibility of recording and transmitting the experience of slavery, those who created historical narratives of enslavement understood the censure they faced if they strayed into territory that they perceived their readers would deem “unthinkable “ and therefore “unspeakable”. These unspeakable aspects include discourses that would have been offensive and off-putting to the white, bourgeois audience to whom the traditional enslavement narrative was addressed as a form of moral institution and propaganda.

Sethe has managed to escape to Ohio with her children. When one day, a school teacher, one nephew, one slave catcher, and a sheriff arrive at the house on Bluestone Road. Sethe knows they have come to take her and the children back to Kentucky and she tries to kill her children in an act that can only be described as an attempt to save them from the cruelty that she knew awaited them there. She is successful in killing her oldest daughter who is not yet two years old. Sethe struggles to justify the death of her daughter as an act to free the child from slavery’s inheritance as much as it was to free her from.

Sethe desperately wants Beloved to understand that the degradations of slavery led her to decide to kill her children. The children are still clean, whereas slavery has sullied her and the other slaves who lived under it those women and men know life under cruel, unstable owners. They know what it feels like to be unable to protect their children. Sethe refuses to let her children exist in such a world. When she weighs life under slavery against no life at all, death wins.

Slavery as an institution was informed by violence and brutality at its core, and by a philosophical imperative to dehumanize the enslaved person to justify a range of atrocities necessary to keep her in line, and thereby maintain social, political, and most significantly, economic order. Deprivation, cultural suppression, physical abuse, sexual exploitation, displacement of affection ties, denial of agency and expression, witnessing brutalities committed upon others all of these phenomena act upon the human subject in ways that impact cognition and identity. By utilizing a psychological reading of trauma, the symptomatology of slavery’s long-term effects in Beloved illuminates the enslaved subjectivity and rehearses possibilities for healing on an individual and a collective level.

On its surface, ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison is a work of historical fiction, bringing to life the situations and characters present in a world readers can only imagine. However, many of the problems Sethe, Paul D, and Denver face throughout the novel are still relevant, albeit in distorted or evolved forms. Even when Paul D had nothing to lose, he continued to experience loss, well past the breaking point of most individuals. He was robbed of his youth, his family, his friends, his freedom, and even his manhood. In many ways, he is the character most comparable to the twenty-first century. Paul D has nothing, and the system in place works tirelessly to keep him destitute and alone. After all of his hardships, the fact that he is still capable of feeling at all is itself an act of rebellion.

From his first introduction, Paul D is “the last of the Sweet Home men” (Morrison 7). The epithet is accurate, to the best of the characters’ knowledge, but is not a simple phrase by any means. Paul D does not look back at his time with anything close to true fondness: “It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home” (16). Sweet Home is a gross misnomer, but it was still the closest Paul D came to a family for most of his life. Before it was torn apart by the arrival of schoolteacher, he had two brothers, two friends he respected, and a master that treated them like men. It complicates the memories of the place, as Sethe says, “it’s where we were . . . All together” (16). At Sweet Home, Paul D felt like a man until schoolteacher came with his “pseudo-scientific ledgers, which transform feeling flesh into dead specimens of science and machines of (re)production” (Dobbs 564). The torture of schoolteacher threw off the balance of life at Sweet Home, and now Paul D is the last of them. But being “the last of the Sweet Home men” is almost bittersweet (Morrison 7). Paul D does have positive, if not fond, memories of being together with his found-family, and he obviously misses them. However, it is more complicated than missing a family that is gone.

When at Sweet Home with Mr. Garner, Paul D felt like a man. Later, after experiencing more of the world and after experiencing something close to freedom, “he wondered how much difference there really was before schoolteacher and after” (Morrison 260). Garner called them men, but he could have “changed his mind,” “took the word away” at any time, and they could have done nothing about it (260). Paul D can’t decide what it means to rely on someone else to decide on his manhood. They weren’t tortured physically, but when Mrs. Garner was widowed and needed money, she sold Paul D’s brother. Considering themselves men didn’t change the fact that someone else was in charge. Being “the last of the Sweet Home men” isn’t just bittersweet because he misses the people he loved (7). It is bittersweet because he must question even the relatively good times with Mr. Garner. It took schoolteacher’s calculated and inhumane treatment for the Pauls to question their place at Sweet Home, and even then, they were unsure what the right decision would be. Paul D realizes that he should have questioned their life more; he is appalled that he may have remained content to stay at Sweet Home with his brothers, “isolated in a wonderful lie, dismissing Halle’s and Baby Suggs’ life before Sweet Home as bad luck” (260). They were “isolated,” hopeful, and convinced that Mr. Garner respected them in a way that meant something. In the end, the idea and promise of Sweet Home was a lie, and Paul D is the only one around, unable to learn if the other men had already known this.

Eighteen years passed between Paul D leaving Sweet Home and meeting Sethe at 124, none of them easy. During those years, Paul D experienced almost every kind of brutal treatment possible. The trauma lodged in the “tobacco tin lodged in his chest” (Morrison 133). He couldn’t easily talk about his experiences, and nobody was around who could fully understand. In order to survive, he repressed the memories and feelings associated with the torture.

Sethe did not understand why Paul D had not talked to Halle the last time he saw him. Paul D’s response is simple: “I had a bit in my mouth” (82). Like “the last of the Sweet Home men,” this simple sentence conveys mental and physical torment that is easy to picture, yet hard to comprehend (7). Sethe acknowledges that even she can only partly understand, having only seen the effects of such treatment, never experiencing it herself: “There ain’t no wildness in your eye nowhere” (84). Treating people like animals, taking away the control and the humanity of speaking, gives people nothing else to lose. The plantation owners were deliberately trying to take away the humanity of enslaved people: “There is some comfort . . . in attributing the sheer brutality of slavery to dumb racism. We imagine pain being inflicted somewhat at random, doled out by the stereotypical white overseer . . . But a good many overseers weren’t allowed to whip at will . . . It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner but the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design” (Desmond).

Like schoolteacher’s book of notes, documenting the ‘human’ and ‘animal’ qualities, forcing Paul D to wear a bit was a deliberate choice, taking away his autonomy and belittling his idea of manhood. In his response to Sethe, Paul D admits, “There’s a way to put it there and there’s a way to take it out. I know em both and I haven’t figured out yet which is worse” (Morrison 84).

The chain gain Paul D spent 86 days on what took out the “wildness” the bit gave him (84). Paul D’s experience in Alfred, George takes place prior to emancipation, but these work crews became more common in the years after the end of slavery. From her place of privilege, Scarlett O’Hara from ‘Gone with the Wind’ sums up the appeal of chain gains and similar enterprises, “I could sublease them for next to nothing and feed them dirt cheap. And he said I could get work out of them in any way I liked, without having the Freedman’s Bureau swarming down on me like hornets, sticking their bills into things that aren’t any of their business” (Mitchell 690). The end of slavery did not end capitalism’s need for cheap or free labor. The increased exploitation of incarcerated people started with the end of slavery, when people like Scarlett no longer had access to enslaved people to keep prices of goods cheap. Even in the false, idealized Southern world of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett was judged for employing prisoners, because some of them were white. During just this short speech, there is no indication that the “them” Scarlett is talking about are people at all (690). They could be horses, for all Scarlett cares.

Living his life in the box of the chain gain took the wild from Paul D, but it broke him in other ways. He started to tremble the moment they took him away from Sweet Home, and on the gang, it just got worse: “Locked up and chained down, his hands shook so bad he couldn’t smoke or even scratch properly” (21). He was not any freer at Sweet Home than in Alfred, Georgia, but the box was too much of a constant reminder. It was so bad that the physical labor was preferable, in a state where workers like Paul D were unlikely to live more than 5 years after they started (Childs 272). His torment was so bad that he was “Grateful for the daylight spent doing mule work in a quarry because he did not tremble when he had a hammer in his hands” (Morrison 49). Paul D’s white oppressors took every opportunity to treat him like an animal. A bit was forced on him, and a collar. He slept in a box, and was chained to do work. The use of his hands is taken away from him, regardless of the secondary nature of this reaction. Even his work he describes as “mule work” (49). It is unsurprising, once he gains his freedom, that he is ill at ease with the comforts of human life. He latches on to small things to retain the humanity locked away for so long.

Despite everything Paul D has gone through, he remains determined to function as a man. Partially, he does this through repression and the “tobacco tin lodged in his chest”, but his subtler method of dealing with his trauma is through song (Morrison 133). Early on in his stay at 124, Sethe refers to him as “a singing man” (48). More than just a simple pastime, singing is necessary for Paul D to keep a semblance of normalcy in this life. Through song, Paul D is able to begin to break the walls he has built up around the painful memories of Sweet Home and the chain gain. It is slow process, and at first he can sing “Nothing like what they sang at Sweet Home” (48). Peter Capuano hypothesizes in his article about the narrative of slave songs, specifically in Morrison’s Beloved: “Song offers slaves the opportunity to express their personal testimonies while remaining within the framework of their larger cultural experiences—all without actually speaking of their shame and trauma” (96). Instead of directly talking about their feelings and experiences, singing offers the chance to speak metaphorically and indirectly. When joining in with others, it offers a way to speak and share without completely breaking down, especially when in front of white guards.

Morrison agrees with Capuano, showing how men in Alfred, Georgia worked through their trauma together: “They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life . . . They killed a boss so often and so completely they had to bring him back to life to pulp him one more time . . . they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for leading them on. Making them think the next sunrise would be worth it” (Morrison 128).

These 46 men experienced life in a way that were uniquely terrible, yet equally unsurprising. They were treated as less than human, and when they eventually lashed out, talked back, or got framed for disobedience, they were sent to somewhere unimaginably worse, sleeping in cages, silently relying on each other to survive. Each could have given up on his own, talked back to a guard or refused to work, but they persevered. Life had tricked them into believing better days were ahead, but none of them were quite ready to give up hope.

Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ revolves around Sethe, a former slave who lives in a haunted house at 124 Bluestone Road. Sethe’s past is complicated: her two sons abandoned her, and her house is haunted by an abusive ghost that everyone believes is the spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter. As the book furthers, it is released that Sethe herself killed her daughter, Beloved. As Beloved reintegrates herself into Sethe’s life, Sethe’s maternal instincts are portrayed and change drastically throughout the novel. Due to the trauma of slavery in ‘Beloved’, Sethe’s view of motherhood is drastically altered and defined by this generational oppression.

Due to her past, Sethe only discovers what actual parenting entails for the first time in her life when she settles at 124. She can care for her children, and when she explains to Paul D why she decided to kill Beloved, she states she can never go back to not being able to stitch a single item of clothing for them. Mrs. Garner had given her the finest cloth with stripes and flowers, which she had forgotten at the plantation, but had yearned to sow for her daughter ever since. “So when I got here, even before they let me get out of bed, I stitched her a little something from a piece of cloth Baby Suggs had. Well, all I’m saying is that’s a selfish pleasure I never had before. I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was, I couldn’t let her nor any of em live under the schoolteacher. That was out” (Morrison, 162-163). Sethe simply yearns for the act of mothering and caring for her children by sowing something nice for them. She never could provide for her children before, and now that she knew what motherhood was all about, Sethe did not want to give it up again. She says: “The truth was simple … ‘I stopped him’, she said, staring at the place where the fence used to be. ‘I took and put my babies where they’d be safe’” (Morrison, 249-250). Thus, her actions were determined by the terror and trauma of slavery. As a result, the dread and pain of enslavement shaped her conduct. Sethe believes that motherhood is about keeping one’s children safe, and when she fails to do so, she resolves to kill her own children and plots to kill herself as well. As stated by the author Morrison at the outset, Sethe’s story and the infanticide are relevant to many black African Americans, and when Sethe tries to explain why she did it, she is expressing an outrage that has been passed down through generations of women who have had no influence over their children’s lives, no say in their upbringing. Sethe contemplates the difficulties of becoming a mother while enslaved in the novel: “Look like I loved em more after I got here. Or maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love” (Morrison, 247). Sethe is well aware that she does not own her daughter; she is merely the slave owner’s property, and she is a victim of slavery. Sethe’s perspective on parenting is revealed when Paul D asks her to have a child with him: “Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer” (Morrison, 132). She believes it is impossible to be a caring mother in her current situation, and therefore the only way to be a mother is to be ‘carefree’. Slavery robbed black people of their selfhood for a long time, especially women, who were robbed of their motherhood.

One method in which Sethe is dehumanized is by denying her the human urge for a suitable wedding. Sethe enlists the help of Mrs. Garner, the nice wife of her previous owner, in order to arrange a wedding. Mrs. Garner laughs, hinting that Sethe’s wishes are absurd — slaves were not entitled to conventional weddings; they were part of white people’s traditions. Mrs. Garner answers “You are one sweet child” (Morrison, 26), and touches Sethe on the head and by doing, so she clearly demonstrates Sethe’s wishes of a proper wedding is intrusive of white tradition and culture, Sethe’s wishes for a decent wedding are plainly infringing on white tradition and culture, as she touches her on the head. Not only is she denied her identity and demeaned by being deprived of a wedding because to the color of her skin, but she is also denied a funeral for her dead daughter. She is also denied her self-hood since she is unable to pay and is therefore compelled to donate her body as a favor to the engraver in exchange for her dead daughter’s gravestone being carved. He promises to engrave seven letters on the baby’s headstone in exchange for ten minutes of sexual exploitation from Sethe. She chooses Beloved, which is “the one word that mattered” (Morrison, 5) from what she remembers the preacher saying at the funeral of her daughter.

There are numerous occurrences of how slaves are treated as animals in the novel. As Sethe tries to explain her motive for killing her child to Paul D, he compares her to an animal by saying: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (Morrison, 252). Sethe’s activities were not only reviled by white people but also by her fellow slaves in her society, as Paul D’s comments demonstrate. Morrison incorporates depictions of black slaves from the perspective of white people several times, reinforcing the idea of black slaves as equivalent to, or even less valuable than, animals. The schoolteacher talks about how the former slave-owner Garner “mated them niggers” (Morrison, 340), and Morrison incorporates depictions of black slaves from the perspective of white people several times, reinforcing the idea of black slaves as equivalent to, or even less valuable than, animals: “Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin” (Morrison, 228). The comparison between slaves and animals is also evident to Sethe, who feels like she is treated no better than an animal. “They handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat”, she says. White dominance has yet again proven to dehumanize the black character Sethe by making her feel like an animal. This then causes a shift in her mindset towards motherhood – thus establishing Sethe in a giver role, like Baby Suggs was. It has been imprinted in her mind by white people that she should not focus on the emotional connection with her children – that she should just focus on giving them a roof over their heads and feeding them. It is this lack of connection that may have driven her to make the inhumane choice to kill Beloved in the first place. In ‘Beloved’ the negative consequences of the institution of slavery on black people are obvious.

Throughout the story the theme of milk reoccurs, and it acts as a symbol for motherhood. When Paul D arrives at Sethe’s residence, which Morrison refers to as 124, she tells him about the incident in which she was beaten and whipped so cruelly that her back is scarred so terribly that it resembles a tree. The violence upsets Paul D, but Sethe is more enraged by the fact that the two rapist youths stole her milk: “‘They used cowhide on you?’. ‘And they took my milk’. ‘They beat you and you were pregnant’. ‘And they took my milk!’” (Morrison, 17). Turning to what Sethe said just before her conversation with Paul D shows the robbed milk is a symbol of lost motherhood for Sethe. Looking back at what Sethe mentioned immediately before her conversation with Paul D, it’s clear that the plundered milk is a symbol of Sethe’s lost motherhood. The milk is much more important to her than being beaten and raped. Sethe seems to consider milk and nursing as more than just feeding her children, more than making sure their hunger is satisfied, because she is unable to build a stable family life for her children while enslaved at Sweet Home. Aside from the apparent importance of providing the newborns with adequate sustenance, she appears to believe that nursing her children is the essence of motherhood. Sethe cannot provide a safe home, nor warm clothes, or any of the commodities of the white family, but she can provide her babies nutritious food and also a moment of maternal care, which she is usually unable to do while working the fields away from her children. Sethe thinks about her milk again later in the story as she considers how she will prove her love for Beloved. She has resolved that no one will ever steal it from her again. Even though she slit her throat, she thinks that by expressing how tenderly she cared for her milk, Beloved will understand that she loved her. Accepting milk as a symbol for love and motherhood, what Sethe is saying is that she is hoping Beloved will see that Beloved is “The one [she] managed to have [love and motherhood] for and to get it to her even after they stole it”.

Throughout the novel, the definition of family and love transform and are muddled – Sethe’s good intentions are ultimately lost among her fatal decision to kill her own children rather than let them be taken back into slavery. Due to her past, her definition of motherhood becomes infinitely complicated, and ‘Beloved’ shows how slavery has caused this generational oppression.

In Morrison’s work, concerned as it is almost exclusively with the female locus, it might be easy to overlook issues of masculinity. Indeed, if these issues are to be found at all, they are found in the corners of her narratives, occupying a peripheral discourse that stands as a secondary concern to black femininity. Where Morrison does offer representations of black masculinity, these are complicated, and seem deliberately problematised to imply a critique of negative masculine ideals. For the sake of clarity, masculinity is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘the assemblage of qualities regarded as characteristic of men’ such characteristics recognisably being “strength,” “bravery,” “control,” and so on.[footnoteRef:1] With a focus on Beloved and Song of Solomon, I aim to examine first how Morrison constructs black masculinity within the context of slavery, the ways in which she constructs and implicitly critiques the versions of black masculinity that arose upon emancipation, and finally the alternative ideals of masculinity she presents to the constructions she criticises. [1: ‘masculinity, n.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, (2018), [accessed 1 February 2019].]

A sparsity of critical literature analyses the matrifocal Beloved as a masculinist text, yet as a neo-slave narrative Beloved is also notably concerned with the issues brought to bear on black masculinity by slavery. Disseminated by white slave owners was a view of African-American men as violent and sexually promiscuous, irresponsible and incapable of becoming breadwinner, and so incapable of meeting the traditional requirements of the all-American man. Through the character of Paul D, Morrison ably demonstrates the oppression and denial of selfhood experienced by black men during slavery – which complicated the image of the black male as both bearer and perpetrator of violence. Paul D, whilst at Sweet Home and subject to Garner’s ownership, is confident that he is a man, because he is ‘so named and called by one who would know’. [footnoteRef:2] Here there is an acknowledgement, even if only subconscious, that Garner, as white slave owner, possesses authority over the label – as though manhood is neither inherent nor independently achievable, but a quality ascribed one by another. Carden remarks that Paul D is ‘the child of benevolent white parents, embedded in hierarchies that modelled those of a patriarchal family,’ but nevertheless ‘is not a son – Sons inherit manhood with patrilineage; Paul D borrows a provisional second-order manhood from a master.’[footnoteRef:3] According to Garner, the hallmarks of manhood are the ability to wield a gun, and the ability to make decisions, though he is sure to limit the options from which his slaves are able to choose. Paul D acquiesces to the naïve belief that ‘in their relationship with Garner was true metal: they were believed and trusted, but most of all they were listened to,’ when in actuality their masculinity is defined by Garner’s higher authority and in his acknowledgement of worth in their thoughts and feelings.[footnoteRef:4] Garner elevates his slaves’ status to “men” because, in maintaining control over four men, rather than four inferior animals, his sense of personal power is significantly increased. Garner fosters in them a sense of manhood purely to fortify his sense of his own manhood. [2: Toni Morrison, Beloved, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), p.125.] [3: Mary Paniccia Carden, “Models of Memory and Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Twentieth Century Literature, 45.4, (1999), 401-427 ( p.405). Emphasis added.] [4: Morrison, Beloved, p. 125.]

When Sweet Home’s ownership passes from Garner to Schoolteacher, Paul D’s donated sense of manhood suffers. He soon learns that his identity is inhibited by the individual perspectives of his white slave owners. Schoolteacher has none of Garner’s condescension, and – rather than characterise them as men – affords his slaves sub-human classification. They are refused the prerequisites of Garner’s brand of masculinity: Schoolteacher denies Paul D ‘first his shotgun, then his thoughts, for Schoolteacher didn’t take advice from Negroes.’[footnoteRef:5] Paul D is suddenly reduced to nothing more than a white man’s product, without value beyond the profit his body collects. Sitter comments at this juncture that ‘Morrison shows how every natural instinct and emotion is in some way twisted or stunted by the experience of living in a culture that measures individual worth by resale value and the ability to reproduce oneself without cost.’[footnoteRef:6] Indeed, Sethe is worth more because she is able to ‘breed.’[footnoteRef:7] When Paul D is sold and removed from Sweet Home, he suffers another blow to his masculinity: he is forced into chains, made to wear a collar and a bit. As he leaves, bestially bound, he passes Mister, the rooster (and it is worthwhile to acknowledge the masculine title that the bird here is granted, a title which is notably absent from Paul D’s name) and notes his defeat: ‘Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.’[footnoteRef:8] Herein lies the binding power of white language over the slave, for when Garner termed Paul D “man”, so he was one, and when Schoolteacher decided he was an animal, an animal he became. As such, it is clear here how slavery impedes a complete construction of black masculine identity. [5: Morrison, Beloved, p. 220.] [6: Deborah Ayer Sitter, “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved”, African American Review, 26.1, (1992), 17-29, (p.18).] [7: Morrison, Beloved, p.227.] [8: Morrison, Beloved, p.74.]

Shortly after his reselling Paul D attacks his new owner, Brandywine, not knowing ‘exactly what prompted him to try other than Halle, Sixo, Paul A, Paul F and Mister.’[footnoteRef:9] The Sweet Home Men here represent Paul D’s ideal of manhood, and inspire the attack in order to keep said manhood intact. Also of note is the trembling Paul D experiences prior to the attack and then thereafter, which is ‘gentle at first – and then wild,’ a trembling that begins with his last look at a Sweet Home tree he names ‘Brother,’ and grows wilder the further he is removed from the tree.[footnoteRef:10] As Sitter comments, ‘Paul D’s image of the tree seems at all moments to be an index of his sense of his own manliness. At Sweet Home Paul D is confident that he is a man.’[footnoteRef:11] Consequentially, the deconstructive cycle is perpetuated with increasing severity, and he is sent to a chain gang, forced into a ‘wooden [box]’, a ‘grave calling itself quarters.’[footnoteRef:12] Here, Paul D realises he is worth less than an animal, barely more valuable living than dead. Once given a gun to carry as a symbol of his masculinity, he is now positioned at the opposite end of the barrel. The chain gang men ‘[wake] to rifle shot,’ and the butt and barrel of their masters’ guns force their compliance to repeated oral rape.[footnoteRef:13] Suffering such a blow to his manhood, Paul D can no longer picture Brother, ‘old, wide and beckoning,’ and can see only an aspen, ‘too young to call a sapling.’[footnoteRef:14] The slave trade has reduced Paul D’s masculine identity almost entirely. [9: Morrison, Beloved, p.106.] [10: Ibid.; Morrison, Beloved, p.21.] [11: Sitter, p.24.] [12: Morrison, Beloved, p.106.] [13: Morrison, Beloved, p.107.] [14: Morrison, Beloved, p.221; 220.]

While not largely concerned with the slave narrative, Morrison’s first male-centric novel Song of Solomon examines the changing black masculine ideal in the period after abolition. In 1869, having received his free papers, Macon Dead I begins the construction of what will become a male-dominated familial empire. He initiates a definition of black masculinity based on capital, and amassing a material wealth that his son, Macon Dead II, believes characterises successful white masculinity. Even beyond the context of slavery, then, the white man’s definition of manhood is the authoritative definition. Macon II’s conviction, that the key prerequisite for manhood is material wealth, is strengthened following the murder of his father, and comes to vitiate his character and his relationships thereafter.

Bell hooks argues that masculinity is deemed to be about demonstrating violence and strength, and thus men are ‘socialise[d][…]to believe without their role as patriarchs they will have no reason for being,’ and in the home, Macon II certainly endorses patriarchal supremacy.[footnoteRef:15] The first to suffer his hypermasculine domestic dominance is his wife, Ruth. He marries her to ‘co-opt her physician father’s social position,’ and ‘his hatred of [her] glittered and sparked in every word he spoke to her.’[footnoteRef:16] During sex, he becomes aroused not by her, but by the removal of her underwear – ‘the most beautiful, the most delicate, the whitest and softest underwear on earth.’ His sexual appetite for her white undergarments and disinterest in her naked body, ‘as moist and crumbly as unbleached sugar,’ indicates the white colonialism that Macon aspires to, his attempts to ‘unlock the most intimate secrets of white male dominance.’[footnoteRef:17] Ruth does not suffer his dominance alone: he keeps his family ‘awkward with fear,’ and in his daughters he ‘chok[es] the lilt out of what should have been girlish voices.’[footnoteRef:18] He denies his daughters autonomy and agency, coercing them into epitomes of feminine purity. Tellingly, though he loathes Milkman for much of the first quarter of the novel, Macon II still affords his son considerably more personal freedom than his daughters. Milkman is allowed to indulge in various alcoholic and sexual deviancies, with no fear of reprimand, though when Corinthians, at age 40, takes up a new boyfriend from the impoverished southside, Macon II locks her in the house and forces her to abandon her housekeeping job. The disparity between his treatment of his daughters and of his son is such that when Milkman punches his father after an assault on his mother, Macon II in fact begins to treat him with greater respect, allowing Milkman to become his business partner. Magdalene called Lena later informs Milkman of the absence of heroism in his act, telling him that ‘you think because you hit him once that we all believe you were protecting her […] It’s a lie. You were taking over, letting us know you had the right to tell her and all of us what to do.’[footnoteRef:19] Here in the domestic realm black masculinity gains a new aspect, being predicated on violence, and the subordination of women. [15: bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, (New York: Atria, 2004) p.115.] [16: Susan Neal Mayberry, Can’t I Love What I Criticize? The Masculine and Morrison, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007) p.82; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, (London: Vintage, 2006), p.10.] [17: Morrison p.16; Mayberry, p.82.] [18: Morrison, Song of Solomon, p.10.] [19: Morrison, Song of Solomon, p.215-16.]

Beloved, too, shares a notion of a masculinity predicated on patriarchy, though to a less severe extent. Whilst the men in Song of Solomon assert themselves over their female counterparts, Paul D does not, and suffers a crippling blow to his manhood as a result. After arriving at 124 Bluestone Road, Beloved challenges Paul D’s manhood more than any white slave owner. So she might have her mother all to herself, she supernaturally forces him out of the house, and he comes to see himself not as a man but as ‘a rag doll, picked up and put down anywhere at any time.’[footnoteRef:20] In his effort to avoid her he sleeps on a pallet in the shed like an animal, ‘because he wasn’t man enough to break out.’[footnoteRef:21] When Beloved successfully seduces him, his inability to resist proves him feeble, less than a man: ‘whenever she turned her behind up the calves of his youth (was that it?) cracked his resolve.’[footnoteRef:22] Unable to oppose her on his own, Paul D must then look to another woman, Sethe, for assistance. He attempts to establish his masculinity in a ‘different but standard way: he wants to prove himself a man by way of being a father.’[footnoteRef:23] Carden judges that ‘in American culture, “man” signifies head of the household, protector of wife and children, giver of law, guardian of culture.’[footnoteRef:24] But in having to supplicate for Sethe’s permission to get her pregnant – ‘I want to get you pregnant, Sethe. Would you do that for me?’ – Paul D’s ultimate position becomes clear.[footnoteRef:25] He can never be the head of the household – this role has been Sethe’s for far too long that she should be displaced or supplanted, and she is far too independent to require his rescuing. Paul D fails to make Sethe pregnant as a means of ‘document[ing] his manhood,’ and his sense of fatherhood is further shaken when he learns from Stamp Paid of her infanticide.[footnoteRef:26] He leaves 124 Bluestone Road, choosing instead to sleep on the floor of a church basement, assigning himself to the role of animal impressed upon him by others. [20: Morrison, Beloved, p.126.] [21: Morrison, Beloved, p.127.] [22: Morrison, Beloved, p.126.] [23: Sitter, p.24.] [24: Carden, p.404.] [25: Morrison, Beloved, p.128.] [26: Sitter, p.24.]

Whilst Paul D acts passively, the men of Song of Solomon do not. They assume the attitude of the Black Power Movement, the strong arm of the black liberation movement of the 1950s and 60s. The Black Power Movement espoused two notions of black masculinity – one predicated on violence, the other on the subordination of women. Guitar Bains – in joining the Seven Days – Milkman, Macon II, and even to some extent Solomon, advance the masculine ethos of the Black Power Movement by attempting to regulate women exclusively to the domestic sphere, or disavow them completely. hooks argues that ‘a man who is unabashedly and unequivocally committed to patriarchal masculinity will both fear and hate all that the culture deems feminine and womanly.’[footnoteRef:27] Black masculinity becomes in the novel a construction defined by female absence. This negation of the feminine echoes a folkloric trope from the slave period, whereby black men were able to attain freedom by either symbolically or literally flying away from their thraldom, and in so doing, from their families and communities. Male flight in the novel comes to represent both a freedom from a life of slavery, and an abandonment of family and community. It must be admitted, at this juncture, that Morrison herself acknowledged that she did not find ‘men who leave their families necessarily villainous,’ though Demetrakopoulos finds that flying with no real point of return comes at the cost of ‘maturation, individuation, connections,’ and results in what Mayberry calls a ‘polarised, soulless masculine.’[footnoteRef:28] Still, Morrison comes to critique this construction of black masculinity in the novel by presenting the tropes and symbols of male flight negatively, in favour of the feminine comfort of orality. The novel grants privilege to oral telling and retelling of black history and culture, largely by women, and subordinates the written word of the white male, which aims to erase black history and culture. In one of the first examples of oral storytelling in the novel Pilate relives her father’s death to Milkman and Guitar, telling how he was blown ‘five feet into the air’, and it is Circe who tells Milkman the history of his family, his grandmother’s name, and his grandfather’s real name.[footnoteRef:29] Even Morrison herself was ‘amazed at how little men taught one another in the book.’[footnoteRef:30] Macon II in particular is heavily associated with the masculine print culture: he views his father as a victim of illiteracy, remarking that ‘everything bad that ever happened to him happened to him because he couldn’t read.’[footnoteRef:31] Moreover, he paints the word ‘OFFICE’ on the front door of his business, in imitation of the ‘white town fathers’ literate, authoritarian mode of signing.’[footnoteRef:32] He is, furthermore, obsessed with his wall calendar and account book. As such, black masculinity in the novel comes to rely not just on the domination of women, but on a complete denial of the feminine. [27: hooks, p. 108.] [28: Nellie McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison”, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr and K.A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 396-411, (p.402); Karla F.C. Holloway and Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison (New York: Greenwood, 1987) pp.86-90; Mayberry, p.72.] [29: Morrison, Song of Solomon, p.40.] [30: McKay, p.410.] [31: Morrison, Song of Solomon, p. 53.] [32: Morrison, Song of Solomon p.17; Mayberry, p.83.]

If Morrison constructs these versions of black masculinity to critique them, then so too does she offer a less problematic alternative. The alternative in Song of Solomon is Pilate. Though she is not a man, she is notably androgynous: tall, strong, bearing a man’s name. She also represents the character in the novel with the strongest sense of personal identity – the most complete individual that Song of Solomon offers us. Morrison in fact admits that she chose a man to be the central character of Song of Solomon because she felt a man had considerably more to learn than a woman.[footnoteRef:33] In Pilate, Milkman finds a satisfactory model of freedom and transcendence: ‘now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly.’[footnoteRef:34] Pilate is grounded, a part of the community, but still she transcends this grounding through her own distinct identity. In this way she occupies both male and female roles: she has the masculine gift of flight, but the feminine grounding in community. So too does she provide a suitable alternative to Guitar’s violent vigilante justice. Her justice does not involve retaliation, but rather forgiveness: she forgives the man who beats Reba, her daughter, just as she forgives Milkman for attempting to steal from her. Pilate is perhaps what the ideal masculine should be, and indeed it is the case that she represents for Milkman an ideal. If there is an identifiable male alternative to the problematic masculinity replete within the novel, this alternative is presented by Milkman at the end of the novel. His masculinity is constructed in the same vein as his fathers, or as Guitar’s in the earlier phases of the novel, but under Pilate’s mentorship becomes ‘a feminine masculinity, a maleness connected to women, anchored by delicately balanced dualities, and based on flying without ever leaving the ground.’[footnoteRef:35] [33: Mayberry, pp.78-9.] [34: Morrison, Song of Solomon, p.146.] [35: Mayberry, p.73.]

Looking to Beloved for an alternative to Paul D’s other-affirmed masculinity, we find Sixo. Sixo is drawn on a heroic scale, not defining himself by the opinions of others, or his judgement of their superiority or inferiority. Morrison, as Sitter notes, suggests that Sixo represents an African ideal of masculinity, by accentuating his ‘Africanness.’[footnoteRef:36] His manliness stems not from the approval of others, nor from the disempowerment of others, but from an unfailing respect that he demonstrates for everyone, whether alive or dead, and for the natural and supernatural worlds. When Sixo arranges to meet his Thirty-Mile Woman in a stone shelter ‘that Redmen used way back when they thought the land was theirs,’ he asks the spirit of the Redmen for permission to enter.[footnoteRef:37] When she loses her way, and fails to meet him, he asks the wind for assistance, and gets it. Sixo does not live contrapuntally to anyone or anything, but rather in harmony with the world around him. By Garner’s standard of manliness, whereby the measure of a man depends on his control of others, Paul D’s exodus from 124 Bluestone Road seems righteous, justified, but held against Sixo’s brand of masculinity, it ‘makes him feel ashamed.’[footnoteRef:38] [36: Sitter, p.23.] [37: Morrison, Beloved, p.24.] [38: Morrison, Beloved, p.267.]

In summation, it can be judged that Morrison’s prominent constructions of masculinity, those she places most obviously within her reader’s field of vision, are granted place on such a stage as a means of exposing their flaws. Morrison implicitly critiques violent and Eurocentric notions of masculinity by proving their fragility, their isolating qualities, and sets up alternatives, either in the ambiguous androgyny of Pilate, the eventual roundedness of Milkman or in the traditionally Africanist figure of Sixo.

References

1. ‘masculinity, n.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, (2018), . [accessed 1 February 2019].
2. Carden, Mary P., “Models of Memory and Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Twentieth Century Literature, 45.4, (1999), 401-427
3. Holloway, Karla F.C. and Stephanie Demetrakopoulos, New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison (New York: Greenwood, 1987)
4. hooks, bell, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, (New York: Atria, 2004)
5. McKay, Nellie, “An Interview with Toni Morrison”, Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. by Henry Louis Gates Jr and K.A. Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993) 396-411
6. Mayberry, Susan N., Can’t I Love What I Criticize? The Masculine and Morrison, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007)
7. Morrison, Toni Beloved, (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987)
8. Morrison, Toni, Song of Solomon, (London: Vintage, 2006)
9. Sitter, Deborah A., “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved”, African American Review, 26.1, (1992), 17-29

In this essay the role of language as being more than a means of communication has been the central focus. Language has been described as a means through which identities can be forged, the instrument through which the past, present, and future can be represented, as well as a means through which we can remember that which has been forgotten. Focus has also been laid on the cultural aspects of language, and how language can be used as a symbolic cultural artifice that separates the Whiteman from the Blackman. Language in this sense becomes not just a vehicular means of communication, but a cultural identity that makes the weaker take on a strength that is akin to his nature. 

Just like the signifying monkey, the weaker man, the black man, enslaved, ripped off his status, autonomy, and culture, uses language as a tool for Hansson 28 to change the status quo. Sly and unpredictable, like the signifying monkey, the Blackman uses language to taunt, goad, boast and cajole. Like “The Monkey – a trickster, like Esu, who is full of guile, who tells lies*[in Yoruba culture, lies refer to tales, stories, and figurative discourse], and who is a rhetorical genius- is intent on demystifying Lion’s self-imposed status as King of the Jungle’’. He talks with his hands, and eyes and uses gestures, innuendos, and indeterminacy to, on the one hand, undermine the superiority of the white man, while on the other, establishing a bond between him and his kinsmen in a language that the white man does not comprehend. 

He uses irony to undermine the supposedly high status of the white man and establishes the uniqueness of his version of the language, the vernacular, with gusto: I tend to dress my source to you dis nite on de all imported subject of Language, a de various tongues ob different nations and niggars, libbing and dead, known and unknown: an in so doing me shant stan shilly shally bout preface to de subject, but run bang at him at once like mad at “dam haystack”. In its role as a means of creating and establishing identity, language is to the black man something to pass on; a cultural heritage that is learned and mastered through adolescence. The Negro learns how to indulge in “black language games”, as a sort of formal language training, separate and unique, incomprehensible to the Whiteman and a “…method of language is like that of oral poetry, substituting in the framework of the grammar”. Signifying is the language of the trickster, which the Blackman uses “that set of words or gestures which arrives at ’direction through indirection’’’ . This is seen in Beloved, in how Sethe’s actions were incomprehensible to the Whiteman, Schoolteacher’s nephew: “‘What she go do that for?’ he wondered; ‘What she want to go and do that for?’’’ he asked Sheriff Hansson 29. 

Sethe’s signifying, her act of infanticide, a clear act of defiance, of reclaiming a lost autonomy, was incomprehensible and shocking to the white man and understood by the Blacks, who needed no words, or singing to signify their understanding. She was crazy, they concurred with the white man’s interpretation of Sethe’s action, but, “Yeah, well, ain’t all’? in the eyes of the white man? She had loved too much, something a slave never should do – she had not accepted her role as the underlying, and just like the monkey, she had challenged the lion to a fight. Also, the use of language as a spiritual connotation that bridges the real and the unreal has also been discussed in this essay. That which the white man calls unreal, the black man calls spiritual; that which the white man calls history, the black man calls memory. The ritualism of language is seen in how the black man learns to signify as an adolescent, contrary to the classic structuralism of the white man, “Black adults teach their children this exceptionally complex system of rhetoric’’. Wideman claims that through language, the black man pays homage to his ancestors, sees the connection between the physical realm and the spiritual, and interprets history as “peoples imaginary recreation… which exist in the imagination…. are a record of ‘certain collective experiences’ that have been repeated generation after generation’’’. 

This trope of interconnectivity between the past, the present, and the future is not only seen in the Yoruba mythology of Esu but is also seen as a black trope in Beloved, as well as in the contemporary African American culture of today. Rushdy’s quote of Wideman summarises the spirituality of language to the black man: ‘Past lives in us, through us. Each of us harbors the spirits of people who walked the earth before we did, and those spirits depend on us for continuing existence, just as we depend on their presence to live our lives to the fullest.’. Hence, when the black man says: ‘‘It was not a story to pass on’’ repetitively – three times, the concept of signifying comes to mind. Beloved, “the Hansson 30 devil-child was clever. …And beautiful…. Her smile was dazzling’’, but they had to forget her because members would be using language to give her life again. Morrison states that we must ‘’bear witness and identify that which is useful from the past and that which ought to be discarded.’ In other words, the past we choose to remember must be palatable, it has to be constructed in a way that serves the present in a positive. Forgetting Beloved’s name, thus, was like forgetting that which was undesirable and brought pain, so although “Everybody knew what she was called, nobody anywhere knew her name”. They had to forget, because, remembering gives life to the past. She was Beloved, but she had no last name.