Term Paper on "Toni Morrison and Her Book Beloved"

Term Paper 6 pages (1752 words) Sources: 5 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Toni Morrison and her book Beloved. The writer examines how Morrison illustrates slavery and racism as discourse which draws the line between the human and not human. There were five sources used to complete this paper.

Beloved and the Ghost of Slavery's Past

Many authors use their work to convey a feeling, a belief or a value, but every once in awhile the world is treated to an author that knows exactly how to convey the human spirit, both in the negative and positive light. This is the case with well-known author Toni Morris and her work Beloved. Morris uses the work to illuminate the plight of the slave, and the ability for humans to act humanely and inhumanely at the same time.

The work is important to the history of America as it blueprints a time and attitude that should never be repeated.

She uses the book to create a discourse about slavery, racism, being human and not being human.

Morrison

For one to understand her position and desire to explore the topic of slavery one needs to have a grasp about Morrison and her life.

She was born in 1931 in Ohio and had three siblings. Her family was filled with storytellers and musicians and she grew up listening to the tales of generations gone by as they were handed down through the relatives (Harris, 2001).

Morrison was taught by her parents that as an African-American, struggling with racism would be a way of life for her. They gave no excuses, they didn't feel sorry for themselves, they simply laid it out as a fact and something she would continue to encounter as she moved out into the world.

She tells of her father's blatant hostility toward white people and her mother's somewhat optimistic belief that over time race relations in America would improve. It is no surprise, therefore, that her novels reflect both the pessimism that racism produces and the optimism that has empowered African-American people to survive and thrive in spite of racism (Harris, 2001)."

And this is the first clue as to how and why her Beloved shows human and not human traits with regard to racism and slavery.

Morrison moved onto Howard University after graduating from college and she earned her Bachelor's degree from there (Harris, 2001).

She then went to Cornell University and obtained a Master's degree in English.

She married a Jamaican man and they had two sons. She also joined a workshop that was a pivotal turning point in her life as she wrote her first short story there that later was completed as her first novel, the Bluest Eye.

She later divorced, went back to Ohio and then back to Syracuse New York with her sons and it was there she began to carve out an identity as a writer.

She was quoted later as saying about that time, "Writing was... The most extraordinary way of thinking and feeling. It became the one thing I was doing that I had absolutely no intention of living without (Harris, 2001)."

She worked as an editor at Random House and went on to publish five novels several that won her international acclaim.

Beloved and Slavery

Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' is a combination of diverse literary forms. However, it is the slave narrative form which predominates. The novel is focused on the institution of slavery. It tells the life of a spirit of a dead baby girl, which took a human form to confront her mother. However, far from being a mere ghost story, 'Beloved' also presents how slavery has denied its victims of individuality and the true value of freedom (Malmgren, 1995)."

The initial reading of Beloved can leave one confused as it seems to jump between genres throughout the book, but when one takes a closer look one sees that Morrison used an uncanny ability to produce a metaphoric journey so that the reader would have a glimpse of what slavery was like for those who lived it. They could not depend on one law, one set of rules or the kindness of people as a given. Instead their world was an ever changing environment in which they survived with constant states of fear, anger, confusion and hope.

While Beloved is obviously the story of a baby that died horribly years before and now lives as a ghost it also belies the human and not human discourse of the time with regard to slavery and racism (Malmgren, 1995).

Sethe the mother, finally becomes convinced that Beloved is indeed her dead daughter returned a spirit (Malmgren, 1995).

Until that point, however, Sethe believes that there is a naturalistic explanation for Beloved's appearance (Malmgren, 1995): "she believed Beloved had been locked up by some white man for his own purposes, and never let out the door (Malmgren, 1995). That she must have escaped to a bridge or someplace and rinsed the rest out of her mind" (119) (Malmgren, 1995). Morrison's dedication of the novel to the "sixty million and more," points out a way of following up on this line of reasoning (Malmgren, 1995). The dedication honors, Morrison says, "the number of black Africans who never made it into slavery - those who died either as captives in Africa or on the slave ships"(Malmgren, 1995)."

As Morrison writes about Sethe being forced to face her own past with regards to a murdered daughter, so the reader is also forced to come to grips with and face the past which was the allowance and support of the inhuman institution of slavery (Malmgren, 1995).

Metaphorically, Morrison presents slavery back to the reader as a reminder that it is not gone and forgotten but its spirit is indeed alive and in existence today.

Racism is also a constant reminder of the woes of slavery. The non-human element of Beloved creates the ability to make her powerful yet subtle, not constantly present but never completely gone. This is the same case as slavery and its current place in society. Morrison presents slavery through the ghost of Beloved, as the issue and remnants of slavery are never obvious but are never completely gone.

By personifying slavery as history's ghost (Malmgren, 1995). Morrison re-imagines the institution and its legacy as a kind of abnormal excess that finally defies rational explanation, a ghastly figure from out of a nightmare (Malmgren, 1995). Indeed, she gives the novel the name of a character who is the ultimate historical victim of slavery, someone totally brutalized and dehumanized, and someone reduced to a ghost of herself. and, the coda to the novel tells us, Beloved's story is so horrific, so much a bad dream, that within the black community it is deliberately repressed (Malmgren, 1995): "it was not a story to pass on" because in a case like this "remembering seemed unwise" (274) (Malmgren, 1995). The black community can choose to forget Beloved, as perhaps America has chosen to forget the legacy of slavery, but for readers of the novel it is not that simple; they hold in their hands the very document that rehearses for them the story of slavery and its aftermath, thus memorializing Beloved's suffering and incarnating history's ghost (Malmgren, 1995). In this way, the novel serves as a form of incantation, the ritualistic calling forth of the spirits of the past (Malmgren, 1995)."

The treatment of slavery in the novel poses a clear path to the link between master, and slave and it does it in a way that it removes the human nature from both parties.

In her prose she embeds the understanding that the treatment of the slaves created a change in their mindsets and their attitudes. She reminds the reader of the white belief at the time that Blacks were animals and unmanageable by society standards while at the same time instructing the reader to remember who brought the Blacks to America and mistreated them to the point that they became animals.

White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift un-navigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.... But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other [livable] place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. in, through, and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (198-9)."

The novel reminds the reader how many people will behave if provided with enough power. The Holocaust also illustrated the point which drives home the horror of slavery all the more.

The insistence at the time of treating slaves as objects and commodities created a discourse within her novel about the denial of self… READ MORE

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