Beloved (Chapter1-11) Toni Morrison's Beloved is a story about an African-American woman, Sethe, and her two daughters Denver and Beloved. The setting is Ohio in the 1870's, eight years after African-Americans were freed from slavery. Sethe originally had four children, two boys Buglar and Howard and two girls Beloved and Denver. Buglar and Howard ran away, one thirteen years old and the other fourteen years old. Slavery was so bad that Sethe preferred to kill her own baby rather than risk having it snatched from her and forced into the same miserable life that she had herself. In fact, she tried to kill all four of her kids, but only succeeded in killing one, who later haunted their house and eventually came back to life as Beloved. She came back from "the dark side"ÃÂ to get back the things she lost. Once Sethe discovers that Beloved is her daughter reincarnated, her guilt that she had carried for eighteen years got even worse.
The Making of Harry Potter 29-05-2012
The Making of Harry Potter 29-05-2012
English: Toni Morrison, Miami Book Fair Internatio...Her guilt was so intense that she became obsessed with making things right with the reincarnated Beloved. Toni Morrison demonstrates that Sethe had a terrible life, which left her scarred both physically and psychologically.
When Sethe was a little girl on a plantation in Carolina, she rarely saw her mother except for a few times out in the fields and once when she was working with indigo. Her mother nursed her for only two or three weeks and she wasn't even allowed to sleep in the same cabin. The last time she saw her mother was when her mother was hung. Everyday life was indeed quite miserable. "I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light, Sunday she slept like a stick."ÃÂ(P.62). She also heard that her mother was taken up many times by the crew, and she threw all the babies away on the island. "She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them."ÃÂ(P.62) Sethe was treated very badly as slave woman in Kentucky. One day, she was even rapped, and when she reported the rape, she was horribly whipped on her back, she was six months pregnant at the time. "Those boys came in there and took my milk. That's what they came in there for. Held me down and took it."ÃÂ(P.16). "Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree."ÃÂ(P.17). The scars on her back looked like a tree, which was not able to bear the sight. "It's a tree, Lu. A chokecherry tree, See, here's the trunk "ÃÂ it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it."ÃÂ(P.79).
Sethe sent her three children ahead by wagon to a location near the Ohio River. She then ran away and attempted to meet her children. She was starving and her legs were so swollen that she could not see her arch or feel her ankles. When she couldn't move and expected to die in wild onion field, a white girl named Amy Denver found her and saved her life. Amy Denver helped her to cross the Ohio River with a canoe. Her baby was born in the dirty canoe, and that's how Sethe's daughter Denver got her name.
When Sethe realized that her children's lives were not going to be any better than her own, she began to regret ever bringing children into such a terrible world. One night, in an effort to keep her babies from being stolen from her, she tried to kill them so they'd be in a safer place. She succeeded in killing her baby girl who haunted their house for eighteen years and was finally reincarnated as Beloved. Sethe wanted to put her children in a safer place to protect them. She preferred death to slavery, but she only made things worse by killing her baby.
Beloved is a very sad story, but certainly a story that needs telling. Reading the book gets one well acquainted with Sehte, her terrible life as a slave and her intense feelings of guilt. Her psychological scars were much deeper than the physical scars on her back and will never heel.
Toni Morrison, on jacket of her Pulitzer Prize win...
English: Toni Morrison speaking at "A Tribute to C...
Beloved (film)