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Lasting Effects of Slavery Portrayed in "Beloved"

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison looks back to the era after the end of the Civil War and tells the story of Sethe, a woman who had been a slave and who escaped with her four children from a Kentucky plantation in 1855. She is a woman understandably affected by her past, and her memory of that time is bound with her belief that her dead daughter, Beloved, haunts the house in which she lives with her youngest daughter, Denver. Beloved is actually a real woman Sethe believes is her daughter reincarnated, though it is suggested rather that Beloved came on a slave ship with her mother and saw her mother throw herself overboard. Morrison's characters often have to find a way to live freely in the world after the experience of slavery, an experience that denied the humanity of black people and that continues to affect black Americans long after the end of the slave era.

In this novel, Morrison considers the moral taint of slavery, connected here with the mother-daughter relationship. Morrison does not simply show how bad slavery is as an imposition on blacks by whites. She considers more complex ills that derive from subsequent relations between slaves and former slaves. The mother-child relationship carries echoes of abandonment and suicide because of the past of these two women and because of the separation slavery often forced on families. Sethe and her daughter are isolated from the black community because of memories of their earlier slavery. Deborah Horvitz indicates the important themes of the book when she writes,

Toni Morrison's fifth novel. . . explores the insidious degradation imposed upon all slaves, even when they are owned by, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's term, "a man of humanity." The novel is also about matrilineal ancestry and the relationships among enslaved, freed, alive, and dead mothers and daughters (Horvitz 157).

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 and was raised in Lorain, a nor...

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Lasting Effects of Slavery Portrayed in "Beloved". (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:35, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1701304.html