Beloved

Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, reveals the heartbreak love and its power to throw an individual into an internal battle against himself. In the beginning of the novel, Sethe, the main character, is seen as a woman who as a woman that has submitted to an isolated life and who cares not to interact with others around her. Yet, this has not always been the case. Sethe was once a woman so full of love. She had admired her husband, Halle, her four young children, Denver, Howard, Buglar, and Beloved, and she the days of the Clearing. And thus, when Sethe had finally reached 124, she fell faint. She had loved too much.

“Your love is too thick,” he said, thinking…. “Too thick?” she said, thinking of the Clearing where Baby Suggs’ commands knocked the pods off horse chestnuts. “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.”

After failing to “protect” her children form the schoolteacher, Sethe experienced much guilt and regret for a very long time. Her guilt stemmed from mercifully killing her “crawling already?” baby girl, and regret from not having done the same for her other three children. Sethe’s actions derived from the fact that she did not want her four children to have the same life and experiences that she had. In her mind, death was better than a life as a slave. Later in the novel, it become evident that Sethe’s tragic past, her scars on her back that resemble a chokecherry tree, was the reason for her wishing to live a life in isolation.

Beloved, who shares that fatal moment with Sethe reacts in a completely different way. Her obsessive and vengeful love haunts Sethe’s house, scaring off her two biological brothers, and fights the force of death by attempting to take her mother’s life. Not only does Beloved herself ha...

... middle of paper ...

...ake peace, Sethe would cry “that Beloved…meant more to her than her own life.” One was killing herself to try to make the other understand, while the other was being selfish and destroying everything standing in the way of her happiness.

Morrison’s Beloved captures the tragedy of love. One love so powerful it consumes everything. One love so powerful it never wins. Sethe lost the game of love by mercifully killing her daughter out of maternal instinct, and lost the game of life by forever suffering for love. Beloved fought heaven and hell to avoid death and took her mother’s life, the only life that loved her enough to die for her. Near the ending of the novel, Sethe’s eyes were “bright but dead, alert but vacant, paying attention to everything about Beloved.” Beloved characterizes the heartbreak of love: so strong it can evolve into hate, so strong it can kill.