Essay About Tough Love in Toni Morrison's Beloved

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Tough Love in Beloved

What kind of mother would cut her child's head off with a hacksaw? This is a question Pulitzer and Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison explores in Beloved, a novel with a chilling metaphor about the legacy of slavery and which finds echoes in another current question, Why is the leading cause of death among young African American men murder by another black?

Sethe, the novel's main protagonist, is an escaped slave and mother of four a few years after the end of the Civil War. Her apparent good fortune at successfully escaping while pregnant and giving birth in flight and finding refuge at her mother-in-law's spiritually nourishing home vanishes twenty-eight days later. The sight of a hat belonging to a cruel white owner who has tracked her down sends her and her four children into a woodshed where rather than let them suffer the torments of slavery proceeds to kill them. After killing Beloved, her third child, she is stopped by a friend who has rushed in as she is swinging the infant by her heels to smash her head.

After some time in jail for murder Sethe returns to a home haunted for years by the child's ghost and after an exorcism attempt the child appears in the flesh as the teenager she would've been, intent on making her mother pay for having taken her life. Without knowing who she is Sethe takes the girl in, but once she realizes it is Beloved she sees it a divine opportunity to seek forgiveness from her daughter and understanding for her deed.

In a story impossible to predict Morrison, with a breathtaking mastery of the language, weaves in and brings to life other complex characters such as Paul D, another slave who had escaped from the same plantation but who had not seen Sethe for over a decade. After unexpectantly finding her in a small Ohio town he moves in with the hope that a bright new beginning is in store for both of them. Denver is Sethe's other daughter who not only almost lost her life in the woodshed but also at birth if it hadn't been for an uneducated white girl who helped Sethe deliver the baby in the tall grases on a river bank. The troubled, isolated teenage girl has rarely ventured from her home and since her two brothers ran away from home her only playmate is her dead sister's ghost.

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