Food as Symbol and Symbolism in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Symbolic Food in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

In two passages of Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, she describes a party at 124. Everyone become so full from the food that flows endlessly that they become angry at Baby Suggs extravagance. Baby Suggs thinks it was this overfullness that caused them all to not notice the coming of Schoolteacher and his sons. The narrator of one passage is Stamp Paid and he recounts to Paul D. what happened at the party – what they ate and how it made everyone feel.

These two passages rely on the retelling of stories from the Bible – the story of the Fall from Grace in the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament and the story of Jesus’ feeding of the hungry with an endless supply of loaves and fishes in the New Testament. In these passages of Beloved, Morrison relocates the reader to the true beginning of the story, the day that Sethe tries to kill her children. In addition, the passage alludes to the eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and the overindulgence is analogous to the parable of the Loaves and Fishes.

While both passages mention ‘beginning’, they are told out of sequence – one on pages 136-138, “She had decided to do something with the fruit worthy of the man’s labor and his love. That’s how it began” (136) and the other on pages 156-157, “Stamp started with the party, the one Baby Suggs gave, but stopped and backed up a bit to tell about the berries—…” (156). These beginnings are “displaced to another time” (Bennett and Royle 4). These references to ‘beginning’ can also appear to be analogous to Biblical beginnings, in the Garden of Eden. The beginning of the story could be read as the true beginning, the Fall from Grace. The entire novel revolves around the day after ...

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...ne in the community warns Baby Suggs family that Schoolteacher is coming. They have all eaten of the ‘fruit’ but it has not brought knowledge, it has dulled it. Stamp paid had “…always believed it wasn’t the exhaustion from a long day’s gorging that dulled them, but some other thing---like, well, like meanness—…” (157). The community will soon confront evil personified by the people’s anger and the Schoolteacher’s hate that has arrived at 124.

Finally, the analogy to the fruit of knowledge and the downfall of man is played out by Sethe as she gathers her children (her fruit) to her. The text continues the analogy as Sethe does something unthinkable, something evil, and she is cast out of the garden for it. These passages serve to reaffirm the never ending battle between good and evil.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: The Penguin Group. 1987.