Identifying the Nameless in Beloved

A name symbolizes what that person means and stands for. Renaming is an act of changing who you want the world to see you as. Naming and renaming is an important concept throughout Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A name is an identity that allows one to identify as a human being. A name is full of history, culture, and individuality. In Beloved, a name is both a source of freedom and a source of degrading history. Naming transforms and alters one’s future and history.

To understand why identity is vital to the characters in Beloved, identity must first be defined. According to the Oxford Dictionary, identity is defined as “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is” (identity). Identity is who you are both internally and externally to the world. The main characters in Toni Morrison's Beloved are former slaves. The former slaves’ main struggle, after having been stripped of their humanity and identity by the white men who owned them, is to reclaim self-ownership and form identities independent of those forced upon them by their owners under the system of slavery. Both Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs show the importance of a name and identity by trying to abolish their history.

Stamp Paid is portrayed as a role model throughout the novel. He is welcoming and helps Sethe to freedom from Sweet Home. Stamp Paid decided to rename himself because of what he went through during his enslavement – giving his wife up to the master’s son. Stamp Paid changed his name instead of killing his wife. Stamp Paid describes why he changed his name:

Born Joshua, he renamed himself when he handed over his wife to his master's son. Handed her over in the sense that he did not kill anybody, thereby himself, because his wife demanded he stay alive. Otherwise, s...

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...rrison’s characters. Slavery has destroyed, or perhaps not allowed the development of one’s identity. Fortunately, this lack of identity can be restored by a change or discovery of a name. “Everyone knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for…” (Morrison 323). Identify is important because it tells us and everyone else who we are and what we stand for. Without a name, you are without an identity. Without and identity, you are without remembrance. Without remembrance, you are undefined.

Works Cited

Coleman, James W. Faithful Vision: Treatments of the Sacred, Spiritual, and Supernatural in Twentieth-century African American Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2006. Print.

"identity". Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press, n.d. Web. 05 May 2014.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.