Race In Beloved

In the novel Beloved, the idea of human beings, especially Africans and African Americans, serving as commodities and property of whites is an overwhelming theme that serves as a main source of conflict and violence within the central character’s lives. This theme is institutionalized in the form of slavery, which as a socioeconomic foundation, continually increases the range and magnitude of this idea’s violent and dangerous consequences. Throughout the novel, a majority of the African and African American characters can be observed undermining this idea, demonstrating the novel’s attempt to disprove that their only value comes from being as a slave while also challenging the idea that certain people have no worth other than what can be gained

By expressing themselves spiritually and releasing their emotional inhibitions openly, these people are challenging the view of them as objects or commodities, which from a literal stance cannot express emotion or feel, and allows for the healing of those who have stopped themselves from or have forgotten they had the ability to feel. As stated in the text numerously by Baby Suggs and Sethe; both women had either forgotten or chosen to forget color, events from their past, and in Baby Suggs’ situation, most of her children, out of fear of feeling too much and losing what they had the ability to love or care for due to the indifference they encountered during their time as slaves. After gaining freedom and the ability to explore their emotional capabilities, many former slaves in this novel allow themselves to love, care, trust, and even feel happiness, while diminishing their previously enduring emotions of fear, hate, and distress. This allowance proves their human nature and confronts and falsifies the idea of humans as objects or

Throughout the novel, many of the African and African American female characters struggle to find worth in themselves after being freed or even if they’d never been enslaved. Once freed, Baby Suggs discovers herself as a preacher and her ability to create community and healing and giving advice those in need, while Sethe identifies herself mainly as a mother who creates her worth from the love and care she has for her children. The last character in the novel to discover her sense of self is the only character who wasn’t enslaved like most of her family was, but who still exhibited the same inability to love herself or feel any self worth for much of her life. It is only near the end of the novel where Denver begins to find the independence and courage needed to leave her home, which leads to her being able to find herself: It was a new thought, having a self to look out for and preserve. And it might not have occurred to her if she hadn’t met Nelson Lord leaving his grandmother’s house […]. All he did was smile and say, ‘Take care of yourself, Denver,’ but she heard it as thought it were what language was made for