Themes And Cruelty In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Cruelty: the Double-edged Sword “Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell” (Francois Mauriac, Brainyquote 2016). These statements posed by French novelist Francois Mauriac can be applied to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The novel centers around Sethe, a former African American slave, who lives in rural Cincinnati, Ohio with her daughter named Denver. As the plot progresses, Sethe is confronted with elements of her haunting past: traumatic experiences from her life as a slave, her daunting escape, and the measures she took to keep her family safe from her hellish owner plague Sethe into the present and force her to come to terms with the past. A definitive theme

An example of this would be Schoolteacher’s pursuit of Sethe and her children after their escape to Cincinnati. After losing most of the Sweet Home men Schoolteacher sets his sights on Sethe and her children in order to make Sweet Home “worth the trouble it was causing him” (Morrison 227). The threat of loss profits motivates Schoolteacher to “secure the breeding one (Sethe)” and “her three pickaninnies” (Morrison 227). He intends to make a living at Sweet Home and is willing to forcibly take his “property” back with him. Schoolteacher will be cruel to his runaways to ensure that he will be able to profit from the farm. Another example of a characters performing cruel acts to meet their goal is Sethe. When Sethe recognizes the hat of Schoolteacher at 124, she gathers all her children and heads to the shed to kill them. Sethe describes her actions to Paul D arguing, “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (Morrison 164). Here Sethe reveals the extent to which she will go to protect her children from the horrors of slavery; she is willing to personally kill each of them if it means slavery will not have them. Her love for her family and personal experiences as a victim of slavery cause her to go cruel lengths to ensure her children’s safety. Sethe does not wish for her children a life under slavery’s influence which she herself suffered from at the hands of Schoolteacher and his nephews. Although Sethe and Schoolteacher come from opposite spectrums of slavery as well as race, they both are willing to achieve their ends through brutal actions. Many of the cruel events in the novel stem from slavery and its profit-driving exploits of human