beloved

times represent a unique calmness. Toni Morrison doesn’t make any exceptions to this idea. In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison uses trees to symbolize comfort, protection and peace. Morrison uses trees throughout Beloved to emphasize the serenity that the natural world offers. Many black characters, and some white and Native American characters, refer to trees as offering calm, healing and escape, thus conveying Morrison’s message that trees bring peace. Besides using the novel’s characters to convey her message, Morrison herself displays and shows the good and calmness that trees represent in the tree imagery in her narration. Perhaps Toni Morrison uses trees and characters’ responses to them to show that when one lives through an ordeal as horrible as slavery, one will naturally find comfort in the simple or seemingly harmless aspects of life, such as nature and especially trees. With the tree’s symbolism of escape and peace, Morrison uses her characters’ references to their serenity and soothing nature as messages that only in nature could these oppressed people find comfort and escape from unwanted thoughts. Almost every one of Morrison’s characters find refuge in trees and nature, especially the main characters such as Sethe and Paul D. During Sethe’s time in slavery, she has witnessed many gruesome and horrible events that blacks endure such as whippings and lynchings. However, Sethe seemingly chooses to remember the sight of sycamore trees over the sight of lynched boys, thus revealing her comfort in a tree’s presence: “Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her- remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that” (6). Although Sethe wishes she would’ve remembered the boys instead, she probably rationalized this thought because when she asks Paul D about news of Halle, she pictures the sycamores instead of the possibility that Halle has been lynched: “‘I wouldn’t have to ask about him would I? You’d tell me if there was anything to tell, wouldn’t you?’ Sethe looked down at her feet and saw again the sycamores” (8). When Schoolteacher whips Sethe, leaving her back leathery with scars, she refers to the scar as a chokecherry tree to soothe and to lessen the physically and emotion...

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... presence in town and preached from a rock in the Clearing surrounded by trees, doing what she finds comfort in, helping and preaching to others: “In the Clearing, Sethe found Baby’s old preaching rock and remembered the smell of leaves simmering in the sun, thunderous feet and the shouts that ripped pods off the limbs of chestnuts. With Baby Suggs’ heart in charge, the people let go” (94). Even Sixo, the wild man went among the trees at night to “keep his bloodlines open.” Each one of these characters has endured the horrors of slavery and faced this ordeal in different ways, but they all deal with slavery with the comforting and harmless aspect of nature, trees. Although people today don’t have to live through slavery, people still have to face their own tough personal situations. Instead of having nature to soothe one’s problems, people today drown their sorrows in material possessions and controlled substances, unfortunately a problem plaguing society. Readers can only remember a time not too long ago when the little secret hiding place in the woods or one’s special thinking rock meant a great deal more than material items, a simple healthy escape from life and it’s problems.