memorybel Memory and Desire in Toni Morrison's Beloved Toni Morrison Beloved Essays

Memory and Desire in Beloved

In Toni Morrison's pitiless fifth novel, Beloved, freedom is defined as 'not to need permission for desire', a freedom which is almost unattainable for the characters in this book, with their branded memories of slavery, chain-gangs, lynchings and beatings. Ella, a former slave who has crossed the river to Ohio and a kind of freedom, advises Sethe, a runaway who has just given birth to a baby girl, "If anybody was to ask, I'd say, 'Don't love nothing.'"

The novel is set in Ohio in the 1880s. The Civil War has been won, slavery has been abolished, but not the memories of it. Morrison, with savage irony, allows Sethe and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, to recall life under a former 'good' slave owner in Kentucky, whose farm was called 'Sweet Home' and who treated his men as something other than children or savages.

This enlightenment was short-lived. The kindly-disposed slave owner falls on hard times and sells one of his men. Then he dies and Sweet Home becomes a sour hell under a new, sadistic proprietor. (Schoolteacher)

Sethe escapes, perilously pregnant, from Kentucky to Ohio, gives birth on the way and when united with her other children tries to kill them when the threat of recapture seems certain.

She succeeds in murdering one baby daughter, Beloved, and is able to erect a tombstone for her only by giving herself to the man who carves it. Her services are enough to pay for one word, 'Beloved' (rather than the full 'Dearly Beloved' of the funeral service) to be carved in the granite.

Morrison's style is both bleak and tender. She writes of the unthinkable without histrionics. Her triumph is that through metaphor, dreams and a saving detachment, she melds horror and beauty into a story that will disturb the mind forever.