Tragedy and Redemption in Toni Morrisons Beloved Essay -- Toni Morris

Tragedy and Redemption in Beloved "This is not a story to pass on."(1) With these enigmatic words, Toni Morrison brings to a conclusion a very rich, very complicated novel, in which slavery and its repercussions are brought into focus, examined, and reassembled to yield a story of tragedy and redemption. The "peculiar institution" of slavery has been the basis for many literary works from Roots to Beloved, with particular emphasis on the physical, mental, and spiritual violence characteristic of the practice of slavery in the South. A far greater shame than slavery itself is the violence that was directed against slave women in the name of slavery. Slave women bore the heaviest burden of slavery, forced to be not only fieldhands and domestic workers, but to satisfy their masters' sexual appetites. Frederick Douglass wrote that the "slave woman is at the mercy of the fathers, sons or brothers of her master."(2) Slaveowners considered their slave women to be fair game, forcing themselves on their female slaves with impunity, and any resulting children were considered property, to be sold like the calves from a cow. The family institutions of the slaves meant nothing to their owners; the children of slaves were likewise considered property and could be sold at their owners' whim. Schoolteacher referred to Sethe and her children as "...the breeding one, her three pickaninnies and whatever the foal might be..."(279) Slave children often did not know who their fathers or even their mothers were... ...gain. Beloved is an unsanitized picture of slavery and its consequences, a condemnation of the violations that humans impose upon each other. That the presence of Beloved is still felt, long after the players have left the stage, is representative of the scars that remain on the hearts and minds of women, that such horrors could be visited upon their sisters once. Notes 1. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York, 1987) 337. All subsequent quotes from Beloved are followed by page numbers in parentheses. 2. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York, 1968 [1855]) 60, qtd. in Blassingame 83. Works Cited 1. Blassingame, John W. The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. 2. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1987)