beloved by toni morrison. How slavery is presented.
...ther. I shall explore a particular chapter in the book and by investigating the author’s use of figurative language, studying events which have occurred and by considering individual themes throughout the passage, I will examine the author’s analysis of the legacy of slavery. The selected passage is situated towards the end of the first part of the story, and involves both Sethe and her lover Paul D, who also lives in the house. Paul has just been informed by Stamp Paid that Sethe killed her own child, and so he wants to know if it is true. Sethe has never managed, like other blacks, to confront the horrors she endured in the past, when she worked as a slave. She constantly reminisces about when she was raped and the tortures she experienced, and so because she has not yet confronted the past, she cannot continue with her life and ‘... her brain was not interested in the future.’ (Beloved, p70) She does not believe Paul would understand her reasons for killing her own child, and when he asks her she thinks to herself how ‘... she could never explain.’ (Beloved: p163) This was because when the white man came to her she believed he would take her children away, and that they would have to endure the anguish she had. Therefore the only option available was to kill her child, so that it could be left in peace; so that it would avoid all the misery and suffering that slavery had caused others. Morrison refers to animals throughout the book, and in this passage she mentions a hummingbird which is entangled in Sethe’s hair, but then manages to escape. When the schoolteacher, a white male master involved in the dismembering of the slaves, arrives in Sethe’s shed, the bird cannot break free, but once Sethe has slit her baby’s throat the bird then manages to escape. This can be interpreted by the reader as relating to slavery because the black people, like the bird, could not be at liberty when under the white’s dominance, and the only peace that came to them was when they died, ‘where they would be safe’ (Beloved: p163) and away from the white people’s authority. Morrison describes slavery as both a national and personal trauma, in which black people’s lives were fragmented, resulting in a loss of identity, culture a...