Loss Of Individuality In Beloved

429 Words2 Pages
The novel Beloved was written by the author Toni Morrison. Beloved takes place after the Civil War, it is inspired by a story of a slave, Sethe, who escapes from slavery. A posse arrives to reclaim Sethe and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Sethe kills her two-year old daughter, Beloved, rather than to permit her to be apprehended and taken back to the Kentucky Plantation from where she recently escaped. A ghost assumed to be Sethe’s daughter, Beloved, returns several years later to haunt her home. Due to the horrible experiences of slavery, for the most part slaves suppressed these memories in an attempt to disregard the past. This suppression from the past causes a loss of self-individuality. Sethe, experiences this loss of self, which could only be cured by the acceptance of the past and the…show more content…
Beloved communicates to Sethe that she came back from the other side for her. Sethe’s hostility with the past is both productive and destructive. Beloved, often questions Sethe about the past, but Beloved also has an unintended influence. For example, Beloved encourages Sethe’s memory of her mother’s hanging to come to the surface. Sethe’s tale of the hanging of her mother marks the first time Denver has ever heard about her grandmother. Due to the emotional memory Sethe has overlooked the African language of her childhood. Maybe Sethe’s failure to recall the language spoken by her mother was intentionally done in the attempt to suppress her memory. The lost language signifies the type of cultural destruction experienced by the slaves. Just as Beloved somewhat reinstates that lost cultural history to Sethe along with her individual history. With this example it shows how Beloved has the power to remind Sethe of her suppressed memories, eventually causing the rehabilitation of

More about Loss Of Individuality In Beloved

Open Document