Beloved Essay, Research Paper

Beloved – Overall Summary

One of the most common reader responses to Beloved is

speechlessness. Readers attempt to deal with that speechlessness by trying to

determine whether Sethe’s attempt to kill her children was morally justified or

not. These almost always seem like stilted, insufficient answers to a beautiful,

poetic, and profoundly disturbing novel. It is as though the novel haunts the

reader until he or she incorporates it into some structure of moral judgment.

Perhaps trying to overcome the speechlessness with an awkward attempt at

moral reasoning is not the most productive way to respond to Beloved.

Instead, we might discover that the effect of speechlessness relates to the

broader thematic content of the novel.

The circumstances of Beloved’s death are horrific. Life in slavery is

equally horrific. For the former slaves that populate the novel, the past is

unspeakable. Every day, Sethe beats back memories of her enslavement at

Sweet Home. For a long while, Paul D can only verbalize his experiences

through song. One of the most common forms of punishment for slaves was

gagging with an iron bit. Sethe’s own mother was forced to wear the bit so

often that she has a permanent smile frozen on her face. Robbing the slave of

the power of speech is a powerful way to make him or her feel like a beast.

Paul D feels even less than the rooster that struts around him as he sits, mute

and chained. Baby Suggs recognizes the importance of speech. She often tells

her parishioners to love their mouths. Throughout Beloved, speechlessness

defines the former slave’s reaction to her and her past.

For Sethe, the past is an unhealed wound that haunts her like the ghost

of her dead daughter. Her daughter, Denver, lives resentfully in the social

isolation of 124. Her knowledge of the past consists of the story of her birth

and some facts about her dead father. The unarticulated past stands like a

barrier between her and Sethe. Sethe’s knowledge of her own parents’ past is

fragmented. The African languages and cultures that form the heritage of the

slaves in the United States are lost in large part to the descendants of first

generation slaves. Baby Suggs knows little about her first seven children, and

she knows little about herself because he has no knowledge of her family

history. Slavery did not favor the development of family structures for slaves.

Legal marriage was not permitted. Husbands and wives could be sold away

from one another, and children were sold away from parents.

The former slaves of Beloved face the task of defining their identities in

the aftermath of a dehumanizing history. They cannot look to family histories

for help because they are so fragmentary. Many of them do not want to look

to their own histories because the events are so painful to remember.

However, these histories are often the only narratives available. Much of the

novel details the struggles of Sethe, Paul D, and others to come to terms with

their histories. During slavery they were treated like animals. Wearing the bit is

a punishment aimed at dehumanizing the slave. Finding the strength to narrate

the unspeakable past often becomes a way to reclaim one’s humanity. It

denies power of the iron bit to gag. It denies the power of that history to rob

the victim of her or her voice.

It is no small task to forge a human identity from the former slave’s past

inhumane existence. Sethe’s reaction to schoolteacher’s arrival is wordless,

spontaneous. He threatens to take her and her children back to the conditions

she risked so much to escape. She succeeds in killing one child, and

schoolteacher knows he will never make a slave out of her again. Sethe’s

actions haunt her for eighteen years. The return of her dead daughter and her

budding relationship with Paul D prompt her to examine her actions in detail.

She thinks back on her life in order to find an explanation.

When the reader faces Sethe’s actions with speechlessness, the

pressure to structure some kind of narrative around them is impossible to

ignore. The pressure to judge them in some way weighs heavy on the reader’s

mind. The black Cincinnati community reacts much in the same way to Sethe’s

killing of her child. Their own pasts often include similar actions, and judging

Sethe allows them to displace the guilt for their own past transgressions. Most

of the reader responses that try to moralize about Sethe’s actions are stilted

and clumsy. The community’s judgment against Sethe results in an eighteen

year stand off. It is as though the pressure to judge comes from a need to

exorcise the haunting effect of the novel. Perhaps the reader should postpone

judgment and stand the discomfort of speechlessness at Sethe’s actions. He or

she may have the smallest idea what it was like for a former slave to create a

narrative from the past, forging an identity that salvaged some scrap of

humanity from utterly dehumanizing experiences.