The Importance Of Names In Toni Morrison's Beloved

“I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved” (Romans 9:25). Toni Morrison’s Beloved is filled to the brim with allusions, specifically and most often to the Bible. In using a verse from Romans as her epigraph, she sums up the entirety of her novel in a few simple words. The novel is about acceptance and a mother’s love. They who were not previously her people will become known as her people, and those who were not previously loved will become beloved. This religious preaching of tolerance and caring is provided as an encapsulation of the entire novel, and helps readers understand exactly what the novel is about. Throughout Beloved, there are several other major examples of religious allusion.

Analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved The book Beloved by Toni Morrison is a very interesting but peculiar book. The book flashes back from the present, past, and future, so often, you really have to pay attention or you will get lost. The book overviews slave's life, but goes into detail about one slave, Sethe. Toni Morrison, of Beloved creates a magic-realistic story based on the life of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery just like the main character. Between Sethe and Beloved, there is always a dramatic situation occurring.

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is a multiply narrated story of having to come to terms with the past to be able to move forward. Set after the Civil War in 1870s, the novel centers on the experiences of the family of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D and on how they try to confront their past with the arrival of Beloved. Two narrative perspectives are main, that of the third-person omniscient and of the third person limited, and there is also a perspective of the first-person. The novel’s narrators shift constantly and most of the times without notifying at all, and these narratives of limited perspectives of different characters help us understand the interiority, the sufferings and memories, of several different characters better and in their diversity.

In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison you often see a use of words that convey a deeper meaning. “Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on...No matter what.” This quote depicts the her dear past and the underlying events leading up the this feeling. Sethe’s life for the past years have not been the best and the quote signifies the her journey and feeling of it all. Sethe has lived in constant uncertainty in a house haunted by her firstborn. Common during this time Sethe’s mother-in-law lived with her. This has a big impact on Sethe’s outlook about things. Baby Suggs prior to her death sank into deep depression. She was exhausted of life, the slavery and the lost of eight

Her traits are trying to balance between good and bad as those around her are aided in her presence. Beloved is a character whose traits are quite balanced. Her actions are not thought through, but it helps characters find a new light. She leads the plot of the novel. Without Beloved, the novel would be without direction.

Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” In this quote, Kierkegaard speaks of the past and how dwelling in events that already happen will prevent a person of living their life in the present. Toni Morrison conveys this message in one of her major themes, showing that constantly wallowing in past memories will prevent characters to move on with their lives. Beloved portrays various sides of cruelty, showing it from a black slave’s point of view to even the owner’s point of view. Throughout the novel, the cruelty that characters experience, whether it be at Sweet Home or from the black community, show the victims’ struggle to move on from the past and the perpetrator’s awareness, or lack thereof, of their own cruel acts.

Parenting has been a long practice that desires and demands unconditional sacrifices. Sacrifice is something that makes motherhood worthwhile. The mother-child relation- ship can be a standout amongst the most convoluted, and fulfilling, of all connections. Women are fuel by self-sacrifice and guilt - but everyone is the better for it. Their youngsters, who feel adored; whatever is left of us, who are saved disagreeable expe- riences with adolescents raised without affection or warmth; and mothers most impor- tantly. For, in relinquishing, a mother feels strong and liberal; and in guild she finds the motivation to right wrong.

Here, however, the more positive epithet is given to Beloved in the dark; when intensely analyzed, this aligns well with the idea of African-American empowerment found within Beloved. In addition to this, “beloved” is seemingly used as an adjective in this quote, since there is no capitalization, which contrasts with Morrison’s typical use of the word as a name. “Beloved” is not the character’s actual name, which is never revealed, but this description may be where the “nickname” originated. There also may be emphasis placed on the fact that Sethe and the ghosts are calling her the same name, through the simple inclusion of the word “beloved,” which serves to underscore the point which Beloved is trying to argue: Sethe is no better than the

1. Beloved, the novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison is a collection of memories of the characters presented in the novel. Most characters in the novel are living with repressed painful memories and hence they are not able to move ahead in their lives and are somewhere stuck. The novel, in a way, becomes a guide for people with painful memories because it is in a way providing solutions to get rid of those memories and move ahead in life. The novel is divided into three parts; each part becomes a step in the healing ritual of painful repressed memories.

Many of her readers have felt uncomfortable with Beloved because of the severe content it has on some of the aspects of slavery (Dell 44). The people who have been in favor of banning Beloved wanted to protect students from reading subject that may be difficult to understand (Sova Social Grounds 74). In the year 1995 parents of students at St. Johns County School wanted the book to ban because of its explicit details in the book (72). Beloved was challenged at Coeur d’Alene School because parents thought permission should be granted before their children read the book (“Beloved, Toni Morrison” par. 4). In 2007, Beloved was removed form a senior AP English class in Eastern High School because of inappropriate subjects (par. 5).

Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420).

Memories are an innate part of us; everyone has them and are affected by them, whether they are good or bad. Memories are the past, and the past is what defines each of us, they change us in good ways and bad. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the characters are each, in their own ways, affected by the memories and traumas of slavery, whether they were slaves or not. It is these memories of slavery that have altered the characters’ beliefs, beliefs that civilization holds correct. Traumas can easily alter a person’s belief, and the continuous traumas caused by slavery can do irreparable damage to a person’s beliefs. These damaged beliefs can also affect those close to a person, such as in the case of Sethe and her children. The novel also shows how

No matter what angle you perceive identity from; everyone is born with a name. This is a specific name that you are to be called in common acknowledgement. However “the precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.” –Pierre Barnard-. Names may promote an individual’s identity, yet it can also defy it. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, multiple characters were given names that convey more context than what meets the eye. They are portrayed in a way that highlights their attributes and personality, and conversely demeanors their identity.

The characters in Beloved, especially Sethe and Paul D are both dehumanized during the slavery experiences by the inhumanity of the white people, their responses to the experience differ due to their different role. Sethe were trapped in the past because the ghost of the dead baby in the house was the representation of Sethe’s past life that she couldnot forget. She accepted the ghost as she accepted the past. But Sethe began to see the future after she confronted her through the appearance of her dead baby as a woman who came to her house. For Sethe, the future existed only after she could explain why she killed her own daughter. She insisted on explaining the reason why she killed her daughter to the grown-up woman Beloved because Sethe felt

CHAPTER-V THE HEALING POWER OF FOLK CULTURE Images of women healing ill or injured women, or of women healing themselves, have become one of the central tropes in contemporary African American women’s novels. Authors such as Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison utilise the trope of healing to measure past and present oppressions of women of color and to discuss what can and what cannot be healed, forgotten and forgiven. Much focus is put on how healing could be accomplished. Some hurt, they say, is so distant that it cannot be reached; other hurt goes so deep that there may be no possibility of healing... some pain can only be healed through a reconnection to the African American community and culture (Gunilla T. Kester 114)