Violence In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison sees black females as victims of violence in all relationships. The focus now is on the sad plight of black girls being maltreated and sexually exploited at home. It is natural to expect that the female children will be spared such violent experiences even when their grown-up sisters are subjected to the severest affliction. Victimization of children takes on various forms. The least of them is neglect by the parents, which forces them fend for themselves and exposes them to many dangers. Another is cruel punishment given to children, making them scapegoats for the mistakes of others. Infanticide is an extreme form of child violence as in Beloved. The female child is particularly vulnerable to oppression at home.
She becomes the target of incest at times culminating in rape and resulting pregnancy. The culprit is often the father. Sometimes other relatives also become instrumental in the female child’s victimization. Thus protectors turn into predators. Rape connected with incest becomes the gravest offence against the female child. Even weak male figures find the family a site for consolidating their power and thus the family acts as “a patriarchal unit within a patriarchal world” (Millet 33).
This paper analyses Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Her first novel. The novel is based on the story of Margaret Garner recorded in The American Baptist in 1856 that Morrison came across while collecting material for The Black Book, a collection of memorabilia in 1974.