Morrison’s Demons
In
Morrison’s Beloved, the presence of spirits
and hauntings is prevalent throughout the entire novel. Beloved, the namesake of the novel is actually a ghost or spirit.
Beloved, an otherwise unnamed character, was killed by her mother eighteen
years previous to the novels beginning. Beloved becomes the focal point of
Morrison’s novel as she haunts her mother’s house and drives away anyone who is
close to her mother, Sethe.
Sethe,
an escaped slave, saws Beloved’s neck in half when Sethe sees a band of slave
catchers coming up the road to reclaim her family. Sethe believes she is
performing an act of love, a terrible deed to prevent Beloved from living a
horrendous life of slavery. Several years after the murder of Beloved, the baby
girl who would have been 2 years old at the time of her death, comes back to
play in Sethe’s home. Beloved’s haunts start as mere tricks, but soon turn
violent. The baby’s spooky exploits chase off two of her brothers and
eventually weary her grandmother to the point of death.
The
baby’s spirit is only one of many things that haunts Sethe throughout Morrison’s
novel. The spirits and haunts also take the form of memories. Memories in Beloved are all connected back to Sethe’s
experiences with slavery. Beloved’s spirit is in fact brought on by Sethe’s
need to never allow her children to be enslaved. Morrison categorizes these
haunts as rememories. Sethe’s memories of slavery are brought on by sightings
of people or similar events. Events
trigger Sethe’s rememories and the reader is consumed by a seemingly tangible
memory of Sethe’s life in slavery.
Morrison’s
story is played out through a series of Sethe’s remomories. Morrison sets the
framework of her story in the first several chapters. Sethe’s rememories are
able to fill the holes and flesh out Morrison’s novel so that the reader
understands what has happened to Sethe throughout her life of slavery and
supposed freedom.
Through
rememories Morrison is able to prove multiple important overlooked tragedies of
slavery. Morrison shows her reader the atrocity that slavery was by detailing
brutal everyday scenes in the memories of the former slaves in Beloved. I think most people understand
that slavery was an egregious societal institution, but how does it affect the
people it touches. How does it affect society in the present day. Through
hauntings and rememories, Morrison points out that very little was actually
solved through the abolition of slavery. African Americans were still without
rights and the economical and racial affects of slavery still haunt African
Americans like an angry ghost.
Morrison
personifies the haunting of slavery and puts it in specific context so that the
reader does not have to comprehend a societal struggle. Instead Sethe’s
struggle can represent the struggle of millions of former slaves, their
posterity, and even African Americans who have no slave ancestors. The reader
is able to understand a specific interesting circumstance that keeps the reader
intrigued. This is effective because taking on a whole societal issue can be
daunting for both author and reader. It often even discourages the reader.
Morrison is able to make multiple amazing points about the struggle of being
African American while pulling her reader into her story and connecting them to
the main character Sethe.
