Morrison’s Lesson About Slavery and Its History

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This novel is mostly based on the slave women and their children as it is stated in the passage from the book Literature and Its Times –Volume 2 called “Beloved by Toni Morrison”. Beloved explores all the potential overcomes and benefits that slave owners have of owning a woman because they are regarded as “not only workers but also as a potential breeder of new property –children who would legally belong to her slave owners” so not only they were forced to work they were kept because they were encouraged to breed children because it was easier for the slave owners to keep them because they legally owned them instead of buying new slaves, maybe because they didn’t afford it or they just didn’t want to spend money. Because Morrison’s purpose was to make a social change she allowed the reader “to experience the novel as an insider”, which helped many of them to understand “what life is like for its main character” Sethe, because of all that she had to go through the reader feels sympathy and feels overwhelmed by the fact that they have been so ignorant about all this ideas and all of the racism and slavery that have happened in our history’s past that have marked many lives. Memories meant a lot to Morrison because the book was based on a true story and she even incorporated the idea of having memories and through Sethe’s point of view readers clearly understand what they really meant and the ideas behind it. In the novel Beloved, Sethe tries to explain this to Denver her other child:

“It’s when you bump into rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm—every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there...” (Morrison, p.36)

When Sethe says this she talks about what happened to her daughter, Beloved. Furthermore if the reader looks for inferences, what is really meant by this quote is that after she becomes an ex-slave she starts looking back at all the problems that the idea of slavery and racism caused her. She revives all the memories of how her autonomy was taken away and how she had no rights over her own children.

“Social Unconsciousness” is more like a fancy word for the willful ignorance that people have. In the article “The Ghost of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” by Linda Krumholz she reacts to the idea of Morrison incorporating memories as a symbol of “a healing process for the characters.” For this characters the “legacy of slavery” is very much seen as a “national trauma” and also as a “personal trauma”, so it is not only something a lot of people had to go through but also what they felt through it, what really caused them to be the person they are now. Morrison in the novel uses rituals to symbolically show the process of the healing characters, and through this rituals such as “dance, songs, story, and other activities” in the novel she uses them for the reader to see the “potential to construct and transform individual consciousness as well as social relations.” So in order to bring forth the future and to make it a better place to live in the characters of Beloved must not only “embodies the suffering and the guilt of the past” but they also have to “embodies the power and beauty of the past”, because Sethe talks about rememories she instantly embodies her past in order for her to take her of her other children and to make sure they don’t have to live through the same circumstances she had too. Morrison’s novel brought people to think about different traditions not just only African Americans’ because that’s what the idea of racism targets the different races and cultures around the world. She wanted to create a powerful representation of slavery and what it all caused for many people now in the future also she wanted people to be more intelligent of how they talked about the past and its influence on others.

Morrison’s purpose was to make people understand that racism still exist because people have decided to be ignorant about it. Problems have been created by this thoughts and Beloved recognizes that this problems created by racism and slavery wont “go away simply because it has been abolished” in the real world now a days African Americans have struggled and have been working so hard and they still get hurt physically and mentally due to racism and what had happened years ago. What Morrison really wanted to teach people was for them to love each other and also what she wanted to teach everybody through this amazing novel was that “We have to embrace ourselves” she said this in an interview on television by Bill Moyers. Morrison hoped that in the future people would have already understood that their willful ignorance was the base of all the problems that erupted because of the “simple’ idea of Racism and the historical occurrence of Slavery. People need to understand that if they don’t have anything nice to say not to say it at all. Even thinking or acting upon such thought isn’t right, they are not just hurting other people they are hurting themselves because they wouldn’t be able to be social or even have good relationships with others because they would base everything on this “simple” ideas.

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Works Cited

Babbitt, Susan E. "Susan E. Babbitt, Identity, Knowledge, and Toni Morrison's Beloved: Questions about Understanding Racism." Vol. 9.No. 3 (1994): 1-18. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

Caesar, Terry Paul. "Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Vol. 34 (1994): 111-120. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

Krumholz, Linda. "The Ghost of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved." Vol. 26.No. 3. (1992): 395-408. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.

Schapiro, Barbara. "The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved." Vol. 32. No. 2. (1991): 194-210. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

Wilson, George. Beloved by Toni Morrison. Literature and Its Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events That Influenced Them. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 1997. 59-65. Print.