Trees: Beautiful or Symbol of Horror?

Toni Morrison’s book, Beloved, evokes the horrors of slavery onto the reader quite often in the book.  I found it interesting that Morrison uses nature a lot in the book to help highlight both horrors and beautiful things.  In the very beginning of the book, Sethe describes a choke-cherry tree that is growing on her back to Paul D.  When Paul D touches it, the details are beautiful:

…and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches…he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith… And he would tolerate no peace until he had touched every ridge and leaf of it with his mouth (p. 17-18)

The reader quickly realizes after Paul D and Sethe sleep together that the “tree” is not beautiful, but the “trunk” and “branches,” “leaves” and “ridges” are all scars from schoolteacher and his men raping and beating her.  This part of the book really spoke to me because it is something we have talked about in many of my outdoor recreation courses.  A big issue in outdoor recreation is diversity: the main demographic is young, middle class, Caucasian males, and we tend to have a lot of discussions in my classes of how we can get a more diverse group of people to participate in outdoor pursuits. 

                Sethe describing the scar on her back as a tree really spoke to me because trees represent lynchings to a lot African Americans, and slavery and civil rights are a big reason why they do not participate in the outdoors.  According to Professor Rasul Mowatt from the HPER, the outdoors does not seem like a safe place to many African Americans and it links back to the days before civil rights when African Americans had no rights, and thus going camping offered no security.  This made me compare the symbol of trees in the book and according to Professor Mowatt: both are a symbol of slavery and violence when relating them to the pre-civil war days.  It is a strange experience to realize that something we find so beautiful, nature, trees, wilderness, evoke quite an opposite feeling for many other people.

Morrison the Poet

Obviously the ending of Beloved was confusing to me, and it can be looked at in many different ways. But, what struck me most was how poetic the last two pages are. I've reread those pages six times since I've gotten home. I think the poetic turn Morrison takes makes for an incredibly entertaining ending. It's one of the best I've ever read.

There's numerous instances of rhyme in the section. For example, "...how can they call her if they don't know her name? Although she has claim..." and "There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed..." both show rhyme and slant rhyme (323). Morrison also includes alliteration in her concluding pages: "...a latch latched and lichen attached" (324).

Don't get me wrong, the imagery throughout the entire novel is awesome. However, it's extra awesome in the ending. The rustling of Beloved's skirt and her knuckles brushing against sleeper's cheeks are two really powerful images.

Lastly, the refrain "...not a story to pass on" enhances the poetic aspect of the ending. The eerie context and musicality of the ending reminds me a lot of James Whitcomb Riley's poem "Little Orphant Annie." In the poem, the orphan, Annie, visits a home and works to earn her board and keep. While she's there she tells the children about other bad children who didn't behave and got snatched up by goblins. The line "An' the Gobble-uns'll git you/ Ef you/ Don't/ Watch/ Out." They're similar in their sing song-y aspects but also in that they feature a stranger (Annie and Beloved) entering a home and teaching a family how to live through beneficial (Annie) actions or Beloved's not so healthy actions.

As with any prose poem, it's important to know who the speaker is and who's being spoken to. Identifying the speaker is the easy part. Like the majority of the novel, we have a third person narrator. It's incredible difficult to identify the "they" in the ending. The most literal interpretation would be to assume the "they" is the Cincinnati community and "those who had spoken to her" are obviously Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. Someone mentioned in class that the "they" could be all African Americans and to come to terms with the difficult past of slavery they need to place their feet in Beloved's footsteps. I'd like to expand the "them" to the point that it encompasses all Americans. And we need to deal with the past by facing it head on.

Versions of History: The Problems of Representation in Beloved

Morrison mentions in the forward to Beloved that “to render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way” (XIX). What an interesting and strange thing to say!—especially for a novel brimming with powerful language. What could Morrison have possibly meant, and how could language—the very medium through which narrative is transmitted in a novel—be put aside? I believe Morrison means something very specific with her usage of “language” here: in order construct her ideal reader, traditional, more obvious forms of representation have to “get out of the way” and be replaced by intentional strategies like nonlinearity, the use of multiple perspectives, and repetition. Her ideal reader will be one who becomes immersed in the experience of enslavement without over-intellectualizing, one who lets the narrative itself do the work of representation and interpretation. The paradox of narrative is that it must necessarily be incomplete compared to the ideas or history it tried to represent; yet one of the only, and perhaps best, ways to represent history is through narrative. An historical occurrence such as American slavery is an event so complex and so tragic that it nearly defies accurate, productive representation. With Beloved, Morrison was acutely aware of these issues, and we as readers get the impression that the form Beloved takes as the narrative we read is the best form of representation: that which communicates experience through fiction, instead of a sense of factual history.

We see Morrison scuffle with the problem of representation most explicitly with the multiple points of view when revealing Sethe’s secret that she murdered her daughter. The order of perspectives narrated to readers is important in considering Morrison’s strategy: it flows and resolves from Schoolteacher, to Stamp Paid, to Sethe herself. These perspectives are set in a hierarchy of degrees of closeness to the experience of slavery, and perhaps Morrison isn’t concerned with truth or factual accuracy—seeing as we get the most slanted perspectives first, and even Sethe’s is biased into obfuscation—but rendering the “how” circumstances surrounding the facts of slavery. The revealed experience of the characters in the novel is more important than narrating any kind of historical fact. Morrison wants to argue, using Beloved, that effective use of narrative begets experience, and experience begets understanding. In Stamp Paid’s version of the story, Paul D repeats the refrain of “That ain’t her mouth, ” referring to how Sethe’s drawn image doesn’t accurately depict how she really looks. This is related to the problem of representation—depending on the perspective, representation is hardly ever 100% accurate and effective. What’s missing in the overarching narrative of slavery, then, is the real mouth that speaks real experience, where “real” doesn’t necessarily mean truthful or factual.

In class, we considered several meanings for the repetition of “This is/It was not a story to pass on” at the end of Beloved. The tension between the alteration of This is/It was made me think that stories of this kind exist in and confront both the past and present, and instead of suggesting that these kinds of stories shouldn’t be transmitted but buried away like so many of the memories in the narrative, it actually suggests the impossibility of them “passing on” into death. The phrasing does not identify an agent that enacts the transmission; the story is doing the action. So maybe, at the end of everything, Morrison wants to argue that stories of this kind have a tendency of perpetuating themselves and, like Beloved herself, sometimes unbury themselves.

Beloved as a Device

We have been debating in class, at different times in the novel, whether Morrison is referring to the created character Beloved or the novel Beloved. The character seems to just be a device to resolve the issues of the other characters in the novel. We discussed in class Beloved being a manifestation of many things for Sethe, including her repressed experiences. Without the character of Beloved, Sethe would not have reason to bring up or reveal her repressed memories. By using the character Beloved, Morrison is able to let, her otherwise more static characters, reveal what the novel is really about. When Beloved comes to 124 and needs help and her identity is ambiguous, it is more about her as a human being and the generosity of the family at 124. But as the novel progresses it becomes more about Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, not Beloved as a character. She loses her sense of being and becomes more of a device to link to the past. Morrison, having set up such a static environment and characters, she has to have Beloved come in and break the cycle: get Sethe to reveal what she is repressing, get Denver to leave the house, and get the community feelings about the house to be more positive.

                The novel does not lead the audience to feel much sympathy for Beloved as a person, but I am struggling to figure out why she has to be just a device and does not have her own relevance. At the end of the novel, once she has done all she was meant to do for the other characters in the novel, she is just able to run away. The characters are able to not think about her again and just let her run off being pregnant. I guess I just want a little more closure for that character, because she was such a significant presence for the other characters in the novel, that I think her outcome should matter, not just used as a device for the progression of the other characters.

The Dangers of Repression

There seems to be a lot of psychological effects of various events present in the characters in this novel.  This is a very effective tool for Morrison to use in order to captivate the reader in a kind of twisted way, to get them wrapped up into the broken minds of these former slaves.  Sethe is a prime example, as a main character, of one who represses quite a lot of trauma from her past.  One would think that it would be obvious to not want to remember the horrible things she went through as a slave, let alone having to kill her own child and live with that trauma.  However, I believe that the presence of Beloved, while she welcomes having her baby back in her life, is a negative manifestation of her repression; she begins to depart from herself when Beloved is around.  She had learned to cope with her life after all the horror she went through, and her personality adjusted to repress those bad memories.  However, Beloved's presence almost splits Sethe's personality in two; the mother she never got to be to Beloved, and the vulnerable former slave who is having to face these memories she hid for so long.  Beloved acts as a tool to get her to remember these things and to refresh the guilt she had of killing her daughter.

Similarly, Paul D is affected by Beloved's presence in that he had also repressed many horrible memories, and that mere physical contact with Beloved draws out the pain in him and destroys his tobacco tin around his heart.  I believe that Beloved is a figment of their imaginations brought on by the high level of psychological repression, and that she is ultimately a danger to their psychological health, already damaged by the horrors they witnessed and experienced.

Thoughts Often Repeated

Throughout the novel we seen this repetition of circles and reoccurring events used to signify that the past is repeating itself.
When Sethe first tells Paul D the truth about what happened in 124 she is "circling him the way she was circling the subject" (189). Sethe's circling signifies her unwillingness to forget the past--to return to it. Even her words, the way she describes the story seem to make a circle.
Other circles pop up in the novel. Sethe begins to grow weak once she realized who Beloved is and Beloved grows plump (whether with child or because of overeating it is uncertain) and this role reversal is similar to that of Sethe and Mrs. Garner. Sethe's transition from a strong independent woman to that of a bedridden woman who lies "under a quilt of merry colors" as though she is circling around to be Mrs. Garner (319).
The end of the novel is certainly the most poignant in terms of circles repeating. We see Sethe bedraggled and wasting away while Beloved seems to be pregnant. The 'schoolteacher' returns to 124 in the form of Mr. Bodwin and as before Sethe has to make a choice. Although this time she chooses to lash out at the manifestation of her fear and frustrations--Mr. Bodwin. Beloved runs away into the woods, pregnant--just like Sethe once ran when she was escaping from Sweet Home.
Denver also circles back to Lady Jones, the woman who once taught her how to read when she was a child. Lady Jones begins teaching Denver again--and so the circle repeats itself.
Morrison's language and used of circles seem to be trying to say that escaping the past is impossible. That history will inevitably repeat itself. Even the last lines of the novel seem to allude to this. The people of the town repress the memories of Beloved but still every so often something, "the rustle of a skirt hushes when they wake, and the knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep seem to belong to the sleeper" reminds them of Beloved so they cannot forget the past (324).

To Love

Through her novel Beloved, author Toni Morrison highlights the often-overlooked dimensions of slave life including the notion of love. For characters like Paul D, love means restraint as a way of coping through the hardships seen before him. For others like Baby Suggs it is used as a measure of freedom and individuality amidst slavery and being claimed as another’s property. By using these tactics of loving in a slave state, both Paul D and Baby Suggs, depict a spectrum in order to create the cautionary tale of Sethe’s love in which love to the point of being unrestrained can lead to destruction. It is through these boundaries and varying love that Morrison presents an overlooked element of American slave history with the complex emotion of love and how it was used or misused through her analysis of these characters.

            Through Paul D and another character Ella, a help for runaway slaves, they believe in a lack of love in order to protect themselves from a constant broken heart due to the sorrow and destruction brought on by slavery. Paul D initially tells Sethe to not love her children as much as she does since it is “risky” and tells her his solution: “to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one” (Morrison 54). Paul D wants to feel as numb as he can to any sort of connection to a loved one. As for Ella, when speaking to Sethe as they are escaping slavery, she too notes the dangers of loving more than a small amount, offering a similar solution like Paul D, “If anybody was to ask me I’d say, ‘Don’t love nothing’” (108). For both Ella and Paul D, to love is to risk one’s emotions, since most emotions such a love will be pushed far down leaving one to only feel pain and sorrow from the act of slavery they lived through. The white plantation owner’s had no sympathy for harsh treatment slaves had to endure known only as property and subordinate to whites. Morrison makes known to the reader that though looked back on in history as some of the darker days of America’s history, slavery had more underneath the surface besides the basic act itself. She gives notice to the emotions and tactics that slaves had to protect themselves from an internal pain of watching other slaves or loved ones fall victim to consequences of slavery from their owners.

            On the other end of the love spectrum, Baby Suggs acts as a counter to Paul D and Ella’s idea of how to deal with love. She urges for the freedom of individuality through love instead of slavery that claims ownership over another. When speaking to a crowd Baby Suggs preaches: “Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh”(103). She begins her speech with loving the most simplistic element of the body, the flesh; the element that visually is the skin or what is seen as color. From being pushed down by whites, she urges the African Americans to embrace themselves for the color they were born into. She furthers the speech to more than just the outward appearance of skin: “hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize”(104). Morrison uses Baby Suggs belief in love in an individualist sense to base it on the individual regardless of color or race. Love is made up through the eyes of one person alone, and to love others is to love oneself. She uses this sense of love in a free sense unlike the shackles she was contained in during slavery. For Baby Suggs, individualist love becomes her coping mechanism to use the emotion rather than restrain it like Paul D. She urges others to use it in an open way to give peace of mind and freedom though still in society they are technically not considered equals or as people for that matter.  

            Morrison establishes both Paul D and Baby Suggs love early in the novel to set up for the destructive love of Sethe. Paul D again tells Sethe that her love is too much, this time he does not call it “ risky” but tells her, “your love is too thick” (193). Paul D acts as a warning for Sethe so she can deal with love. Not taught to love or be a mother, Sethe is forced to learn on her own, a seemingly instinctive element as love and motherhood, she consumes her children with her entire self. Unlike Baby Suggs, who pushes others to love their individuality, Sethe only seems to love her children to unimaginable amounts, without restraint.  Sethe combats his claim by arguing: “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all” (194). For her, she believes there is only one kind of love: consuming love. But for each of the characters, it is also interesting to note that they all seem to have their measurements and ways of love, in terms of their experiences and without thinking of future consequences.