Beloved by Toni Morrison

Analytical analysis

The novel deals with memory, with personal and cultural history, as though they are real and tangible things that can walk into someone's life or move objects in a house; and it does not only this, but looks at the way the perceptions of outsiders can “create” or change what they are perceiving; and looks at slavery and the power a name has and what impact not owning oneself or the world one looks at can have on a person's life and their ability to view and create themselves.

The novel centers on the former slave Sethe and her daughter Denver and their house at 124 Bluestone Road. The house is haunted and avoided by everyone in the neighborhood, and in some way holds both Sethe and Denver to its confines. Morrison gradually reveals an image of the house from years before, when it was a hub for the neighborhood and recently freed or escaped slaves. Not until Paul D, an escaped slave from Sweet Home (where Sethe, her husband Halle, and his mother-in-law Baby Suggs were also slaves) enters the home and throws out the ghost, returning it in its physical form of a grown woman, does the history of the house and its family begin to reveal itself.

There is too much here to fairly address in a short review, so I'll focus my attentions on Paul D and specifically on the way he recognizes perception as forming the world. At one point near novel's end some of Morrison's characters begin to question their lives at Sweet Home and after Sweet Home, how the way they were addressed (as “men” at Sweet Home and as “children” elsewhere) affected how they viewed themselves. Did being called “men” make them, really, men, or was it simply another way of controlling them? Although they felt at the time of their enslavement somehow, slightly, empowered by the word “men,” was that title any better than being called children - as they were treated, regardless of the relative kindness of their owner? And how, after they escaped slavery, did the reclaiming of the word change their lives and their way of viewing themselves? Once Morrison's characters were capable of perceiving the world through their own eyes, through the eyes they did, for the first time in their lives, own, could they think of themselves as men? At one point one of the slaves at Sweet Home, Sixo, is beaten by “schoolteacher” to “show him that definitions belonged to the definers - not the defined”. It is only those who are free and have the power to label their world who can truly own it(Bloom, pp. 12).Discussion

Paul D, though, recognizes too the way the perceptions of others can influence or change what a person is. He repeatedly notes the way women “glow” when they're around the man they're attracted to; it's why he is able to seduce (though that seems the wrong word) Sethe when he walks into the home that is controlled ...