Beloved: The Human Condition :: essays research papers

     Toni Morrisons novel, Beloved, reveals the effects of human emotion and its power to cast an unmarried into a struggle against him or herself. In the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the chief(prenominal) character, Sethe, as a charr who is resigned to her desolate animation and isolates herself from all those around her. Yet, she was once a woman full of feeling she had loved her hubby Halle, loved her four young children, and loved the days of the Clearing. And thus, Sethe was jaded when she began her life at 124 Bluestone Road-- she had loved too much. After failing to save her children from the schoolteacher, Sethe suffered forever with crime and regret. Guilt for having killed her "crawling already?" baby miss, and then regret for not having succeeded in her task. It later be move ups apparent that Sethes tragic past, her chokecherry tree, was the reason why she lived a life of isolation. Beloved, who shares with Seths that one fa tal moment, reacts to it in a totally different way because of her obsessive and vengeful love, she haunts Sethes house and fights the forces of death, only to come back in an attempt to take her mothers life. Through her usage of symbolism, Morrison exposes the inbred conflicts that encumber her characters. By contrasting those individuals, she shows tragedy in the human condition. both Sethe and Beloved suffer the devastating emotional effects of that one fatal event while the guilty mother who lived refuses to passionately love again, the daughter who was betrayed fights heaven and hell- in the name of love- just to live again.     Sethe was a woman who knew how to love, and ultimately fell to ruin because of her "too-thick love" (164). Within Sethe was the power of monotone love for her children-- she had "milk enough for all" (201). Morrison uses breast milk to signify how strong Sethes maternal desires were. She could never forget the ter ror of the schoolteacher robbing her of her nurturing juices, she crawled on bleeding limbs to fill her babys mouth with her milk, and finally, she immortalized that grim summer day when she feed Denver her breast milk-- mingled with blood. The bestial image of milk and blood farther fortifies the eminence of maternal instinct by portraying the value of a mothers milk as equal to that of her blood. And the