Beloved: The Human Condition :: essays research papers

     Toni Morrisons novel, Beloved, reveals the effects of human emotion and its power to cast an individual into a try against him or herself. In the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the main character, Sethe, as a charr who is resigned to her desolate life and isolates herself from all those around her. Yet, she was once a woman full of feeling she had loved her husband 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. by and by failing to save her children from the schoolteacher, Sethe suffered forever with guilt and regret. Guilt for having killed her "crawling already?" baby daughter, and then regret for not having succeeded in her task. It later becomes 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 fatal moment, reacts t o it in a completely different way because of her obsessive and vengeful love, she haunts Sethes house and fights the forces of death, exactly to come back in an attempt to take her mothers life. Through her usage of symbolism, Morrison exposes the internal conflicts that encumber her characters. By contrasting those individuals, she shows tragedy in the human condition. two Sethe and Beloved suffer the devastating emotional effects of that one fateful event while the guilty mother who lived refuses to passionately love again, the daughter who was betrayed fights enlightenment 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 unconditional love for her children-- she had "milk enough for all" (201). Morrison uses breast milk to symbolize how strong Sethes maternal desires were. She could never forget the t error of the schoolteacher robbing her of her nurturing juices, she crawled on bleeding limbs to fill her babys lecture with her milk, and finally, she immortalized that grim summer day when she fed Denver her breast milk-- mingled with blood. The bestial image of milk and blood further fortifies the eminence of maternal instinct by portraying the value of a mothers milk as equal to that of her blood. And the