Toni Morrison’s Beloved Portrays an Institutionalized Dehumanization of the Slaves. Elucidate.

Beloved Portrays an Institutionalized Dehumanization of the Slaves

 
Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual devastation wrought by slavery, a devastation that continue to haunt those characters who are former slaves even in freedom. The most dangerous of slavery’s effect is its negative impact on the former slave’s sense of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Paul D, for instance, is so alienated from himself that at one point he cannot tell whether the screaming he hears is his own or someone else’s. Slaves were told they were subhuman and were traded as commodities whose worth could be expressed in dollars. Consequently, Paul D is very insecure about whether or not he could possibly be a real “man,” and he frequently wonders about hos value as a person.

 

Sethe, also, was treated as a subhuman. She once walked in on schoolteacher giving his pupils lessons on her “animal characteristics.” She too seems to be alienated from her and filled with her self-loathing. Thus, she sees the best part of herself as her children. Yet her children also have volatile, unstable identities. Denver conflates her identity with Beloved’s and Beloved feels herself actually beginning to physically disintegrate. Slavery has also limited baby Suggs’s self- conception by shattering her family and denying her the opportunity to be a true wife, sister, daughter, or loving mother. As a result of their inability to believe in their own existence, both baby Suggs and Paul D become depressed and tired. Baby Suggs’s fatigue is spiritual, while Paul D‘ s is emotional. While a slave, Paul D developed self- defeating coping strategies to protect him from the emotional pain he was forced to endure. Any feelings he had were locked away in the rusted “tobacco tin” of his heart, and he concluded that one should love nothing too intensely. Other slaves—Jackson Till, Aunt Phyllis, and Halle—went insane and thus suffered a complete loss of self. Sethe fears that she, too, will end her days  in madness. Indeed, she does prove to be mad when she kills her own daughter. Yet Sethe’s act of infanticide illuminates the perverse forces of the institution of slavery: under slavery, a mother best expresses her love for her children by murdering them and thus protecting them from the more gradual destruction wrought by slavery. Stamp paid muses that slavery’s negative consequences are not limited to the slaves: he notes that slavery causes whites to become “changed and altered . . . made . . . bloody, silly, worse than they ever wanted to be. “ The insidious effects of the institution affect not only the identities of its black victims but those of the whites who perpetrate it and the collective identity of Americans. Where slavery exists, everyone suffers a loss of humanity and compassion. Crucially, in Beloved, we learn about the history and legacy of slavery not from schoolteacher’s or even from the Bodwins’ point of view but rather from Sethe’s Paul D’ s Stamp Paid’ s and Baby Suggs’s.