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Week12 : Beloved (6pt)

11/29/2020

This week I read Beloved by Toni Morrison. I found the way the community treats Sethe and the residents at 124 is jumping between protecting and betraying back and forth. Sethe flashes back on when she first escaped from Sweet Home and arrived at Baby Suggs’s house, the community made her feel accepted and not left behind. She recalls, “One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day. That’s how she got through the waiting for Halle.” That was probably the first time that she felt as a free person living in a community. Even though she also has her community back in Sweet Home, it’s a totally different experience as she mentioned, “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” However the happy moment did not last long. Later on, the community did not warn her about the schoolteacher’s approach. This results in the fact that Sethe has to kill her own baby, then it leads the relationship between Sethe and the community towards a negative situation because the way they see Sethe has changed. That is the start of Sethe isolating herself and the house at 124 from the warm community that she used to have. This situation seems like it has not changed until people realize what Beloved has been doing to Sethe and the family after Denver seeks out for help on her own initiative. People embrace the past and turn to support Sethe and 124. It seems like Beloved has been the key to whether Sethe and the house at 124 fit in the community or not, since her death, spirit, and her existence have been so dramatic and controversial. I also think the community is driven by guilt, which involves morality. They must have felt guilty inside of their hearts, not just simply because Denver went out of her comfort zone and went seek for help. In the story, we see the evolution of the community’s attitude towards Sethe from welcoming her to isolating her, and then turning back to support her again. I think it really reflects instinctive human nature. It seems like it has not changed throughout human history, even now, too. Whether we think within morality or not, the thoughts are always so exposed and easy to be seen. I think Toni Morrison did a great job on depicting the story with this characteristic of human nature, and left that to us for the judge.

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