Examine Beloved as a novel of the destructiveness of love

Toni Morrison deals with a violence that is paradoxically an act of love. In her exploration of the moral ambiguity of horrific love she breaks down the polarities of right and wrong and explores the ‘grey’ areas of human love, ‘when love slips through.’ 

The novel is based on the real life case of a slave girl - Margaret Garner - who in order to protect her children from slavery, attempted to murder them and succeeded in killing her baby girl. Through the use of her unique and remarkable style Morrison presents us with glimpses of the past which creep through both the cracks in Sethe’s memory and the plot of the novel, revealing a desperate act of love more haunting than any baby ghost. Due to the horror of slavery Sethe’s murder of Beloved is transformed into what Morrison controversially deems ‘the ultimate gesture of a loving mother’, whose action proclaims, ‘to kill my children is preferable to having them die’. 

This idea, of the terrible brutalization of slavery as being a death of the profoundest kind - a death of one’s humanity - is epitomized in Schoolteacher’s ‘project’, in which he measures Sethe’s body for anthropological reasons. The absolute horror of such a system is chillingly illustrated in the scene when Schoolteacher scolds his pupil for not putting Sethe’s human characteristics on the right; her animal ones on the left as he has been instructed to do. The ultimate violation of Sethe’s body and also her motherhood is captured in the scene in which Schoolteacher’s white pupils hold Sethe down and ‘steal her milk’. Sethe is simply viewed as a commodity; an animal with no human rights whatsoever. When Schoolteacher chastises his nephew for over-beating her it is on the grounds of her inhumanity, not her humanity. He asks him, ‘what would his own horse do if he beat it beyond the point of education’ and insists that he is accountable for such ‘creatures God had given him the responsibility of. 

Morrison clearly illustrates through such scenes why Sethe feels compelled in desperation, and as an instinctive act of protective love, to push her children ‘through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them’. Killing her children under such circumstances, where the prospect of life seems bleaker than the finality of death, seems merciful rather than cruel. It is not an innate ‘badness’ which leads her to such a desperate measure but a society which has denied and distorted her ability to love and to choose: ‘it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other liveable place. 

It was the jungle white folks planted in them’. Of course in a system of complete human denial it, would be ludicrous to expect the individual’s idea of love not to be distorted. Beloved reflects how in such a society allowing oneself to love is a dangerous practice doomed to heartache. Paul D, witnessing the strength of Sethe’s love for Denver, thinks her intensity is ‘very risky’. His solution is to repress love, to damp the fire of emotions to protect oneself from loss.