by Lindsey Greene
The
artifact above is meant to represent 124 Bluestone Road, the house Sethe
escapes to with her children. Expecting to find a safe haven, she is later cornered
and forced to make the most difficult and impactful decision of her life. 124
becomes a dichotic image: a place of both nurturing freedom and the inescapable
imprisonment of the past. This contradiction in the definition of “home” recurs
throughout the novel. In a society in which blacks were viewed as “outsiders”
and worse, as property, finding a place to call home for these people was not
only difficult, but nearly impossible.
Were the
plantations on which the slaves had been forced to toil also to be considered
their home? The plantation Sweet Home, as its name suggests, is the product of
romantic imaginings by Mr. Garner, the owner. Although Mr. Garner treats his
slaves more kindly than most slave owners and insists that his slaves are “men
every one” (12), and although Sethe acknowledges that her time with Mr. and
Mrs. Garner was more bearable than anywhere else as a slave, the true
perversity of the situation is the fact that Mr. Garner’s false utopia had masked
the realities of what he was perpetuating (Rhodes 77). Mr. Garner had been
trying to convert his slaves into people more resembling himself. Stamp Paid considers
this later when he says, “Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under
every dark skin was a jungle. […] But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with
them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks
planted in them” (Morrison 234). By considering their slaves to be uncivilized
and less-than-human, whites created the very hostility and resentment in their
captive workforce that they had feared all along. Paul D admits that, as for
Sweet Home, “’It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home’” (Morrison 16). If not
in the place that their captors had taken them, where could the slaves consider
themselves to be “at home”?
The
earliest slaves were taken straight from Africa and, for them, “home” was the
faraway land from which they had been “snatched […] without preparation or
defense” (Morrison XVIII). But what about those who had been born into slavery?
Secondary generations of slaves, like Sethe and her children, experienced Diaspora
in a different manner. Aside from the cultural and biological hand-me-downs of their
predecessors, slavery-born slaves and those born into recent freedom were faced
with the conundrum of existing without a tangible sense of home. Was home the
Africa they had never seen? Sethe recalls that the woman who helped nurse her,
Nan, “used different words” in “the same language [Sethe’s mother] spoke” and Nan
tells Sethe that Sethe had been given “the name of the black man” (Morrison 74).
It would seem that, at least for Sethe’s mother, the idea of home now resided
in her child as a hope for the future and a return to the life she had known. As
a child, Sethe cannot understand the significance of her namesake, but she
looks back as an adult and becomes angry. She is both a part of and separate
from her mother’s concept of community.
Following
her mother’s example, Sethe puts her sense of meaning into her children. Home
is a place one should always be able to return to for comfort and safety;
lacking such a physical place, Sethe self-identifies with the lives she has
created out of love. Her children become an extension of herself. By attempting
to kill her children, she was doing just what she would have done had she been
alone: anything it took to never return to slavery. For her children, both the
ones who survive and the one who does not, home is difficult to define. The two
boys run away and probably end up living a drifter life similar to Paul D
before he finds Sethe at 124. Denver lives in the house but lacks a sense of
community. “Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by,” she says (Morrison 17). It
isn’t until Denver leaves the house that she begins to find herself. And as for
Beloved, the toddler murdered by her mother’s hand with “no say in any of it”
(Morrison XVIII): not only does she haunt—and thus reclaim---the home she
should have been allowed to have, she also seemingly reincarnates herself when
Paul D attempts to drive her spirit away from her home, her family. When Paul D
asks Sethe, “Who owns this house?” (Morrison 17), the unspoken answer is:
Beloved. As one of Sethe’s children, she is both home and homeless, and haunts
the house in mimicry of how the concept of “home” is haunted for all displaced
slaves and ex-slaves.
Works Cited
Rhodes, Jewell Parker. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved: Ironies of a “Sweet Home” Utopia in a Dystopian Slave Society.” Utopian
Studies 1.1 (1990): 77-92. JSTOR. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.
Lindsey,
ReplyDeleteI think you have a lot of really interesting sub-points in your description. The idea that the white slaveowners are creating the thing they fear is intriguing and I think that it contributes to the sort of double-reality that existed in this time period. Reality was so warped by slavery that the true natures of the slaves were masked and even replaced by the expectations of the slaveowners simply by their fear of the slaves .
The concept of “home” is also a sort of double-reality, as you note when you talk about its safety versus the fact that it caused slavery to persecute Sethe. I had never considered the ancestral tie to Africa as something that might be pulling Sethe away from the homes she has inhabited, and I like the way that you discuss Sethe creating her home in her children as an alternative to searching her past.
Beloved as the owner of the house, and thus the owner of Sethe’s idea of home, is also a really fascinating point. The memory of slavery haunts Sethe’s home; Beloved will forever be tainted by the cause of her death. I think the image you chose highlights that haunting feeling that the reader gets when they consider Sethe’s home and the fear that lurks inside of it. The house looks dilapidated and I think that’s a good parallel for how Sethe feels after her trauma and how her family, another aspect of her home, ends up after everything happens with Beloved.
Lindsey the artifact you choose is a wonderful artifact. I think the idea of no places as a theme in the novel is very prevalent. Such is the case when Paul D starts sleeping in the shed, then moves to sleep in the church or the fact that Sethe and Paul D talk about the past at first like it was good and name their past home “Sweet Home”. You might also consider the fact that they were trying to make the slaves in their own image as a representation of the mind set, this parallels with the way the bible says God created humans so in a way Mr. Garner saw himself as a god like figure. Because the slaves no longer have a place to call home they have created a utopian (the very word means no place) town, in which to live in and search for an identity.
ReplyDeleteLindsey,
ReplyDeleteI like that you relate home to a sense of identity, because for the characters in Beloved, homes are very closely tied to their senses of self. It’s interesting that Sethe holds on to the ideals of Sweet Home in the same way that you connect the first generation of slaves with their connections to the Africa diaspora. Denver becomes, like Sethe, confused about this idyllic remembrance of the past. She asks Paul D and Sethe, “How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it? Look like if it was so sweet you would have stayed” (Morrison 26). Sweet Home remains a part of Sethe and Paul D’s identities even after they’ve been gone for years—Sethe still refers to Paul D as one of the “Sweet Home men.” For Denver, this identity doesn’t make sense in a similar fashion to Sethe’s confusion about Nan’s language and her own name.
Denver, is forced to base her identity then, in 124, though she hates her life in the house because of the baby ghost, which serves as a constant reminder of the identity she can’t claim for herself. Once she leaves 124 and finds a new home with a new purpose, she, as you mention, finally finds her identity. It’s interesting that while Sethe and the first generation slaves connect very strongly to their original homes, after the disappearance of Beloved, Denver creates her own sense of home elsewhere. Whether this is just a facet of Denver’s character, or whether it’s representative of Morrison’s attempt to show how children born into a newly-freed society might have to find that identity for themselves instead of relying on the past, remains up for debate.