How Slavery Can Destroy All Self-Love

In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, identity is often discussed, as the former slave characters try to live their lives freely. One of the dangerous effects of being enslaved is an emptiness where your sense of self should be and a loss of self-love. Baby Suggs preaches about how they should love their hands and appreciate their bodies because they belong to them. She reminds the former slaves about how they should love themselves, not because they are especially unique, but because they need to reintroduce love and attention on themselves.

It's interesting how the schoolteacher is described as teaching them about their "animal like characteristics." It reminds the reader how Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs were taught their whole lives about how little they are worth, and how they have a value of an animal.

I think that this can cause major damage to the slave's minds, even if they are freed, because they are constantly put down. Even if they have the strength to try and maintain some sort of optimism or happiness, they aren't able to because they are always told about how little they matter. This completely changes the way they think about themselves.

Sethe, for example, thinks that she is not worth saving, but that her non-enslaved children are pure and need to always be protected. She has no sense of self-worth and self-love because she was told her whole life that she is not worth anything. Furthermore, Paul D is constantly trying to block out the pain from slavery and put it in his tobacco tin in his heart. But, he doesn't have any sense of self or self love because he was never able to deal with the heavy emotional pain of being enslaved.

I think that Toni Morrison does an amazing job of getting inside the mind of an enslaved person who has been so completely destroyed physically and emotionally. It's difficult to think about how a person would be able to move on from the emotional pain of their past. But, it's important to try to think about these things when we are attempting to understand the history of slavery and its impact on the humans who suffered through it.