Morrison uses love to bring people together, rip them apart, build them or and tear them down. She is able to manipulate one feeling and action to construct a complex novel that links love with freedom. Through Sethe, and others, Morrison touches on just how capable and compelling love truly is.
Throughout the novel, slavery is experienced and referenced. Morrison uses such a institution to demonstrate just how demolishing the absence of love can be. The enslaved lust after and cry-out for love. With the lack of freedom, there is inevitable shortage of love.
As the novel continues and Sethe gives birth and is forced to face the realization that her baby girl will lead the same devastating life she did. Sethe's love for her daughter prompts her to murder Beloved, as an act of prevention of slavery. She has so much love for her daughter she is about to take her own life just to keep her from her calamitous life as a slave. She believes she has just given Beloved freedom from a lifetime of pain and suffering.
Morrison builds a bond between love and freedom by writing about having the genuine choice to choose who you love. Sethe speaks of this with, "... to get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire-- well now, that was freedom" (191). She feels pure freedom and power when she can love who she want, how she wants, when she wants.
Through Sethe's trials and actions, Morrison cultivates love in is breath taking light. Beloved suggests that love is a all-powerful feeling that can lead people to do things they never thought they could. As well as the fact that, love will provide natural power and absolute freedom.
I think Morrison also has some interesting ties between love and fear in this novel. In many ways, it almost suggests that love and fear are similar feelings/emotions. They both contribute to the various extreme situations and actions taken in the book. The lack of love, in my opinion, is more due to fear than lack of freedom. Fear of loss and pain is what keeps the slaves from really loving each other and their children. Sethe murders her children out of love, but also because of the fear that love has struck in her.
ReplyDeleteI think you made some very interesting points about the way Morrison writes the novel. When you talked about how love is something they all desire it sparked be to think about the way Denver acts toward Beloved. I cant quite tell if its love or something deeper, on some levels I almost think Denver try's to become Beloved and in a way takes a way from who Beloved is.
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