BELOVED
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COMPARATIVE ESSAY
It all begins with the story of a woman born into slavery, known as Margret Garner, who slit her two-year-old daughter’s throat while the other two lays on the ground still wounded after a failed escape attempt from slavery. The author takes us back to the time where the oppressed did not have a voice, and by revising the narrative genre, she expands slave narration as a symbolic sign to explore and represent slave dimensions of life. Beloved demonstrates an interference that disrupts the cultural opinions that Sethe’s story, the black slave mother, is just the past not worth remembering. Insist on slavery allows the discovery of current aspects that are deeply rooted in the text. Beloved in its essence, a fugitive slave’s narrative is the most shocking case of all the fugitive slave cases that have seen the issue of Margret Garner, who never had the opportunity to voice out her own story. By protecting her child from slavery through death, abolitionists widely regarded Margaret Garner’s decisive act as radical and brave. An enslaved woman deciding the fate of her child was unusual, and, while infanticide in such a circumstance was not unheard of, it was rare.
In the prose and poem genre, the slave mother by Harper; it brings in the motivations and emotions of Margaret Garner and decides to save her daughter through death. In this sixty-four-line poem, Harper develops a domestic narrative where Margaret’s devotion to her children, her “treasures,” is beyond doubt. She tries to escape into Ohio and find sanctuary for her refugee family, but her commitment to freedom does not waver when this proves impossible. Still, shifts in its target from the desire for a purported free state to the afterlife (Harper 45–48). If safety cannot be achieved on earth, this determined mother will transform her life-giving power into life-taking and send her children to heaven. Harper makes Margaret Garner’s logic clear: if safety cannot be achieved on earth, then this determined mother will transform her life-giving power into life-taking and send her children to heaven. There is some interconnection between the destinies of the former slaves’ communities who settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. All the characters are burdened by bondage’s memory and the urge to feel free of that burden. Becoming free of similar loading seemed to have motivated many former slaves to dictate or write their narratives of oppression, fight and triumph over the adversity both before and after the civil war. Keeping this tradition it features a reconstructed history of slave experiences, escapes attempts, and struggles for success in the land of freedom. However, the novel also records former slaves need to remember the past; this gives evidence to the black community that they should desire to put the past in the past to keep it from controlling the present and maybe averting the future. Morrisson’s novel attests to African American struggle from some of the post-civil war narratives of Elizabeth Keckley, Fredrick Douglass to the neo-slave stories to reclaim the slave past in ways that could enhance the possibility of sprouting ideals of freedom.
Looking at Paul Garner’s character, it seems to hark back to slave narrative tradition, and in the end, he surveys his life and understands it to have been patterned by series of escapes from various kinds of bondage. Through Paul Garner, the novel portrays the theme of the quest for freedom. By the time he arrives in Cincinnati, he is convinced that “he has seen and felt it all,” and he has learned to keep all his bitter memory to himself in what is termed” the tobacco tin lodged in his chest,” which he is sure that nothing in this world could pry open(Morrison,113). His experience with Sethe opens him up to more hope and more despair that he has never faced before. After walking out on Sethe in a shocked reaction to knowing what is called’ the misery,’ Paul ponders his pain by trying to trace it back from its source.
Paul did not have to fight his master for his manhood in terms of slave quest; the white man readily granted him that status denominated him
and his fellow slaves as men even before
they had thought of the ways they might claim the title for themselves. This had the effect of forestalling significant rebellion of the slaves against the master and denying the slaves the opportunity to define their manhood regarding their existential standards. As a concern, Paul D has never questioned that he has done many “manly things” in his life, “but was that Garner’s gift or his own will?… Did a Whiteman saying it make it so?” (Morrison,220). The alertness of the power devoted to nominative speech acts encompasses the slave narrative custom. Over again, slaves who chose their first acts as freemen to retitle themselves and thus recover their identities for themselves.
For Paul D Garner, however, whose manhood, as well as his name, have already been spoken for by a white man, the problem of self-reclamation is not as simple as some nineteenth-century slave narrators made it look; this is why Paul D Garner accepts his slave name: maybe he senses that behind all words, indeed behind the very concept of manhood itself, there is the master whose address gives that concept its original meaning and value and whose control over that discourse severely prevents not only the power but also the very verbal terms with which a black person’s saying something, could make it so.
Up until the time when he moves in with Sethe and her daughter Denver, Paul D has lived in such a way as to avoid testing the full depth and breadth of his humanity. The test of physical survival as a black man in the post-Civil War era is challenge enough for him. But when he takes up with Sethe and enters her haunted life. He finds himself urging her to trust him more than he trusts himself, to believe in their prospects more than he has ever considered in his future, and to “go as far inside as you need to” (Morrison, 46), in defiance of his own rule never to open up the tightly closed lid of his heart. Through the middle chapters of the novel, the two former slaves open up to each other via the sharing of many long-buried memories of their humiliations, sufferings, and outrages at whites’ hands. Whiteout planning on it, Paul D finds himself telling Seethe why her husband Halle did not join her and the children when most of the slaves of Sweet Home managed to escape to the North. Sethe’s response to Paul D’s revelations about the past is instructive. In a sense, she feels violated by Paul D’s narrative of slavery; for another reason, she feels self-betrayed by a mind “loaded with the past and hungry for more” (70). “I don’t want to know or have to remember that” (70), she says bitterly. To Sethe, Paul D’s narrative of slavery offers no liberation — it threatens to engulf her in the past to the point where she would have “no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (Morrison, 70).
As a result, Instead of receiving Paul D’s story as her liberty from the past, Sethe would rather cast-off that story and knowledge of the yet unknown misfortunes entrenched in it, in the name of her reasonableness, her self-preservation. In dramatizing this reaction of Sethe suggests to us in ways that are not articulated in the 19th-century slave narratives, the lacerating contradiction must have attended many ex-slave narrators in their return through memory and imagination to their pain-filled past. There must have been a tremendous social and cultural domineering, strengthened by a dauntless faith. Need to look backward to step forward kept ex-slaves, especially after liberation, telling and retelling, writing, and publishing their narratives. Long after much proof that white people, the original primary audience for the slave narratives, were interested in reading their stories.
In conclusion, the novel beloved offers a different perspective in the historical narration of slavery, traumatic racial issues, and love.
References
Singh, Kavita, and Mrs. Geeta Yadav. “Narrative Technique in the Novel Beloved By Toni Morrison.” Studies in Indian Place Names 40.50 (2020): 2980-2987.
Ganter, Granville. “Lyrical Liberators: The American Antislavery Movement in Verse, 1831-1865 ed. by Monica Pelaez.” African American Review 53.1 (2020): 73-75.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Christian Bourgois, 2015.