This novel is based on a true story of a African American slave woman her name is Margaret Garner, who in 1856 escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her husband Robert, and their children. They sought refuge in Ohio, but their owner and law officers soon caught up with the family. Despite the fact that Seth and Paul D are free they are still mentally and psychically enslaved because they still remember all the torture they went through during their time. Slavery was a big impact towards these characters and their lifestyles they could not have a normal life. Threw out this novel we see many cases that Seth and Paul D are impacted because of the mistreat of them.
Additionally, Slavery is basically like someone owns you and they have full control over you and that can be very hard for a human being to go through because they are forced to do many things they don’t want to Seth and Paul D don’t have any will power. It makes the character feel like animals and very disrespected. Furthermore Seth has suffered a lot in her life because she is owned by the school teacher and she was always traped and she did not want her kids to live what she is going trough.So Seth thought by killing her daughter she will save her child.
Also Seth slit the throats of her other two childs but they survived. Overall Seth wanted to do the right thing but she was not thing right. She thought that by killing her kids she will help them in the long run and not make them suffer.“Stamp looked into Paul Deyes and the sweet conviction in them almost made them wonder if it had happened at all eighteen years ago that while he and baby suggs were looking the wrong way a pretty little slave girl have recognized a hat and split to kill her children.”
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Beloved explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual devastation wrought by slavery, a devastation that continues to haunt those characters who are former slaves even in freedom. The most dangerous of slavery’s effects is its negative impact on the former slaves’ senses of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Paul D, for instance, is so alienated from himself that at one point he cannot tell whether the screaming he hears is his own or someone else’s. Slaves were told they were subhuman and were traded as commodities whose worth could be expressed in dollars.
Consequently, Paul D is very insecure about whether or not he could possibly be a real “man,” and he frequently wonders about his value as a person. “Baby closes her eyes. Perhaps they were right. Suddenly behind the disapproving odor, way way back behind it, she smelled another thing. Dark and coming. Something she couldn’t get at because the odor hid it. “Sethe, also, was treated as a subhuman. She once walked in on schoolteacher giving his pupils a lesson on her “animal characteristics.” She, too, seems to be alienated from herself and filled with self-loathing.
Thus, she sees the best part of herself as her children. Yet her children also have volatile, unstable identities. Denver conflates her identity with Beloved’s, and Beloved feels herself actually beginning to physically disintegrate. Slavery has also limited Baby Suggs’s self-conception by shattering her family and denying her the opportunity to be a true wife, sister, daughter.
References
- History.com – Slavery
- Library of Congress – African American Odyssey: Slavery
- Encyclopedia Britannica – Transatlantic Slave Trade
- National Geographic – Slavery
- Smithsonian Magazine – Stories Enslaved People Told Straight to Them
- Wikipedia – Slavery in the United States
- US History.org – Slavery and Abolitionism
