Equality in Beloved

“‘No more powerful than the way I loved her,’ Sethe answered and there it was again. The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones; the one she selected to lean against on tiptoe, her knees wide open as any grave. Pink as a fingernail it was, and sprinkled with glittering chips. Ten minutes, he said. You got ten minutes I’ll do it for free” (5).

Reading the novel Beloved through the biographical / historical lens requires the reader to know about the author, Toni Morrison’s life and time time period in which the novel was written to figure out what message she is trying to get across in this book.

Beloved was written by Toni Morrison in 1987. Toni Morrison grew up to black African-American parents who moved to Ohio to escape racism in the south, similar to Sethe, the book’s main character. Many of her books have a common theme of gender and racial equality.

Beloved author Toni Morrison.

Sethe murdered her daughter in panic to save her daughter from slavery when the slave catchers came after her and her family. In this passage, Sethe is prostituting herself in order to get the word “Beloved” inscribed on her murdered daughter’s headstone. In 1873, not too long after slavery was abolished, black people were discriminated against (especially if they were former slaves) and were not seen as equal by whites. Sethe, who has just escaped slavery, is a black woman who cannot afford to get anything inscribed on her daughter’s headstone. So, she basically goes with the only option: she sells her body. In the forward, Morrison explains what was going on around the time she wrote the book in 1987. She talks about how it was a time for women’s rights and equality (“equal pay, equal treatment”), although throughout the entire novel, there is nothing but inequality shown for Sethe and her family. Whether it be because of her gender or because of her race, Sethe is struggling for equality, just like women were fighting for in 1987.

This passage also shows that Sethe cannot escape the horrors of her past. Also in the forward, Morrison talks about the concept of freedom, and how she felt free after she finally left her job to become a novelist. She wonders “what ‘free’ could possibly mean to women.” A major theme of this book, and this passage specifically, is freedom. Sethe can never truly be free. She is not longer bound by chains to slavery, but she cannot escape her past. Merely talking about her daughter brings up nothing but awful memories of slavery, and even after she escaped slavery, she can never be free. She is constantly running from memories associated with her daughter, and is literally being haunted by her. After she escaped slavery and murdered her daughter, she had next to nothing; she couldn’t even afford to get one word inscribed on her daughter’s headstone and so she has to sell her body for it. She then becomes a social outcast, and no one can truly understand why she murdered her daughter, not realizing that infanticide was really not an uncommon occurrence during the times of slavery.

When Sethe talks about how much she loved her daughter, she is perhaps referencing the reason for her murdering her daughter. Throughout the book, Sethe is seen as a social outcast. No one cares to understand or even ask her why she did what she did; they just see her as heartless, and exclude her from society. But, further into the book, it becomes clear that Sethe murdered her daughter out of love; she would rather anything happen to her children than for them to see the horrors of slavery.