consonant (‘colour conscious’) intensifying the image that is created by the simile: after the
death of her baby daughter, Sethe, like a female chicken, whose colour perception is superior
to that of a human, is perfectly able to biologically and physically perceive colour—but is not
able to psychologically, or emotionally, perceive it.
Morrison lists the vibrantly coloured dishes Sethe observe at the kitchen where she works,
evoking visual imagery—‘Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and
vegetables’—and then juxtaposes them with the dull-coloured dishes the cook makes—‘while
the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest’, but, even working with such brightly coloured
Beloved: Prose Commentary 2
foods every day, Sethe cannot ‘remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash’.
The juxtaposition of Sethe’s vibrant dishes to the cook’s dull soups and meats shows the
extent to which Sethe ‘misses’ colour—even going so far as to be unable to psychologically
perceive the bright red of a molly apple or the bright yellow of a squash. The polyptoton—the
repetitions of the word ‘remember’ in different forms: ‘remember remembering’—shows,
and places emphasis on, the distance Sethe feels from the memories of her once vibrant and
colourful life. ‘Every dawn she saw the dawn’—Sethe, of course, only physically ‘seeing’ the
‘dawn’ (the word ‘dawn’, in the sentence, used in a way that almost expresses antanaclasis, as
in the first instance it is used as the period of time, and in the second a noun) and never
acknowledging or remarking its colour; indeed, Sethe saw the beautiful sunset, but never
noticed its beauty. This is symbolic, perhaps, of Sethe’s repressed past; Sethe had once been
able to perceive colour, but had lost this ability with the death of Beloved, and in the same
way, Sethe was once able to feel happiness with her family and her children, but she had long
since lost this emotion, now only feeling the loneliness and darkness of 124 and, within it, the
suffocating presence of the baby ghost. In this inability to perceive colour, Sethe senses that
there is something wrong with herself, and the paragraph ends with canacosmetis—an
ordered recollection of events reflective of the way Sethe’s perception of colour has faded:
one day, she saw red baby blood—the alliteration of the plosive consonants reinforcing the
harsh, piercing, memory of Beloved’s death, then she saw ‘pink gravestone chips’, and then
‘that was the last of it’; the red had faded into pink, and the pink had faded into nothingness,
and, as such, the death of Beloved had brought with it the death of Sethe’s happiness.
The second paragraph begins with the personification of the house 124: ‘124 was so full of
strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all’. The personification
alludes to the spirit of the baby that lingers within the house. The house of 124, and the ghost
of Beloved, symbolic of Sethe’s repressed past and the overwhelming emotions associated
with it, is juxtaposed to the numbness Sethe feels, and her oblivion to loss—the ‘inability to
perceive colour’ that was referred to in the first paragraph of the extract—the emptiness of
her emotion further amplified using the alliteration of an empty vowel sound (‘anything at
all’). It is with these thoughts that Sethe then reflects upon her past; ‘There was a time when
she scanned the fields every morning and every evening for her boys.’ There was a time
when ‘she stood at the open window, unmindful of flies, her head cocked to her left shoulder,
her eyes searching to the right for them.’ Sethe was once able to feel hopeful, to feel that—
uncaring of any distractions (‘flies’); uncaring of anything but her beloved sons—there was a
chance that her sons might come back, that there was a chance of finding her lost children,
but could now hope for their return no longer; this is, very possibly, parallel to the way Sethe
was once able to feel love, and happiness, but was now unable to do so, losing hope of ever
recovering it. ‘Cloud shadow on the road, an old woman, a wandering goat’, Morrison
conveys the growing darkness, mystery and uncertainty of Sethe’s emotion with the passage
of time, leading finally to the gradual repression of her dark past; ‘each one looked at first
like Howard—no, Buglar’. ‘Little by little she stopped and their thirteen-year-old faces faded
completely into their baby ones, which came to her only in sleep’; The persistent repetition of
alliterative consonants (‘little by little’, ‘she stopped’, ‘their thirteen-year-old’, ‘faces faded’)
heightens the emotion within the sentence and lends to it a certain rhythm, symbolic of the
gradual passing of time, and, with it, the gradual fading of Sethe’s memories, such that she
cannot remember her sons’ faces anymore, except in her dreams.
Beloved: Prose Commentary 3
Sethe’s subconscious memory torments her during her sleep, the only time when she can
escape 124—which, in reality, is the place where she is kept captive; where her painful
memories lie; and from which she cannot escape, as much as she wishes to—(‘When her
dreams roamed outside 124, anywhere they wished’). In her dreams she is tortured by images
of happiness that are impossible to attain; ‘she saw them sometimes in beautiful trees, their
little legs barely visible in the leaves. Sometimes they ran along the railroad track laughing,
too loud, apparently, to hear her because they never did turn around.’ The use of alliteration
(‘she saw them sometimes’, ‘little legs’) and near rhyme (‘trees, leaves’) within the first
sentence accentuates the image of Sethe’s maternal desire to nurture and heal her two boys,
just as trees—symbolic of healing, comfort and life—nurture and heal life on earth, and the
use of alliterative consonants within the second (‘ran along the railroad track’, ‘laughing, too
loud’) evokes a sense of boyish carelessness, youth, and ultimately happiness; another
maternal desire—the wish to see her two boys youthful and happy. However, when Sethe
awakes from her dreams, she awakes to her far from happy life, Morrison’s use of
personification expressing the intensity of the baby spirit’s presence within the house (‘the
house crowded in on her’), and the constant reminders of her dark past, found within the
writer’s metaphors: ‘the soda crackers lined up in a row’, which are the crumbled remains of
her two missing boys, Howard and Buglar; the ‘white stairs her baby girl loved to climb’,
which are the symbol of her daughter Beloved’s ascension to heaven; the ‘corner where Baby
Suggs mended shoes’, which is the reminder of Sethe’s captivity, and, more extensively,
America’s black slavery captivity, as the act of shoe-mending was taught to Baby Suggs in
slavery; the ‘stove where Denver burned her fingers’, which is the idiomatic symbol of
Denver’s, and Sethe’s, suffering—the unpleasant result of Beloved’s death; and, most
evidently, the ‘spite of the house itself’, the ghost of baby Beloved that chokes the house with
its overwhelming presence, symbolic of Sethe’s haunted and emotionally overpowering past.
‘There was no room for any other thing or body’—the word ‘room’ taken not in a literal
sense, but in a figurative sense, to mean that there was no ‘room’ for any more bad memories,
as the presence of the ghost Beloved seemed to fill the house until ‘Paul D arrived and broke
up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the
place he had made.’ Paul D literally, and figuratively, ‘broke up the place’; physically, he
exorcises the ghost of Beloved, and emotionally, he breaks Sethe’s oblivion to reality. The
isocolon (a form of parallelism that is reinforced by the similar length of the words),
homoioteleuton (the repetition of the ending ‘ing’) and asyndeton (the deliberate omission of
conjunctions) of the verbs ‘making, shifting, moving’ and ‘standing’ intensify Paul D’s
actions, speeding up the rhythm of the sentence and creating a sense of a climax, dramatising
their effects upon the house and, this, of course, upon Sethe’s life.
With the arrival of Paul D and his exorcism of Beloved comes Sethe’s return to her
perceptive and emotional senses. Visual imagery, and a tone of change, hope and prospect,
evoked by the vivid orange colour, draws attention to how Sethe is now able to perceive—
this time psychologically as well as physiologically—vibrant colours again, as she notices,
and is distracted by, the two orange squares on the quilt in the keeping room (‘she was
distracted by the two orange squares’). An intense juxtaposition to the crowdedness and the
overwhelming existence of the ghost in the previous paragraph indicates the dramatic change
in Sethe’s mind with the departure of Beloved’s spirit: she is now able to see ‘how barren 124
really was’. Sethe notices these changes within herself and traces them back to Paul D;
Beloved: Prose Commentary 4
‘Emotions sped to the surface in his company’—the alliteration (‘sped to the surface’)
stressing the consonants and therefore the intense passion she is able to feel in his presence—
and ‘things became what they were: drabness looked drab; heat was hot.’ The paragmenon—
the repetition of words as well as its cognates (‘drabness looked drab’; ‘heat was hot’)—of
what seem to be very natural and obvious sensory experiences is reflective upon Sethe’s
return to the feeling and sensation she had been missing since the death of Beloved.
‘Windows suddenly had view’: through a metaphorical window, evoking a sense of clarity,
Sethe is able to see things as they are, emotionally and physically; she is able to see outside
124 and into a possible, hopeful, future; she is able to perceive life as she did long ago. The
extract then concludes with an observation of Paul D’s character: ‘And wouldn’t you know
he’d be a singing man’. Paul D’s ‘singing’, an example of auditory imagery, is an allusion to
Paul D as a blues singer; an African-American slave who expresses his sorrow and misery
through music. Sethe believes it is the musical expression of his sentiment that lies behind
Sethe’s long-lost ability to express, and perceive, her thoughts and emotions—and perhaps
even the prospect of a new reality.
In conclusion, the extract from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is a highly emotive piece of
narrative prose that, through a third-person subjective narrative mode, a transformation of
tone from solemn and sombre at the beginning to one of hopefulness at the end, and
rhetorical devices such as metaphor, alliteration and visual imagery, expresses the thoughts of
an African-American slave mother with a haunting and emotionally overwhelming past as
she reflects upon her memories, her broken family and her captivity, but also her return to the
world of emotional sensory, perception of reality—and, with these, the prospect and hope of
a new life.
