Beloved-Setting

            “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison, tells a story of a family plagued by their past and their struggle to live in the present and look forward to the future. Sethe, the main character of “Beloved,” was an ex-slave who ran away from Sweet Home, the southern plantation she was enslaved on, and, with the help of the Underground Railroad and a kind stranger named Amy Denver, made it to house number 124 where her mother-in-law lived in the state of Ohio. Throughout the story, readers learn more and more about the horrors and abuses Sethe faced while living at Sweet Home, and the terrible consequences they had on her mind and body. Her husbands eventual descend into insanity and the sexual and physical abuse she faced on the plantation led to her eventual escape, but while she achieved her freedom, the scars from the past could never be washed clean from her skin or her nearly broken spirit. When her old master came to retrieve her, she attempted to murder her two sons and youngest daughter, and succeeded in killing her eldest daughter (who wasn’t even two years old); she would have rather seen her children dead than watch them experience the anguish she had experienced when she was enslaved.

            Setting plays a major role in this story, as it does in every person’s life. The nature vs. nurture argument has been, for the most part, settled as being equally influential in a persons life: meaning that the environment we are born and raised in drastically affects who we are, who we will become, and the way in which we view the world. “Beloved” takes place in 1873, with flashbacks to the early 1850’s, and to be born both black and a slave in the southern part of the United States meant that you would be subjected to the cruelty of racist, white “owners” who were in complete control of your environment. Sethe’s mother had been branded and hung, she herself had been branded, sexually abused, and whipped until she her flesh resembled a “chokecherry tree.” Objectively, most people would agree that infanticide is inexcusable and anyone capable of such a thing could be little more than a heartless criminal. But after being shown the horrible things Sethe experienced in slavery, one cannot help but to sympathize with her.

            Had Sethe been born in a different time or place, she might have never experienced such abuse and probably would have never dreamed of murdering her own children, as readers today could never truly understand what human beings were subjected to before the thought of Civil Rights and equality came into being. The setting of this story is crucial, for had it not been set in the time and place it was, the story would have been quite different, and the actions of the characters would have been viewed in a much different way. How else could readers sympathize with a main character who could believe they were doing the right thing by slitting their own child’s throat?