Bluestone Road and Trees That Listen

In her re-imagining of the slave memoir, Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison writes hard truths in the form of fiction. The novel follows Sethe, a fugitive slave living outside of Cincinnati with her daughter in a house with a history. Morrison's settings in the story serve many purposes, but the most exceptionally interesting one is the use of setting to cast light onto the characters in the novel.

There are two major settings within the novel: Sweet Home and 124. They are where the bulk of the plot actually takes place, and they also are used as proper nouns. The events that occur in all of these places are the events that define the characters in the novel, but the settings do much more than just host a drama. Each of these places are described as good places. Sweet Home is described as having "more pretty trees than any farm around." (26). It was a stunningly beautiful place where Mr. Garner treated the slaves more like men than any other owner would dare. The land itself, the farm, is not evil. It is the institution of slavery, and the arrival of it's true form with the "schoolteacher" that corrupts this setting. 124, similarly, is a nice house with two stories that Baby Suggs is proud to live in. It, like Baby Suggs herself, is loved by the community. Then Sethe does the unspeakable and the house is henceforth tragic, broken, and haunted.

Morrison could have made each of these places ugly in order to contain and color the ugliness that they hold after their corruption. In fact, many writer's would have. Instead, Morrison makes the reader question whether a place is evil just because evil has been done there. This question stretches out, not just laying over the places but also the people in this novel. Is Sethe evil because her circumstances drove her to do unspeakable things?

These questions are woven together, especially between 124 and Sethe. The novel starts with "124 was spiteful" (1) and we instantly see the house as a mischievous, haunted thing. Sethe, however, starts as somewhat tired and broken but seemingly as pure as she could be in such situations. Slowly, their places are reversed as we learn more about what comes before, and the way that they have influenced each other. 124 cannot be all bad, just as Sethe cannot be all good, and by the end the reader is all but certain that they were both simply existing before horror visited them both. To further this tie, Morrison also personifies the house with emotions and attributes direct actions to it.

Toni Morrison not only creates interesting settings for her characters to act in, but also makes the settings actors as well. This opens up questions for the reader about inherent good or evil, and allows Morrison to tie these questions to her characters as well.