Setting in Beloved

Toni Morrison’s Beloved, published in 1987,  is an interesting tribute to Black History month this February. Set almost a century before the Civil Rights era in the United States, the novel is rampant with the darkness and anguish of slavery for the African Americans. In Morrison’s book, the main character, named Sethe, is troubled and haunted by the ghost of her traumatic past memories. Though she has undergone several horrid events, the most gruesome by far would be that of her own attempt to kill her own four children, and worse, her success in murdering her eldest daughter. But this was not done in cold blood; in Sethe’s mind, she was protecting them from the acute suffering and emotional turmoil a life of slavery brings –she had merely been helping them escape from the claws of a former slave-owner who had cornered Sethe in a free state after she had escaped from Sweet Home, a plantation in Kentucky. While we can tack on labels such as murderer, runaway slave, victim of physical and sexual abuse, and squanderer among others, Morrison’s portrayal of Sethe as a strong black woman whose love for her children eclipses much else sets her apart from many of her contemporary peers, allowing the audience to connect intimately with the protagonist, even through the third person point of view that the story unfolds in.

Setting is a crucial aspect of Morrison’s work in Beloved. Not only does the specific time frame in American history elicit the indignant emotional spark in her readers, but the temporal alternation between Sethe’s past and future allows her reader to put together the puzzle of Sethe’s identity as the story develops. Flashbacks of Sethe’s past are full of the despair too frequently felt in the lives of blacks back then. When Paul D tells Sethe that “[She] is [her] best thing,” the theme of personal identity is not only understood through Sethe’s haunted relationship with her killed daughter, and daughter’s ghost, but is punctuated by the fact that millions of slaves at the time can also be analyzed in terms of personal identity (Morrison 160).

Morrison’s novel inspires me to use the powerful impact of setting not only allure my readers, but to reinforce the message of my story. In my few fictional writings, I often make use of a realistic, modern setting, letting the characters and their life events take over the plot. In the fantasy pieces I put together, I do make better use of setting by trying to show my readers a shimmering, imaginary world, where the focus is most often on the members of said world rather than the physical features of this world, or even on the psychological effect said world has on my characters. Morrison’s incorporation of the American slavery period in the lives of her characters (meaning, Sethe, Paul D, Denver, and other characters, especially those that are African American, lead lives dominated by the historical context of the story, which is only to be expected, but is remarkable nonetheless) helps develop the themes of hope, entrapment, and personal identity in the novel. I will try to use setting in my future work, whether fictional or not, to spin the atmospheric web of my story, and use it like Morrison did to allow my readers to better understand my characters.

-- Nakita Mortimer