Beloved: Key Quotes Flashcards
“Sethe knew that the circle she was making around the room, him, the subject, would remain one. That she could never close in, pin it down for anybody who had to ask. If they didn’t get it right off - she could never explain.”
“it’s my job to… keep them away from what I know is terrible”
- Sethe avoids direct confrontation of her act and instead makes recourse to love and logic
- paradox between two definitions of closure ie. ‘closing something’ and ‘resolution’ - she physically closes the circle but her tautological/ circular argument in the dialogue where she makes recourse to love and logic and refuses to acknowledge the actual event - both circles are a means of avoidance
- if the circle is not pinned down to a centre then the text takes a decentred perspective from which the marginal take on increased significance
“little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings”
“no one will list my features on the animal side of the page…”
- semantic field of animalistic references - both literally and metaphorically they reduce her to the position of an animal - the animalistic references demonstrate her psychological digression into the involuntarily instinctive ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ response but in actuality a reader understands that her actions are based on the mediation of human rationality - that she disrupts the binary and acts both to fight (ie. in her rebellion) and flight (ie. as in escape)
- it is the complexity of her response that she is actually humanised
- in actuality - they also reduce her to less than an animal because she is unable to carry out ‘flight’ effectively because she is trapped - her very recourse to a means of the ultimate escapism is again proof of the rationality of her actions
- deeply concerned with being viewed as an animal - text is her means of fighting against that damnation because it would mean she had succumbed to the dogma of the white man
“And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.”
- single monosyllabic term “No.”
- overwhelmed by her psychological force - digression into instinctual logic
- mimetic representation of her thoughts
“you got two feet Sethe, not four”
- CF: hummingbirds’ quote
- from an objective perspective, Paul D does not understand the complexity of the response and thus views it in the animalistic binary of ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ when in reality it exists beyond
- he also tries to apply generalised moral law to the situation but it is only when he is able to empathise with Sethe that he applies situatinal ethics and comes to recognise the necessity of her actions
What does Sethe fear after her act?
- the knowledge of her capacity to murder
- the ostracisation from her community - “I ain’t got no friends take a handsaw to their own children”
Symbol of the spirit that haunts the house
that later may take the physical form of the character of Beloved
- physical manifestation of her capacity to murde
How does Morrison allow us to interpret the spirit of the house in different ways?
- because Morrison takes influence from post-modernist literature and thus releases herself from mimetic realism to enable the flexibility of interpretation
Denver - “not the house! It’s us! And it’s you!”
- supports the interpretation that the spirit that haunts the house is in some way a manifestation of a part of Sethe herself and it is this that is driving away the community and frightening her
“Not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could.”
she is held “under her breasts”, and his cheek is pressed into the euphemistically named “chokecherry tree”
- as an external figure from that of 124, he is able to free Sethe from her fear of herself because, at this point, he is unaware of her capacity to kill which haunts her, but instead his unprejudiced care allows her to acknowledge the fluidity of her identity and her sensitivity as the facade of her coping fractures to reveal her vulnerability and fear etc.
- “it is one thing to be freed, it is another thing to own that freed self” - part of the revision is a reconnection with her former identity before the cataclysmic event of the infanticide - “to own that freed self” is not only to have been freed and thus be a survivor, it is reframing the self in recognition of vulnerability - difficulty of this is to release a part of the self into the control of the slave owners
- re-registering the ownership of the body from the white man to a man of trust and care
“shaking”, “grinding”, and “pitching” of the house
“down on all fours”
- “grinding” - corroding, suggests friction, lengthy and agonising process
- “pitching” - can mean thrusting, piercing and penetrative quality of her psychological trauma - connections to hunting, threat of the potential reawakening of trauma but also goes through a zoomorphic transformation
- Sethe is reduced to a crumpled heap at the mercy of her own psychological force, notably as the animal she fears herself to be
- physically racked with pain, the reader cannot essentialise her into a frighteningly animalistic pre-rational being
“she got enough without you. She got enough!”
- he disassociates the spirit and Sethe because he does not realise the full significance of what he is experiencing, could say that he humanises her - but really what he comes to recognise is that she has been human all along and he merely needs to disrupt moral law to apply situational ethics in the same way that she has
- but also he dissociates the spirit as an alien presence which is also inadvertently correct - the psychological impact of slavery has unearthed what not need otherwise have arisen - slavery has caused alienation from the self
- however - NB: she is only relieved for a short period of time - closure cannot be achieved through an external source only and this point is only agitated when Paul D also becomes frightened by the knowledge of her infanticide and she is required to defend herself again - perhaps the “circle” will “remain one” because the revision re-engages her with herself and she finds some element of internal peace (childishness of the repeated circling) in recognition that no one may understand but equally no one can free her from her haunting, it must be an internal activity
“I couldn’t let her… live under school teacher. That was out”
- truncation of the sentence indicates how she self regulates her thoughts before they progres
“pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing again and again her reasons”
- she is plagued by guilt because she cannot make her daughter understand her reasons - tried to use this as a means of atonement
- impossible enterprise because Beloved would not be able to understand across any of her possible identities - as the reincarnation of her baby daughter, as a woman unconnected to the family, physical manifestation of Sethe’s capacity to murder
- Sethe tries to relieve herself of guilt through a medium that will never have the capacity for forgiveness, meaning that the depth of her guilt is endless
- Morrison is attempting a feat of transmission through her readership - whereby we are cast as the only individuals who are privileged with the intimacy of her story and can be the only party able to dignify Margaret Garner with the deserved perspective
- we become the ones closest to Sethe’s voice
“it was as though Sethe didn’t really want forgiveness given,” and “Beloved helped her out”, creating a bottomless thirst of “desire”
Sethe is “eaten up by that past, consumed by her memory”
“Beloved ate up her life” and “the bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became”
- consumptive metaphors - caesura and the superlatives emphasises the interdependence of “bigger” and “smaller” - causal relationship
- if Beloved is the physical manifestation of the trauma memory then seeing her provokes a rupture in memory which results in the thinly veiled cliche of ‘opening the floodgates’ in which memories are triggered in a flood
Setting of 124
Morrison utilises the setting of “124” as a realm in which the depths of Sethe’s psychological trauma continue to be plumbed, and she becomes trapped in a triangulation between herself, Beloved, and her daughte
