Image Study: A Visual Interpretation of Motifs in Beloved

The Chokecherry Tree:   

"A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves.  Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all I know" (page 18).

The above image was taken from the movie adaptation of Beloved.  To the right, is a photograph of an actual chokecherry tree, taken from an online catalog.

Forever on Sethe's back are several scars in the formation of what appears to be a tree. These scars came from a beating Sethe underwent while she was six months pregnant with Denver. When Sethe told Mrs. Garner that boys had stolen her breast milk, the school teacher helping out with the farm she worked on ordered one of the boys to beat Sethe, leaving the patches of dead skin on her back.

Amy Denver is the first person to notice the shape of the scars left on Sethe's back. She remarks by first giving an awed description and then says "What God have in mind, I wonder" (page 93).When Paul D first comes to 124 he undresses Sethe and feels the chokecherry tree. While reexamining it after he and Sethe first became intimate, he thinks:

"And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold miner pawning through pay dirt was in fact a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped like one; but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and be near" (page 25)...

I believe the chokecherry tree on Sethe's back symbolizes pain and the tribulations of her life. This pain is not something that Sethe can feel anymore, partly because she won't allow herself to and partly because it is physically impossible for her. She rarely lets herself feel the hurt she has experienced and only when Paul D touches the chokecherry tree does she self-inflict emotional pain and allow herself to trust and remember the details of her past. When people see her back, they see pain. Amy Denver imagines how awful the person who 'planted' the tree on Sethe must be, because even she, who has experienced several whippings as an indentured servant, has never dealt with a beating so severe. Some, like Paul D, are revolted by the ugliness, while others, like Amy, are simply awed by the beauty in pain.

Color: 

"Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of death, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.
"Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don't""(page 4).

The above picture is a lavender field and to the right is an African quilt. These two selected pictures represent the image of color in the novel.

Color is one of the motifs in Beloved. I believe it represents forgetfulness. Baby Suggs is able to use color as a means of forgetting her past. Likewise, Sethe does the same thing:

"Sethe looked at her hands, her bottle-green sleeves, and thought how little color there was in the house and how strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she though, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it" (pages 46-47).

 The last color Sethe can remember was in such a strong scene that she is unable to remember anymore occurrences of color.  She needs more images to block out the mental image of her dead child and, just as Baby Suggs had, can use color as a way to block out the haunting past.

The quilt is used as a picture because, in the novel, it holds the only exception to a room ridden of color. This little bit of color amongst so much darkness is, in my view, an escape from Sethe's conscious. If she allows herself more pondering of color, she will be able to suppress the terror of her past.

Feet & Eyes:

"People I saw as a child," she said, "who'd had the bit always looked wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it couldn't have worked, because it put a wildness where there wasn't any. When I look at you, I don't see it. There ain't no wildness in your eye nowhere" (page 84).

The feet above are strange. They are shaped abnormally and also have two many toes. I used this image because the feet show something about the person they belong to. The eyes to the right provide a portal. You can take a long look into the eyes, because there is something intriguing that draws you in.

Morrison spends a lot of time talking about one's feet when they are introduced to the story. In the opening scene, Sethe is barefoot. When Beloved is brought into the story, Sethe notices her feet. When Sethe makes her journey to freedom, her feet are swollen and nearly dead.

I think feet represent life's journey. More specifically, they show the circumstances of one's past, such as where and how long he has traveled. This is important because it characterizes people as old and experienced versus new and innocent.

Morrison also takes note of people's eyes in the story. Whether the eyes be wild or express passion as they have done for Sethe and Paul D, they play an important role in character. Eyes are often regarded as the way to see into someone's soul. Morrison uses eyes to determine her characters' passions, fears, and hopes.

The River & Night:

"A fully dressed woman walked out of the water" (page 60).

"Who like him, had hidden in caves and fought for food; who like him, stole from pigs; who, like him,  had slept in trees in the day and walked by night" (page 78).

The river and night both symbolize a form of passage. Beloved emerges from the river from her dead life onto her new, living one. Also, Paul D can only travel at night from his enslaved life to his of freedom. These two images show the ways someone can change their lives, whether they emerge as living beings or as freed men.

Velvet:

"Boston. Get me some velvet. It's a store there called Wilson. I seen the pictures of it and they have the prettiest velvet. They don't believe I'm a get it, but I am" (page 40).

 When she discovers Sethe lying in the cold field, Amy Denver reveals she is on her way to Boston to find velvet. She also says that no one believed she would get it but is determined.

I think velvet represents desire and also extreme measures that one will get to achieve their dreams. It also shows hope. The characters describe velvet as such a wonderful thing, but none of them have ever seen it. However, they expect that they will sometime. This is important because by concentrating on an object, they can endure most of what life throws at them.

Title Ambiguity: The Double Denotation of Beloved

"Ten minutes, he said. You got ten minutes I'll do it for free.
Ten minutes for seven letters. With another ten could she have gotten "Dearly" too? She had not thought to ask him and it bothered her still that it might have been possible--that for twenty minutes, a half hour, say, she could have had the whole thing, every word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (and all there was to say, surely) engraved on her baby's headstone: Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. She thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite new. That should certainly be enough. Enough to answer one more preacher, one more abolitionist and a town full of disgust." (page 5).

Behold! The first occurrence of the title word in the story. Approximately 5.5 pages into the novel, it seems as though Ms. Toni Morrison has granted her readers the simple pleasure of knowing the meaning behind the title of the book. However, being a Morrison novel, nothing is ever as it seems in Beloved. 

While still indulging in the brief pleasure Morrison has allowed us, we find it in our abilities to begin piecing together the puzzle of the novel. Regretfully, Sethe choose those 7 letters to forever mark the gravestone of her dead baby girl (the same dead child whose spirit we find out, one paragraph later, is haunting 124). With this knowledge gained, we figure this is a suitable title for a book that tells the story of a house haunted by a "sad, not evil" ghost. Unfortunately, we haven't solved the mystery of the title just yet. In fact, this pleasure is only an illusion; there is more to come on the significance of 'Beloved'.

Obviously, there is a reason I bring up this instance in the plot 67 pages into the novel. Almost 60 pages after our revelation of discovering the origin of the title, we gain a little bit more insight. A mysterious girl shows up in the novel and upon being discovered by Paul D, Sethe, and Denver on their way home from "Colored Thursday" of the carnival, our characters engage in conversation:

"You from around here?" Sethe asked her.
She shook her head no and reached down to take off her shoes. She pulled her dress up to the knees and rolled down her stockings. When the hosiery was tucked into the shoes, Sethe saw that her feet were like her hands, soft and new. She must have hitched a wagon ride, thought Sethe. Probably one of those West Virginia girls looking for something to beat a life of tobacco and sorghum. Sethe bent to pick up the shoes.
"What might your name be?" asked Paul D.
"Beloved," she said, and her voice was so low and rough each one looked at the other two. They heard the voice first--later the name.
"Beloved. You use a last name, Beloved?" Paul D asked her.
"Last?" She seemed puzzled. Then "No," and she spelled it for them, slowly as though the letters were being formed as she spoke them.
Sethe dropped the shoes; Denver sat down and Paul D smiled" (page 67).

The two denotations of Beloved provide several similarities. For one, there is a mention of a wagon ride for both: The baby, before dying, rode in a wagon in her escape; Beloved must have just hitched one. Beloved's hands are soft as new, just as the baby's hands would have been. Later discovered, Beloved is around 19 or 20 years old--about 2 years older than Denver. The baby was 2 years old when Denver was born. Sethe also recognizes the similarities (or maybe just reacts to the significance of Beloved's name). 

I believe that Beloved and Sethe's dead baby may have something else in common. Morrison has already made evident the supernatural elements in her story; maybe this is an additional item meant to spook the reader with its eeriness.

Once again, what at first seems to be the reason for the  novel's single-word title may not exactly be it. The connection between these two 'Beloved's is obvious but can only be revealed with time and patience. I have finally reached that point in the novel where I cannot put it down because of its increasing buildup of suspense. The eeriness, intriguing as it is, is making me overly anxious. My mind is full of ridiculous questions, but in Beloved, nothing is too ridiculous to withhold from asking:

• Is Beloved a reincarnation of Sethe's dead child? Paul D (who, despite my earlier predictions, does not seem to be going anywhere) did in fact drive the baby's spirit out, so could it be that the baby is coming back in a more physical form?
  
• Why did she rise out of the water? (That part of the chapter reminded me of the corpses rising from the lake in a scene of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.)
• How long will she stay? Will she form a 'sisterly' bond with Denver?

Among the most  unresolvable questions, why haven't I read a novel by Toni Morrison before? She is a modern literary genius, with her plot twists and inscrutably peculiar writing style; the praise for her work is not to be rendered meaningless.

The Introduction: A First Look at the Writing Style of Toni Morrison

"124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for them the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them" (page 3)

This is the opening paragraph to Toni Morrison's prize winning book Beloved. Right away, the reader is snatched into the home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinatti, Ohio. With no forewarning, the reader is brought into the story, not expecting the conflicts to be shown, although not clear, within the first page of the novel. Everything is a mystery; there are so many questions: Why is 124 (which we shall presume to be a house upon the first reading) so spiteful and so full of baby's venom? Why would a baby even have venom? What did Howard and Buglar run away from exactly? Where is the proper introduction? Why can't my questions be answered already?

Evoking questions from the reader so early in the novel achieves one of Morrison's many purposes. As stated in the foreword of the book she "wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book's population--just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense" (xviii).With just that, no preparation or defense, Morrison takes us into the home of Sethe, a runaway slave made to live in a house haunted by the spirit of her dead daughter and  ridden with the regret for settling for just the word 'Beloved' on the child's tombstone.

With incomplete sentences, several instances of misplaced punctuation, and an unorthodox introduction, Morrison seldom follows any of the conventional rules for novel writing. The prose is characterized by shorts phrases like "Full of baby's venom" and "Twenty years. A life time" (page 28), placed in paragraphs to fool readers to believe they are perfectly suitable sentences. It is also composed of what were formerly two words and have now been written as one, of which include 'whitewoman', 'Redmen', and 'coloredpeople'. Morrision's stylistic prose suggest that the mere adjectives of the individuals engulf them entirely and become their identities. This characteristic suits the time period of which the story takes place, because in the days of slavery and racial discrimination, a man could be no more than his color to the world.

The writing style of Toni Morrison is simple, but deviant from that of comparable contemporary writers. She leaves no time for readers to become acquainted with her characters and, without any written sign of hesitation, introduces them to the strange circumstances of the plot and her peculiar prose. What at first appears to be a simplistic form of writing is actually a more complex, premeditated style. The prose of Beloved is parallel to the dialect of its characters and the structure of the plot (such as the absence of a more ordinary introduction) correlates with the occurrences of the characters' lives. Real life seldom happens in an organized fashion and Morrison's prose likewise does not follow any standards.


Slowly but surely, I am getting used to Morrison's odd style. I will admit I did have to reread these first 33 pages in order to fully comprehend the action in the plot.  For example, upon my first reading I missed the eagerness in Paul D's eyes when Sethe invited him to stay. I also misunderstood the description of the scars on Sethe's back, which although referred to as a chokecherry tree are just a bit of dead skin caused by a beating. I can't wait to see if Paul D will prove Baby Suggs old saying true, that "a man ain't nothing but a man" (page 26), or if he will be an exception and actually stick around 124. Seeing as the house is haunted by a dead baby, I highly doubt he will prove anyone wrong.