Journal #1: Paul D

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Paul D is perhaps the most significant and complex
male character in the novel. However like many characters in the novel he is plagued by a
lack of self worth or identity. Paul D is described as “the kind of man who could walk into a
house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could cry and tell
him things they only told each other” (Morrison, 13). He himself is however emotionally
crippled. Years of pain and suffering cause Paul to constantly question his value as a person
and a man. Paul D. frequently wonders about his value as a person and struggles with the
concept of being a real man. To endure the brutality he suffered at Sweet Home and in the
chain gang Paul D developed a coping strategy in which he locked all his feelings away in
the rusted “tobacco box” of his heart and decided never to love anything too much (Morrison,
97). By stopping himself from experiencing any emotion Paul willingly restricted himself
from developing a sense of identity so it couldn’t be taken away form him. It takes the arrival
of Beloved and her seduction to release him and to free the "red heart" he's imprisoned in the
"rusted tobacco tin" of his memories. Beloved forces Paul D to feeling ashamed and abhor
himself for sleeping with her thus opening his heart also to emotions of love for Sethe. By
choosing to love another person a finally opening his heart Paul D is able to develop an
identity. Paul D struggles through his hardships and eventually “puts his story next to”
Sethe’s (Morrison, 232). With this display of love and maturity Paul D is finally able to find
his identity as a loving man.
(299)
 Journal #2: Beloved
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the character Beloved holds a lot of significance
besides just being the reincarnation of Sethe’s deceased daughter. The character Beloved
embodies the historical past of slavery that haunts Seth. The presence of Beloved forces
Sethe to recognize the pains of her past so she can come to terms with herself. She acts as the
intervention in the novel to interrupt Sethe’s unwillingness to face memory and history.
Beloveds return to house 124 as a full grown woman is symbolic of the way the past never
dies but when left to manifest can grow more intense in the present. Sethe works hard as
possible to remember as little about her past in the novel because “every mention of her past
life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost” (Morrison, 69). By forgetting her past Sethe
allowed it to grow larger than life and be reborn in the form of Beloved. By the end of the
novel Sethe grows weak while Beloved becomes healthy and pregnant. This symbolizes the
draining nature of the past if it’s allowed to suckle life from the present. Beloved also acts as
a symbol of a slow but powerful ablution in the novel. During her time with Sethe, Beloved
evokes painful memories and encourages her mother to talk about her life. Through this
Beloved purges Sethe’s past of some of their toxicity and forces her mother to confront her
pain. By telling Beloved her past as a way to “feed her” curiosity Sethe is able to expunge
years of guilt and horror. This verbal exorcising of the atrocities allowed Sethe to make peace
with herself and look forward to the future. Before Beloved’s arrival Sethe was living in a
house haunted by the ghost of her past. Beloved’s intervention through recognition of the
past allows Sethe to figure out who she is and look forward to the future.
(316)
 Journal #3: Duality of Slavery
The vexing effect of slavery on slaves plays a large role in Toni Morrison’s novel
Beloved. The damaging effects of slavery on a person’s sense of morality are not limited to
the slave. Morrison, in her novel, develops the theme that slavery corrupts and dehumanizes
everyone it comes in contact with, including the slave master. For the peculiar institution of
slavery to work whites convinced themselves that slaves were less than human. They
constantly dehumanized and subjugated slaves. For example, the schoolteacher’s wicked
lessons on Sethe’s animalistic qualities and violent racism are his means of justifying the
institution of slavery. Barbarizing African Americans also allowed whites to run away from
their own savagery by projecting them onto their slaves. Stamp Paid illustrates this clearly
when he states “White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was
a jungle… In a way . . . they were right. . . . But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them
to this place. . . . It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread . . . until
it invaded the whites who had made it. . . . Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they
wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived
under their own white skin; the red gums were their own” (Morrison, 149). So in the act of
infanticide, Sethe was out worldly mimicking the morality of her white master. She was just
repeating the savagery she herself had experienced many times. The slave regime made the
white man’s sense of moral meaningless and therefore his sense of identity. In this way
slavery hurt the slave masters. The slave on the other hand lost their culture and humanity
and thus took on the same moral atmosphere of their masters.
(310)
 Essay: Escape
Many human experiences fit well into the poems of Emily Dickinson. Her poem #512
is no exception to this. The poem is sensitive to meaning and context of all kinds. The poem
The Soul has Bandaged Moments uses vivid language to paint an intricate picture if the
human need for escaped and freedom. Coupled with the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison
both works work to show that even after liberation the mind and soul is not free from
damaged, loneliness and isolation. The poem does this by presenting a beautiful metaphor of
a struggling soul whilst the novel portrays this through its complicated protagonist and
symbolism of Beloved.
Without the poem’s incredible use of language the thoughts of the mysterious
Dickinson would be difficult to decipher in the poem. The poem is dense with figurative
language about coping and managing in loneliness and isolation. Dickinson begins the poem
with a personal revelation. She describes a soul this bandaged and frightened by her fear.
Here Dickinson’s careful diction with the word bandaged effectively directs the readers
thought to something that has been hurt, a wound serious enough to require bandages.
Dickinson then smoothly personifies the fear of the soul as a goblin that is holds it captive.
The soul seems to be lost with no way of escape. This is what is seems till we get to the third
stanza when Dickinson uses nature as a metaphor t suggest that the soul has some hw escaped
“like … a bee... long dungeoned from his rose”. This soul is blissful in its freedom; however
we find that the soul is again captured by fear personified. With shackles and staples the soul
is brought back to its hurt and bandaged moment. With diction that alludes to imprisonment
Dickson helps the reader realize that the soul was never truly free from its fear, but laments,
“brayed of tongue” perhaps because the moments are to horrible and personal to talk about.
The soul in poem #512 never escapes but stays lamenting in her lonely moments but
the main character of Morison’s novel is able to escape. Sethe is a complex character in the
novel. Her most powerful characteristic is her intense devotion to her children. After her
escaped from Sweet Home Sethe has 28 days of freedom and happiness at 124. However like
the soul in Dickson’s poem her freedom is cut short when the schoolteacher finds her again.
Sethe’s devotion to her children makes her try to kill her children rather than relinquish them
to the Schoolteacher. Sethe’s memories of cruelty and brutality in bondage, would not allow
her to give up her children to such a life. Sethe’s brain was “loaded with the past and hungry
for more, it left her no room to imagine” (Morrison, 168). Toni personifies Sethe’s fear of her
past with the arrival of Beloved in 124. Like a parasite Beloved drains Sethe of her life force
just as her life in slavery had until her she loses her job and she begins to waste away. The
draining away of Sethe by the presence of Beloved shows that Sethe is still enslaved by the
pains of her past. She succumbed to Beloved, the reincarnation of the terror of her past. Only
when Sethe learns to confront her past head-on, to assert herself in its presence, is she able to
remove herself from its oppressive power and begin to life freely. Sethe realized that “the
past was something to leave behind. And if they didn’t stay behind, well, you would have to
stomp it out” (Morrison, 254).
The works of Morrison And Dickinson portray the attempts of the soul to escape
from fear and oppression. The figurative language in The soul has Bandaged Moments and
the character Sethe in Beloved shows that the only way to escape fear and oppression is
through confrontation and acceptance.