Exploring Personal Choices in Toni Morrisons Beloved Essay -- Toni Mo

Exploring Personal Choices in Toni Morrisons BelovedAt the climax of her book Beloved, Toni Morrison uses strong imagery to examine the mind of a woman who is thinking of killing her own children. She writes,Because the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteachers hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected any bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. outside this place, where they would be safe. And the hummingbird wings beat on. (163)A full analysis of the book, or even of this passag e, would be more extensive than is justified by the constraints of this paper. To a large bound this book is about the victims of the system of slavery. However, Morisson uses this and other passages to comment on issues that are still present even after significant changes in social and scotch systems. One statement Morisson is making here is that there is a dichotomy between what we should do to obey our personal spiritual laws and what we should do to exercise greens sense or be normal. Also that often neither of these is what we actually do nor what we want to do as a person trying to have it away life. She makes it implicitly clear in this sentence, as she does in other parts of the novel, completeing with other characters. It is va... ...uate all the options we have for dealing with it. Perhaps Toni Morrison wrote this book to look for choices that we all have made between what is right for the reasonable man and what is right for us in the context of what we believe an d feel, and how we reconcile those things as we deal with society afterward. God judges the heart of every person, but other people can only judge and deal with us on the tail end of what they see and hear us do and say. That is a major challenge for each person expressing his or her true feelings clearly, before and after the action, and expressing them to a pitying person who is also able to parse that expression. Perhaps the hummingbirds in this passage were all the reactions by people who closed Sethe in rather than allowed her to express herself openly. whole shebang CitedMorrison, Toni. Beloved. New York Plume, 1997.