Abstract
Ethical Analysis
By: Gemechis Desta Buba
Novel: Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
In the Novel Beloved, six prime themes and paradigmatic verifications
can evidently be detected. The socio-political issue of race and
slavery, the emotional dilemma of dealing with the past in
retrospective and prospective, the banality of evil in the broader
theological delineation, the moral ambiguity of murder as a redemptive
means, the essential meaning of authentic freedom and the conceptual
construct of a family in contrast with it’s deconstruction via
contemporary practicum. The novelist devotes the literary duty to
explicating these ethical, philosophical, psychological, theological
and anthropological issues in a very creative and intuitive way.
The issue of race and slavery is one of the primary themes of
Beloved. The community of ex-slaves and the process of their adjustment
to a new survivor’s scenario is the focal point of the novel. Through
the eyes a schoolteacher, the novel questions, the difference between a
man and an animal. As the Negro Community is vividly explicated, the
novel adheres to the fact that a colored person is like any other human
being. The paradox of enduring the injustices of an unfeeling people
and the combat against them is in juxtaposition to one another.
Beloved further explores the tremendous cost that love yearns for,
especially, if one is a slave and subject to having one’s children, kin
or lover disappear forever at the owner’s whim. Morrison and others
lived through such horrors, but she could never let it happen to her
own. The novel is a depiction of the ferocity with which black men and
women strove to make and sustain families. Remembering who you are and
where you come from is one of the themes that run through her work,
thus Morrison asserts proudly that she is a black woman writer. As a
philosophical base of the novel, the author used objective
correlativism, Biblical allusions and ambiguous symbols, which created
an intellectual arena riddled with intuitive force and vivid drama of
life in praxis.
Literary Style and Structure
The Novel Beloved is not a linear tale, told from the beginning to an
end. It is experimentally structured to depict the encompassing levels
of the past from the slave ship to sweet home, as well as the present.
Morrison retrieves the past tells in flashbacks, stories and in plain
fashions as if it were happening in the present. The novel leaves an
intellectual challenge to knit the essentially fragmented and shattered
literary development of the novel.
The novel makes the past alive by juxtaposing it with the present. This
intentional move reinforces the idea that the past is alive in the
present, and by giving the readers fragments of facts to work with.
Morrison’s artistry in this regard is ethically consequential. The
literary style emulates the readers’ rational faculty into a live
interaction with an accountable moral agent as depicted in the story.
The actual reading of the novel is a practical intellectual transition
from a status of a reader to a responsible moral agent with a concrete
mindset and ethical paradigm.
The structure of the novel Beloved is characterized with diverse, point
of view, which create a tapestry of people who interact-individuals
joined by past or present in a community. Morrison has used an
ever-switching point of view; every character has a statement to make
in the entire setting of the novel. At one point, Paul D and Sethe
exchange flashbacks that finally melt into one whole chapter (chapter
2). On the flip side, the worldview switches off between four white
people who unreservedly show the biased point of view of some men who
view slaves as tamed animals. In her literary style and structure
Morrison utilizes the stream of consciousness writing with a limited
inclination to using strict narrative. Her intentional motivation is
not capturing people’s attentions and emotions, but transformational
with an intellectually intuitive challenge and scientific facts
displayed to be probed for a moral judgment.
Thematic Analysis
a. Race and Slavery
The Novel Beloved is explicitly tied to the issue of ‘Race and
Slavery’. It is a literary attempt to wrestle with the legacy of
slavery. The novelist based her novel on a real-life incident, in which
an escaped slave woman who faced recapture killed her children rather
than allow them to be taken back into slavery. The protagonist’s
recapture follows the Fugitive Slave act of 1850, part of the
Compromise of 1850, which stated that escaped slaves, as property,
could be tracked down across state lines and retrieved by their
seasoned masters. Themes of love, family, and self-possession in a
world where slavery has recently become a thing, were subjects of
exploration. According Michel Foucault, “ …slavery is the great risk
that Greek freedom resists, there is also another danger that initially
appears to be the opposite of slavery: the abuse of power.”1 In the
Novel Beloved, Morrison demonstrates this fact of power polarization as
a source of ethical distortion, which gets institutionalized in the
form of slavery.
b. Reminiscence in Retrospective
Beloved, deals with human past. Each moral agent and protagonist in the
novel has endured a furious past saturated with mighty horrors. Sethe
was raped and forced to murder, Paul D was imprisoned, Stamp Paid’s
wife was abducted for sexual pleasure, and many other similar acts. In
retrospective most of these characters have chosen to repress the past
or to vigorously work against it. Dr. Robert D. Philips wrote, “The
implications that people want to be ruined rather than changed or to
die in dread rather than confront a challenging task sounds perverse.
But measured by the logic of survival, it ‘makes sense’ to guard one’s
familiar misery rather than to venture into the promising unknown.”2 In
the same pattern of thought Toni Morrison challenges the dilemma of the
reminiscence of slavery in retrospective with a bold acceptance of the
facts to rightly appropriate ‘the eternal now’ and face tomorrow with
‘a courage to be’ in the words of the great theologians Paul Tillich.
c. Banality of Evil
This
theme comes up as the Bodwins household, which includes the statue of a
black boy and the words “At Yo Service,” was described. The Bodwins
were reacting aggressively against slavery; yet fail to comprehend the
mindset behind the statue. Morrison here demonstrates that slavery is
an institution, a philosophy and a mindset, which is far-reaching in
its consequences. The novel further discloses the intensity of slavery
and what must be done to abolish it completely. According to the
Nicomachean Ethics, “Further, one kind of good being activity and
another being state, the processes that restore us to our natural state
are only incidentally pleasant; for that matter the activity at work in
the appetites for them is the activity of so much of our state and
nature as has remained unimpaired; for there are actually pleasures
that involve no pain or appetite…”3 The issue of banality of evil is
evidently one of the grave dilemmas and challenges to all schools of
life. Morrison’s approach it inline with the Aristotelian view on the
Nichomachean Ethics of the ‘being and state’ argument. Slavery should
be seen both as a being in it’s institutionalized existence and should
also be regarded as a state of life in it’s consequential impact on
human life.
d. Moral Ambiguity of the Murder
The question; ‘Was the murder right or wrong?’ Plays a large role as a
moral ambiguity. The resolution reached is that it was the right thing
to do, but Sethe didn’t have the right to do it. When she committed the
murder the entire community shunned her. But had she not murdered
Beloved, her and all the children’s life would have been sold into
slavery. The intense tension of the moral ambiguity remains in
congruity with the preeminent act of Sethe. This dynamic moral
ambiguity can be put under the scrutiny of Plato’s Pharmacy; “In
classical Greek, a Pharmacon) is a drug, and as such it may be taken to
mean either a remedy or a poison, either the cure of illness or its
cause. It is this essential undecidability of the Pharmacon) that poses
the problem of translation which, as Derrida points out, is not simply
the problem of translating Plato’s Greek into another language, but
already introduces within that single language…”4 Sethe is depicted as
a moral agent surrounded with ambiguity in her family arena as she
executes her moral agency with dialectic reasoning. The dialectic
ethics here is demonstrated when her act of killing Beloved is seen
from both sides at once as; remedy-poison, good-bad, positive-negative.
This ethical tension the act becomes morally justifiable, when we
screen it through the Philosphical frame of reference set by Plato’s
Pharmacy. Philanthropically, the human principle of sacrifice as a
redemptive act is another argument of justification to assert Sethes’
act as dignifying to the ontology of the human being.
e. Human Freedom
The novel addresses the essence of human freedom as ideal and practical
concept. According to Morrison, freedom is conceptually and in
practicum more than a matter of not belonging to a single master. Was
Baby Suggs truly free, while men were allowed to barge into her yard at
any time? Was Paul D free, though he wasn’t allowed to love whatever he
wanted to love? Were any of the Negroes truly free, who had to wait at
the back of the supermarket for the whites to be served before they
could get their groceries? Alex F. Osborn wrote, “ We have to
de-condition ourselves-to root out the habit of restricting our
ideation within the limits of past experience, and thus to let our
imagination run loose in seeking clues to the solutions of new
problems.”5 This echoes Morrison’s rational motif in delineating issues
alluding to human freedom. People who have gone through the practical
brutality of slavery should de-condition themselves from the
restrictive habit as an adjustment to the wise and strategic utility of
the costly assumed freedom of status thought and expression.
f. Concept of Family
The
concept of family pervades the novel. Most of the slaves were torn
apart from their families at an early age, and there was a very little
hope in discovering what is left of their families. The consequences of
these were evident in Sethe, who is possessive of her children, and
Paul D, who is determined not to love anything too much. According the
ethical argument given by Wogman and Strong, “ Family and social
services, especially those that provide for culture and education,
should be further promoted. When all these things are being organized,
vigilance is necessary to prevent the citizens from being led into a
certain criteria vis-à-vis society or from rejecting the burden of
taking up office or from refusing to serve…” 6 This has been withheld
from the direct victims of slavery as disclosed in an artistic way by
Morrison on the Novel, Beloved.
Biblical Allusions
Most literary commentators of Morison’s Beloved concede to the fact
that the Novel has got explicit and strong Christian overtones. This is
demonstrated in the literary content and style as Toni Morrison
repeatedly alludes to the tapestry of Biblical self-promulgation. From
the discussions of flesh and spirit to the trinity, the use of ‘she is
mine’ and the use of ‘beloved’ attest to the fact that Morrison has
repeatedly alluded to the Bible in the panorama of her ideological
construct. These allusions serve to add weight to the story and bring
another perspective into the moral issues. Nevertheless the allusion
surpasses a mere phrasiological similarity to embracing an ethical
notion witnessing to the existential reality of a guiding ethical
principle to the universe with a full inclusion of humanity. This
governing principle runs through the scripture but it is often misused
as an instrument of abuse in the systemic governance of humanity.
Bibliography
1. Aristotle, Translated by David Ross., Aristotle The Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford University Press. Oxford. 1998.
2. Foucault, Michel., Paul Rabinow, editor. Ethics Subjectivity and Truth. Volume I. The New York Press. New York. 1994.
3. Fletcher, Joseph., Situation Ethics, The New Morality. Westminster John Knox Press. Kentucky, Louisville. 1966.
4. Jacques, Derrida., A Derrida Reader, Between the Blinds. Columbia University Press. New York. 1991.
5. Osborn, F. Alex, L.H.D. Applied Imagination. 21st Printing. 3rd Revised Edition. Charles Scribner’s Sons. New York. 1963.
6. Plato, Translated By G.M.A. Grube Revised By C.D.C. Reeve. Plato
Republic. Hachette Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/Cambridge.
1992.
7. Morrison, Toni., Beloved. A Plume Book, Penguin Publishing. New York. 1987.
8. Philips, D. Robert (Dr)., The Recovery of the True Self. The Human
Animal In and out of Therapy. Professional Press. Chapel Hill, NC.
9. Other Materials from the Internet are used.
