Breaking Metaphoric Shackles in Toni Morrisons Beloved :: Toni Morrison Beloved Essays

Breaking Metaphoric Shackles in Beloved      Ã‚  Ã‚   In Toni Morrison's novels, she uses her main characters to represent herself as an African American artist, and her stories as African American art, and Beloved is no exception. She does this through her underlying symbolic references to the destructiveness of slavery and the connections between the characters themselves. Syntax is also what makes this novel work, using both the powers and limits of language to represent her African American culture with simple words and name choices.    One of her main characters, Baby Suggs, uses her English with some abandon, but only after getting her message across, however simple it may seem. She might choose simplicity over complexity in speech, but her words carry the needed intensity to express herself in the little time she has left on earth (Dahill-Baue, 472-73). Baby Suggs represents the authentic black woman, having been freed from slavery by her son, Halle. "Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it" (Morrison, 3).    Slavery has limited Baby Suggs' self-conception by shattering her family and denying her the opportunity to be who she wants to be, which is a good wife and mother. She is seen as wise and spiritual, even in her last days. "You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side" (Morrison, 5). What makes her so authentic is her ability to have such control over language, dismissing the "binding shackles of social codes" (Dahill-Baue, 473).    Baby Suggs is not the only main character to hint that slavery it/was an experience that could never be known exactly for what it truly was. Morrison, through all of her characters, remains willing to risk losing her main characters to a past that can be neither seen nor controlled. She uses Sethe to symbolize the border between slavery and freedom, and unexpectedly does not allow Sethe to grow in the novel and escape that painful border (Parrish, 84). Through fragmented rememories, we see that Sethe was frequently treated as an animal in her period as a slave. She once walked in on Schoolteacher giving his pupils a lesson on her "animal characteristics.