Beloved shows the
effects that slavery has on the identity and sense of self of the enslaved.
This is demonstrated through the names, coping-mechanisms, and the way the
characters live their free lives.
In an overarching point, the simple
term “slave” already serves to strip identity and even dehumanize the
individual. A slave has a gender, history, family; he or she might have been a
teacher or a baker; each person has personality, quirks, beliefs, but by
grouping all of these people into the category of “slave,” their identities are
lost first to the outside world, then to the enslaved individual himself.
Beloved
demonstrates this idea at a personal level. In Baby Suggs, the first to be
free, we see the effects of slavery on her sense of self when she steps out of
the wagon, onto free soil, and is startled by her ownership of her own body: “These
hands belong to me. These are my
hands,” Baby Suggs exclaims (166). When Mr. Garner tells her that they’ve
called her Jenny because that was the name on her when they bought her, Baby
Suggs admits that she doesn’t “call herself nothing” (167), but then decides to
take the only names with which she can identify.
In Paul D, too, we see the struggle
for a solid sense of self. While living in Alfred in the cages, he is nothing
but one of 46 men. Attached by the chain, the group isn’t one of individuals.
Paul D can’t even be sure if it’s him screaming, or if he’s crying. Once he is
free, Paul D copes by locking up his memories and his emotions in his tobacco
tin of a heart. This seems to be a common coping process, the elimination of
personal emotion. Baby Suggs finally gives up under the crushing weight of
hers, and Sethe refrains from feeling for herself.
Sethe seems to have displaced her ‘self’
into her children. Identifying most strongly as a mother, Sethe finds the best
of her life through her children and, later, Beloved. The burden of a life as a
slave has sucked the sense of individuality and self from the freed.
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