The physical and psychological affect empire left on the flesh of women used for breeding in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Kimberly Hallows

Professor Hurtado

March 9, 2012

English 3133

The physical and psychological affect empire left on the flesh of women used for breeding in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Examination of Toni Morrison’s Beloved demonstrates how empire is written on the flesh of African American women that are enslaved. The slave owners psychologically and physically scar the African American women in this novel. The women’s bodies are marked by over breeding, physical scars left when the women are raped or resist rape, and the psychological scars caused by this abuse. The empire written on these women’s bodies causes them to lose their sense of self-worth and become numb to occurrences that many people are emotionally disturbed by, such as the murder of a child.

Morrison provides examples of the use of African American women to breed throughout Beloved and the impact it leaves on those women. Their owners see them as “property that reproduced itself without cost” (269). Slave owners in America force their female slaves to constantly reproduce so that they will have more slaves to either use on their own land, sell to other slave owners, or trade for merchandise. The author states “They have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them” (247).  The African women in this novel have multiple children against their own will.

Baby Suggs is one example of an African American women used for breeding in Beloved. She gives birth to eight children from different fathers and she is only able to keep one of them (27-28). The rest of her children are traded or sold. Her pregnancies are not voluntary and she does not choose the fathers of these children. Her uterus, her vagina, her ovaries and her breasts are not her own so she has no say in how they are used. In the novel, Suggs describes the use of the slaves’ bodies, claiming, “slave life had busted her legs, back, head, and eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue” (102). The mentioning of the womb is a reference to the constant pregnancy these slaves endure in order to make more children for their owners to keep, sell or trade as property. The African women’s bodies were greatly affected by all of the stress the numerous pregnancies placed upon them, some of which were the result of rape.

Rape is another way that empire is printed on the flesh of African women in Beloved. Baby Suggs, Sethe and Ella are each raped in this novel. Ella, a character who helps Denver rescue Sethe from Beloved, gave birth to a child that was half white because her slave owner raped her for his own satisfaction, which resulted in a pregnancy: “She had delivered, but would not nurse, a hairy white thing, fathered by “the lowest yet” (305).

Sethe, the novels’ protagonist, endures having her whole reproductive system taken as property by Schoolteacher, her slave master. SchoolTeacher thinks that Sethe was his property so he refers to her as the “breeding one” and claims she has, “ten breeding years left” (176, 267). He allows his sons to hold Sethe against her will, raping her and taking the milk from her breast (18-20). When Sethe resists being raped, she is whipped, which leaves the scar on her back that resembles a cherry tree. This is a strong representation of empire on the flesh of a woman in Beloved.

Sethe had experienced something similar as a child. While her mother was in the fields working, a woman named Nan had to nurse all of the children, including the whites. Sethe was the last to nurse because she was black so she “got what was left” (236). Nan’s body was violated, just as Sethe’s eventually would be.

The narrator describes when Ella was raped by her slave owner. She described her slave master as “the lowest yet”. He and his sons rape her for years (301). This slave owner encourages his sons to rape Ella and she produces one of their children, yet she refuses to nurse the child. Ella, like Baby Suggs and Sethe, did not have a choice when it came to her body. Her body was not her own, it belonged to her slave owner. These women are not seen as human beings. They are commodities to the people that own them; therefore those people chose what their bodies are used for.

This treatment causes serious psychological scarring. Baby Suggs reaches a point where she does not even try to connect with her newborn children because she knows they are not hers to keep. Once they are born, they are traded away or sold the way that cattle or pigs are, so she decides it “wasn’t worth the trouble to try and learn new features you would never see change into adulthood anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her own-fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize anywhere” (163). The children she gave birth to in the novel were not hers. She did not get to keep and nurture her children as nature intended. She sees them when they are born and then doesn’t see them again. She never is able to find out where they end up or what becomes of them. After a few children, I think she realizes the reality of not owning her children and her mother instincts become numb.

Baby Suggs compassion returns when she goes to 124. This place, “had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed” (102).  She helps other people to overcome their past lives as slaves but eventually her past catches up with her. When Sethe comes to 124 and murders her baby to keep her from the life of a slave, anguish returns to Baby Suggs and the narrator states that she, “dismissed her great heart and lay in the keeping-room bed,” until she dies (104). Beloved’s death reminds her of the reality of what she has suffered through as a slave. This is the marking of the empire, psychological ruin. She cannot, like many African American slaves, escape these wounds.

Sethe is so greatly affected by the treatment she receives that she murders her own child in order to protect her from going through the same torture that Sethe and so many other women had gone through. For Sethe to think that dying is less painful than returning to the plantation and living life with SchoolTeacher, the reader is made aware of how terrible the treatment must have been. When Schoolteacher realizes Sethe has gone crazy, he does not acknowledge that it is caused by his treatment; however, it does keep him from taking her back to Sweet Home because he believes she is too crazy to reproduce. The narrator states, “now she’d gone wild” (176). It is as though she is an animal with a disability that he doesn’t want multiplied on his plantation. He permanently scars her.

The treatment Ella received from “the lowest yet” keeps her from cringing when hearing the story of Beloved, Sethe’s murdered child, returning to 124 and torturing Sethe. Ella is not stunned by the return of Sethe’s murdered daughter to 124 because she has faced her own demons: “A killing, a kidnap, a rape-whatever, she listened and nodded. Nothing compared to “the lowest yet”” (301). This excerpt provides proof of the atrocities Ella faced during the years she was a slave. Murder, kidnap and rape will not cause a human to flinch after they have seen and experienced these things and worse numerous times. Ella, like Sethe and Baby Suggs, becomes psychologically numb to these horrors.

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved indicates that women in slavery are used for sexual pleasure and breeding until the psychological impact causes them to become immune to events that are unbearable for others or until they just give up completely. Baby Suggs learns not to love her children and later just lays in bed until she dies. Sethe is able to murder her child to save her from slavery and Ella is able to face that child’s ghost to rescue Sethe. Neither Sethe nor Ella hesitate because they have already seen so much during their enslaved years, that the markings of empire altered their normal psychological functioning as human beings. The use of their female parts against their will, are not the only things altered by the treatment. Their minds are changed forever.