The Imagery Of Beloved Trees - Essay Example

The Imagery of Beloved Trees in Morrison’s Novel

One of the central characters of the novel "Beloved" by Tony Morrison is a black slave Sethe placed in the jungle of trees of slavery with her daughter Denver where she gets scars, seeking freedom, both physical and spiritual. The writer focuses the reader's attention on her feminine destiny, consciousness, on her personal and social problems. She portrays Sethe as an independent tree, a strong-willed and determined woman who focuses on the well-being of her family and daughter Denver and does everything to protect their children from slavery.

Addressing the image of Sethe, the author does not only reflect the horror in which the slaves lived but also depicts the power of motherhood. With incredible force, the author shows how Sethe deliberates her child – “Beloved” from fate, in which Beloved embodies the burden of guilt. She is sure that her children and especially her daughter Denver are her best creation in the “jungle” that symbolically represents slavery; they belong to her by nature.

In the novel “Beloved”, Tony Morrison describes the abuse that Sethe had to endure on the way to the freedom getting scars. She was beaten and raped by white men, but she had the courage not to be harmed. Tony Morrison claims to be a political feminist, and she is not interested in the “jungle” attacks on men. The author wants to show the process of the formation of the African-American personality through the women's eyes. She does not portray men as weak, but only wants them to be just as strong people like African American women.

In the novel, “the imagery of beloved trees” appeals to a reader’s subconsciousness. In the conditions of the “jungle of trees” that the slavery is, blacks were considered to be a working cattle, which only brought income, and for the slave owner, sex did not matter. And although for the hosts it was advantageous for their slaves to have many children, because children also became their property, however, no concessions were given to women.

White hosts did not consider black to be people; they were just labour, like animals getting scars. Even in the Sweet Home, the teacher, watching Sethe, he wrote in the left column her human qualities, and in the right – the animal’s ones symbolically and ironically depicting that she lives around the trees in the jungle.

No slave-girl had her own body to belong to her. When Sethe was pregnant expecting to give birth to Denver, she was beaten with a whip of cowhide so much that scars on her back represented the jungle as if a tree had grown. The trunk of which was made of red bark, and on the branches of a tree were leaves and flowers, small, white, like cherries. Each of the characters had their vision of scars on Sethe's back.

Amy, a white girl, sees a tree in it. Baby Sags takes the scars for crimson roses, and when Paul Dee sees Sethe's back, the scars had already turned into patterns, and the skin was so rough that it resembled the washing machine. The dead skin of scars on the back of Sethe symbolizes the dead part in her past and the jungle of the slavery with the scars.

The prose by Morrison and her characters create the story of African-Americans, and in the tree lines, the author uses the magic realist techniques, but here they are performed by functions of characters. Morrison seeks to return to her people what he was deprived of – the ethnic identity. This is a feature of Morrison's magical realism: it is not mythological ruins of reality like those in the Latin American writers, but through mythologization of trees and anesthetization, Morrison creates the history of slavery hidden behind every tree in the “jungle”. Real events get a kind of prose in her sometimes a mystical decision, in accordance with the principles of creating novels that she advocates: “It must be beautiful and full of power, it must work on people. The novel must enlighten; this is what opens the door and shows the way. That shows what conflicts and problems exist and grow as a tree”.

These theses seem to those that can be illustrated by an analysis of the use of Morrison’sdrawing of one of the most ambiguous and universal images in world culture - the image of the Tree. In its two main general mythological categories - “The Tree of Life” and “The Tree of the World”- it contains a very wide range of meanings. In Latin American Literature, these values ​​were assimilated selectively and also underwent various changes when people tried to hide in the forest and find salvation among the trees. One of the main characters of the novel is Sethe, whose only defenders are trees, and she is hiding in the forest behind a tree from the chase: “I found myself in the forest, and in such a place, where drooling will drip from any lumberjack.

Pecans of such sizes that have not been heard of since the twenties. Maples are spread six to seven branches as thick as trees. Acacia, White Walnut, White cedar, ash. The trees are healthy and not very many. Others would seem to be even where, as long as the light, playful breeze does not ruffle to their crown. [...] Crossing and stopping, the girl appeared in the pierced sun of a grove of bamboo intertwined with wild grapes”. This marvellous forest will forever remain in her memories as the symbol of salvation represented by trees in a jungle.

The image of a tree in a romance space by Tony Morrison is not magical or miraculous; it seems to be a magical connection between a man and trees, the relationship of man with nature. The characters of the book by Morrison need to communicate with nature, they often recall happy moments in the forest, pleasant moments of relaxation in the shade of trees, they perceive the forest as salvation, and trees as friends. Morrison using the universal polysemy of the symbolism of the Tree enriches its internal structure with the new characteristics and finds new facets of understanding the image.

Acting in this way, Morrison seems to be returning to African Americans what was taken from them. Her works, like the literature of magical realism, often perform a cognitive function, “Not only they operate with subjective characteristics of the author’s perceptions, but also use them to characterize a person or epochs”. Giving an essential role to mythological elements in consciousness in the life of African-Americans, the writer “splices the sphere of a grounded life and the sphere of innermost depths of consciousness”,“ closing the beginnings and ends of the historical and of the being of her people”.

In contrast, the example of the male weakness in the novel is Paul Dee, who tried to banish the ghost of the Beloved, but after that, he materialized into a young girl and settled down in the house owned by Sethe and her daughter Denver. She began to push Paul Dee first out of the room, and then out of the house, and only moving to the barn, Paul managed to find peace. And although Paul Dee understood that Sethe was trying to, he had the courage and wanted to live with her all his life, but Paul still looked the weaker than her and even her daughter Denver realized this. Paul bowed to her power and understood that there was not a strong enough man to escape, and he needs her, Sethe’s, help. Unlike Paul, to help her mother, Denver was forced to seek help from a commune of women, which cleaned the house from the ghost of Sethe's long-dead daughter. And the most interesting moreover, the characters perceive the supernatural without surprise, simply as part of reality. Introducing paranormal forces into the novel, Tony Morrison gave a voice to all those who died of slavery.

In the novel, Tony Morrison recreates the worldview of the characters, their mentality that celebrates the past, slavery and racism. This work contains theoretical interpretations of the reality of African-Americans, those who have survived everything on their own. And although Tony Morrison herself was not a slave after hearing stories about slavery from her grandmother, she decided to start writing about black women, about their destiny in the jungle of slavery, and consciousness, because the writer must highlight the problems that concern her kind of, she just can't write about another culture. Morrison uses the symbolism of trees to display the settings of slavery with the elements of magical realism.