Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” Explores What It Means to Be Human
Does it matter that “You have two feet, not four”?
In Beloved, Toni Morrison compares Sethe, one of the main characters, to two types of animals: cows and birds. The first has four feet, the second two. (Incidentally, the house that serves as the book's primary setting is known only as 124.)
The first animal is domesticated and docile, while the second usually symbolises flight, and therefore freedom. Through these comparisons, Morrison shows how Sethe is dehumanised and how Sethe claims her humanity.
Sethe as a Docile, Domesticated Cow
Whenever Sethe is compared to a cow, the comparison is imposed on her by one of the other characters, particularly by a male character that seeks to extract utility from her. Thus, the comparison — the dehumanisation — is out of her control.
Sethe is reduced to a docile creature that exists to serve someone else. We first see this when Sethe tells us that her former slavemaster, schoolteacher, watched and took notes as his two adult nephews took her milk. With a habit of taking a measuring tape to Sethe and the other slaves of Sweet Home, her former plantation, schoolteacher presumably saw the milking as no more than a scientific study.
Sethe and her four children eventually escape to 124. When Sethe sees the schoolteacher, one of the nephews, and two others come to claim “their property,” Sethe reacts by attempting to kill her children instead of allowing them to become slaves, an event referred to as “the Misery.” The nephew, looking on in horror, does not even consider the possibility that milking her could have caused her actions. Incredulous, he only wonders,
What she go and do that for? On account of a beating? Hell, he’d been beat a million times and he was white… But no beating ever made him… — pp. 176–177 of Beloved
The schoolteacher, also assuming her actions were triggered by the whipping (that occurred after the milking), thinks of how
[he] had chastised that nephew [who had beat Sethe], telling him to think — just think — what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education… Suppose you beat hounds past that point that away… you just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success — p. 176 of Beloved
The inability to consider the milking as an inciting factor shows how both men have utterly dehumanised Sethe in their minds. It seems that milking a Black slave woman is no more out of the ordinary than milking a cow.
We also see this comparison to a cow from Paul D’s point of view. Having yearned for Sethe since first knowing her at Sweet Home, Paul D used to rape calves while waiting for her to decide which of the Sweet Home men she would take as a partner.
Shortly after Paul D and Sethe have sex for the first time, Paul D notes that “the jump from a calf to a girl wasn’t all that mighty.” Though Paul D admires and largely supports Sethe throughout the book, this comparison ultimately degrades her status to that of a domesticated animal whose purpose was to satisfy his sexual urges. This is a comparison made starker by the description that the Sweet Home men “had taken to cows… when rape seemed the solitary gift of life.”
The comparison is so deeply engraved in his mind that later when he confronts Sethe about the Misery, he reprimands her by saying,
“You got two feet, Sethe, not four.”
Ultimately, this line breaks her and causes her to retreat into solitude with her daughter Sethe, and Beloved, a girl that the book hints is the reincarnated daughter that Sethe killed. Similarly, overhearing the schoolteacher instructing a student to list Sethe’s animal characteristics is what prompts her to start planning her escape from Sweet Home.
Though she is a flawed character, Sethe’s integrity and self-value are rooted in her humanity, and the acts she finds most hurtful are those in which someone verbally compares her to an animal.*
Sethe as a Bird in Flight
In contrast, Sethe is compared to birds in critical scenes in which she claims her autonomy, in line with how birds often symbolise flight and, therefore, freedom.
In Sethe’s case, she finds freedom in two extreme acts of violence. Having reunited with her children safely and found a free bBlack community at 124, she becomes a “hawk” when the schoolteacher comes to reclaim his “property” (her and her children). Stamp Paid, while revealing the story to Paul D, remembers how,
“she flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands worked like claws, how she collected them every which way.”
This grotesque imagery conveys a sense of swift decisiveness. She soars, free from all thought and emotion, particularly guilt, except for the impulse to save her children from the claws of slavery. When we see the Misery again from Sethe’s remembering of it, she describes how she heard and felt hummingbirds poking needles into her head. They,
“…stuck their needle beaks right through her head cloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew.”
The first description of Sethe as a bird comes from an external source, Stamp, while the second is conveyed (through authorial voice) as if it’s from Sethe’s (first-person) point of view. This transition in point of view shows how she has internalised the connection between her freedom and birds' imagery.
While lovely to look at, hummingbirds are fiercely territorial, perhaps because they need aggressiveness to compensate for their small size. At the same time, hummingbirds move more freely than most other birds, as they have tighter control over lateral movements (up/down, left/right, and forwards/backwards).
This territorial behaviour aligns with how animals behave when cornered. The hummingbird’s movements align with how Sethe finds freedom in finally being able to move her own body in a way that she wishes, free of a slavemaster’s commands.
The hummingbird imagery reappears when Mr Bodwin, the white man that owns 124, came to pick up Denver to work for him as a caretaker. Mistaking Mr Bodwin as a schoolteacher (or perhaps any slave catcher), Sethe feels the hummingbirds again and “flies” at Mr Bodwin with an ice pick.
Again, she is driven solely by the maternal instinct to protect her children, without fearing what her onlooking neighbours and daughters might think, without fearing what the slavemasters might think. When she tells Paul D about the Misery, she shows that her concept of freedom is closely intertwined with her ability to love her children, saying,
“…maybe I couldn’t love em property in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped won off that wagon — there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to.”
She was just as proud that she managed to plot her family’s escape, “the only thing I ever did on my own,” and she was ecstatic to experience “a kind of selfishness I never knew nothing about before. It felt good. Good and right” when she was reunited with her children, who had escaped first. Though horrified by the Misery, Paul D acknowledges that
“He knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose — not to need permission for desire — well now, that was freedom.”
Like humans, birds stand on two feet, but unlike us, they can fly. In these intense moments, Sethe forgoes all inhibitions, internal and external, to totally embrace her motherhood, an aspect that is key to her personhood and her identity. Thus, by becoming an animal, Sethe becomes human.
What does it mean to be human?
Sethe’s evolution throughout the book as a cow — a comparison forced onto her by men who wanted something from her — and a bird — a comparison that occurs ultimately through authorial voice and could therefore be seen as an identity she claims for herself — invites the reader to consider what it means to be human.
Footnote
At the end of the novel, we leave her bedridden, too weary for the foolishness of rage, much like her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, who had retired to bed when faced with the futility of rising above her oppressors (“I’m saying they came into my yard,” she insists when Stamp Paid, her friend, begs her to overcome her shame from the Misery and re-assume her leadership role in the community, p. 211.)
Reference
Vega Gonzalez, Susana. Broken Wings of Freedom: Bird Imagery in Toni Morrison’s Novels. Revista de Studios Norteamericanos, №7 (2000), pp. 75–84.
