Chapter 6 - Form, Freedom, and Ethical Choice in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Summary

Chapter 6 focuses on how, for Toni Morrison’s Sethe in Beloved, a sense of precarity comes from the brutal conditions of slavery from which she has recently escaped as well as from her own traumatic attempt at murdering her children so as to take them out of the circuitry of enslavement. I isolate the terms of the ethical topos that Morrison so suggestively lays out behind Sethe’s terrible choice and connect this to other aspects of the novel. These historical and personal details about the violence of slavery form a potent background to our reading of the novel and allow us to attend closely to the problem of moral residue that is seen most tellingly in Baby Suggs’s response to Sethe’s choice. I return to Aristotle’s anagnorisis (but this time split between two characters) as a way of reviewing one of the central concepts of tragedy.