Toni Morrisons "Beloved": The Ultimate Freedom

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the characters struggle with accepting the horror of their pasts in the world of slavery and moving on with their lives. Despite their theoretical emancipation, Paul D and Sethe are still enslaved, not only by continuing societal prejudices, but also their own need for self-preservation. A major part of that self-preservation is maintaining their hard-sought emancipation, not just from slavery, but from any type of bondage. Paul D upsets that precarious sense of freedom in his need for Sethe’s too-thick love; consequently, he wrestles with the knowledge that allowing himself to love her would mean risking what is left of his strength and risking his license to roam. Paul D searches throughout Morrison’s novel to preserve his freedom and his red heart stored in a rusty tobacco tin, but he nevertheless reaches simultaneously for Sethe’s love, and the conflict between the two—love and self-protection—leaves Paul D in a quandary until finally he disc...