After reading Beloved, I found that one of the most memorable parts of the book for me was reading the first sentence. “124 was spiteful” (1). The other two books of the novel mimic this beginning, the second “124 was loud” and the third “124 was quiet.” These phrases show how throughout the book, the house is haunted by a baby’s ghost, how the house is damaged by the ghost’s physical presence, and how is it devastated by the ghost’s grief and anger. The novel is described as moving from tension to chaos to grief, which as a whole seems to comment on the historical level of slavery as well.
The story of Beloved is one of anguish, of how your past will always come back to haunt you. I think this book also comments on the theme of names and slavery. I found it interesting that the house Sethe lives in was referred to as simply 124. It wasn’t called “124 (street name)” or “number 124,” and as a result, it seems like it has a real name. Also, the way that the book referred to 124 as spiteful, loud, and quiet gave the house a sort of personality. This made me think of how slave names were treated throughout the book and why it was important for the book to treat names in this way.
As a slave one was usually called only by a first name, although some adopted the surnames of their masters. Many freed slaves chose to adopt a different name, often an innocuous American name or naming themselves after a hero (e.g. Washington, Jefferson, etc.). Morrison addresses this topic in individual characters, namely Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs chose her name over the slave handle “Jenny Whitlow” because her husband’s name was Suggs and he called her Baby, and “Baby Suggs” was all she had left of him. Stamp Paid also chose his name for a specific reason, since for him it symbolizes the settlement of debts. Beloved, the name of the book, speaks to the loss of a child. In the book, we even learn that “124” is a name bestowed; it didn’t have a name when Sethe’s family first lived there since Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. Looking at names, readers are supposed to see that names serve as reminders of links to other people and personal principles, as well as how this affect those who were previously slaves.
While I feel that this thought isn’t very complete, it was something that stood out to me as I read the book and I wanted to explore it further. Please comment if you have other thoughts about the implications of names in the novel.
This is really interesting. I never really thought of names as anything more than names. In slave culture it makes sense how important they would have been. I also think it's really interesting how you said 124 was personified, as it was always described to be something.
ReplyDeleteStamp Paid is also a good example of this kind of self-naming: his name, chosen for himself, reflects his strong feeling that he's paid whatever debt he owes to life when he "allowed" his wife to be taken by the slave-owner. Naming is a critical aspect of the legacy of slavery--since the slaves were named after their owners' family names, the lack of a "real name" reflects the lack of familial/historical memory, a literally untraceable connection to a lost family tree. So when Baby Suggs "chooses" the name her husband always called her, rather than "Jenny," which she's never been called by anyone, it reflects this larger historical context of naming and self-naming in relation to slavery.
ReplyDeleteI think the fact that we never hear Beloved's given name, only the one put on the tombstone, is interesting because it's like an additional way of suggesting how the child is no longer alive. Not knowing her given name seems to evoke a sense of loss and perhaps even the repression of Sethe's memories, as the name of her daughter might be too painful to remember. At the funeral, she couldn't hear or remember the preacher's words beyond the first sentence, which is telling of the emotional trauma she was feeling. Another thing that comes to mind is how Baby Suggs didn't remember the features of her children because she knew that doing so would make the pain of their being taken away even greater. Maybe the same sort of thing is happening with Sethe. Regardless of whether these connections make sense or not, Beloved is still an important name because it describes the significance of Sethe's connection with her first daughter.
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting observation. I failed to see the parallelism in the first sentence of each book until you mentioned it. 124 definitely does seem like a character of its own and not just an inanimate object. Just like how we see Denver develop as a character, we can see 124 develop as well.
ReplyDeleteI think your observations are very interesting. I liked that you included the renaming of 124, as the house was basically a character in the novel and had such an important presence.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of the importance of naming in Morrison's Beloved has strong parallels to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In Beloved, names invoke an ability to control, while in Invisible Man, the lack of a name suggests that there is no control.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of the importance of naming in Morrison's Beloved has strong parallels to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In Beloved, names invoke an ability to control, while in Invisible Man, the lack of a name suggests that there is no control.
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