CHARACTERIZATION
124
-“124 was spiteful” – part 1 “full of baby’s venom” p. 3
-“The return of Denver’s hearing, cut off by an answer she could not bear to hear, cut on by the sound of her dead sister trying to climb the stairs, signaled another shift in the fortunes of the people of 124. From then on the presence was full of spite.”
The mood of 124 changes; it changes because in the beginning, the baby’s ghost fills the house with spite at its unfair and early death
-“124 was loud” – part 2: Paul D. leaves, three women left alone
The house becomes loud at Baby Sugg’s party because of all the people and also later with the violent acts that are committed by Sethe, 124 becomes loud with the absence of Paul D; Stamp Paid can hear the three women’s voices laying claim to each other, he hears the voices saying “mine”
-“124 was quiet” – part 3: Sethe is wasting away, Denver is excluded
The house becomes quiet when Sethe loses her job and the family is going hungry. “Denver… was surprised to learn hunger could do that: quiet you down and wear you out.”
-Pg.50 “124 was so full of strong feeling perhaps she was oblivious to the loss of anything at all. There was a time when she scanned the fields every morning and every evening for her boys. When she stood at the open window, unmindful of flies, her head cocked to her left shoulder, her eyes searching to the right for them. Cloud shadow on the road, an old woman, a wandering goat untethered and gnawing bramble—each one looked at first like Howard—no, Buglar. Little by little she topped and their thirteen-year-old faces faded completely into their baby ones, which came to her only in sleep. When her dreams roamed outside 124, anywhere they wished, she saw them sometimes in beautiful trees, their little legs barely visible in the leaves…
Pg.51 spite of the house itself. There was no room for any other thing or body until Paul D arrived and broke up the place, making room, shifting it, moving it over to someplace else, then standing in the place he had made.”
(“The Haunting of 124, Schmudde) – “two main factors in a haunting: an old house and the restlessness of a spirit.” The house is haunted because the 124 itself is an important factor by providing “an unbroken link to the past.” “124 is a point of antithetical forces, black and white, past and present, this world and the other.” 124, although representative of freedom, also enslaves Sethe through Beloved’s spirit.
-“looking in a mirror shattered it… two tiny hand prints appeared n the cake…” very strong presence of the ghost in 124, so strong that it is physically felt, not only in the cake but also when the force picks up Here Boy and slams him against the wall, again with Paul D. and the shaking of the table
-12…4 – 3 is missing b/c Beloved was the 3rd child, the house represents the violence that occurred, the 3 is missing to always remind the community of Beloved, they’ll always be reminded of slavery, haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s 3rd child, Beloved
Sethe says the house is “lonely and rebuked”
Denver feels suppressed in the house
(p. 23) – “I can’t live here. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I can’t live here. Nobody speaks to us. Nobody comes by. Boys don’t like me. Girls don’t either.”
Sethe – “It’s the house. People don’t—“
”It’s not! It’s not the house. It’s us! And it’s you!”
“haunted house.”-pg.23
124 has a suppressing, enslaving effect on people. Along with Beloved, like slavery, 124 serves the purpose of trapping and isolating its residents
“haint in my house,…one journey and I paid for the ticket, …it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much…” pg.23
124 intensifies the action of the novel by physically showing its effect on Sethe, Paul D., and Denver; its moods reflect the occurrences in the home, and it moves with violence when its angry (Paul D. coming into the home threatens the spirit of the baby.)
“…legs weren’t shaking because of worry, but because the floorboards were and the grinding, shoving floor was only part of it. The house itself was pitching. ..quaking slowed to an occasional lurch. ..another breathing was just as tired.” (pg.27)
“Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure… a person that wept, sighed, trembled, and fell into fits… a nervous, idle relative (someone dependent but proud).” – 124 is personified, qualities of sadness and melancholy: weeping, trembling; although 124 is violent and trapping, it is also filled with incredible sadness.
“someone dependent but proud” – representative of slavery, Morrison is making a comment about slavery through her description of the house, slavery is dependent on the slaves themselves because without it, slavery would not exist or survive. However, the slaves are treated badly because although the slave trade completely depends on the slaves, it is proud, too proud to admit its wrongdoings to the enslaved.
- pg. 161 “124, rocking with laughter, goodwill, and food for ninety, made them angry” when Baby makes a feast of blackberries, etc.
124 wasn’t always angry and violent. It was happy before the arrival of the four horsemen, and the incident of Sethe killing Beloved is what changed the spirit of 124 forever.
-124 is always completely devoid of color, even when Baby Suggs is dying and craving color, there is only a couple of patches of orange inside the room, the color represents vibrancy and life, the residents of 124 are cut off from the world and their lives are lacking vibrancy and a sense of moving forward.
(p 47) “124 was so full of strong feeling… house crowded in on her… the spite of the house…” lack of color “signaled how barren 124 really was… compared to the rest of the world, 124 was bald.”
124 is vibrant, spiritual, full of “baby’s venom” and “spite,” the house wasn’t like that until Sethe came, bringing Beloved with her
At the end, 124 is finally reincorporated into the community when Beloved is exorcised by the community people led by Ella
Baby Suggs
-Baby Suggs is a caretaker, she’s paralleled to Jesus Christ, a symbol of the Christian religion, preaching to people in The Clearing; she is holy, spiritual, the emotional rock and anchor for the community and the people in her house. She offers comfort on every level to Sethe when she is going through her hardest times whether its helping her take care of her children by being a mother figure or washing her feet and massaging her scars
-Baby Suggs: Based on oral tradition, Baby Suggs’ name and title is “Baby Suggs, holy”.
Christian symbol for Jesus Christ, her feast of blueberry pies (like the parable of the five loaves of bread and two fish, there’s suddenly an abundance of turkey and blackberry pies.), etc. paralleled to Jesus feeding a huge crowd from 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread, she washes and takes care of Sethe’s feet like Jesus washed the feet of his disciples.
-Also, the archetypal Earthmother: symbolic of fruition, abundance, and fertility (had 8 children), traditionally offers spiritual and emotional nourishment to those with whom she comes in contact. She offers spiritual nourishment to the community through her preaching, and she offers emotional nourishment by being there for Sethe. Her physical touch is enough for Sethe to keep going; she goes to the Clearing to Baby’s rock, needing her touch to take away her pain.
-Although Baby is so spiritual and full of life when Sethe first comes, after the incident, she takes to her bed and gives up on living. The murder of the child changes Baby Suggs and completely kills her resolve to live.
“Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head. From her sickbed, she heard them go but that wasn’t the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn’t like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present – intolerable…”
-In her room there are two patches of orange on her gray quilt. And orange is the only color on the quilt. The archetype of orange is for needing a push and abundance. It relates because it shows how Baby Suggs is pushing for color because her life is gray. It also shows the abundance of pain in her life. “Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it…”
Her craving for color is contrasted with Sethe. After the incident, Baby Suggs craves color even though she has given up on living. She still wants the vitality and life that she had. However, Sethe does not have this same craving. She seems to have lost all interest or consciousness of color after losing Beloved. Her inability to notice color represents the lack of life and luster in her life. Beloved’s death is a monumental moment changing all of the community forever.
“How strange that she had not missed it the way Baby did. Deliberate, she thought, it must be deliberate, because the last color she remembered was the pink chips in the headstone of her baby girl. After that she became as color conscious as a hen.”
-“Died soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.” – Sethe says this. Baby Suggs lived a hard life, slavery, losing all of her children as infants or when very young. This hardens her, and she is quite surprised with the turnout of Halle, her youngest, who refuses to leave her and even pays off her freedom. Baby provided such a strong emotional and spiritual support for everyone even when her life had been so hard. Her eight children were all separated from her, and she “felt” all of them die.
-“But maybe a man was nothing but a man, which is what Baby Suggs always said.” (pg.31)Baby Suggs views man as if it were an animal, because “they encouraged you to put some of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely that was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he had done: ran her children out and tore up the house.”
-“A man ain’t nothing but a man”, said Baby Suggs. “But a son? Well now, that’s somebody.” (pg.32) Baby Suggs commenting how a man moves around a lot but a son is a somebody because a son is always concerned about you and cares for your existence. “Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized. So Baby’s eight children had six fathers. What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children. Halle she was able to keep the longest. Twenty years. A lifetime. Given to her, no doubt, to make up for hearing that her two girls, neither of whom had their adult teeth, were sold and gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye. To make up for coupling with a straw boss for four months in exchange for keeping her third child, a boy, with her- only to have him traded for lumber in the spring of the next year and to find herself pregnant by the man who promised not to and did. That child she could not love and the rest she would not. “God take what He would,” she said. “And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing.” (pg.33) Shows, once a slave always a slave, with people breaking promises, and never any “genuine” freedom
-“Took her a long time to finish with blue, then yellow, then green. She was well into pink when she died. I don’t believe she wanted to get to red and I understand why because me and Beloved outdid ourselves with it.” (pg. 237) Here, Sethe talks about the different colors that Baby Suggs had colored and each color represents the different phases of her life that she had gone through. The blue is the archetype for sadness, which is representative of her times in slavery where she had been enslaved and sold to Mr. Garner. The yellow is the archetype for health, which had affected her ability to serve Mr. and Mrs. Garner because of her failing hip. This health problem is what pushed Halle to earn his mother’s freedom and give her a place to stay where she would no longer have to serve anyone but herself. The green represents the renewal, when she is finally freed and set into a new home where she can start her life fresh and without so much worry in her life. It is almost a rebirth of sorts for her as she experiences freedom for the first time and finally knows how it feels. The green is also an archetype for fertility, as when Sethe had arrived with a brand new grandchild, Denver. The renewal of the family is also shown through the color green. Pink is then a symbol of the innocent love they had experienced now that their family was together again, except for Halle. They had been welcome with their neighbors and felt accepted into society for the first time, and felt like normal human beings, almost. And finally red was the symbol for the blood that had spilt by Sethe’s hands and the sacrifice that she had made for the children by killing one of her own. The red which had been absent since her freedom, had come back to haunt her when the white slave owners had arrived to take them back and ruin the family they had created.
Mr. Rooster
Envied by Paul D. because he has freedom
The animals are freer than men which shows how low slaves’ status is (p 87)
“He (Mister) was always hateful… Bloody, too, and evil… Mister, he looked so… free. Better than me. Stronger, tougher. Son a bitch couldn’t even get out the shell by his self but he was still king and I was… Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was… I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.” – Paul D.
Mister serves the thematic purpose of showing the extreme debasement of the slaves, the horrors of slavery; he represents the low status of the slaves because even an animal as insignificant as a chicken has more freedom and authority than the slaves.
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