The Dynamics Of Love Toni Morrison s Beloved - 2402 Words

GwonSeob Cha Paper Topic The Dynamics of Love In Toni Morrison’s Beloved â€Å"The need of a love-relationship is the fundamental thing [in life].† (Guntrip 45) Love - possibly one of the most universally known yet personally exclusive emotion felt by man. In merely one word, â€Å"love† is used to express the love between a person and an object, a parental figure and his/her dependent, two people in a platonic relationship, and even the bond between two lovers. Love can also come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and even magnitudes. Throughout her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison shows a very peculiar sense of love through Sethe’s relationship with Beloved as well as her relationship with Paul D. Although certain accounts may seem as if the love died†¦show more content†¦As Schapiro states earlier, â€Å"The mother, the child s first vital other, is made unreliable or unavailable by a slave system which either separates her from her child or so enervates and depletes her that she has no self with which to confer recognition.â⠂¬  (Schapiro 194), and lastly, Paul D had to personally endure the tragedies of slavery, which involved constant torture and humility. Due to these misfortunes that everyone had to go through, they themselves are unable to recognize their own inner selves. It is here where the problem arises: if the characters themselves do not know themselves, how are they expected to know, or even love one another? Sethe, Beloved, and Paul D all have one thing in common: a lack of memory. In Beloved’s case, she was murdered as an infant and therefore doesn’t own any memories, and in Sethe and Paul D’s case, they have a constant need to forget their memories for the fear of their memories overtaking them. It is specifically these characters’ lack of memory, or self, that helps create this interesting dynamic of love. The love that they share between them, at first is incomplete and rather