Beloved Rhetorical Analysis

Serpentine Appetite

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, when Sethe is going into labor with Denver and encounters a white woman (thinking at first the woman is a boy), a sudden urge to attack the woman surfaces, much like the predacious appetite of a snake. Sethe describes to Denver that “something came up out of the earth into her” (38). The use of the unspecified pronoun “something” suggests that Sethe was either unwilling or unable to adequately describe what came over her, as if the experience were frightening or unnatural. Sethe furthers the characterization of her experience as unnatural when she says the feeling was “like a freezing, but moving too” (38). Sethe’s description of herself “freezing, but moving” perhaps suggests that she was not in control of her body (she was not able to move but still found herself moving), or in other words, was in some way possessed by whatever came out of the earth. She says it “‘look[ed] like I was just cold jaws grinding’” and that “suddenly she was eager for [the woman’s] eyes, to bite into them; to gnaw [her] cheek” (38). With phrases like “cold jaws grinding” and eager to “bite into” the woman’s eyes and “gnaw [her] cheek,” Morrison connotes a malevolent, almost snake-like appetite for the woman. This snake-like characterization coupled with an experience similar to possession could be a reference to the biblical serpent, a representation of both forbidden appetite and corruption.