Sethe's Rememory

Thomas Bebbington

p. 5, KP

AP Lang and Comp

April 11, 2013

Sethe’s Rememory

In Beloved, Toni Morrison describes the way in which Sethe deals with her past while remembering her life in slavery. In this passage, Toni Morrison employs cataloguing, repetition, and similes to illustrate the strategies Sethe utilizes to escape from her past and enter into a new life of freedom. While thinking about milk she used to feed her children on Sweet Home, “she was spinning. Round and round the room” (187). To distract herself from her painful past, Sethe utilizes the tactic of spinning, and Toni Morrison describes this with repetition to describe the rapidity of her actions, as if she is trying to rid herself of the memories. As an attempt to enter a life of freedom, she uses these unusual movements to cling to the present. Morrison describes her movement throughout the kitchen when she says Sethe moved “Past the jelly cupboard, past the window, the sideboard, the keeping-room door, the dry sink, the stove” (187). In this delineation of Sethe’s movements, Toni Morrison employs cataloguing and asyndeton to emphasize her erratic actions in an attempt to relinquish her memories. She uses these calming strategies to mentally and physiologically ground herself, closing her mind to all the distant events that continue to plague her life eighteen years later. When Paul D recognizes her comforting movements, he describes her as “a slow but steady wheel” (187). This simile that Morrison employs compares Sethe to a “wheel”, almost guiding her into a new life of freedom. The wheel is the decisions Sethe makes leading her into a life not dictated by chains. By utilizing distracting movements that resemble a “steady wheel”, Sethe is determined to escape her memories of chains and begin to live a life of liberation and freedom, and distracting herself by “spinning” is the only way she knows how. To block out the past events, and start life over is the only way Sethe can reach happiness.