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‘What There Was Before Language’: Animals and the Challenges of Being Human in the Novels of Toni Morrison

‘What There Was Before Language’: Animals and the Challenges of Being Human in the Novels of Toni... Comparative Critical Studies 2, 3, pp. 365–80 © BCLA 2005 CHAPTER TWO Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved revolves around one central act: a runaway slave, Sethe, cuts the throat of her infant daughter rather than let her be taken back to slavery. Schoolteacher, the slavemaster who has come to reclaim them, attributes Sethe’s reaction to a beating one of his nephews gave her before she ran away: But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run. Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to think – just think – what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education? … you just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success. (pp. 149–50)1 However, for Sethe, it is not the nephew’s beating but rather Schoolteacher’s classification of her as animal that makes slavery ultimately unbearable. She recognises that this classification undergirds every atrocity committed against her as a slave. She knows that it is the fact that Schoolteacher’s nephews saw her as ‘the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses’ (p. 200) that http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Critical Studies Edinburgh University Press

‘What There Was Before Language’: Animals and the Challenges of Being Human in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Comparative Critical Studies , Volume 2 (3): 365 – Oct 1, 2005

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References (1)

Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
© Edinburgh University Press
ISSN
1744-1854
eISSN
1750-0109
DOI
10.3366/ccs.2005.2.3.365
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Comparative Critical Studies 2, 3, pp. 365–80 © BCLA 2005 CHAPTER TWO Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved revolves around one central act: a runaway slave, Sethe, cuts the throat of her infant daughter rather than let her be taken back to slavery. Schoolteacher, the slavemaster who has come to reclaim them, attributes Sethe’s reaction to a beating one of his nephews gave her before she ran away: But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run. Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to think – just think – what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education? … you just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success. (pp. 149–50)1 However, for Sethe, it is not the nephew’s beating but rather Schoolteacher’s classification of her as animal that makes slavery ultimately unbearable. She recognises that this classification undergirds every atrocity committed against her as a slave. She knows that it is the fact that Schoolteacher’s nephews saw her as ‘the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses’ (p. 200) that

Journal

Comparative Critical StudiesEdinburgh University Press

Published: Oct 1, 2005

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