In a novel about racism and slavery, one cannot pay too much attention to the question of colors. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, however, the issue of color is not limited to discussions of race. Blood, ribbons and even roosters, all in bright colors, take up the setting of the novel and provide valuable insight into the major themes of dehumanization and the struggle for freedom. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Sethe, the novel's protagonist, inhabits a world set entirely in black and white. The racial dichotomy created by slavery, combined with the traumatic associations of events caused by slavery, erased all color from his world. Sethe's inability to see color gradually emerges after she murders her own child in a desperate attempt to save the child from a life of slavery: every day she worked on fruit pies, dishes of potatoes and vegetables while the cook prepared the soup, meat and everything. the rest. And she didn't remember a Molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but did not recognize or notice its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as if one day she saw red baby blood, another day pink shards of a tombstone, and it was all that (47). Sethe's unconsciousness towards color is explained by the lack of freedom that Sethe has experienced in her life. She has a brush of color, the menacing red that will continually reappear throughout the novel, when she runs away to get Denver. Amy, the “white woman” who attended Denver’s birth, goes to Boston in search of velvet. “Carmine,” she said, referring to the deep blood red. "It means red but when we talk about velvet, we have to say 'carmine'." (41). This red is revisited during Sethe's murder of her daughter approximately twenty-eight days later. After her death, Sethe was imprisoned for two years, further limiting her freedom. Sethe believes that Baby Suggs, her stepmother of sorts, began contemplating color because of Baby's newfound freedom. Sethe says that “now I know why Baby Suggs thought about color in his later years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy, it before” (237). This mental connection of Sethe's between color and freedom raises an interesting point. After Sethe's release from prison, she is no longer a slave in the technical sense, that is, someone else's property. However, her continued inability to see color illustrates that in her own mind, Sethe is still enslaved. This feeling of continued connection is due to his past. She feels guilty about Beloved's murder, but it's not the act of homicide itself that bothers her. This is the idea that Beloved, as a child, could not understand the reasons for his death. When Beloved appears in human form, Sethe does not instantly recognize her. Eventually the reappearance is recognized for what it is and at this point Sethe "pleaded for forgiveness, counting, listing over and over her reasons: that Beloved was more important, meant more to her than her own life » (285). This type of continued servitude and submission perpetuates the subjugation of Sethe's life and prohibits her from experiencing any color except those that define her: black and white. Baby Suggs' relationship with color, however, is not as simple as Sethe assumes. It's true that she started thinking about color after gaining her freedom, but it's a little more complex. In aconversation with Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs explains his obsession with colors. She begins: “What I need to do is get into bed and lie down. I want to focus on something harmless in this world. » “What world are you talking about?” There is nothing harmless here. » “Yes, it is. Blue. It doesn't hurt anyone. Neither does yellow." "You go to bed to think about yellow?" "I like yellow" (211). Until Beloved's murder, it would be relatively easy to pin down Baby Suggs' favorite color like the black skin of her fellow slaves at a spiritual gathering in the woods, Baby Suggs reinforces the dominant dichotomies of the slave population: black versus white, oppressed versus oppressor She cries out for white contempt for skin color in slavery. reminds the slaves who listen to him that “here, we are flesh; flesh that cries, that laughs; flesh that dances barefoot in the grass. despise” (103). Suggs' color spectrum, before Beloved's death, consists of just two: black, with which she fully identifies, and white, which for her embodies oppression, hatred, and arrogance. Color enters Baby Suggs' life. when she realizes that she cannot agree with either black thinking, as represented by Sethe, or white thinking, such as that of a school teacher, to reach a conclusion about the circumstances surrounding the death of Beloved. Stamp Paid makes this observation: The heart that expressed love, the mouth that spoke the Word, did not count. They came to her garden and she could neither approve nor condemn Sethe's difficult choice. Either could have saved her, but beaten by the assertions of both, she lay down. The Whites had finally tired her (212). After a lifetime of consciously being entirely black and not white, Suggs begins to realize that there are indeed shades of meaning that may not fit into such a two-tone system. In realizing this, she must also realize the relative severity of reactions to black and white: a white man can whip a black man's back until he bleeds, just because of his color, and Sethe, her own beautiful -black girl, kill Beloved at the sight of a white man, lest the child continue to be a slave. In response to this, Suggs chose to spend the rest of his life focusing on the most harmless colors, the ones that no one was ever killed or whipped over. It "took [her] a long time to get through blue, then yellow, then green. She was well into pink when she died. I don't think she wanted to go red... " (237). The color red takes on a special meaning in this novel. Obviously, it is associated with blood, but as Morrison has tried to point out throughout the novel, color is rarely as simple and unambiguous as it may seem. The character of Beloved is often associated with this meaning of the color red. She is the one who was murdered, whose blood caused Sethe's "wet red hands" and the "red puddle" into which Baby Suggs slips (178-9). But when combined with Stamp Paid's red ribbon and Paul D.'s own experience with the color red - Mr. Rooster's comb and his own red heart whose existence he originally doubts - the reader may come to recognize the use of red. the coloring is not a direct analogy to blood, but rather an exclamation point to emphasize the text's powerful dehumanizing moments. Stamp Paid's ribbon is a perfect example of this convention of emphasis: Tying his tray on the bank of the Licking River, Staring at it as best he could, he saw.