In 1873 slavery had been abolished in Cincinnati, Ohio for ten years. This is the setting in which Toni Morrison places the characters of her powerfully moving novel, Beloved. After the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, Sethe, the mother who killed her son to protect him from a life of slavery, has yet to know the true meaning of freedom. Such a controversial and difficult to digest plot will surely make many readers' hair stand on end. Too often, however, Beloved is scrutinized for its “obviously symbolic story” and not adequately appreciated for the vivid metaphors essential to understanding post-Civil War slavery (Rumens). Morrison's intense metaphorical writing serves as a constant reminder of Sethe's endlessly enslaved life, tied to her guilt, her past, and her horribly disturbing memories. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Morrison's prose is loaded with symbolic meaning, often leaving room for various interpretations by readers. While some aspects of the plot are fully developed, explained and interpreted by the author, others are simply hinted at so that the reader can find their own meaning in the image created by Morrison. The numerous references to Sethe's "stolen milk" may be one of the images that Carol Rumens attacks in her critique as "overly symbolic." This is an aspect of Sethe's life that Morrison explores and interprets thoroughly in her writing. It conveys the importance of creating a bond between mother and daughter through breastfeeding and shows the destruction caused when this bond is broken. When Sethe arrives in Cincinnati after running away from her sweet home she is reunited with her children, this reunion is linked by a vivid image of breastfeeding, 'she closed her left nipple with the two fingers of her right and the baby opened his mouth. They hit the mark together” (94). To suggest that motifs such as these are too obvious implies that Carol Rumens has overlooked the cardinal meaning of this image. The importance of a daughter being nursed by a mother can be traced back to Sethe's early life when she was deprived of her mother's milk and "sucked by another woman whose job it was" (60). Sethe relives the torture of having her milk stolen by the boys of Sweet Home because, similar to how her mother was deprived, the inhumanity of slavery deprived her of the only pleasure a slave is given, the gift of raising her son. . This is the kind of meaning Morrison wants the reader to find in his writing. On the surface many of the metaphors in Beloved appear to be too obvious, but as with all of Morrison's writing, there is always a hidden meaning behind its visually appealing appearance. style. When Carol Rumens describes Beloved as "overly symbolic," she is implying that the novel is simply a series of symbols that make up a plot. If this is the case, Rumens has failed to notice the intense impact that Morrison's metaphors and symbols create and the crucial depth they add to the novel. The 'cherry tree' scar on Sethe's back, for example, is a reminder of the deep pain of her past. The fact that he is on her back is important because he is always with her but she can't see him, much in the same way that her pain is always present but constantly pushed aside and ignored. There's clearly sound reasoning behind Morrison's choice to shape Sethe's scar into a tree, and she describes its appearance in graphic detail as "a chokecherry tree." Trunk, branches and even leaves.There might also be some cherries" (16). This description is a travesty. She creates an image of life, a flowering tree in spring, but Sethe cannot perceive it because “the skin on her back has been dead for years” (18). This is similar to Sethe's emotional life; although physically alive, she has been emotionally frozen or dead since killing her eighteen-year-old daughter years earlier. Stanley Crouch argues that Morrison "cannot resist the temptation of the banal and the sentimental" when referring to the scene in which Sethe receives the tree-shaped scar. He overlooked, however, the vital importance of this powerful metaphor. Morrison intentionally alludes to this "choked cherry tree" because it is one of his strongest metaphors for Sethe's life as she is permanently frightened by the inhumanity of slavery, just as her back is permanently frightened by the uncontrollable desire of the boys in Sweet Home. Color may also be attacked by Rumens and Crouch in their reviews, but if so, the meaning of that metaphor has, once again, been sadly ignored. Baby Suggs is the first to realize its importance when she 'used what little energy she had left to think about color' (4). She began noticing color when she was a free woman, and Sethe believes this is because she "never had time to see it, let alone enjoy it before" (201). Why then had Sethe not appreciated or at least noticed the color of things during her time as a free woman in Cincinnati? There had only been two colors that had any relevance to Sethe when she was enslaved in Sweet Home, and those were black and white, the two colors that dictated her entire life. Even Sethe wonders how she can go so long without even noticing the color of the world around her. Every dawn he worked on fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook prepared the soup, meat and everything else. And he couldn't remember seeing a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn he saw the dawn, but he never recognized or noticed its color. There was something wrong with that (39). Morrison's solution to the problem of Sethe's forgetfulness of color is simple and is a recurring idea throughout the novel. Sethe knew no freedom. He had enjoyed the "free life" for twenty-eight days after his escape from Sweet Home, but this was cut short by the sight of his daughter's red blood and made concrete by his two-year prison sentence. From that moment on, as Morrison demonstrates through the loss of color, Sethe returned to living her life as a slave, trapped in memories of her past. If the loss of color sensitivity portrays Sethe as a slave to her past, then the physical presence of The Beloved makes Sethe a slave to her guilt. The beloved appears in the flesh the day Paul D, Denver and Sethe go to the carnival. This is Sethe's "first social outing in eighteen years", and thus a perfect time for Beloved to emerge and refresh Sethe's guilt, not only for killing her daughter, but also for having fun at the carnival (46) . Morrison has created a diabolical figure to ensure that Sethe does not get carried away, breaks free from her traumatic past, and begins "a life" with Paul D (46). Sethe, on the other hand, is subtly tormented by Beloved's presence and her persistent questions that have a tendency to bring back unwanted memories. Questions that at first seem innocuous like "where are your diamonds?" they take Sethe back to prison where her earrings were removed from her skirt, thus reminding her of why she was there in the first place, and ultimately reviving her feelings. of guilt and shame. Desperate to alleviate her own guilt, Sethe becomes.