Color In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison’s captive novel, Beloved, addresses the malicious cruelties in consequence to slavery. Morrison captures readers with the story of an African American’s journey through slavery and into a new life, carrying along the painful memories from the past. In Beloved, the main characters must reconstruct themselves after the physical and mental devastation of slavery. However, color in this novel is not confined to the discussions of race. Once experiencing freedom, characters notice the world is not just consisted of black and white but also many other vivid colors. The color red provides a valuable insight into different prominent themes throughout the novel: love, hope, passion and death. Throughout Beloved, color is used to represent …show more content…
Sethe, the novel's protagonist, lives in a world defined entirely in just black and white. The racial polarity of the time period, created by slavery, combined with painful events as a result of slavery strips all color out of Sethe’s world. After Sethe murders her own child in a desperate attempt to save the child from a life of slavery, she can no longer see color. “ After that she became as color conscious as a hen. Every dawn she worked at fruit pies, potato dishes and vegetables while the cook did the soup, meat and all the rest. And she could not remember remembering a molly apple or a yellow squash. Every dawn she saw the dawn, but never acknowledged or remarked its color. There was something wrong with that. It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it.” (Morrison 50). Sethe’s obliviousness to color correlates to her suppressing of memories. However, the color red is the only color that breaks that wall for Sethe.
Sethe can't forget what she did to Beloved. Here, the color red represents death and pain . Pink which is part of the red, from the spectrum is the color of the gravestone Sethe acquires for