Two-Toned Morality in Beloved

Generally a novel is driven by story and by conflict. Throughout the history of the novel, the story and the conflict have been related very closely, where the story is the story of the conflict. Pamela, for example, where the conflict is a very moralistic one and where Mr. B is a clear antagonist to Pamela’s protagonism, is the story of the resolution of that conflict.

Jane Eyre has an antagonism in it, but it is embodied by the circumstances of the plot rather than by one particular character. Here, too, the story is the story of the resolution of that conflict. Beloved is a novel that departs somewhat from this kind of resolution. Much of this novel’s story has already taken place before the exposition of the novel, so that the main conflict is whether or not the effects of that story can be resolved. The resolution and the conflict do not conclude together. The morality involved with this resolution is not a clear matter of antagonism.

If beloved were merely a novel of antagonism, perhaps it would take place entirely at Sweet Home. Slavery itself, or perhaps Schoolteacher would be played against the slaves’ protagonism in order to expose the amorality of slavery. Beloved is more complicated, subtler, in the way that it addresses morality. It studies the complicated aftermath of slavery, which is already wrong. Alongside its examination of what is wrong about slavery and the resolution of its effects, the novel depicts a situation, a murder, brought on by the threat of slavery.

That a main idea can be discussed in moral terms with room for an ambiguous morality — this is some of the value of a moral discourse within a novel. A novel can show that human experience is not easily discussed in moral terms. The morality of the murder is not portrayed in terms of clear protagonism and antagonism. The murder is not clearly right or wrong, good or bad. It is both, or neither. It is two-toned.

Critic Robert Heilman defines “two-tone fiction” as an aspect of fiction that “implies rather a problem or difficulty, not necessarily an irreconcilable disunity, but at least a divergence that excites inquiry.” Heilman adds that two-tone fiction has to do more with emotional response than with meaning. “Two-tone” fiction invites reader to respond to it with conflicting emotions, and makes no case for either one, or makes a case for both. “Beloved” is an excellent example of two-tone fiction as a literary device that can be used to portray morality with more complexity than with a conflict between a protagonist and an antagonist.
Heilman describes the way two-toned fiction can be used to discuss morality. “The issue may arise from emotional contradictions that express themselves in fictional elements of not wholly congruous impact.”

To say that there are “elements of not wholly congruous impact” is to say that there are certain things in human experience that can be portrayed and discussed in terms of their morality, but that the morality of such things can never be fixed. The murder that Sethe commits in Beloved has just such an impact on the other characters in the novel, on its victim perhaps, certainly on Sethe and also upon the reader. The novel is a study of this complexity, more than it is the recounting of its resolution.

Many of the other characters in the novel, Sethe’s community, are peripheral to the story of the novel because they have shunned her for having committed the murder. By the end of the novel, they have compromised their earlier simplistic view of the murder, by reuniting seethe with their community and by addressing their own guilt. The community begins to understand the two-toned nature of the murder, that it may have wrongness to it, but that it is somewhat understandable. Because there is a “not wholly congruous impact” to the murder, though, there are those characters that do not eventually come to the same conclusion about it.

There is a two-toned depiction of who is at fault for the killing. Sethe may be the one who committed the act, but it may never have been necessary if the community-at-large had given an adequate warning about Schoolteacher’s arrival.

Stamp looked into Paul D’s eyes and the sweet conviction in them almost made him wonder if it had happened at all, eighteen years ago, that while he and Baby Suggs were looking the wrong way, a pretty little slavegirl had recognized a hat, and split to the woodshed to kill her children (158).

Paul D. compares Sethe to a four-legged animal when he discovers what she has done, and he, like Sethe’s sons decides to shun Sethe, to leave and never return. To these characters, the murder is clearly wrong. Perhaps they resemble the Schoolteacher’s nephew who thinks that “no beating” would ever drive him to do such a thing.

Baby Suggs is obviously troubled by the killing, even during the immediate aftermath, but she is not so repulsed to avoid having “traded the living for the dead”, handing a living baby to a woman who holds a freshly killed one in spite of her thoughts “Don’t let her take that last one, too.” (152). At first, Baby Suggs seems to understand Sethe’s motivations, but being haunted by images like that of blood mixed with milk finally weighs Baby Suggs down into an incurable depression. The other characters react variously in judgement of Sethe. Many of them change their minds. Many of them can not. That variety further emphasizes the two-toned nature of the morality of her actions.

If the character of Beloved is interpreted to be the reincarnated spirit of the murdered child, then Beloved’s interaction with Sethe can be read with some bearing on her morality. Beloved’s very touch, to Sethe, is depicted in two-tone. It is at once medicinal and frightening. Beloved rubs Sethe, soothing her, and yet Beloved also seems to strangle Sethe. Strangulation might be an act of revenge, against Sethe in retribution for the murder she has committed, or it might be that Beloved is telling the truth when she says “I fixed it, didn’t I? Didn’t I fix her neck?” I kissed her neck. I didn’t choke it. The circle of iron choked it.”

Sethe can only recall her frenzied desire to prevent her children from enduring slavery’s beatings again. Sethe’s motivation for the murder is the basis of its two-toned morality. In the presence of a certain and absolute wrong, that is the slavery that threatens her children, she is confronted with a desire to commit a lesser wrong in order to prevent a greater one. She chooses the lesser of two evils. To Sethe, it would be better to be dead than to endure slavery, and it would be better to murder her own children than to give them up to a slave master. Murder may well be always wrong, and certainly it is wrong here, but in Sethe’s mind it was the right thing to do at the time.

Sethe, in particular, is a character who must be comfortable with two-toned interpretations. She must live with the reality of what she was forced to do, which was wrong and yet right.
A reader presented with a depiction in two-tone like this one may choose to call into question the reliability of the narrator. It is no accident that Beloved does not say that the murder is entirely condemned or entirely condoned, in fact the novel is largely the story of this dilemma. Beloved is not the kind of story that can resolve its moral issues in a tidy fashion and perhaps this is why it is a story that must not be told. The fact that this story is told, in the way that it is told, in two-tone is an example of what storytelling can do to demonstrate a moral issue in all of its complexity, leaving the reader to understand that complexity. An understanding of the complexity is enough.

It should be clear that Beloved is a novel that employs the device Halperin defines in “Two-Toned Fiction”. In depicting the aftermath of Sethe’s decision to kill her children, there are a variety of consequences, positive and negative, so that it is clear that the narration favors a complex answer to the question of the morality of the killing. The killing was wrong and right. It was two-toned.

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Dylan

Pleased to meet you! I'm Dylan Kinnett, your friendly neighborhood writer.