Trauma is a ghost and the memories can be haunting. Each has the ability to drive a person to madness, or inspire them with a certain enlightened strength. A person's ability to act resiliently, despite the severity of their harm, determines how their experiences will affect them and, therefore, whether these effects will have a positive or negative influence on their future life. Beloved, by Toni Morrison, demonstrates the relentless effects of trauma on its victims, no matter how serious the incident, and transparently depicts both the positive outcomes and negative consequences that arise from how a person copes his fate. In this, Morrison advocates the power of traumatic experiences, as they can evoke everything from empathy to madness, and the importance of remaining resilient in difficult times. Each character in Beloved undergoes some sort of damaging experience that either fills them with a sense of compassion or pushes them toward their own demise. That a person applies their pain to their personal growth and exerts an unsuspected strength to overcome the traumatic effects of their agony opens the way to a more beautiful and more enlightened future. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay The weight of one person's trauma cannot be compared to another's because a painful experience will trigger absolute agony in a person, regardless of how their pain may be juxtaposed with that of others. Baby Suggs falls prey to these careless comparisons, as members of the close-knit community begin to criticize her and the experiences she's had. As they gather in the courtyard of 124, the general consensus of the community becomes: Where does she find all this, Baby Suggs, holy?... The loaves and fishes were her powers - they did not belong not to a former slave. who had probably never carried a hundred pounds on the ladder… Who had never been whipped by a ten-year-old white boy like God knows they had. Who hadn't even escaped slavery. (Morrison 161-162) Baby Suggs' peers, to whom she has devoted herself, and those who have become family to her, do not believe that her trauma matches theirs, and therefore choose to isolate themselves . her. Because of the horrors they witnessed, from being "whipped" to being forced to flee through betrayal, people allowed their horrific encounters with mistreatment and torture to stunt their personal growth. They don't realize that ultimately what Baby Suggs endured, compared to what they themselves endured, doesn't matter because torment can't be quantified, and that's the torment that drove Baby Suggs to his grave. She may not have "escaped slavery" or "carried a hundred pounds to weigh," but Baby Suggs is pushed beyond the limits of her "holy" goodness, to a breaking point that loses his last hope of life. of freedom truly experienced. In her final moments, she cries out for life's simplest beauty, color, which helps her find her first pieces of peace in the crazy life she has led. Ultimately, Baby Suggs' continued inability to face her trauma is what inevitably consumes her, and no matter what horrors she may or may not have encountered in her life, she comes to a place where she can't fight anymore. the trauma that affects his life is based solely on the resilience he shows in his situation and what he is able to retain from his experiences. Where Baby Suggs' pain, although seemingly moderate compared tothat of others, kills her, characters like Sixo are empowered to take charge of their lives and attempt to make a radical change. Sixo, whose horrible life ranges from constant beatings to just a taste of freedom before having it ripped away from him, is inspired and motivated to escape, take his friends and "family" with him, and live a free life. Despite being brutally murdered by the schoolteacher and his white nephews, his last minutes of life show that he truly overcame his traumas and, although he was physically unable to escape, he regained his spiritual freedom. As he is “surrounded and tied,” then set on fire, “he laughs… His feet are burning; the fabric of his pants is smoking. He laughs. Something's funny... Sixo interrupts, laughing, to shout, "Seven-O!" Seven-O!' » (267). As he is being burned alive, the man who never laughed goes into a fit of rage. He laughs because, although he won't live long enough to experience the world outside of Sweet Home, his wife and the child she's carrying will. A piece of Sixo, a human being who shares his genetics and the only thing truly unique to him, his identity, will be born into a life of freedom. In his final moments of his life, Sixo realizes that he has finally achieved the basic human rights afforded to all human beings, namely emotion, happiness, family, and an inheritance. His laughter is his way of showing that even if he falls, he has forever overcome the fears of his slavery and will be peacefully free in his afterlife. The overwhelming horrors of one trauma versus another do not degrade the mistreatment and torture suffered, and ultimately, Sixo and Baby Suggs happily accept death and spiritual liberation. Although the weight of Sixo's torture may have been more severe than Baby Suggs' experiences, his resilience and ability to see a hopeful future beyond his trauma gives him a more positive and powerful ending than Baby's. The trauma is relentless, even though when the torture stops, the suffering does not stop. It is easier to become consumed by your own pain and the memories associated with such agony than to fight what seems like a hopeless battle. This is the case of Paul D, who wasted his eighteen years of freedom literally "walking away" from his problems, refusing to learn from his experiences and locking away his emotions perceived as dangerous in his heart of “tobacco box”. His ultimate breaking point comes when he discovers his true value as a slave, nine hundred dollars. This completely strips him of his humanity and forces him to view himself as someone else's property. When Sethe and Paul D begin to reminisce about the horrible memories of Sweet Home, Paul D remembers, ““I will never be Paul D again, alive or dead. »…Saying more might push them both to a place where they could. I can't believe it. He would keep the rest where it belongs: in this tobacco tin buried in his chest, where a red heart once was” (86). Paul D's trauma has left him guarded and scarred, and he therefore demonstrates a strong desire to protect himself and others from ever feeling this pain again. He does not allow himself to continue to reflect on his difficulties, despite the fact that he and Sethe remain in a constant period of trying to heal and move forward, in order to prevent either of them from falling back into a cycle of blocking in the world. pass. Paul D condemns all of his emotions, memories, and the components that make him human into his "rusty tobacco tin" so that he will not attach to the feelings that come with a pure "red heart." Although his intentions are to protect himself from the pain of living in the past, Paul Dclosed himself off to the empathy, compassion, and pure love that can be learned wholeheartedly in overcoming trauma. Every person is susceptible to trauma and being seriously affected. by the horrors they experience. Ironically, the character who embodies the horrific trauma that tortures every member of the community also acts on the effects of his own damage. Beloved is a newborn baby, barely crawling, when his loving mother puts a saw to his throat. When she is reborn and returns to 124 years old, the trauma caused by her murder and abandonment as a child is what leads Beloved to embody the haunting return of the past. Séthe tries to apologize, to explain the reasons for her actions, but Beloved refuses to understand. The text says: [Beloved] took the best of everything - first... the more she took, the more Sethe began to speak, to explain, to describe how much she had suffered... Beloved accused her of having left behind. For not being nice to her, for not smiling at her… Sethe was crying… Beloved was not interested. She said that when she cried, no one was there. (284) Beloved's own traumatic experience of seeing her mother kill her and not "saying goodbye to her or even looking at her before running away" is what drives her to act the way she does . Her own revenge for her pain is to "take the best of everything" and grow as Sethe deteriorates. Being a representation of how easily the past can haunt the present, Beloved has complete control over Sethe and makes her feel the regret and utter agony that she did not feel when she committed the act for the first time. Beloved's manipulation of everyone around her, to achieve revenge she can never receive, is the result of her inability to sympathize with her mother's own "suffering", forgive and learn the lesson clearly taught: the importance of sacrifice, family, and the power of unconditional love. Beloved personifies the idea that memories, no matter how horrible, cannot be avoided, but must instead be faced. Continually felt agony has the capacity to drive a person to madness, isolation, and self-destruction. As Sethe begins to get used to a life without slavery, her former owner finds her intent on enslaving her and her children. On the verge of madness with her total refusal to condemn her babies to such a cruel life, she plans to kill them. Sethe, the woman whose entire individual identity is nourished by her motherhood, is driven to murder her own children because of the trauma she has suffered. When Beloved returns, she is forced to confront the guilt she has rejected for years, and: "Once Sethe saw the scar...the little curved shadow of a smile in the kootchy-kootchy place -coo under her chin…once Sethe saw her. , touched him with her finger and closed her eyes for a long time… It was as if his mother had lost her mind” (281-282). Even in her freedom, Sethe is still possessed and controlled by memories of slavery and everything she did to desperately escape it. Seeing the scar on Beloved's neck forces her to look the ghost inside her in the face and face a memory she's tried to forget. Sethe chooses to isolate herself from the community, rejecting any company that might be offered to her, in order to avoid her guilt. She shows no regret until Beloved returns, and the trauma born from her memories can only torture her more. Clearly, not being able to allow herself to feel and heal from her trauma is what sends Sethe into an unhealthy world of loneliness, guilt, and haunting memories. While the inability to address thetrauma with effectiveness and resilience can lead to isolation, madness and being entirely consumed by the past, facing difficulties correctly and learning from them can bring a person to an enlightened state of empathy, compassion, love for loved ones. them, and ultimately, healing. The person who best describes this ability to recover is Stamp Paid, who built his entire identity as a free man through his recovery. Having been forced to free his wife, one of the only elements in his life that made him human, Stamp Paid comes to the ultimate conclusion that he has paid his debt to the world. He decides to live deliberately and entirely for himself, because he no longer believes he can ever owe anything. The trauma Stamp Paid endured, rather than damaging his sense of hope or his will to persevere, inspired him to become a strong advocate for solidarity and unity within the African-American community. When he finds himself in Ohio, among the population of ex-slaves, "he extends his freedom from debt to others by helping them pay and repay everything they owed in misery" (218 ). Stamp Paid, much like Baby Suggs, discovers his new life's purpose in charity and bringing others to the same state of spiritual and emotional restoration he has found. He thrives both by believing for himself and by teaching others: “You have paid for life; now, life owes it to you. Stamp's role in the community is to protect, both physically and emotionally, and to unite the African American people of Cincinnati in a type of family and humanity they have never known. As someone who has faced despair and not lost faith in a happy life, Stamp Paid plays the most important role in the community's dynamics, as he shows pure compassion towards those who are less fortunate than him and the positivity that allows you to truly learn from your past experiences can bring you. The person who finds the greatest sense of positivity and empowerment among her struggles is Ella, the ultimate hero of the story. Having experienced a childhood as a constant victim of rape at the hands of her father and brother, Ella believes she has seen "the lowest ever" and has come to the conclusion that "no one has been so lucky" ( 301). Given that Ella experienced a type of trauma that could have completely broken her, Ella chose to learn from her experience that no one deserves this type of cruel suffering and she acts with empathy to defend those who must endure it. In the end, “it was Ella more than anyone who convinced the others that a rescue was in order.” She was a practical woman who believed that there was either a root to chew or to avoid for every illness…There was also something personal in her fury” (301-302). The fact that Ella is described as "practical" speaks volumes about her character's resilience, as practicality becomes difficult to achieve when a life of incredible agony, "a murder, a kidnapping, a rape - little matters,” is all a person grows up to be. know the world to come. Ella sees Sethe and her daughter's damaging situation as "reasonable" and finds "something personal" in her pure rage. Seeing the horrors she endures, Ella has become a compassionate, empathetic, and empowered woman who will protect anyone in trouble, whether they agree with her past decisions or not. Ella is the epitome of human understanding and consideration for the experiences that drive people to certain actions, because she knew how to grow from her trauma. There is a lesson to be learned about resilience and recovery, even in the most horrific situations: It is never too late for a person to take action...