Вестник ТГПУ им Л.Н. Толстого №3 2005

СОТРУДНИЧЕСТВО № 3, 2005 Natalia Kondratyeva One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. GastonBachelard Today most of the people live to the fullest and prefer not to think about their past. They consider it easy to forget all the wrongs they’ve done, let alone what wrong have been done to them. Yet, years pass and inner conflicts sooner or later begin to tear people from within. Having read the novel “Beloved" by Toni Morrison, its main character, Sethe, has had a great influence on me. She taught me how to deal with the past and made me understand that to achieve psychic wholeness, each person must come to accept his or her memories and understand the vital importance of the community. Mistaken is a person if he thinks the past can be gone for good. The past is a lasting presence, waiting to be resurrected. One never knows what it can reveal. The struggle for psychic wholeness is a continuous one in Toni Morrison's Beloved. It is a process which requires access to painful memories of loss, grief, confusion, rage and guilt over the murder of Sethe’s daughter whom she didn’t want to grow up into slavery: “I put my babies where they be safe; I'd rather they be at peace in heaven than in hell here on the earth.” The author of the novel, Toni Morrison, clearly refrains, at least explicitly or in conventional terms, from either condemning or condoning Sethe's desperate deed and expresses her opinion in the words ofBaby Suggs, Sethe’smother-in-law: "... she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice". One can only endeavor to understand rather than judge this hopeless decision. Still even if no explicit judgment is passed on Sethe's deed, even if the reader is given a number of unquestionably good reasons that partly legitimate her decision, she is nevertheless shown to commit a major transgression in deciding to cut her daughter’s throat with a saw. It’s seen when Paul D, shortly after his arrival at 124, takes Sethe and Denver out to the carnival. They walk past a big patch of rotting roses stretching along the lumberyard fence. The narrator then makes the following remark: "The sawyer who had planted them twelve years ago to give his workplace a friendly feel— something to take the sin out of slicing trees for a living-was amazed by their abundance ..." Trees play a crucial role in African religion but apart from any religion the most salient feature of the tree is that it is identified with Life. The reader can now better grasp the meaning of the narrator’s comment upon the sawyer's misdeed: it is what the tree encloses, Life itself, that is sacred. And having committed this murder Sethe infringes upon a principle whose sacredness is postulated by the narrator's remark on the sawyer's sin. Besides, Morrison introduces two details which leave no doubt as to her intention to use the tree as evidence of her protagonist's crime. The man who commits the sin of cutting trees is no anonymous person. He is a sawyer, which cannot but call to mind the very saw' that Sethe uses to cut her daughter's throat, thus drawing attention to the similarity between the two actions. Moreover, the murder of the children (with a saw!) inevitably brings to mind abortion, that is also considered a transgression against the unborn life. It’s completely wrong because it is a failure to love and care for a human baby. It is also wrong because it constitutes the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. What should a woman do if she has aborted a baby and now realizes she did wrong? She does not need to spend the rest of her life with the burden of unforgiven guilt. The Bible says abortion is wrong, but it also offers a source of true forgiveness through the blood of Jesus Christ. God will forgive if people will come to Him according to His conditions. The past must not be buried deep in people’s hearts and memories but must be revived and endured in order to heal.