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Beloved focuses on racial exploitation rather than class struggle. “Whitepeople”, especially men, are the oppressors in Morrison’s story. African American Gothic expresses anxieties towards the dominant white society, which subjugates slaves and ex-slaves. The torture the whites exert on black slaves reaches Gothic extremes of

114 Lawrence Hall expresses similar views (376).

115 In this dissertation I use Joel Kehler’s terms: the House of Man and the House of Nature.

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cruelty and violence. When Baby Suggs breaks down, she accuses the whites of being the source of all the blacks’ suffering. However, Morrison reminds us that the nineteenth century was not hard exclusively for African Americans. Beloved not only reflects racial oppression, but also class struggle. At the time of the story, white indentured servants were treated almost like slaves. The only difference was that their servitude was for a limited term. Amy, the white girl, is an indentured servant who helps Sethe escape and becomes Denver’s midwife. Amy’s mother had worked for her owner to pay for her passage and, after dying, her daughter had to liquidate her mother’s debt with her labor. Even if the white girl is sometimes rough with Sethe, she does not abandon the slave or turn her in.The story of the pregnant black woman’s rescue by the white servant points to female companionship and cooperation, a typical theme of Female Gothic fiction, as well as interracial solidarity.

Amy tells Sethe that she is going to Boston to get some velvet. Her desire for the colored cloth resembles Baby Suggs’s and Sethe’s. They have endured a life of hardship and denial and, as Ann-Janine Morey has pointed out, their yearning for color is their yearning for life (online).¹¹⁶ Linda Krumholz points out how the situations of Amy and Sethe are somehow alike: “The similarity between the two women’s situations supercedes their mutual, racially based mistrust, indicating that class relations (as well as differences in inherited cultural values) are central in shaping racial differences”

(1999: 113-114). These three women suffer the dynamics of domination and subordination that are characteristic of the patriarchal white society, even though the black female is also racially marginalized.

Morrison depicts the transition between the slavery system and the ex-slave’s incorporation into the paid labor force. In contrast to the black slave who serves his master without any compensation but the right to go on living, the free black receives some money. When a private called Keane, who has been with the Massachusetts 54^th, tells him that blacks were paid to fight, Paul D can only look at him with wonder and envy. Then the miracle happens when he arrives at Trenton. He is standing in a street when he hears a white man who calls him to help unload two trunks. Afterwards the white man gives him a coin. For a while Paul D does not even know what to do with

116 Ann-Janine Morey says that color is something typically associated with women, who give them innumerable names and use them as a metaphoric shorthand in assigning value: colorlessness is boring and full of color is to be rich (online). Beloved’s love for life is clearly seen in her fascination for the two orange patches in the quilt. Sethe also claims color in her last days with Beloved. She plans a garden of vegetables and flowers and buys ribbons and cloth to make garments for her two daughters: “To reclaim color [. . .] is part of reclaiming the inseparability of body and spirit and the historic witness of the enduring community [. . .] for Morrison, color, once part of the language of oppression, is being transformed into the language of life itself” (Morey: online). Pérez-Torres argues that “The punning on Baby Suggs’s fixation with ‘color’ is an appropriate verbal device for a narrative concerning and arising from a black culture” (1999: 184).

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the money or whether anybody would sell him anything. Finally, he buys some withered turnips; “his first earned purchase made him glow” (Beloved: 269).

Despite Paul D’s joy at being paid for his work, social oppression does not end for slaves after liberation. Even as free individuals, African Americans are second or even third class citizens. Baby Suggs tells Stamp Paid that blacks are in this world to look for the back door. They cannot do the things whites do. They are not in control of their lives, as free human beings should be. The old black woman is still the whites’

servant, for whom she makes shoes, the symbol of her bondage after her “freedom”.

Shoes are associated with dirtiness, inferring blacks’ condition as the lowest servants.

Sethe cannot accept this situation. That is why, she prefers to steal supplies from the restaurant where she works rather than wait at the back door of Phelps store, as all of the other blacks do, until all the whites are served. Even though Sethe feels guilty because of her petty thefts, her pride does not let her stand at the back door, as a second-class human being.

Freed life for blacks is not the paradise it was believed to be. Like slave life, it is an everyday test. Whites have the power and blacks have to work for them to receive very low salaries, with little hope of improving their living conditions. Ex-slaves’

occupations are the worst and least paid: servants, such as Janey; prostitutes; cooks, like Sethe; workers at the slaughterhouse, like Stamp Paid and Paul D. Even the educated blacks, as Stamp Paid thinks, have a very difficult life: they have “the weight of the whole race sitting there” (Beloved: 198). They have to survive in a hostile world and prove that whites’ ideas about them are wrong. This is a hard mission to accomplish in a society that discriminates against blacks.

As a contrast to the cruel situation of black slaves and ex-slaves, as Morrison argues, Africa appears to be a lost paradise: a place where free black women gather flowers and play in the long grass (Carabí 1993: 109). When Denver is telling Beloved the story of how she was born, they are on a quilt (on the bed), which brings them an image of Africa: “It was smelling like grass and feeling like handsthe hands of unrested hands of busy women: dry, warm, prickly” (Beloved: 78). In Beloved’s imagination, Sethe is the one who picked yellow flowers from the place before the crouching (in the slave ships). Now she sees these flowers on the orange patches of the quilt. In the characters’ memories the pleasant pictures of the black community in their homeland, before they were captured, contrast with the harshness of their black bondage in the New World. As Morrison claims, Africa becomes the symbol of Eden before the fall of man, ‘slavery’: “It may be a little too romantic to think about Africa as a kind of Eden, a place before the fall, before, corruption, the cradle of humanity” (Carabí

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1993: 109). Slaves’ longing for their native land makes that their feelings of unbelonging persist. Du Bois says:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (qtd. in Ogunyemi: online)¹¹⁷

Together with the paradisal image of Africa, blacks also have the myth of the "Magical North”, symbol of liberty for the slaves. However, “the harsh lesson of freedom in the

‘Magical North’ is that it offers little to combat the racist institutions, whether in the form of chattel slavery or the brutal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law” (Jesser: online).

Even though it seems to be a "better” place, it does not live up to the slaves’

expectations: it is not benevolent and welcoming (Jesser: online).