In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, she starts off a chapter with “the four horsemen came-schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff” (174). Immediately the imagery that comes to mind is the Four Horsemen from the Bible, who come to Earth as part of the Apocalypse. And in the book, the events following the four horsemen’s arrival can definitely be seen as apocalyptic and world changing. As the mother of four children, Sethe has to make a horrible, split-second decision: does she want her children to experience the horrors that she went through in slaver, or is there another option? Readers judge her decision one way or another, but I’m not sure we have the right. We can read about Sethe’s experience and try to imagine it, but most readers have never experienced anything like what she went through and most likely we never will.
Back to the four horsemen, why did Morrison choose to have the reader’s initial impression of this scene from the outsider’s perspective? One factor was probably timing. You can include these perspectives now and then go back to Sethe’s and other’s later in order to get as much out of the scene as possible. Another point that was brought up in class is because of emotions. The four outsiders are cruel people who are doing their job and only care about retrieving what they see as property and bringing them back so that they can be paid. They don’t have emotions and they can look at this scene in a way and describe it and only give us the facts. Other characters that are involved would look at it and be biased by their emotions. The four horsemen can look at the scene, ignore the tragedy, and give us the cold, hard facts. Seeing this lack of compassion just gives us more reasons to sympathize with Sethe and try to understand her decision.
I agree with you that the "four horsemen's" perspective on the horrific scene in Baby Suggs's yard does work to generate sympathy for Sethe, but I don't see this narrative perspective as being particularly "factual" or objective. We do get a cold accounting of the facts--and they'd shock us no matter how Morrison chose to present them to us. But the slave-catcher has his own vested interest in this scene, and we're shocked by the way he refers to characters we know and admire in such dismissive, belittling, racist terms. And schoolteacher, of course, tries to draw a bunch of "lessons" from the horrific scene, and we don't at all agree (I assume) with the meanings he takes from it all. Our perspective is displaced here, and we get a clear and scary picture of precisely what Sethe is trying to save her children *from*. In this sense, I definitely agree that this chapter "gives us more reasons to sympathize with Sethe."
ReplyDeleteI also agree that this scene works to make the reader more sympathetic to Sethe's cause because there is something cold and distant about the four horsemen's perspective. It's not that it's objective, but its that they have no person relations to Sethe as a human being, and they basically just have a non-emotional loss from the situation. If we read it from any of her family or friend's perspectives, it would have been much more tragic, and a truly emotional loss that would make it hard for readers to sympathize with Sethe again.
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