Essay on the dehumanisation of slaves in "Beloved" - Toni Morrison

Explore how Toni Morrison describes the dehumanisation of slaves in Part 1 of “Beloved”

Dehumanisation is the act by which humans deprived of their “humanness”, stripped of their humanity, divested of individuality, and that are denied of basic human rights by other people. Dehumanisation can be mechanistic, applied on several people by organised methods, like during the holocaust and it can be animalistic as well. Human beings can be treated like less than animals, which happened a lot during slavery, and the case in Beloved, where the consequences of a lifetime of slavery are examined. Violence dehumanises a person and makes them feel inferior for the rest of their life.

The theme of dehumanisation is present all throughout the first part of Beloved, It specially and most obviously appears through the animalisation slaves suffered in the plantation. When Paul D tells Sethe about having a bit in his mout, he tells her that the worst part was not tasting the metal and not being able to communicate, but being watched by the roosters. He hates this because he feels like they are mocking him. He feels not like them but even inferior, completely insignificant: “Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was... I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.” Similarly, that masters put the African Americans in cages like they were animals: "But then they shoved him into the box and dropped the cage door down, his hands quit taking instruction.” Furthermore, they were not only dehumanised and completely brought to worthlessness but also their dead bodies were not treated with respect and with even less worth than an animal’s: “Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin.”

The animalisation was so extreme that it had even made them come to act like animals themselves. When a slave was caught doing something strictly forbidden and heavily punished they let their "animal" instinct to takeover in order to save themselves: "The very nigger with his head hanging and a little jelly-jar smile on his face could all of a sudden roar, like a bull or some such, and commence to do unbelievable things.”

There is also a reflection about who is the least human. The slaves that were constantly mistreated and seen as animals or the white masters that dehumanised them, and therefore had an inhuman behaviour? One of example of “animal” and “savage” behaviour is when the boys come and "milk" Sethe. She is treated like she is an animal which is dehumanising for her but the ones actually acting like animals are the white boys: ”After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. Thats what they came in there for. Held me down and took it.”

The effect of being constantly humiliated, dehumanised and animalised makes them also see each other as animals. After finding out what Sethe did to her children, Paul D sees Sethe as an animal and openly expresses this to her: ”You got two feet, Sethe, not four”. This also leads them to see themselves as inhuman, like when Paul D says : “I am not a man”

Moreover, slaves are dehumanised by their inability to do simple things that a human should be able to do on a regular basis, like communicating:

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