Food Metaphors In Beloved

In this section from Toni Morrison's Beloved I copied into my journal, Sethe is rubbing Paul D's back and thinking about how this activity is similar to kneading bread. She then extends the metaphor to a third activity: trying to push away unpleasant memories. 

One understanding of metaphor -- and there are many -- is that of proportional analogy. To give one example, from John Kirby's article Aristotle on Metaphor, "as old age stands to life, so the evening stands to the day: so the poet will call evening "old age of the day," as Empedocles does, and old age "the evening of life" or "the sunset of life." Unlike Empedocles, with his two part analogy, here Morrison has a three part analogy: 1. back rubs remind of 2. kneading bread which, in turn, remind of 3. suppressing unpleasant memories.

I also noted another food metaphor in today's reading:

"Must be from the old days," Sethe said. The days when 124 was a way station where messages came and then their senders. Where bits of news soaked like dried beans in spring water -- until they were soft enough to digest.

Here some information can only be understood after time has passed is, by analogy, similar to how dried beans take time to soften enough to eat.

Morrison wrote the novel for an audience deeply familiar with reading and literacy. However, characters like Sethe and Paul D lived in a pre-literate world -- at one point we learn that they learned only enough of the alphabet to recognize their names. Food and its related activities, rather than written language, becomes one metaphor Morrison uses to stand for memories of slavery.