AMERICAN LITERATURE

ASSIGNMENT

Q) Beloved is the ghost of murdered baby as well as the representative of the black and

angry dead. Do you agree? Give a reasoned answer.

Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer, Toni Morrison. The novel is set after the

civil war (1861-1865). The story revolves around an African-American slave. The idea of

the storyline is believed to be inspired by Margret Garner (an African-American slave)

who escaped slavery in Kentucky and flee to Ohio, a free state.

The book’s epigraph reads “sixty million and more” referring to the Africans and their

descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. Beloved is however a

historical novel. The novel sets this story as a focus on an epic scale re-creation of

African life under slavery and its aftermath. Beloved also focuses on the influence on

African-American historical fiction of magic realism.

Though touched by the prevailing postmodern irony towards the question of truth and

representation, fiction and history. Beloved and most contemporary novels of slavery are

not “historiographic metafictions” denying for possibly historical ‘truth’. In Beloved,

Morrison constructs a parallel between the individual, processes of psychological

recovery and a historical or a national process. It is believed, the idea of Beloved, the
character came to Morrison from an 1856 newspaper article published in the American

Baptist which read “A visit to the slave mother who killed her own child”.

Despite the dangers of remembering the past, African-American artists have insistently

based a large part of their aesthetic ideal precisely on that activity.

John Edgar Wideman prefaces his novel ‘Sent for you yesterday’ with this testament

“Past lives in us, through us. Each of us harbor the spirit of people who walked the earth

before we did and those spirits depend on us for continuing existence, just as we depend

on their presence to live our lives to the fullest”

As Toni Morrison said, “Keeping in touch with ancestor is the work of reconstructive

memory. The concern with appearance, the ideology of transmission, is, though, only part

of the overall trajectory of her revisionary part. Eventually, her work, she states, must

“bear witness and identify which is useful from the past that ought to be discarded”. It

must, that is, signify on the past and make it palatable for present politic- eschewing that

part of the past which has been constructed out of a denigrative ideology and

reconstructing that part which will serve the present. By taking a historical personage- a

daughter of a faintly famous African-American victim of racist ideology- and

constructing her as a hopeful presence in a contemporary setting, Morrison offers an

interrogation into the fields of revisionist historiography and fiction.

A reading of the novel as a recuperation of unrepresented history does not begin to

account for its cultivation of the bizarre and uncanny; its revival of gothic conventions-

the haunted house, the bloody secret and the sexually alluring ghost. Beloved is haunted
by history, memory and a specter that embodies both; yet it would be accurate to say that

Beloved is haunted by the history and memory of rape, specifically. Beloved is

manifestly about the filling of historical gaps.

In the novel, Beloved, Beloved is shown as a character who is believed to be the ghost of

the child of Sethe, whom Sethe killed early in the childhood. The narration of the story

and certain instances indicate Beloved to be a ‘physical’ ghost. For instance, Beloved’s

name itself. Sethe decided to kill her own child and write ‘beloved’ on her tomb stone as

it is how she wanted to remember her child. Beloved even tells Denver how Sethe is her

mam and this is where she belongs. But, Beloved is not any physical ghost which is there

to haunt the family, or the ghost of child that might be seeking revenge, but Beloved is

the ‘ghost of the past’. The kind of memories that the three characters have repressed and

that still haunts them. Beloved is portrayed as the ghost that makes the characters realize

and accept their past without being in denial anymore. Specially for Sethe, who has had a

past darker than Paul D or Denver. The fact that she was raped, her husband left her, all

her years as a slave, her mother in law, Baby Suggs used to hate her and worst of all, her

memory of murdering her own child and the other two boys running away. Beloved was

shaped more or less as the ghost of Sethe’s past, that haunted her the most.

Some have even compared Beloved’s ‘ghost’ to succubus (a female demon) that sexually

assaults male sleepers, as Beloved did with Paul D and forced him in bed with her. The

succubus figure is related to a vampire which is incorporated into African-American

culture in form of shape shifting witches who “ride” their terrified victims in night
(Beloved drains Paul D of semen and Sethe of vitality). The succubus also feed off the

horrible memories of its victims- as Beloved fed off Sethe throughout its existence.

The plot of the ‘ghost’ girl can also be seen to draw upon the mode of historical romance

and supernatural fate which have traditionally served to transform black history into

mythic fiction.

Morrison succeeded in creating more in her novel than a sense of history; she makes the

past aunt the present through bewildered and bewildering character of Beloved. As

Denver quotes

“anything dead coming back to life hurts”

(Morrison,35)

- Beloved makes this maxim literal as a physical manifestation of suppressed memories.

In a sense it can be believed that she is like an analyst, the object of transference and

cathexis that draws out the past, while at the same time, she is the past.

There is another critic that suggests that Beloved represents the psychological repression

that does not always leave the past behind.

Beloved is believed to be the incarnation of Sethe’s baby girl and her most painful

memory- the murder of her daughter to protect her child from slavery. Beloved, forces

Sethe to confront the gap between her motherlove and the realities of motherhood in

slavery. Beloved not just acts as the ghost of Sethe’s past, but for all three characters. She

functions as the spur to Paul D’s and Denver’s repressed pasts, forcing Paul D to confront
the shame and pain of the powerless man in slavery and enabling Denver to deal with her

mother’s history as a slave.

“The devil-child was clever they thought.

…smile was dazzling”

(Morrison,261)

Here Beloved embodies the suffering and guilt of the past, but she also successfully

embodies the power and beauty of the past and the need to realize the past fully in order

to bring forth the future pregnant with possibilities. In the last chapter of part one, seethe

moves around Paul D she comes closest to explaining the murder of her baby, but the

revelation is still internal and silent. Beloved represents the irrationality of the world by

defying definition and categorization while at the same time participating in the novel as

a sister, daughter, lover and finally perhaps as a mother.

Beloved also represents the suppression of the African-American slaves. As in her

monologue, Beloved talks about her rising from the ‘dark’. Her memories are from the

world of the dead and unlike her mother, whose mind wanders to the past, Beloved insists

that in the world of ghosts it is always the timeless present.

“All of it is now it is always now…

My own dead man is pulled away from my face I miss his pretty white points”

(Morrison,249)
Beloved’s monologue also constitutes a race-memory, as beloved describes a world that

is eternally a slave ship. Sixty million or more died on that voyage from Africa and the

slave ships were cramped and deadly places, where the bodies of the living and the dead

were cramped into the dark, rat infested cargo holds. The slaves on the ship were

terrified, most of them had been separated from their friends and family. They were

victims of often-terrible punishments and sexual orientations and many believed that

white men planned to kill them and eat them. Beloved speaks of their thirst and hunger,

of death and sickness and of “men without skin” (Morrison,249), she says all the people

are trying to leave their bodies behind.

The world of Beloved is claustrophobic and eternal and often, she is curled up in it like a

trapped fetus. She describes herself as alone and in need to find a place to be and thus

becomes desperate to be born again so that she can return to Sethe.

Beloved’s connections to the characters are both symbolic and “real”; her confused words

and thoughts are perplexing; even her physical form is shifting and mature. The

character, Beloved, like the novel Beloved works to fight a complacency towards history

by both healing and disturbing the readers. Beloved depicts a healing ritual or “cleaning”

for Sethe, whose inability to confront her painful memory of slavery and especially her

guilt for killing her child keeps her mentally and emotionally enslaved despite eighteen

years of freedom.
Analyzing the story as a whole, towards the end one might not believe Beloved to solely

be a ‘ghost’ of Sethe’s dead daughter, but a ghost of the past. Some memories and

incidents of the past that are stuck with our lives forever. Finally, while Beloved can be

read as a ritual of healing, there is also an element of disruption and unease in the novel

embodied in the character of Beloved. The story does not only focuses on the lives of the

characters, but also makes it readers aware of the situation and false treatment of the

African-American slaves through the life of Beloved.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage Books. 2010

 Pamela E. Barnett ‘Figurations of rape and supernatural in Beloved’ PMLA, Vol.

112, No. 3 (May 1997), pp 418-427

 Rody, Caroline ‘Toni Morrison’s Beloved: History, “Rememory” and a “Clamor

for a kiss”’. American Literary History, Vol.7, No.1 (Spring,1995), pp. 92-119

 Krumholz, Linda “The ghosts of slavery: Historical recovery in Toni Morrison’s

Beloved”. African American Review, Vol 26, No.3, Fiction Issue (Autumn, 1992)

 Caesar, Terry Paul “Slavery and motherhood in Beloved. Revista de Letars, Vol

34 (1994), pp. 111-120

 www.encyclopediavirginia.org

 www.en.wikipedia.org

 www.britannica.com
BELOVED
TONI MORRISON

SUBMITTED BY:

RUPAL ARORA

BA(H) ENGLISH, II YEAR

1404