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Beloved Study Guide

Toni Morrison

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Part One: Chapter 1

Part One: Chapter 1

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Note: The text of Beloved is divided into Parts One, Two, and Three. Within each part, there
are smaller sections. They function like chapters, but are never designated as such by the
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book itself. For ease of reference, this SparkNote has labeled these sections as numbered
chapters. This numbering system runs continuously through all three of the book’s parts.
Beloved

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Summary

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Full Book Analysis

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. SUMMARY

Character List
See Important Quotes Explained CHARACTERS

Sethe
CHARACTERS

Themes
The novel opens in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio. For the past eighteen years, Sethe, a formerly LITERARY DEVICES
enslaved person, and her daughter, Denver, have been living in a house that is haunted by the
ghost of Sethe’s rstborn baby daughter. Until eight years ago, Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Slavery
Suggs, also lived with them in their house at 124 Bluestone Road. Before she died, Baby Suggs QUOTES

sank into a deep depression, exhausted by a life of slavery and by the loss of all eight of her
Full Book
children. She spent her last days requesting “color”—bits of brightly colored objects she hoped
QUICK QUIZZES
would alleviate her sadness. Her death came only a short while after Sethe’s sons, Howard and
Buglar, each ran away from 124 following encounters with their dead sister’s ghost.

Sethe works hard to remember as little as possible about her past, and the memory of her sons Take a Study Break
is fading fast. Most of her painful memories involve Sweet Home, a plantation in Kentucky
where she lived as an enslaved person until her escape eighteen years ago. On this day, QUIZ: Is This a Taylor Swift Lyric or a
however, she returns home and nds an unexpected and surprising guest: Paul D. Paul D was Quote by Edgar Allan Poe?
one of ve men who were Sethe’s fellow enslaved people at Sweet Home; these had included
Paul A, Paul F, Sixo, and Sethe’s husband, Halle. Although Sethe hasn’t seen Paul D in eighteen
years, they slip into easy conversation and Sethe invites him inside. Paul D walks into a pool of The 7 Most Embarrassing Proposals
in Literature
eerie red light and feels a wave of grief come over him. Sethe explains that the presence is the
sad specter of her dead baby, whose throat was cut before it was two years old. At her
daughter’s funeral, Sethe mistook the preacher’s reference to the “Dearly Beloved” mourners
The 6 Best and Worst TV Show
for a reference to her dead daughter. Afterward, she agreed to ten minutes of sex with an
Adaptations of Books
engraver in order to have the word “Beloved” carved on the baby’s headstone.

Paul D has desired Sethe ever since she arrived at Sweet Home at the age of thirteen to
replace Baby Suggs. Baby Suggs left because her son Halle had bought her freedom with ve QUIZ: Which Greek God Are You?
years of weekend labor. She chose Halle, and together they had two sons and a daughter.
Sethe was pregnant with a fourth child, Denver, when the family made its escape from Sweet
Home. Sethe and Halle were separated during their escape, however, and neither Paul D nor
Sethe knows what happened to Halle. Seeing her mother irting and talking about Sweet
Home with Paul D makes Denver feel lonely and excluded. She reacts with surly jealousy and
dissolves into tears at the dinner table one evening. She cries that she cannot stay in the house
because the community knows it to be haunted. Consequently, everyone avoids Denver and
she has no friends. When Paul D wonders aloud why they haven’t moved from 124, Sethe rmly
asserts that she will never run away from anything again.

Later, Sethe explains that she was whipped before she ran from Sweet Home to meet Baby
Suggs and her children, whom she had sent ahead, in Cincinnati. The white girl who helped
deliver Denver said the resulting scars looked like a chokecherry tree. Sethe cries and says that
the men who beat her stole her baby’s milk before she ran. Paul D comes up behind her and
pulls down the top of her dress. He cradles her breasts in his hands while he kisses each line of
her scars. The house immediately begins to lurch and shake as the ghost vents its rage. Paul D
shouts and ghts with the ghost, chasing it away. Denver resents Paul D’s act—the ghost was
the only company she had.

Analysis

From the beginning, Beloved focuses on the import of memory and history. Sethe struggles
daily with the haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories and also in
the form of her daughter’s aggressive ghost. For Sethe, the present is mostly a struggle to beat
back the past, because the memories of her daughter’s death and the experiences at Sweet
Home are too painful for her to recall consciously. But Sethe’s repression is problematic,
because the absence of history and memory inhibits the construction of a stable identity. Even
Sethe’s hard-won freedom is threatened by her inability to confront her prior life. Paul D’s arrival
gives Sethe the opportunity and the impetus to nally come to terms with her painful life
history.

Read more about the context of Beloved and the importance of history
in Toni Morrison’s novels.

Already in the rst chapter, the reader begins to gain a sense of the horrors that have taken
place. Like the ghost, the address of the house is a stubborn reminder of its history. The
characters refer to the house by its number, 124. These digits highlight the absence of Sethe’s
murdered third child. As an institution, slavery shattered its victims’ traditional family structures,
or else precluded such structures from ever forming. Enslaved people were thus deprived of
the foundations of any identity apart from their role as servants. Baby Suggs is a woman who
never had the chance to be a real mother, daughter, or sister. Later, we learn that neither Sethe
nor Paul D knew their parents, and the relatively long, six-year marriage of Halle and Sethe is
an anomaly in an institution that would regularly redistribute men and women to di erent farms
as their owners deemed necessary.

Read more about slavery’s e ect on family as a theme.

The scars on Sethe’s back serve as another testament to her dis guring and dehumanizing
years enslaved. Like the ghost, the scars also work as a metaphor for the way that past
tragedies a ect us psychologically, “haunting” or “scarring” us for life. More speci cally, the tree
shape formed by the scars might symbolize Sethe’s incomplete family tree. It could also
symbolize the burden of existence itself, through an allusion to the “tree of knowledge” from
which Adam and Eve ate, initiating their mortality and su ering. Sethe’s “tree” may also o er
insight into the empowering abilities of interpretation. In the same way that the white men are
able to justify and increase their power over enslaved people by “studying” and interpreting
them according to their own whims, Amy’s interpretation of Sethe’s mass of ugly scars as a
“chokecherry tree” transforms a story of pain and oppression into one of survival. In the hands
of the right storyteller, Sethe’s marks become a poignant and beautiful symbol. When Paul D
kisses them, he reinforces this more positive interpretation.

Read more about trees as symbols.

The chapter provides other similar examples of the way that Paul D’s presence works to help
Sethe reclaim authority over her own past. Sethe has always prioritized others’ needs over her
own. For example, although she suggests in her story that schoolteacher’s nephews raped her,
Sethe is preoccupied with their theft of her breast milk. She privileges her children’s needs over
her own. When Paul D cradles her breasts, Sethe is “relieved of their weight.” The narrator
comments that the “responsibility for her breasts,” the symbols of her devotion to her children,
was Paul’s for a moment. Usually de ned by her motherhood, Sethe has a chance to be herself
for a moment, whoever that may be. Paul D reacquaints Sethe with her body as a locus of her
own desires and not merely a site for the desires of others—whether those of the rapists or
those of her babies.

Read an in-depth analysis of Paul D.

Paul D’s arrival is not comforting to Denver because Paul D threatens Denver’s exclusive hold
on Sethe’s a ections. He also reminds Denver about the existence of a part of Sethe that she
has never been able to access. Although she is eighteen years old, Denver’s fragile sense of
self cannot bear talk of a world that does not include her. She has lived in relative isolation for
her entire life, and she is angered and disturbed by Paul D’s sudden intrusion.

Read more about Denver’s response to Paul D’s arrival.

The events of the novel unfold on two di erent temporal planes: the present of Cincinnati in
1873, and Sethe’s time at Sweet Home during the 1850s, which is narrated largely in ashback.
In this rst chapter, Morrison plants the seeds of the major events that will unfurl over the
course of the novel: Sethe’s encounter with schoolteacher and his nephews; the enslaved
people's escape from Sweet Home; the story of Amy Denver; and the mystery of Sethe’s baby’s
murder. These past events are told in a nonlinear manner, fading and resurfacing cyclically as
the characters’ memories reveal more and more to the reader and to the characters
themselves.

Read more about Beloved as a work of historical ction.

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