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Anthony Graf

Mr. McMurtry

AP Lit: 7th Period

29 April 2022

The Women of Beloved

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is a painfully truthful telling of a Black family in

mid-civil war America, focusing especially on three notable women as they battle the effects

slavery had, and continues to have, on them. Baby Suggs has an important history as a woman

bought out of the claws of slavery, who quickly realizes that the pains of slavery are far from

over. Sethe is her daughter in law who lives in a constant fear of her enslaved past to the point

where she’s willing to take the life of her own child. Finally, Denver is Sethe’s daughter who

never had to experience slavery, yet longs to be included in the discussions of the “before time”

and suffers alone and in fear of those like Sethe who are still affected by slavery. Toni Morrison

uses these three generations of women to display the lasting effects and generational trauma that

slavery inflicts on its victims. Denver’s arc, however, offers an escape from this mental slavery

in return for hard work and a different type of struggle. Her perseverance, love, and selflessness

act as a model for the postslavery individuals who wish to reshape the society that opposed them

one step at a time.

Baby Suggs is introduced as an individual enveloped in the pits of despair. As her

grandsons run away from their only family, “Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head,” having

decided that nothing was worth her time anymore besides “pondering color,” (Morrison 2). Her

disinterest for family isn’t new, it was a constant theme throughout her life. Early on, Sethe

comments that all Baby Suggs “lets [herself] remember” is one small detail about her eldest
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daughter, the first of eight children (Morrison 8). The high mortality rate of children born into

slavery forces parents to emotionally disconnect from the children, lest running the risk of the

parent running face first into emotional turmoil. This unnatural requirement of humans fulfilling

the role of animals understandably depressed Baby Suggs to a position of despair that only found

momentary relief in her freedom from slavery.

Baby Suggs’s son Halle offered her hope in the form of independence, something that

was new to her life. Something as simple as realizing that “[her] hands belong to [her]” only

takes meaning once Baby Suggs has something to do with those hands (Morrison 166). Baby

Suggs makes use of these hands, becoming a preacher and discussing the importance of loving,

appreciating, and of course using their bodies and selves for greater good. “‘And O my people

they do not love your hands…. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them.

Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that

either,’” (Morrison 103-104). Baby Suggs is actively working to fight the prejudice of those who

treat, raise, and breed slaves as nothing more than soulless animals. Baby Suggs, having been

afflicted with a lifetime of emotionally disconnecting those who came from her from herself,

embraces the flesh and the body. She believes that now that she is “free,” she is free to once

again risk her mental security and begin to love and attach emotions to people. Unfortunately this

once again comes back to bite her, and this time it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back and

destroys any hope Baby Suggs has for her future.

Sethe, the daughter in law of Sethe, offers a more agential view on escape from

enslavement. Sethe’s escape from Sweet Home gives her a taste of what independence and

freedom as a woman who lived her whole life as a slave might look like. Throughout the novel,

different details are revealed about the planning and risk taking involved in Sethe’s decision to
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escape Sweet Home, but one thing is clear: her desire to escape was there. Even after the fact

Sethe calls her escape “the only good thing [she] ever did on her own,” (Morrison 190). After the

escape is complete though, Sethe realizes that freedom from slavery is not as simple as just

running away from the plantation where she spent her worst days. Just as Baby Suggs realizes

that, mentally, there is no easy escape from the horrors of slavery, Sethe realizes that just because

she is physically gone from Sweet Home, slavery will still follow her. There is nothing that

makes this truth more evident than the Misery.

A mere “twenty-eight days of having women friends, a mother-in-law, and all her

children together” was enough to give Sethe a false sense of security in her new residency at 124

(Morrison 204). The illusion of freedom seeped into Sethe’s mind just enough to set up a painful

irony in what came next. Just twenty-eight days after her arrival in Cincinnati so followed the

“four horsemen”- a strict allusion to the four horsemen of the apocalypse that bring on the

apocalypse as a form of punishment (Morrison 174). Though Sethe succeeded in her attempt at

running away from Sweet Home, her actions still left a lasting impression on her life and those

around her. These four men, the schoolteacher, nephew, sheriff, and slave catcher, were all

affected by Sethe’s escape, and therefore believed in the need to punish her for for what she did,

bringing what they thought was justice to the situation. The horsemen threatened to bring Sethe

back to slavery, solidifying the lasting effects of slavery on Sethe. Even if she escaped Sweet

Home, she would never escape the perception of being seen as a slave. She is still seen as “a

jungle,” something that needs to be tied up and tamed, along with whatever offspring she puts

into the world (Morrison 234). This is what inspires The Misery: Sethe’s act of twisted love that

allows her to make a decision for Beloved stating that a life cut extraordinarily short is preferable

to one spent entirely enslaved. The moment Sethe brings the saw to the throat of Beloved is
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when Baby Suggs decides that “there is no bad luck in the world but white folks” (Morrison

105). This is the moment of realization where it becomes evident to Baby Suggs and the reader

that slavery cannot simply be walked away from; it hunts down the victim either physically, like

the horsemen, or mentally, like the despair Baby Suggs dies to.

Though it may seem easy to sympathize with Baby Suggs and fall into a despair in

regards to the situation of the characters, Denver offers a unique and optimistic perspective on

the scenario, taking an initiative that her mother, Sethe, began when she ran away from slavery,

yet failed to complete. Denver spends the majority of the novel upset with her disconnect from

the past Sethe thinks she has escaped, yet consistently seems to bring up. She despises any

discussion or connections to this past, even “flat out asking Paul D how long he was gonna hang

around,” seeing as Paul D was Sethe’s current connection to the past she supposedly longs to

forget (Morrison 52). Denver is the only remaining child Sethe has, and the only child Sethe

gave birth to outside of Sweet Home. Denver is a child of a post-slavery world, making it

unsurprising that she is the one to break the line of women in the family giving into the tempting

despair of slavery. From the moment she came into the world Denver was on the run from the

past, pushing towards the future.

Denver’s potential is realized in the final chapters of the book when Sethe is so enslaved

to the power of Beloved, her ghost child representing Sethe’s own pained past, that “Anything

[Beloved] wanted she got, and when Sethe ran out of things to give her, Beloved invented

desire,” (Morrison 283). Denver’s realization that unless she “got work, there would be no one to

save, no one to come home to, and no Denver either” was enough to force her into the world and

push through to create a future for herself (Morrison 297). So Denver conquers her fear of the

outside world and forces herself to the Bodwins, a white couple who are willing to pay Denver to
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stay the night and care for them. Ironically, this is the same job Sethe had with Mrs. Gardner:

staying the night just in case the white person in power needed help. The important difference

between the instances is that Denver is getting paid in order to support and rebuild her family,

while Sethe’s enslavement actively fought against the healthy formation of family. Denver is

beginning to use the world for her own self betterment, rather than staying hidden away and

wishing to be involved in the past that she hates just as much as she longs for.

The women of Toni Morrison’s Beloved all have different narratives that work together to

tell the story of how slavery continues to affect it’s victims long past their escape. In some,

despair takes root and quickly eats away at their belief in good in man. Baby Suggs feels this

despair, having been dehumanized and objectified for years before finally seeing the white

people she’d hated for years drive her daughter-in-law to murder her child. Some victims may be

haunted every day by memories so strong that it may seem as though those memories are still

alive and present with them that day. Sethe is convinced that the only way to move forward is to

block out her past, while in reality that past continues to affect every move she makes in her life.

In some, however, a hope and optimism may be presented through the struggles of hard work

and perseverance, allowing them to move on from the horrors of slavery. Denver shows a

postslavery world how to slowly move on, step by step, from a world of hellish servitude to one

of freedom lived for oneself.

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Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage Classics, 2022.