DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

• Topic: Beloved by Toni Morrison Part-1

• Subject: Postmodern Fiction
• Lecture 9, Week 9
• M. Phil. English semester 1st
• Toni Morrison’s Beloved won her Nobel Prize for Literature. She
has converted ‘white and male-centered literary world into a
multicultural mosaic” (Tally, 2007, p.1) The novel contains
supernatural elements like ghosts. It paints a grim and horrible
picture of slavery. It also deals with issues of women.
• “Through the language of memory, metaphor and dream,
Morrison at once examines what was suppressed, determines
what is useful for survival, and discards what is too painful to
carry forward. Though history is central, it is a “history of
consciousness”, “a ghost story”, which, simply because it lacks
“materiality” is no less real” (Tally, 2007, p. 23).
 PART-1
• 124 WAS SPITEFUL: Sethe and Denver were alone victims of a
baby’s venom in the haunted grey and white house on Bluestone
road in Ohio. Sethe’s sons Howard and Burglar could not bear the
Ghost’s disturbances and fled the House. Baby Suggs whose
present and past were equally ‘intolerable’ was dead. Denver
confronted the ghost at which her Mother, Sethe’ said “She wasn’t
even two years old when she died. Too little to understand. Two
little to talk much” (p. 4). Sethe asked her mother-in- law to go
somewhere else. Suggs, who had eight children and had lost them
all, refused and said, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its
rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby.
My husband’s spirit was to come back in here? or yours?” (p. 5).
• Sethe walked through the fields and noticed “Sweet Home rolling,
rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes” (p. 6) in its shameless
beauty and thought if hell was “a pretty place too”. Sethe had
memory of Paul D sitting on the porch. He wandered eighteen
years and arrived to find his mother Suggs dead. Sethe said Suggs
did not die hard “ Being alive was the hard part” (p. 7). D asked if
she believed her husband Halle was still alive. Sethe replied she
and Suggs considered him dead in 1885 on her baby’s birth. Sethe
escaped the house with the help of a white girl. D asked her
“What kind of evil you got in here” (p. 8). They six belonged to
Mrs. Garner’s farm who had sold D’s brother to pay her debts.
Sethe had a wave of grief and said her new-born baby was dead.
• D: “If a Negro got legs, he ought to use them” (p. 10). Sethe arrived
at Sweet Home at thirteen and five of its men looked at her. “A year
of yearning, when rape seemed the solitary gift of life” (p. 10). Mr.
Garner said he did not want a nigger around his wife. His own
niggers were: Paul D Garner, Paul F Garner, Paul A Garner, Halle
Suggs and Sixo, the Wild man “All in their twenties, minus women,
fucking cows, dreaming of rape, thrashing on pallets, rubbing their
thighs and waiting for the new girl” (P.11). She chose Halle.
• Denver asked D if he knew her father. She seemed not to belong to
“Your daddy” and “Sweet Home”. Her “own father’s absence was
not hers” but her grandmother’s son who bemoaned him, her
mother’s husband, D’s “absent friend”.
• “Only those who knew him (“knew him well”) could claim his
absence for themselves” (p. 13). Denver told D about the presence
of a baby ghost in the house not sad but “Rebuked. Lonely and
rebuked” (p. 13). “My sister,” said Denver. “She died in this house”
(p. 13). It reminded D of a headless bride in sweet home but he
contradicts himself “It wasn’t sweet and it sure wasn’t home” (p.
14). He thinks the ghost would not harm him as he was stranger
there. Denver feels terrified: “I can’t live here. I don’t know where
to go or what to do, but I can’t live here. Nobody speaks to me.
Nobody comes by. Boys don’t like me. Girls don’t either” (p. 14).
Sethe consoles her but D finds it hard to live in a haunted house.
Sethe answers: “It’s easier than some other things” (p.15).
• D asks her to leave for her daughter’s sake but Sethe refuses “I got a
tree on my back…No more running—from running. I will never run
from another thing on this earth. I took one journey…It cost me too
much..” (P. 15).
• D “What tree on your back? Is something growing on your back? I
don’t see nothing growing on your back.”
• Sethe “It’s tree all the same” (p. 15). A white girl told her 18 years ago
“A chokeberry tree. Trunk branches, and even leaves” (p. 16). She had
milk for her baby girl. D said men knew nothing about it. Sethe “Then
they know what it’s like to send your children off when your breasts
are full” (p. 16). School –teacher caused a tree on her back. “And they
took my milk” (p. 17). D had a charm. People confessed and shared
their innermost secrets with him.
• NOT QUITE in a hurry but D was ready for most craved sex. He
kissed the wrought iron on her back. She took him upstairs but was
not prepared “though she could remember desire, she had
forgotten how it worked; the clutch and helplessness that resided in
the hands..” (p. 20). He was finished before they could take off their
clothes as his “dreaming of her had been too long and too long ago”
(p. 20). D realized the wrought-iron maze on her back to be a
revolting clump of the scars. Not a tree… May be shaped like one
but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting;
things you could trust and be near; talk to…”(P. 21). D spent his time
with Sixo. Sixo went thirty miles to see a woman on Sunday but was
dead tired like a corpse. Sethe undressed further when she rose to
cook.
• Sethe wept when she told him about her
stolen milk. D rubbed Sethe’s back skin but she
could not feel as it was dead. “Trust things and
remember things because the last of the Sweet
Home men was their to catch her if she sank”
(p. 18). D challenged the ghost with shaking
legs and than the spirit left. Denver missed her
brothers—Burglar (22) and Howard (23) while
her mother was upstairs with Paul D.
• Suggs had said about men “They encouraged you to put some
of your weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light
and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations,
after which they did what they had done: ran her children out
and tore up the house” (p.22). She was not scared of the five
men in Sweet Home. The men looked tamed in their presence.
Suggs eight sons had had six fathers. Suggs called Halle his 8th
nothing but a man but he remained close to her. God took her
three children and gave her Halle “who gave her freedom
when it didn’t mean a thing” (p. 23). D heard Sethe’s breathing
and tried to oblige her but his appetite was gone “Actually it
was a good thing—not wanting her” (p. 24).
• Sixo took 3 months and 243 miles to bring
Thirty-Mile woman round but failed to reach
the meeting place. D burned for Sethe who
had not an attractive face but mouth. “Halle
was more like brother than a husband” (p. 25).
Mrs. Garner arranged their marriage and they
coupled in the cornfield. For D “It had been
hard, hard, hard sitting there erect as dogs,
watching corn stalks dance at noon” (p.27).
• DENVER SECRETS: Miss Bodwin, the white woman, gave
her and her mother Christmas cologne during war days.
Beyond 124 was a stream, a narrow field and a wood with
five boxwood bushes where Denver played “closed off
from the hurt of the hurt world” (p.28). She was named
after a white girl who had assisted in her birth in a canoe.
Sethe walked barefooted and got hurt. Sethe was born in
Carolina or Louisiana and she remembered its song and
dance. “Oh but when they sang. And oh but when they
danced and sometimes they danced the antelope” (p. 31).
Her later life was full of grief.
• She fled to be free. “That on a ridge of pine near the Ohio River,
trying to get to her three children, one of whom was starving for the
food she carried; that after her husband had disappeared; that after
her milk had been stolen, her back pulped, her children orphaned,
she was not to have an easeful death. No.” (p. 31). She saw a
monster when she was extremely hungry. She met a white girl who
did not expect a nigger there. The girl asked her to bring some
velvet from Wilson store. The girl worked there to pay off her
mother’s death. Sethe had never seen velvet: “If I did I didn’t know
it. What’s it like velvet” (p. 33). The girl, Amy, said “Well, Lu, velvet is
like the world just born. Clean and new and so much smooth” (p.
33). Sethe was taken to a lean-to for delivery. Sethe finds hard to
believe in time.
• “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to
think it was my memory. You know. Some things you forget.
Some things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are
still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—
the picture of it—stays, not just in my memory, but out
there, in the world…Where I was before I came here, that
place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm
—every tree and grass blade of it dies” (pp. 35-36). Denver
“If it’s still there waiting, that must mean nothing ever
died”. Sethe: “Nothing ever dies” (p. 36). Denver knows
that Sethe was whipped and she ran off pregnant with her.
• The school teacher took over the farm after Mr. Garner’s death.
He came with two boys. “Denver had taught herself to take
pride in the condemnation Negros heaped on them; the
assumption that the haunting was done by an evil thing looking
for more. None of them knew the downright pleasure of
enchantment, of not suspecting but knowing the things behind
things. Her brothers had known, but it scared them. Grandma
Baby knew, but it saddened her. None could appreciate the
safety of ghost company. Even Sethe didn’t love it. She just took
it for granted—like a sudden change in the weather” (p. 37). D
had made Denver lonely by engaging Sethe. Sethe like Suggs
was starved for color and remembered her pink birth color.
• “Every dawn, she saw the dawn but never acknowledged or
remarked its color” (p. 39). D brought her sense of color and
emotions. “ Things became what they were: darkness looked drab:
heat was hot. Windows suddenly had view. And wouldn’t you know
he’d be a singing man” (p. 39). D came from Georgia and lived in a
house with a woman—both not normal. This made him crazy.
Sethe said “White people better here than Kentucky but you may
have to scramble some” (p. 41). She praised Denver “Everybody I
knew dead or gone or dead and gone. Not her. Not my Denver” (p.
42). The schoolmaster found her but she with Denver went to jail. “
As for Denver, the job Sethe had off keeping her from the past was
still waiting for her was all that mattered” (p. 41)
• PLEASANTLY TROUBLED. Denver minds D’s presence and Sethe
feels embarrassed. “And I’m as surprised by her manners as you are
hurt by them” (p. 44). She apologizes but D says “You can’t do that.
You can’t apologize for nobody. She got to do that…For a used-to-
be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous,
especially if it were her children she had settled on to love…Tell her
it’s not about choosing somebody over her—it’s making space for
somebody along with her” (p. 44). D assures Sethe of his love: “I’ll
catch you before you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I’ll hold
your ankles. Make sure you get back out…We can make a life, girl. A
life”. They attend a carnival. “They were not holding hands, but
their shadows were” (p. 47). They saw dances and ate food.
• He bought Denver everything she asked and much more. Sethe was
delighted. D asked his acquaintances for work.
• A FULLY DRESSED woman of 19 or 20 came out of water and sat
near the steps of 124. Denver gave her water which she drank as if
she had crossed a desert. She looked poorly fed. She told her name
‘Beloved’. Then she slept for four days. D told how he ran about
with black people in the countryside to avoid arrest. Beloved was
breathing like an engine and seemed feverish. Denver, filled with
compassion, tended her and prayed for her. Beloved recovered and
ate much food and sugar. Denver was always around her. D
observed “Acts sick, sounds sick, but she don’t look sick. Good skin,
bright eyes and strong as a bull” (p. 56).
• RAINWATER hung on pine needles. Beloved’s eyes were fixed on
Sethe. She went away 124 to meet Sethe early on her return from
work in the town. Sethe felt elated. Once Beloved touched her “A
touch no heavier than a feather, but loaded, nevertheless, with
desire” (P. 58). Her desire was bottomless and she asked Sethe
about her diamonds. Sethe explained how once crystals hung her
ears. They was given by a Kentucky woman on her marriage. She
had honeymoon in the cornfield as before marriage. Denver
wanted to be combed tomorrow as it hurt her. “Today is always
here,” said Sethe. “Tomorrow, never.” (p. 60). Sethe’s mother never
fixed up her hair. She showed Sethe mark on her ribs. She slapped
Sethe when Sethe asked “Mark the mark on me too” (p, 61)
• Her ma’am told her that her mother and Nan were both from
the sea. Denver hated Sethe’s stories as she was not in them.
She was surprised how Beloved knew about the diamonds.
• BELOVED WAS shining. D asked Beloved about her siblings and
place. Beloved “This place. I was looking for this place I could be
in” (p. 165). “I walked here,” she said. “A long, long, long, long
way. Nobody bring me. Nobody help me” (p.61). Beloved’s being
homeless and friendless reminded D of black people “During,
before and after the War, he had seen Negroes so stunned, or
hungry, or tired or bereft, it was a wonder they recalled and said
anything. Who, like him, had hidden in caves and fought owls for
food;
• who, like him, stole from pigs; who, like him slept in trees in the
day and walked by night;. who, like him, had buried themselves in
slop and jumped in wells to avoid regulators, raiders, patrollers,
veterans, hill men, posses and merrymakers” (p. 66). A colored
boy of 14 was hanged for stealing baby ducks. “Move. Walk. Run.
Hide. Steal and move on” (p.66). But Beloved was different and D
wanted her out. Denver worried herself sick for her. D says Sethe
told her they stole her milk but something broke Halle. “But
whatever he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig”
(P. 68). “He saw?” Sethe. “He saw them boys do that to me and let
them keep on breathing air? He saw? He saw? He saw?....They
took my milk and he saw it and didn’t come down
• Sunday came and he didn’t Monday came and no Halle.
I thought he was dead, that’s why; then I thought they
caught him, that’s why. ” (p. 69). A man can not chop
down things that are inside. He had smeared his face
with butter and said nothing. D could not save or
comfort him because of iron bit in his mouth. D did not
plan to tell her that. Her brain was loaded with the past.
“Nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work
of beating back the past” (p. 73).
• TO BE CONTINUED…
 References
• Tally, J. ed. (2007). The Cambridge Companion
to Toni Morrison. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
• Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Plume
Book.