Toni Morrison: Beloved

            Beloved is often described as a ghost story, but I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. There is a ghost haunting Sethe and Denver at the beginning of the novel, for sure, the ghost of Sethe’s baby daughter, but then a new arrival in the house, Paul D., routs the ghost. After that, we’re into territory where it’s not quite clear what exactly is going on. In terms of what we know and when we know it, there’s evidence pointing both ways, but the matter is never resolved.

            The character of Beloved is either the now grown ghost of Sethe’s daughter, whom Sethe killed to avoid having her taken back into slavery, or a strange girl who was kept locked up for years by a nightmare of a man down the road from Sethe’s house. In a lot of ways, of course, she’s both. Beloved stands for every wrong done during slavery, every kind of abuse and inhuman treatment, every cruelty and viciousness. Sethe’s body is the one marked by whips, but Beloved herself carries every kind of memory of all of those wrongs.

            This book makes an excellent companion to Liar because the question about what the truth actually is doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant whether Sethe puts all of her grief and pain about her lost child onto a strange girl, or onto the ghost of her child. Sethe comes through the experience purged of her past and finally ready to move on into the present. As with Micah in Liar, the truth and the reality may be different, but they mean the same thing. I’ve never taught this book, but I can imagine a class getting hung up on what really happened and why the question is left unresolved. Clearly, with both books, that’s the goal.

            I’m fascinated by this choice, though. Why not decide? Why give us all the evidence we need to go either way? The girl who was kept prisoner satisfies my need for rational answers about someone who eats food and is otherwise a normal human being. Of course, she knows all sorts of things that only Beloved could know, about the earrings, about the song that Sethe made up and sang to her children. And when we get into the disconnected and poetic section of the book, Beloved tells us her memories, many of them having to do with the man with no skin, a white man who imprisoned her for years. It’s not even perfectly clear what the term “man with no skin” means until Beloved sees another white man and takes off running, never to be seen again.

            Has a ghost been exorcised, or has a mentally ill naked pregnant girl run off into the woods? It’s hard not to see that flight as a mirror of Sethe’s flight from slavery to Cincinnati, where Denver was born in a boat. Denver’s escape from the household brings about Beloved’s exorcism. It’s all so beautifully written and beautifully constructed, especially the way that the story is told in bits and shreds and scraps, little pieces of evidence scattered throughout the entire length of the novel. I especially love the way different people tell the same stories differently, and even more so the way the same person will tell a story differently at various times. The truth is made up of all these facets.

            I’m going to be working on monsters in the spring, so I’m already thinking ahead about that a little. Obviously slavery and all of its abuses are a tremendous and inescapable catastrophe, a cultural Armageddon that left its victims scattered and destroyed. Beloved herself carries all of those consequences. But Beloved is also a monster in the household, something unnatural and disruptive and destructive. The person who ultimately gets transformed by the monster (a very common reaction to monsters in fiction) is Denver, Sethe’s daughter, the only one of her children who still remains with her. Denver has not left the property since her childhood, but when Beloved costs Sethe her job and the family actually begins to starve, Denver finally breaks free of the family shame and overcomes her shyness and goes out to find work to feed the three of them. Denver has grown up entirely focused on Beloved, the pain and loss of Sethe’s past. Her transformation allows her to support the family, first of all, but then to regain the friendship of the community that was lost the day Sethe killed Beloved, the act that turned Sethe into a monster in the eyes of all around her.  

            That community feels like the most wonderful thing in the world. It’s what Sethe has been missing since she escaped in the first place, a group of people she knew and cared about, who cared about her. She lost them because of the murder, but then started to find a place with them again at the end. What do people want more than to belong? Throughout the novel, it almost feels like Sethe and Denver and Beloved and Paul D. live in a house in the middle of nowhere, miles from any other people. That’s how cut off the house and its inhabitants are. I kept being surprised that they were just walking distance away from everyone else, when it felt like uncrossable miles. It’s a brilliant illustration of isolation combined with a gorgeous representation of guilt and forgiveness in Beloved herself.