LITERATURE: Beloved – Ghosts in Realism

Sethe’s little girl, Beloved, had been sent ahead with her two boys to safety at Baby Sugg’s before she herself escapes the slavery of Sweet Home.  She is pregnant and safely delivers another little girl, Denver, before she reaches refuge, not knowing what has happened to her husband Halle in their flight.

When the novel opens, we are told that the house where Sethe and Denver are living is haunted by Beloved, who has been murdered some time after their arrival.  We don’t know how, but are instead given horrors that Sethe and her people have lived through, that we can only imagine and like Sethe herself, don’t know if we want to know more.  Paul D has some answers, and he rids the house of Beloved’s spirit as he himself moves in.

Then, Beloved returns:

A fully dressed woman walked out of the water.  She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree.  All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat.  Everything hurt but her lungs most of all.  (p. 50)

She is taken in by Sethe, Denver and Paul D., and while the name "Beloved" itself should be a tip-off, it is only Denver who understands that this strange young woman is her sister, Sethe’s murdered baby.

But is there more to it?  While we can believe in ghosts or not, justify the coincidence of the name and accept overactive imaginations for the spirit of Beloved in haunting their home, there may be much more to what Beloved represents that is over and beyond the character.  Is she the ever-constant presence of the suffering and misery of the black American’s past?  Is she something different for each of the characters; comfort for Sethe, companionship and a sense of past for Denver, who was born into better times and feels isolated from what the others share, or, in becoming reality, and at the age she would be had she lived, does Beloved become as well a link in time that parallels the generations?

Until, I think, we find how Beloved has died–and this background is slowly coming out of Sethe–we may only speculate on her appearance and place in the story.