Beloved: On the Shadows that Haunt Us

This book has been hard.

Morrison manages to fill every word with so much intention and detail that one can easily get swept away and overwhelmed by trying to uncover every hidden message. The content is brutal. Slavery. Murder. Infanticide. Rape. Try to digest it all at once and it will become lodged in your throat, cutting off your airway, disorientating you at best, shutting you down at worst.




Beloved has an intended audience, I believe, but not those of African American descent- the legacies of the tortured slaves that Morrison focuses on. I believe Morrison wrote this book to spear the veil of our imaginations and preconceptions of slavery; our education shows us the objective facts of slavery, heres how many, heres how they lived, heres what rights they were stripped of. But a textbook cannot teach the story, and that is where Beloved rises to take its place.




For most people, this is the meaning they will take from the novel, and I commend them for it. However, I believe there is still more available for those who want to search deeper- something more universal to every person's experience. Beloved, beyond the story of slavery, is the story of a woman deeply haunted by her past. That, to me, is what this book is about. 124 itself is at first plagued by the spirit of Sethe’s murdered child, who then presumably manifests itself as Beloved (as one of many available interpretations). Objectively, we can see Sethe is haunted by the act of murdering her child. Haunted because she acted impulsively. Haunted because she saw no other escape- not for herself- for her children at the hands of Schoolteacher. Haunted because that child was “crawling already?” before she ever had the chance to raise her free.




But Sethe’s shadows grow from much deeper roots. Her past life at Sweethome, what I can only put together as a surreal environment where her very presence uprooted the traditional nature of the men (Paul D and the other slaves) around her and the workings of the farm. Mr. Garner was an unorthodox slave owner, praising the strength and vitality of his slaves. Calling Sethe by name (what he assumed to be her name). The men, beyond all reason, kept a respectful distance. Sethe had influence, a strange influence, over Sweethome. That influence was destroyed by Schoolteacher. Taking her milk. Hunting her like a lost head of cattle. Schoolteacher drove Sethe out of her surrealist normalcy, violated the most primitive nature of her rights, and left her with nothing but a deaf daughter and red-painted walls.




Its hard to say what the integrity is really left inside her, meaning how much is truly left whole and kept together. Personally, I cant imagine someone enduring that much and escaping without severe trauma, but Sethe is still presented as a strong headed, steadfast woman. While isolated, she takes care of herself and Denver, and manages day to day affairs with the presence of her child's spirit roaming her halls. We are not allowed insight into Sethe’s internal affairs, at least not from her own stream of consciousness. However, I believe Beloved’s character is intended to be the manifestation of Sethe’s broken unconscious- her shattered Superego and her inflamed Id. Beloved is birthed from hell, rising out of the waters in the body of a young, attractive woman but holding within an intensity of obsession, compulsion, impulsiveness, and dissociative nature. She clings to Sethe in a way that makes the reader squirm- the situational irony knowing she is a parasite of some sort but watching Sethe carry on complacently. She tortures Paul D mentally and sexually, driving him out of the house and away from Sethe, violating him, and ultimately breaking his connection with Sethe. She feeds off of Sethe- her love and attention- and ravages whatever else lays in her way.




This is the kind of destruction that comes from trauma like Sethe’s own. Beloved is not independent of Sethe, but the body of her broken spirit released into the world, wreaking havoc after somehow being kept at bay for 18 years. After Sethe escaped Sweethome, after she murdered her child, she took everything into a great vault in her mind and sealed it shut. To her, it was out of her conscious awareness, and therefore gone from her concern. But the pain still grew, eventually collapsing in on itself as a singularity that became a portal to the physical world, a portal for everything to manifest itself; Beloved, rising out of the waters.