Beloved: Analysis

From the beginning, Beloved focuses on the import of memory and history. Sethe struggles daily with the haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories and also in the form of her daughter's aggressive ghost. For Sethe, the present is mostly a struggle to beat back the past, because the memories of her daughter's death and the experiences at Sweet Home are too painful for her to recall consciously. But Sethe's repression is problematic, because the absence of history and memory inhibits the construction of a stable identity. Even Sethe's hard-won freedom is threatened by her inability to confront her prior life. Paul D's arrival gives Sethe the opportunity and the impetus to finally come to terms with her painful life history.

Already in the first chapter, the reader begins to gain a sense of the horrors that have taken place. Like the ghost, the address of the house is a stubborn reminder of its history. The characters refer to the house by its number, 124. These digits highlight the absence of Sethe's murdered third child. As an institution, slavery shattered its victims' traditional family structures, or else precluded such structures from ever forming. Slaves were thus deprived of the foundations of any identity apart from their role as servants. Baby Suggs is a woman who never had the chance to be a real mother, daughter, or sister. Later, we learn that neither Sethe nor Paul D knew their parents, and the relatively long, six-year marriage of Halle and Sethe is an anomaly in an institution that would regularly redistribute men and women to different farms as their owners deemed necessary.

The scars on Sethe's back serve as another testament to her disfiguring and dehumanizing years as a slave. Like the ghost, the scars also work as a metaphor for the way that past tragedies affect us psychologically, "haunting" or "scarring" us for life. More specifically, the tree shape formed by the scars might symbolize Sethe's incomplete family tree. It could also symbolize the burden of existence itself, through an allusion to the "tree of knowledge" from which Adam and Eve ate, initiating their mortality and suffering. Sethe's "tree" may also offer insight into the empowering abilities of interpretation. In the same way that the white men are able to justify and increase their power over the slaves by "studying" and interpreting them according to their own whims, Amy's interpretation of Sethe's mass of ugly scars as a "chokecherry tree" transforms a story of pain and oppression into one of survival. In the hands of the right storyteller, Sethe's marks become a poignant and beautiful symbol. When Paul D kisses them, he reinforces this more positive interpretation.

The chapter provides other similar examples of the way that Paul D's presence works to help Sethe reclaim authority over her own past. Sethe has always prioritized others' needs over her own. For example, although she suggests in her story that schoolteacher's nephews raped her, Sethe is preoccupied with their theft of her breast milk. She privileges her children's needs over her own. When Paul D cradles her breasts, Sethe is "relieved of their weight." The narrator comments that the "responsibility for her breasts," the symbols of her devotion to her children, was Paul's for a moment. Usually defined by her motherhood, Sethe has a chance to be herself for a moment, whoever that may be. Paul D reacquaints Sethe with her body as a locus of her own desires and not merely a site for the desires of others--whether those of the rapists or those of her babies.

Paul D's arrival is not comforting to Denver because Paul D threatens Denver's exclusive hold on Sethe's affections. He also reminds Denver about the existence of a part of Sethe that she has never been able to access. Although she is eighteen years old, Denver's fragile sense of self cannot bear talk of a world that does not include her. She has lived in relative isolation for her entire life, and she is angered and disturbed by Paul D's sudden intrusion.

The events of the novel unfold on two different temporal planes: the present of Cincinnati in 1873, and Sethe's time at Sweet Home during the 1850s, which is narrated largely in flashback. In this first chapter, Morrison plants the seeds of the major events that will unfurl over the course of the novel: Sethe's encounter with schoolteacher and his nephews; the slaves' escape from Sweet Home; the story of Amy Denver; and the mystery of Sethe's baby's murder. These past events are told in a nonlinear manner, fading and resurfacing cyclically as the characters' memories reveal more and more to the reader and to the characters themselves.

Analysis: Chapters 2-3

Chapter 2 begins with Paul D gazing at Sethe's back and it ends with her gazing at his. These images symbolize what is taking place thematically in the chapter: the characters' charting of their respective memories, of what lies behind them, at their backs. Sethe's back also contains the visible scars of her whipping. The narration alternates between two time periods--the present in Cincinnati and the Sweet Home past. The Sweet Home past is presented from both Paul D's and Sethe's perspectives, as the narrator's focus shifts between the two characters. The novel maps out the points of proximity and distance between them. Both characters, for example, are disappointed after having sex, and they simultaneously begin thinking about Sethe and Halle's encounter in the cornfield twenty-five years ago. On the other hand, Paul D's sudden, secret revulsion toward Sethe's scars suggests an emotional distance that takes even him by surprise.

Sethe recalls that Halle loved her in a brotherly way, not like a man "laying claim." However, beneath the surface of this seemingly positive memory is the fact of the impotence inherent to the slave condition. Even if he had wanted to do so, Halle could not have laid claim to his enslaved wife any more than she could lay claim to herself. Slaves were not permitted to become legally married because marriage means giving yourself in contract to one another, and slaves are already contracted to their owners. The prohibition of marriage also prevented the slaves from having a strong claim on their children. Baby Suggs's loss of her eight children was nothing unusual in slave life. The names of Paul D and his brothers are also a testament to the slaves' lack of ownership over themselves and their children. Paul D's brothers are named Paul A and Paul F, suggesting their interchangeability in the minds of their owners. Moreover,