The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison is a classic book about a woman desperate to save her family, who does something horrifying because she thinks she has no other choice.

The premise of the novel describes a young woman named Sethe, who starts out as a slave in Kentucky on a plantation called Sweet Home. Though the novel jumps from one time period to the next, the main story is of her escape and the consequent actions of that escape, almost twenty years later.

Sethe has four children: Buglar, Howard, Denver, and the baby she “never got to name”. Denver, the youngest, was born while Sethe was on the run, and helped by a young white girl named Amy. When Sethe eventually makes it to her freedom, in the form of her husband’s mother, named Baby Suggs, she is reunited with all her babies for a blissful few weeks.

Tragedy comes in the form of the schoolteacher who runs Sweet Home, who tracks Sethe down. The moral question comes into play of whether or not what Sethe did was horrifying or something to save her child from a fate worse than death.

In the gruesome events that followed, Sethe goes out to the back shed and takes a hatchet to the baby that was never named, cutting her neck to the point where her head almost falls off. When she is found, she is taken to jail with her youngest daughter, but then released after a certain amount of time.

Eighteen years later the ghost of the little girl Sethe killed haunts the house she and Denver live in. A friend from the past, Paul D, makes his appearance and so starts the events that bring that baby ghost back to life.

Beloved comes to Sethe’s house in a black dress of lace and silk, buttoned up to her neck. She is a young woman, perhaps in her twenties, and is almost baby-like in appearance and demeanor.

While Denver and Sethe are oblivious to what is going on, Paul D sees what Beloved is doing to the family. She is anything but a benign presence, and something sinister lurks in dark corners.

As the reader learns, Beloved is attached to Sethe in multiple ways. She is never far away from her mother, and Sethe is enjoying that because she gets her daughter back after loss.

Beloved proves to be a dangerous force, almost choking Sethe to death, forcing sexual interactions with Paul D, and eventually driving Paul D out of the house. Beloved becomes entirely dependent on Sethe, breaking the family apart as a whole. There is a malignancy in Beloved’s attentiveness to her mother, because all that time was lost. Beloved was “on the other side”, and was never even given a name. The years she was a spectral figure hindered her from spending time with her mother; as an actual person, she is greedy for her mother’s love and doesn’t want anyone else to have it.

When looking into the perspective of both Sethe and Beloved, whose reaction is more valid? Was Sethe killing her own child to save her from slavery really so horrifying? Is Beloved’s clingy, obsessive behavior appropriate, or does the young woman have a darker purpose?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120603/

Source:

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Penguin Books, 1987.