off so she has no choice but to come back to me in flesh”
Sethe as a black slave could not emancipate herself from the dark memories that kept on chasing her even after these long years of freedom. The most terrible of them all is the murder of her child Beloved, this horrible crime that pursued her and destructed her life. Being a slave to her memories Sethe could not overcome this sense of guilt towards her baby although she sees that did this terrible crime to save the baby from a lifetime dehumanised life she has once lived .
“ How if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.”
Sethe was greatly hurt with what she faced when she was at Sweet Home, she was taken away from her mother - she does not even know who her mother is “ Nun had to nurse whitebabies and me too because Ma,am was in the rice. The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left.Or none.There was no nursing milk to call my own.”, even when she decided to marry Halle , she could not wear a white dress as the rest of the brides do , she could not even celebrate this wedding. What was more abusing to her pride was when she overheard the schoolteacher telling his nephews his scientific measuring of the slaves’ body parts and asking them to put Sethe's human characteristics in one column and her animal characteristics in another. Sethe was horrified and was somehow shamed, too shamed to tell Halle about what she had heard.
This is the life that she did not want her children to live; that is why she wanted to kill them all, but she failed to do so except with Beloved. Although Sethe is a victim to the society she lives in, nevertheless, she is rejected from her black community even though they shared with her this suffering, it’s when Paul D. noticed the fact that Sethe killed her daughter, he withdrew from her life because he could not stay with a murderer.
As a slave to her past, Sethe could not enjoy her present life. The physical and spiritual torture she experienced while she was a slave ruined her present and damaged all anticipations of a bright future. This explains why whenever she encounters new events in her life she keeps on referring back to her past. For instance when she was making love with Paul D, she was incapable of enjoying it neither did he although they both longed for it because for Sethe, she doesn’t like the idea Paul D. suggested of leaving the house , as for Paul D. , he dislikes the way Seth’s breasts laying flat on her and is also repulsed by the clump of scars on her back which he refused to regard as a chokecherry tree as she describes them.
The past memories overpowered the characters’ minds and affected directly and indirectly their lives; this justifies when Beloved’s ghost firstly appears to Sethe as a human, she was in the form of a full grown woman and not a baby as she died, but at the age where she would be if she had lived. This form is consistent with Sethe’s ideas about the past. Although the baby died, it continued to grow and change as if has lived and its presence is totally real. This confirms the main stream of the novel –Sethe’s inability to dump her awful memories.
Sethe’s perception of the past comes from her own painful relationship with the legacy of slavery. She is still convinced that the past could hurt that is why she could not overcome this dreadful feeling whenever she remembers the schoolteacher. She still remembers how they stole her milk and she kept on narrating this incident numerously whether to Paul D or to Beloved. She even repeated the story in her mind so that Beloved might overhear it and believe that the mother feels guilty for what she did to her. These memories and more devastated Sethe’s life all over and enslaved her soul.
The physical presence of Beloved strengthens Sethe’s feeling of enslavement but this time she is a slave to her guilt. Beloved appears in the flesh the day that Paul D., Denver and Sethe go to the carnival. This is Sethe’s first social outing in eighteen years and therefore a perfect time for Beloved to surface and refresh Sethe’s feeling of guilt not only for killing her daughter, but also for enjoying herself at the carnival. Morrison created a devilish figure to ensure that Sethe doesn’t get carried away, free herself from her traumatic past and starts a new life with Paul D forgetting everything about her crime. So that the past again is governing the main character of the novel.
Desperately, Sethe attempts to eliminate herself from this sense of guilt. Contrarily she becomes a slave not only to her past, but also to Beloved’s desires. Beloved personifies desire; her desire is firstly made evident by her greedy habits at dinner table, to the extent that she relentlessly eats Sethe’s meals although she grows plump. Her desires don't stop at this, but grows stronger and more absurd to the extent that she wants her mother to give her all her attention even if this would lead to her death.
This sense of possessiveness that overwhelmed the daughter leads her to say:
“I am Beloved , and she is mine.”
She repeatedly confirmed this feeling saying:
“you are mine
you are mine
you are mine.”
Sethe is having the same feeling that is why she imprisoned herself behind these bars of guilt and reproach and could not and did not want to free herself of it, this as well is shown at the end of the novel when she emphasises Beloved’s words:
“I have your milk
I have your smile
I will take care of you.”
The Past years problems do not only overshadows Sethe and her daughter’s lives, but also Paul D whose past was even worse (imprisonment, torture, sexual strive and suppression) .This past that stopped him from talking to Sethe about her time in jail because it reminds him of his own past . This painful past has its own powerful influence on Sethe and Paul D and on the way they interacted together. However, Paul D succeeded to survive through closing himself off as a way of protecting himself. As for Sethe, her escape from Sweet Home and living in a place where no one knows her as well as sending her children away to protect them from being taken away .All this along with shutting her daughter and herself up in this haunted home were means of protecting herself from this ruthless past.
Sethe has seen a lot , she is whipped, tortured , degraded and above all driven to kill her child ; all these incidents lead her to lock up herself behind this bars of slavery .That is why she is a slave to her memories which constituted a precarious reason behind this feeling and which she failed to overcome.
The novel reminds us of the slaves’ suffering, and invites the reader to contend with the past and the legacy of slavery. The effects of slavery continue to this day, and, like the characters of the book, we must learn to understand the past if we are to deal with its effects on the present. Beloved is also our name, taken from the funeral service in which Sethe mistook the minister's words referring to the assembled mourners for the name of the dead. Beloved is a ghost of the past, but she is named for the audience at her funeral-an audience that includes, through the form of the novel, the readers of the book. Her name is ours; her legacy is one that we share and must confront. Toni Morrison has successfully introduced a novel that depicts a real and genuine picture of slavery during the Nineteenth Century especially to those who have not lived during that period and who have not witnessed the practices of whites in the United States to the black people who were brought from Africa to serve them.
Critics views to this novel varied, for instance in a criticism by Jennifer L. Holden-Kirwan she said:
“While Morrison, like Sethe and Paul D., would prefer to repress the memory of slavery, she feels compelled to create a space in which the ‘enslaved’ may finally speak. As Elizabeth Abel has pointed out, ‘Beloved deliberately represents captive persons as subjects rather than objects of oppression, and does so primarily in a discourse on the hunger, passion, and violence generated in the 'too thick' mother-daughter bond produced by the conditions of slavery". While the end of slavery sought to transform objects (slaves) into subjects (free men and women), the characters in Beloved find the passage into subjectivity somewhat elusive.”
Another comment on the novel is published in Los Angeles Times by John Leonard :
“She escaped from slavery but was haunted by its heritage – from the fires of the flesh to the heartbreakiing challenges to the spirit . Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting … of slavey and its aftermath is Toni Morrison’s beastest novel- a dazzling achievemnet and a spellbinding experience.”