The Ghost of Beloved
One of the most engaging arguments about Toni Morrison’s book Beloved is centered around the nature of the girl Beloved. The argument is whether Beloved is simply a young woman who herself had suffered the horrors of slavery, or the ghost of Sethe’s crawling already? baby girl. The evidence shows that Morrison intended Beloved to be the ghost of the crawling already? girl.
It has been said that there are basically two reasons why ghosts walk: they have either unfinished business to attend to of have died a very violent death. The crawling already? girl fits both of these profiles. She died without growing up, without knowing why she died. As a result, she has unfinished business with her mother, Sethe. The crawling already? girl’s death was also horribly violent. Her mother cut her throat with a saw in the cold shed, rather than have her and her children be brought back into slavery.
Many of the clues that indicate Beloved is actually the ghost of the baby girl are within the passages where she first arrives at the house on Bluestone Road. Each of these things put together support the idea that Toni Morrison intended Beloved to be the ghost of the crawling already? baby girl.
The first clue is that she "had what sounded like asthma", meaning that her breathing was labored. If Beloved is the ghost, it would make sense that she would have trouble breathing; after all, because the windpipe is found in the neck, and Beloved’s neck was nearly severed, her windpipe would have to have been severed also. She would have quick, raspy breathing, as people with asthma have when they can’t hold a breath.
Earlier in the book, Morrison talked about how the ghost slammed Here Boy into ...
... middle of paper ...
...of the bread that Baby Suggs gave her. The burnt bottom pieces of the bread could have reminded her of the river that they crossed to get to 124. The river could have looked black because they crossed at night.
When all of the information is tallied up and the clues counted, all of the evidence points to the fact that Beloved is not a real woman, but the spirit if the baby girl come to life. She could have reanimated the body from the hunter’s cabin that Stamp Paid made a passing reference to, or maybe she created the body herself, and that’s why she was so worried it would fall apart. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is that all of the evidence points to the fact that somehow, Beloved did come back to life. She is truly the ghost of the crawling already? baby girl.
Works Cited:
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, Penguin Books USA Inc, 1988.
The first chapter of his book titled “Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things” gives Keegan’s recognition to the fact that historians do not focus enough on actual soldiers. To explain this further, what Keegan is saying is that a historian puts things in a pack of sequential dates and times; but to the soldier, these things happen very rapidly and many times without planning. Keegan continues on to make note that when a historian puts together the pain-staking task of compilation of facts, the information is put down on paper as the writer’s view of how the facts unfolded and not from the soldier’s perspective.
... was with a man. Although the story is a ghost story first of all, it is also a comment on the Victorian society, its cruelty, "destructive pressures" and "restrictive code of behavior," that led to many tragedies. The ghost motive is unquestionably the prevailing one and can be understood in the realistic as well as the symbolic way. As symbols, the ghosts stand for the restrained love and the corrupted psyche of the woman getting mad, who cannot control her sexual desires. The ghosts themselves are not scarier than the condition of the mind of the woman who in pursuit of love becomes insane.
Sophocles. King Oedipus. Trans. E.F. Watling. Sophocles: The Theban Plays. London: Penguin Books. 25-68. 1974. Print.
Sophocles. "Oedipus Rex." An Introduction to Literature, 11th ed.Eds. Sylvan Barnet, et al. New York: Longman, 1997.
The novel, Beloved, centers around the life of Sethe, a former slave, who murders her infant daughter to save her from a life of slavery. Eighteen years later, Sethe’s daughter, Beloved, returns from the grave as a young woman. In Arlene Keizer’s article, Beloved: Ideologies in Conflict, Improvised Subjects, Keizer claims that Beloved’s return in the flesh is in itself extended evocation of certain African belief systems (120). By representing Beloved as a human being and not as a spirit, Morrison has demonstrated the beliefs of two African religious traditions, one taken from the Yoruba and Igbo and the other taken from the Akamba people of Kenya (120). Keizer quotes Dr. Carole B. Davies by stating, the children of Yoruba cosmology or the Igbo culture, who die and are reborn repeatedly to plague their mothers, are marked so that they can be identified when they return (qt in Keizer 121). In the novel, the reincarnated Beloved returns with a scar across her neck where Sethe slash her throat. Keizer then quotes John Mibiti who explains that among the Akamba people of Kenya, a child who dies before she is named is st...
there is also the idea that she might be just some random woman. Beloved's appearance at 124 seemed to have impeccable timing, which. brought about the question of "was she a random woman who heard about the family and took the needed place of the baby ghost. " Some of the information brought to the aid of Beloved is the baby ghost. can be contradicted by this theory.
Myers, H. A. (1949). Aristotle's study of tragedy. Educational Theatre Journal, 1(2), 115. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1290192594?accountid=12085
This story, although somewhat unique in its exact plot, contains many elements that make it a typical and traditional ghost story. These elements suggest common fears in today’s society of people in general, and children specifically.
Wyatt, Jean. “Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” PMLA, Vol. 108, No.3 (May, 1993): 474-488. JSTOR. Web. 27. Oct. 2015.
Toni Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved, a vividly unconventional family saga, is set in Ohio in the mid 1880s. By that time slavery had been shattered by the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and the succeeding constitutional amendments, though daily reality for the freed slaves continued to be a matter of perpetual struggle, not only with segregation and its attendant insults, but the curse of memory.
...to support the book’s theme of a woman in search for herself and sense of personal value. Forgiving one’s self, coping with the past, and learning from mistakes are ubiquitous and timeless lessons to be learned for all people. Beloved, as well as several other works by Morrison, will continue to be a vastly entertaining ghost story as well as a genuinely heart-touching novel.
In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, Morrison uses universal themes and characters that anyone can relate to today. Set in the 1800s, Beloved is about the destructive effects of American slavery. Most destructive in the novel, however, is the impact of slavery on the human soul. Morrison’s Beloved highlights how slavery contributes to the destruction of one’s identity by examining the importance of community solidarity, as well as the powers and limits of language during the 1860s.
To understand why identity is vital to the characters in Beloved, identity must first be defined. According to the Oxford Dictionary, identity is defined as “the fact of being who or what a person or thing is” (identity). Identity is who you are both internally and externally to the world. The main characters in Toni Morrison's Beloved are former slaves. The former slaves’ main struggle, after having been stripped of their humanity and identity by the white men who owned them, is to reclaim self-ownership and form identities independent of those forced upon them by their owners under the system of slavery. Both Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs show the importance of a name and identity by trying to abolish their history.
Writing about any artist or author makes us more curious about the writer and his or her view of life. I believe every writer reflects his or her own perspective in their writings even if they did not talk about themselves; this will appear to the reader in one way or another.
Cartwright, Mark. "Greek Tragedy." Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia, 16 Mar. 2013. Web. 04 Mar. 2014.