Carmen Gillespie's Beloved Essay

Carmen Gillespie’s article of Beloved emphasizes the obstacles of finding true identity that are undergone by former slaves who have gained their freedom but are “haunted by their memories of their earliest and formative experiences as someone else's property.” (Gillespie 1) The article first introduces the readers to Beloved’s representation in the novel of how she can be seen as “a personification of all the trauma and catastrophic human cost of the Middle Passage and slavery” (1) and what altered the urge to write this story, which was based on a true story of Margaret Garner, a slave who tried to kill her children in order to keep them from returning to slavery. In addition, to start off the critical commentary, Gillespie breaks down the title of the novel into three parts, the word be and love and the letter d. Through her description of the word be, one main question of the novel is highlighted, “what does it mean to be a human being and then, particularly, what does it mean to be a human being when one's primary humanity is denied.” (2) In the beginning of the novel, Sethe is faced with the decision to choose who she wants to be married to from the male slaves in Sweet Home and is expected to be