The Torment of Days Gone By

The past haunts and reshapes the present. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a mother fails to put her dead baby to rest and both her family and house suffer the consequences. The novel’s first words reveal the height of their dilemma: ‘124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. [. . .] [By] 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims’ (3). Morrison offers a vision of a family's collective past and how it may infiltrate the present. History has the potential to abuse its victims. They must confront and make peace with its claims.

Sethe, the mother, is a strategist. She devises methods and games to keep the past’s hauntings at bay. Memory informs her sense of history. To her advantage, memory is easily broke down, re-moulded and reshaped.

Sethe’s former life as a slave threatens to destroy her future. As a way of coping, she refuses to revisit her former traumas and enforces linguistic taboos. Both she and her grandmother agree ‘without saying so that [her past life] was unspeakable; to Denver’s inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling incomplete reveries’ (58). ‘To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay’ (42). Her avid consistency makes the everyday a bit more liveable.

Later, as a restaurant-hand, Sethe develops a work ethic to calm her mind. The effort blends with her former strategies, admitting that there is nothing ‘better than to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past’ (73). Her refusal to speak about history is a direct challenge to its demands. In so doing, she finds trauma manageable, stuffing it all into a locked box. Unfortunately, history bites back and her consciousness constantly battles with memory. Despite herself, the past becomes a perennial concern.

The mysterious arrival of Beloved, a young girl, signals Sethe’s defeat. Beloved is the reincarnation of Sethe’s dead daughter: the baby she failed to offer a good death. Eventually, history forces Sethe to confess.

To demonstrate the severity of the past’s burden, Morrison involves magical elements in her story. Ghosts, the undead, and the paranormal all feature in Sethe’s life, and Beloved’s ghostly return signifies the destructive potential of Sethe's unburied guilt. In 124, Beloved’s arrival darkens the family’s mental space. When Stamp Paid, a long-time familial friend, arrives, he at once hears and feels the house’s sorrow.

124 was left to its own devices. [. . .] Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to [him], were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken. (199)

The house’s ghost-burdened history prevents his entrance, refusing his help. Although Stamp Paid knows something is wrong, he struggles to approach Sethe. An invisible evil permeates the family and ruins their chance of receiving aid.

Sethe’s past decision erects the walls of this invisible evil. When young, Sethe kills her new-born infant to free her from a tortured future, posthumously naming her ‘Beloved’. On the one hand, Sethe’s decision signals her mercy and love as a mother. ‘My plan was to take us all to the other side,’ she confesses, ‘where my own ma’am is. They stopped me from getting us there, but they didn’t stop you from getting there’ (203). As an escapee, Sethe faces re-enslavement, with her former master hot on her trail. The death of her new-born is a pragmatic decision: the ultimate form of love. She rationalises it for the rest of her life.

On the other hand, Beloved’s spirit resents her failed chance at daughterhood. During a rare moment of solipsism, Beloved’s ghost lets loose her ‘baby’s venom’.

I am Beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers away from leaves [. . .] I am not separate from her  there is no place where I stop    her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too    a hot thing. (210) [spacing in original]

Sethe’s double-feeling of mercy/guilt extends to the dead daughter’s errand. It surrounds Beloved’s death throughout the novel – as complicated and multi-faceted as the motives that led to her mother’s decision. Beloved’s ghost seeks unity, yet her idea of unity – in flesh, mind, and spirit – expresses itself in deathly possession.

The way forward, then, is a mix of justification, truth, and atonement, and Sethe’s evasion from these ideas serve to destroy her. Facing her troubles, both Beloved and Sethe succumb to madness, suffering and screaming within the walls of 124. Denver spectates and begins to understand their displays of misery.

[She] thought she understood the connection between her mother and Beloved: Sethe was trying to make up for her handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. (251)

The pain persists, as do the ghosts. Face-to-face, mother and dead daughter reveal both the best and the worst in each other. They share their struggles.

In a final heart-breaking moment, Sethe reveals her true compassion as an individual. On her deathbed, her last words are selfless; Stamp Paid listens. She cries and weeps over ‘my best thing’: her long-gone daughter, Beloved (272). Seth’s ego-less parting with the earth – her focus on the lives of others during her final moments – shows her empathy and understanding for those around her. She dies, forgotten and ‘unaccounted for’ (275). But her story burns bright, teaching the world that her love conquers anything. Her eventual confrontation with the past heals her soul.

Source:

Beloved. By Toni Morrison. Pp 275. London: Vintage, 1987. 0-09-976011-8.

The New Yorker, 19 August 2019