Guilty Conscience Portrayed in "Beloved"
Guilty Conscience Portrayed in "Beloved"
Who or what is Beloved? Many people think that Beloved is the Devil or a savior. Others just take her at face value as Sethe's dead child come back to haunt her. I believe that all of these ideas come close to her identity, but they are still not completely right. This is not a story about good or evil, but rather a story about facing your own past. Beloved (the character) is simply a physical manifestation of Sethe's guilty conscience.
Sethe's desire to save her children from slavery was stronger than her humanity, and as a result she brutally murdered her baby, and buried it under the headstone "Beloved." Sethe chose to have this engraved on the tomb, because this was the "word she heard the preacher say at the funeral (all there was to say, surely)...Dearly Beloved" (5). The baby is first christened at death, with a name by which the preacher refers to the spectators at the burial. Sethe thus named the child after herself, insofar as she, Sethe, was whom the preacher was addressing as "dearly beloved." In this way she brands her detached conscience with guilt.
I call it her "detached conscience" because in order to go on with life Sethe needed to remove herself from her guilt. She removes herself so completely that her neighbors, already upset at her crime, isolated her because she seemed to feel no remorse for the awful deed. Sethe's stoic resolve continues until Denver loses her hearing, which was caused by Denver not being able to deal with hearing what her mother had done. Only when her mother's conscience manifests itself as the ghost of the baby does Denver's hearing return.
Denver, having as a child suckled her sister's blood with her mother's milk, attaches herself to this ghost, the manifestation of her mother's guilt. She makes friends with it, because due to her mother's heinous deed, she will have no other friends in the community. Denver must make peace with what her mother did in order for her to survive, and she accomplishes this by making the ghost her playmate. In their own little world, both Denver and her mother acclimate themselves to the sin that they must live with.
The appearance of Paul D throws everything into turmoil. To Sethe, Paul D is a man...