Imbalance in Beloved Essay

In the book Beloved by Toni Morrison, nothing is ever in balance. It is the constant imbalance between and within her characters caused by slavery and the memory of slavery that is the essence of Beloved. As examples, I will focus on one character: the title character Beloved. Beloved is several things. When Paul D asks Denver, "You think she sure 'nough your sister?", Denver replies, "At times. At times I think she was--more." She was a heck of a lot more. Yes, she was Denver's sister, the child Sethe killed, just as the real life Margaret Garner killed one of her children to keep her from slavery. As that child, at first an unseen and unnamed spirit, later as the bodily Beloved, she is the one and only appropriate judge for Sethe, the only one who can not only judge, but forgive. She is also, apparently, a real person, a young woman who has survived the horrors of a slave ship. Her spotty recollections of being among bodies and death and of maybe being a sex captive are evidence of this.

Beloved also is the ghost of slavery that haunts history and our consciousness. The repression of this memory causes psychosis in not only those who were slaves or who owned slaves, but also those who think about slavery, who have extreme opinions of it, who feel or felt demeaned by it, or empowered by it. This repression allows a human to rationalize animal attributes to another human and thereby justify inhuman treatment. It allows one who is or was a slave to survive, but in a way which does not permit a valid existence. This causes a lack of self-esteem and, perversely, guilt feelings. Beloved: daughter/sister, judge, middle passage survivor, and ghost of slavery. Who could ask for more conjuncture than that? The story does not end on page 275; it only pauses. The ghost of slavery still haunts. Morrison tells us that "blackpeople" must face the ghost together, as a community, in order to make her go away. She tells us, to dig out and look at the historical truth and thereby end repression which allows tragedies to continue. Sethe's child had no name, but the ghost has two names: predjudice and ignorance.