Written under the thoughtful direction of Drs. Joshua Glick and Toni Jaudon for the Spring 2021 ENGL 497 Thesis Seminar at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.

In her 1988 lecture “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison questions the “ghost in the machine” that haunts American literature – that is, the influence of Blackness on texts that work to avoid it, the “active but unsummoned presences that can distort the workings of the machine and can also make it work” (The Source of Self-Regard 174). The image of the ghost here is, of course, intentional. In her response to this “presence,” Morrison unpacks the beginning of another ghost story that is at the same time individual, communal, and cultural – her own novel Beloved (1987). Beloved was Morrison’s fifth novel, and it became an immediate best-seller following its publication. It won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1988, and to this day it remains one of her most well-known works. By the time of the novel’s release, Morrison had already established herself as a prominent author, but Beloved specifically continues to be a source of critical debate and analysis; this is thanks in large part to Morrison’s unwillingness to close off any one interpretation of the narrative or its ambiguous ending. Morrison’s understanding of the haunted-ness of literature writ large informs our own understanding of Beloved’s presence in the text. Morrison is clear when speaking about the novel that her purpose from the outset was to “confront the reader with what must be immediately incomprehensible… by then it is clear, if not at once, that something is beyond control, but is not beyond understanding” (195). In both subject and shape, Morrison’s work combines the “incredible spirit world” and the “incredible political world” in a way that she describes as “excessively demanding” (emphasis mine). It is within this model of excessive demand – on the reader, on the characters, and on the structure of the novel – that the text forces us to see inside the machine and face that presence. 

Even when taken in its most literal sense, Beloved’s ghost pushes at the seams of comprehension. Different characters understand Beloved differently – Sethe sees her as her dead daughter returned home, Paul D theorizes that she is a girl who has escaped sexual enslavement at the hands of a local white man, and our own glimpse into Beloved’s thoughts shows us a girl from the Middle Passage searching for her mother. Beloved is a ghost story, but it is also a story about a community of people coming up through and against history. Sethe has to reckon with her failure to “beat back the past” (Beloved 86). She and Paul D both have their lives at Sweet Home to contend with as they fill the gaps in each other’s memories. It is Denver who must do what the other two cannot – walk fully into the present of the surrounding community and, with their help, bring the future to bear on 124 Bluestone. Within each of these threads and the others that Morrison weaves into Beloved’s sphere of influence is the tangible weight that history and memory exert on the text. Even Beloved herself, struggling to reconcile her memories of the Middle Passage with Sethe’s memories of her as a daughter, is a consequence rather than the cause of this strain. 

Morrison refuses to settle Beloved’s “true” identity within the narrative, leading critics to understand the text’s haunted-ness in a variety of ways, from what R. Clifton Spargo calls a “specter of enslavement” to Michele Janette’s “culture-bearing ghost woman.” Beyond hypothesizing about Beloved’s identity and meaning as a ghost, others have commented upon the different ways that haunting manifests within the text, such as the spatial and temporal effects of history and memory. Still others emphasize the role that trauma plays in simultaneously catalyzing and exacerbating Beloved’s presence. Understandably, many readings of Beloved concern themselves with Beloved’s exit from the narrative – more specifically, whether we can read her “exorcism” as a hopeful ending to the story. One area of critical thought that is especially helpful in understanding the novel (and in fact might help us capture simultaneously some of these approaches previously mentioned) concerns itself with Beloved’s ties to magical realism. Although the genre is overwhelmingly studied in the context of Latin American works, many critics have drawn insightful comparisons between Morrison’s novel and other magical realist texts. These connections occur on textual and cultural levels, as readers point out the parallels between ways of coping with history and memory in Latin America and the Southern United States; analyses of the genre from a comparative literature standpoint have led critics like Lois Parkinson Zamora to consider magical realism “in a hemispheric sense,” rather than belonging to any one region (Zamora 500). Using magical realism as a framework through which to view Beloved illuminates the ways Morrison uses history and memory to fashion the social and historical realities of the text – both for the characters within the novel and for us as readers. 

Rather than simply claiming the novel as another work of magical realism as others have done, the genre can serve as a lens through which to gain a more acute understanding of Beloved – one that engages with other interpretive approaches while examining the lesser-studied dynamics of excess in the text. This is a vital direction to take in deepening our analyses of the novel; shifting the focus from what the ghost means to how the ghost means allows us to conceptualize different axes of haunting as they manifest across time, space, and characters. Additionally, reading the ghost in a holistic sense gives us an idea of haunting as a multidimensional event that is deeply connected to the way history interacts with the present. No two people in Beloved are haunted by quite the same ghost, even if they call her by a similar name. Through an exploration of how Morrison deals with these ghosts (or intentionally doesn’t) by the novel’s end, we can tease out how these “active but unsummoned presences” work through and beyond the text. 

I. Haunting and the Magically Real

Before wading too far into Beloved’s specific kinds of haunting and their implications, it is necessary to lay some groundwork concerning magical realism; the translation of the genre from Latin America to the American South will inform our reading of the text. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris have collected essays from a variety of scholars about the genre’s origins and modern interpretations, a few of which hold key ideas to understanding Morrison’s work. In their introduction to the collection, Zamora and Faris underscore the significance of a “magical departure” from realism: “the supernatural is not a simple or obvious matter, but it is an ordinary matter, an everyday occurrence – admitted, accepted, and integrated into the rationality and materiality of literary realism” (2-3). The key difference between realism, fantasy, and what Cuban author Alejo Carpentier originally termed “lo real maravilloso” – the marvelous real – is the way in which the supernatural augments the natural. In magical realist texts, ghosts don’t serve as a cheap scare or an invitation for disbelief. Rather, supernatural elements provide a different mode of understanding the natural itself: an epistemology of haunting that does not reside in a world outside of the text but is instead an inextricable part of this one. 

This way of interpreting reality brings with it inherent political, cultural, and historical repercussions. In a work of magical realism, ghosts are an “ontological disruption” to a literary hegemony of assumed opposition between the magical and the real: “for the characters… and for the author who creates it, magic may be real, reality magical; there is no need to label them as such” (3). The dissolution of boundaries between magic and reality chafes against a dominant power structure that demands these hard lines around what is acceptable in order to define itself. In her own essay about the genre, Zamora points out the tendency of “individuals, times, places… to transform magically into other (or all) individuals, times, places,” calling this movement a “slippage from the individual to the collective” (501). Expanding realism through the supernatural often centers non-Western modes of understanding that challenge these powers not just in content, but in form. Encountering a world where ghosts are as real as any other character in the novel calls our perception of reality into question, from broader cultural implications down to the level of how time and space function in and around us. 

Embedded in this expansion lies the opportunity to process reality in a way that does not threaten to completely unravel either the narrative or our experience of it. Zamora describes this as “the fundamental magical realist sense that reality always exceeds our capacities to describe or understand or prove… the function of literature is to engage this excessive reality… ghosts are often our guides” (498, emphasis mine). Reality as we normally construct it cannot hold or digest the pressure of a horrific past, because admitting that past a place in “reality” would be to admit participation in the system that caused and causes that trauma. Magical realism, in asking us to consider a reality where we admit those horrors, where we release our white-knuckle grip on structure, labels, and our usual understanding of the “normal” world, frees us to see what lies beyond the edges of our everyday experience. To push Zamora’s argument further in a way that still resonates in the “hemispheric” sense: magical realism works within and without history as an attempt to fill a gap in the archives – especially regarding enslavement – that the dominant power structure actively works to erase. Ghosts as such are inadmissible into the prevailing historical structure, but in this way, they become an invitation into the history that lies on the outside of accepted records. Magical realism opens a space where we can see the “unspeakable things,” the intersections of then and now, memory and history, and engage with them in a way that is impossible otherwise. Under this model, we don’t just hear and wonder about the ghost’s presence – the ghost walks into the room and asks us to see it, to speak back to it, becomes, in a sense, our “guide” to this wider reality. 

Given these characteristics, it is no surprise that Morrison’s work – which concerns itself with interrogating the notion of a “universal” Western culture and works so often at the intersection of the political and the spiritual (Self-Regard 195) – has been a wellspring for thinking about magical realism in the Southern U.S. (a place that was and is still brimming with these memory-laden pressure points). In her essay “Past-On Stories: History and the Magically Real,” P. Gabrielle Foreman engages with the genre as it pertains to Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits and Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Foreman takes the important step of grounding Morrison’s writing in the magical realist tradition; in line with a basic tenet of the genre, the text “does not explore another or second reality, but rather amplifies the parameters of our present reality” (Foreman 298, emphasis mine). She also highlights the cultural dimension of Morrison’s intentions – that is, creating “a reality solidly rooted in the world of African Americans, in black cultural traditions” (299). Her analysis of this aspect of the text focuses squarely on the role of women storytellers and the passing on of history through oral tradition. She identifies these women as a site of connection between the categories of “history, ontology, and the magically real,” as well as using them to articulate the “relation between ontology and naming” (285). Naming is a form of knowing, but, as we will see, naming can also complicate how and where this knowledge occurs. 

Although Foreman focuses most of her analysis on a different work of Morrison’s, it becomes immediately clear that Beloved serves as a strong example of her argument, and indeed she mentions the novel briefly towards the end of her essay. She asserts that “Beloved’s most basic premise lies in the magical,” though she does not spend much time unpacking this premise. This is all the more reason to focus on Beloved specifically, since many of the points that Foreman makes about Song of Solomon lend themselves to thinking about this text – like the fact that in both novels, “women are simultaneously the site of the historical and the magical” (287). Sethe’s mind and body bear the story of her time at Sweet Home. Sethe’s back is a physical site of the history of enslavement; her abuse is literally “embodied” as a tree that she cannot see for herself: “A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves… Could have cherries too now for all I know” (Morrison 18). The idea that eighteen-year-old scars might still grow and even bear fruit incorporates an element of history understood as magical; Sethe’s description acknowledges the way that the past continues to grow into the present. This growth comes with Paul D’s touch as he learns “the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches” (20) – it is this moment, where Sethe starts to contemplate “trust[ing] things and remember[ing] things because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her,” that pushes the baby’s ghost over the edge and into a rage (21). It is in this moment that the haunting will break its own boundaries and eventually take the shape of Beloved. 

As a ghost, Beloved serves as “the site of the historical and the magical” most obviously: she is a magical manifestation of the past on several levels, and her presence amplifies not only the parameters of Sethe and Denver’s world, but of the act of haunting itself. Rather than appearing as a physical ghost from the start, the past has until now been imbued into the text architecturally – the house performs the haunting through its paranormal movements. After 124 Bluestone begins to react violently to Paul D’s comforting Sethe, he uses its own furniture to try and banish the presence: 

A table rushed toward him and he grabbed its leg. Somehow he managed to stand at an angle and, holding the table by two legs, he bashed it about, wrecking everything, screaming back at the screaming house. “You want to fight, come on! God damn it! She got enough without you. She got enough!” (22)

The struggle between Paul D and the house happens as though between two people; the furniture “rushes” and the house “screams.” In his own screaming, Paul D also reveals a central dynamic between Sethe and her haunting: she has “enough” weighing on her without the added presence of her dead baby, but the house (understood by her to be that same presence) demands more of her. Rather than solving the problem, Paul D has only physically embodied that “beating back the past” that Sethe attempts emotionally. In fact, his outburst in some respect solidifies the ghost’s move from haunted house to flesh and bone. After the scene calms down, there is “another breathing… just as tired” as Sethe, Denver, and Paul D (22). The haunting once established as the “baby’s venom” (3) in the house finally takes on the shape of the young girl, thus demonstrating Foreman’s point that the magical aspects of Morrison’s work “do not fade… but rather become sharper [and] more immediate” (Foreman 296). Through this interaction, we come to realize that the haunting can move between these different manifestations – when the weight of it grows too large, or it becomes evident that the haunting that works for Sethe and Denver will not work for Paul D, the ghost can re-embody itself into more effective shapes. 

II. Axes of Haunting: Identity, Time, Space

Foreman’s observations about the role of names in Song of Solomon bring up valuable avenues for exploring the figure of Beloved. She cites the importance of naming in African American culture as “a creative and subversive practice in a country that has historically denied, manipulated, and mangled black names,” and she goes on to say that “names… bear witness” (290). Perhaps most intriguing is her assertion that “names are historically embedded, and their recovery involves a certain kind of responsibility to them” (291). Foreman does not spend a substantial amount of time connecting this line of thinking to Beloved. This gap is unfortunate because Beloved’s naming challenges Foreman’s ideas in noteworthy ways. This absence does, however, speak to a space in the larger discourse surrounding Beloved. An emphasis on settling the ghost’s identity and reconciling the haunting in any one direction or form leads analyses of the novel to overlook the ways in which Beloved functions in all of these ways – within magical realism, but not bound to it; a daughter to two mothers across time; a girl who can be gaunt ghost and fully flesh; a metaphor that points to and through traumatic history but that can also point to us in the here and now – in short, how Beloved can inhabit multiple spaces at once and still not be held completely by them, and how that multiplicity is intentional and laden with meaning. Her name and the act of naming in the novel gives us a space in which to analyze haunting across these different registers and to make observations about this charged form of identity. 

Foreman quotes Morrison in contending that “once you have named [a thing], you have power” (290). With this in mind, we can consider the ways that Beloved’s name achieves this “power” as well as the ways in which it fails to do so. Beloved’s name comes only in death, and only in the form of a headstone that costs Sethe “ten minutes rutting among the gravestones with the engraver” (Morrison 5). Sethe thinks of the “baby’s fury” as tangled up in – or bearing witness to – “those ten minutes,” to the point where the memory of the engraver becomes “longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (6). Beloved’s death robs her of a name in life, leaving the only thing to be “recovered” that name given to her at the funeral, the “Dearly Beloved” that Sethe clings to. Her name cannot be separated from her death. Though she is “beloved” by Sethe as her child, she is “Beloved” because she is dead, and she is dead because she was murdered. The power in this name lies in that which Beloved has over Sethe to constantly remind her of the dual pain of guilt and trauma. Her name constantly references that wound, placing the “rage” of that “little old baby” at the forefront of her existence as a haunting presence (5). We can see this most clearly when Sethe begins to speak about explaining the murder to Beloved. Sethe starts by naming her: “Beloved, she my daughter… When I explain it she’ll understand, because she understands everything already… she’ll understand. She my daughter” (236). By this point, Beloved has already “amazed” Sethe with the need to constantly hear stories, though Sethe admits that “every mention of her past life hurt” (69). It is Beloved who is calling up this past and begging Sethe to relive it again and again – in Sethe’s repeated assertion that Beloved is “my daughter,” she convinces herself that recreating this pain is what she owes to the ghost. Beloved might already “understand,” but Sethe will keep explaining the past to her anyway. 

Were Beloved’s presence only a manifestation of Sethe’s dead baby, her name might be able to capture the whole of this identity in the text. But Morrison weaves in other possibilities that frustrate the desire to categorize this ghost. The name Beloved becomes a catch-all for these different identities – a murdered child, a young girl who has escaped sexual abuse, and a girl separated from her mother in the Middle Passage. Each of these scenarios conjures a unique horror, and Morrison never settles the argument as to which one Beloved “really” is. The tension created by these coexisting personalities becomes apparent when we gain access to Beloved’s thoughts. She begins by claiming her name in a way that echoes Sethe: “I am Beloved and she is mine.” As she goes on, it is clear that there are other memories pulling at the seams of her identity, most notably those of her time on a ship “crouching and watching others who are crouching too” (249). This section comes together in disjointed and fragmentary parts, which speaks to Beloved’s inability to comprehend or synthesize all of these pasts layered on top of each other. If there is a name to be recovered from the girl and her mother in the Middle Passage, the text does not give it to us. “Beloved” can only contain one history under that name, but as a haunting presence, she manifests the pain of several different lives. She cannot name these other people, and so does not have the “power” over them that Foreman alludes to. 

Something has to give under the weight of this excess of identities, and we see this breakdown as Beloved transposes one history onto another. Her experience in the Middle Passage spills over onto her relationship to Sethe – for her, Sethe and her mother on the ship are one and the same: “Sethe is the one that picked flowers…in the place before the crouching… Sethe went into the sea” (253). Sethe does not know this past, so as Beloved begins to ask more of her – specifically for explanations she cannot give about the mother who went “into the sea” – Sethe begins to waste away under the stress of Beloved’s demands. Sethe, who from the beginning of the novel works to suppress her own past, finds herself bombarded with Beloved’s hunger for a different set of stories that she does not have. The explanations that Sethe gives will not suffice because she cannot answer what Beloved is asking: she cannot even comprehend the question being asked. Neither can Beloved herself bridge this gap in communication because it occurs both temporally and spatially – across a generation and an ocean. The collapsing of these layers only further confuses the situation; Beloved cannot reconcile their convergence, and we find out in these moments that she does not understand in the way Sethe needs her to. 

What Foreman eventually calls an “amplified reality” in reference to Song of Solomon, I would interpret here as an “excess of reality” pertaining to Beloved – pulling in the language of excess already seen in Zamora’s work on magical realism gives us a more precise way of thinking about the reality of the novel. Each of the identities that people project onto Beloved are real histories with real trauma attached, but there are so many of them that one name, one ghost cannot hold them all together for long. Here too, Beloved becomes a “site of the historical and the magical,” but she is the site of a history that Sethe does not have direct access to because of her own past. Where Beloved’s memory of the Middle Passage is a directly experiential one, Sethe’s memory goes only as far back as her mother, one whom she struggles to remember. She is at the same time cut off from that knowledge of her childhood – of “singing and dancing and how crowded it was… the same language her ma’am spoke” – and fully embedded within the knowledge of its removal, of that which “would never come back” (74). The aftereffects of that removal and the message that “was and had been there all along” tear at Sethe’s memory; her pleading question to her mother – “how will you know me?” – becomes something else for her to “beat back.” Beloved, with her hunger for the past, for knowledge, makes these memories “clearer and clearer” in Sethe’s mind, but this sharpening of memory results in a blurring of the present; Sethe notices Beloved and Denver as “the two girls sitting near the stove,” and they “seemed little and far away.” Sethe forces herself out of the past’s dangerous hold by shifting the conversation back to the man who was able to ward off the ghost earlier, if only for a while: “Paul D be here in a minute” (74). As we will see again at the end of the novel, Denver picks up on this dynamic, but twists Sethe’s question into one of her own. Denver focuses on Beloved’s unexplainable knowledge of Sethe, turning the question from “how will you know me?” into “how did she know?” (75). This question of knowing and being known transverses temporal and spatial boundaries. Beloved cannot be totally known in any of her forms; Sethe cannot totally remember her own past without threatening the present; Denver does not have a way to truly know either of them. 

The structure of excess and knowledge plays out across the novel in a variety of contexts, all of which point back to a fundamental concept: memory and history overflowing the boundaries of a reality imposed upon it by characters or readers, undermining any attempt to contain through understanding or explain away their demanding presence. This excess lies at the root of Beloved’s “unspeakable things,” manifested within and in excess of different axes of haunting – among them temporal, spatial, mental, physical, and epistemological. Morrison’s use of magical realism to express this concept comes from the need for the text to haunt and be haunted in a way that is true to life. “True to life,” in this sense, means to illuminate those aspects of life that would otherwise be cast off as unrealistic in favor of those which allow us to forget, to “successfully” (for a time) beat back the past, or pretend our ghosts don’t exist. Beloved’s presence, and the larger haunting she is a part of, makes “clearer and clearer” those memories we would rather suppress. Spilling light into the dark corners of the past and present allows us to see the true size of the reality we stand in, and perhaps to stand more fully inside it without being consumed in the way that Beloved threatens to consume Sethe.

III. How to Know, How to Haunt

After seeing this dynamic play out between characters, we return again to the question of how: how does Beloved know? How does Beloved mean? Put another way: how does haunting in all its forms come to manifest the excess at the heart of the novel? To understand how Beloved’s ghost comes into being, we need to consider how a ghost becomes a ghost at all – that is, the forces that turn absence into absent presence, the key that makes a traumatic event into a haunting. For this, Avery F. Gordon’s reading of Morrison in her book Ghostly Matters proves indispensable. Gordon describes haunting as

One way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavey, for instance) … Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them. What’s distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known… unlike trauma, [haunting] is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. (Gordon xvi)

For Gordon, a key difference between haunting and the forces that create haunting lies in the ghost’s ability to demand change from the system that brought it into being. A ghost occurs at the breaking point in order to expose “the cracks and rigging” in the current system. Although she claims that a ghost is not “the invisible or some ineffable excess,” I would argue that her project’s desire to “richly conjure, describe, narrate, and explain the liens, the costs, the forfeits, and the losses of modern systems of abusive power in their immediacy and worldly significance” (xvii) is in fact a desire to make the ineffable effable – or, to find that “something-to-be-done” in the midst of Morrison’s “unspeakable things.” This desire conjures the concept of excess, since it is excess that pushes a system to that breaking point, excess that forces “the people who are meant to be invisible” to the forefront, excess that calls for “something else, something different than before” (xvi). Excess moves from the realm of the invisible/ineffable into the realm of the seen/spoken and becomes what Morrison calls a “demanding presence,” – though the ghost might not itself be the excess, in the way that the fruit is not the tree but also would not exist without it. In this text, enslavement is the instance within which traumatic memory functions; as both a moment and an ongoing process, it creates an excess that demands haunting as a catalyst for “something-to-be-done.” 

In her description of the features of haunting, Gordon expands upon Zamora’s ideas about the “slippage from the individual to the collective” by focusing on the inherently socially embedded nature of the ghost: “the ghost cannot be simply tracked back to an individual loss or trauma” (183). It is the collective nature of that system of violence that makes each of its individual manifestations so tangible. Because the ghost cannot be pinned into one individual meaning (as we’ve already established with Beloved’s name), it is also “pregnant with unfulfilled possibility… [the ghost] figures this utopian dimension of haunting.” The strain on Beloved caused by layers of identity bleeding into one another poses not just the threat of destroying Sethe and her suppression of the past, but the embedded promise of a possible future through “reckoning with [that] repression” instead of being consumed by it (183). Furthermore, the history that conjures the ghost is “a wavering yet determinate social structure… it is always a site of struggle and contradiction between the living and the ghostly” (184). Gordon suggests to us a ghost that both experiences and performs haunting; Beloved, along with everyone else, is subject to the rupture that occurs at the intersection of the collective and the individual, the moment of excess when “two events become one story” (160). Layers of meaning collapse on one another and overwhelm the present moment with the embodied and embedded past and the uncertain possibility of the future. Gordon speaks often of the duality of Beloved’s presence, of that existence which “retells one story and in this way summons another… creating a palimpsest” (146). As is evident in the cases of Sethe and Paul D, who either “beat back the past” or lock it away “in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be” (Morrison 86), Gordon understands that the weight of meaning – that which is summoned in the retelling – often presses most heavily on what isn’t said: the ghost haunts and is haunted by the “unspeakability of her story” (Gordon 175). This unspeakability lies at the edges of every character’s story, but also at the edges of the text itself.  

It is here that we can look to the moment in the narrative where traumatic memory becomes an unspeakable breaking point. Beloved’s murder begins the transformation from tragedy to haunting, but the community around 124 Bluestone crystallizes the process by making that death unspeakable, excessive, “not a story to pass on” (Morrison 324). Beloved becomes a ghost not solely through the “rage” of “a little old baby” at being killed (5), but through the collective decision of the rest of the community to refuse that memory, to leave the residents of that house at the mercy of the struggle “between the living and the ghostly” (Gordon 184). In the attempt to cut off Sethe and Baby Suggs, the rupture forms that will allow Beloved to embody not just one rejected memory, but all of them – it is at the community level that Beloved finally becomes “a site of the historical and the magical,” because her unspeakability conjures the other unspeakable facets of reality and forces them back into everyone’s line of sight. This moment of rupture opens the door for those other beaten-back pasts to come rushing out: not through the swinging and screaming of furniture, but through the suffocating silence of a shunned household. 

Beloved’s murder resonates on the individual, local, and societal registers simultaneously because Sethe’s decision in that moment epitomizes the tension between individual and communal trauma. Both the larger structure of enslavement itself and the individual decision of schoolteacher to chase Sethe force her into this decision, and so her actions take place both on the individual level of a mother to her daughter and on the societal level of a formerly enslaved woman reacting to that system. “Two events become one story” here as well, because Sethe’s abuse at Sweet Home informs her decision to murder her daughter. Before she will answer Paul D’s unasked question “which lay in the clipping he showed her,” she recalls different memories of that place before she explains the “selfish pleasure,” the fact that “I couldn’t let her nor any of em live under schoolteacher. That was out.” For Sethe, there is no question: 

the truth was simple, not a long-drawn-out record of flowered shifts, tree cages, selfishness, ankle ropes and wells. Simple: she was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher’s hat, she heard wings… And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where they would be safe. (Morrison 192)

This moment of interiority around Sethe’s experience of the murder shows us the beginning of the breaking point. Her memories of different facets of Sweet Home swell, but they are not the center of her thoughts. The decision rests on the word “no,” the center of the “circle she was making around the room, him, the subject.” That one word grows, duplicates itself into the actions that follow it, from a succession of “Nonono” to flying, collecting, carrying, pushing, and dragging. The rhythm of three in “Nonono” follows her through the moment; the parts of her are “precious and fine and beautiful,” she “carried, pushed, dragged,” she describes the other side of the veil as “out, away, over there.” Unlike the “roaring” in Paul D’s head that disorients him as he listens to her, the cacophony caused by “hummingbird wings” beating around Sethe and the rhythm of her actions reveals her certainty, her conviction that the place “through the veil” is the only place left to go – even if, as she presumes, no one except Beloved herself understands.  

One version of this story has already been told before this moment, but it comes from outside of Sethe’s perspective. In the earlier retelling, we receive the additional detail of “a throng, now, of black faces” gathered outside the house – Sethe’s exit from the scene is surrounded by silence from every side, as opposed to the “roaring” that plagues Paul D. The only noise here is hypothetical, the “singing [that] would have begun at once… Some cape of sound would have quickly been wrapped around her… As it was, they waited… And then no words. Humming. No words at all” (179). There are no words here like there are in Sethe’s repeated “no,” but the crowd’s “humming” anticipates the “hummingbirds” in Sethe’s head later so that the sound frames the moment in two ways, one personal and one collective. 

The murder literally “resonates” through this hum, and both instances signal the creation of distance between Sethe and others. In the original instance, the space is physical: 124 Bluestone is “desolate and exposed at the very hour when everybody stopped dropping by” (192). The house, which becomes the first noticeable manifestation of the ghost, reflects the community’s shunning of Sethe. The other distance is emotional; it is the “forest” that appears between Sethe and Paul D and continues “locking the distance between them, giving is shape and heft” until Paul D leaves the house. In the second instance, Beloved’s physical appearance at the top of the stairs accentuates the “shape and heft” of separation between Sethe and Paul D, signaling both that “slippage” from the individual to the collective (and, in this case, the collective back to the individual) and the “animated state” of the violence done both to and by Sethe. Gordon’s language of duality is useful here again: the murder is both action and reaction, and so is the community’s decision to abandon 124 Bluestone. This chain reaction of causing/being caused cannot help but summon one story in the retelling of another; the inextricability of Beloved from her murder and the murder from Sethe’s enslavement is what triggers the community to try and “beat [it] back,” but instead this process only exacerbates the rupture, creating an excess of traumatic pressure that amplifies the haunted-ness of the text. 

IV. Into the Yard

Turning to the end of the novel, then, becomes a way to examine the intersection of Gordon’s “something-to-be-done,” Foreman’s ideas on naming and identity, and Zamora’s magical realist idea of the ghost as a “guide” to an overflowing reality. Although commonly referred to in terms of exorcism, Beloved’s departure from the novel does not bring about the kind of settled catharsis that the term exorcism evokes. Instead, the text leaves us with another moment of excess, of spilling over, of something that escapes our full understanding and disappears “cutting through the woods” (315). But before the moment of Beloved’s slipping into the physical unknown, there is a movement in the opposite direction: towards knowledge, towards the future, out – as Baby Suggs would have it – into “the yard” (288). 

It is Denver’s dealings with her ghost that reveal the final layer of this haunting; from her name to her ability to make connections impossible for others, Denver’s trajectory in the final section of the narrative points us outward physically, emotionally, and temporally. Her name comes from a point of connection; Sethe names her daughter after Amy Denver, the “girl looking for velvet” who helps her give birth to her daughter in the middle of her escape from Sweet Home. Denver’s name reflects their interaction and evokes the story of her birth, in direct contrast to the way Beloved evokes the story of her death. The sisters become reverses of one another – one living, one dead, one who feeds off the breach between Sethe and the community and the other who will attempt to reach across it. 

Despite the moment of contact her name recalls, Denver struggles against isolation throughout the text. After her brothers leave and Baby Suggs dies, she is left alone with her mother among a community that will not come near the two of them or their haunted house. Her solitude solidifies further after Paul D’s arrival, because he brings with him a history that she does not have access to – Sethe is careful with what she will tell Denver of her time at Sweet Home, but Sethe and Paul D are able to share in a collective knowledge of their past that alienates Denver: “They were a twosome, saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her. That her own father’s absence was not hers” (15). In response to this separation, Denver leans into the haunting presence and has “a vague smile on her lips” when the house begins to shudder (21). It is this moment of anger, combined with Paul D’s furniture swinging, that summons Beloved in physical form. 

Beloved serves as a stopgap for Denver’s loneliness for a while – her presence is an opportunity to have a sibling once again after both of her brothers have run off. Even as the situation deteriorates, as Paul D leaves and Sethe and Beloved spend longer stretches of time together, Denver sees her mother as the danger: “Her eye was on her mother, for a signal that the thing that was in her was out, and she would kill again” (283). Instead, Denver starts to realize the extent of Beloved’s demanding presence. She sees Sethe struggling to keep up with Beloved’s “invented desire,” and notices that the two women are becoming one image as Beloved absorbs more and more of Sethe’s attention and energy. Even if she does not understand completely, Denver witnesses the converging histories that we have already seen. Sethe and Beloved argue, trying to make two separate events into one and finding their stories impossible to reconcile. Denver, who is once again on the outside of the relationship, can see how Beloved’s increasing tangibility comes at the price of Sethe’s own fading. Sethe’s eyes are “bright but dead, alert but vacant,” and she notices everything but Beloved’s “basket-fat stomach,” the image of her insatiable demands. 

Once Denver does realize that it is her mother who needs protecting and not Beloved, she comes up against a different problem. Isolated once again, first by Sethe and Paul D and now by Sethe and Beloved, Denver does not have a ghost to summon in revenge. This time, she knows that “she would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world.” She faces the prospect of leaving the house as being “swallowed up in the world beyond the edge of the porch” (286). The language of eating echoes the devouring of Sethe by Beloved, with her growing figure and “lapping devotion like cream” (286). Denver is afraid of being completely consumed by the outside world; her thoughts begin to swirl with “small things” that might scratch or touch, where “feeling could overtake you and stick to you like a shadow,” and, most importantly, her mother’s warning about places “like Sweet Home where time didn’t pass and where, like her mother said, the bad was waiting for her as well.” Finally, the question of knowing takes a new form – not “how will you know me,” not “how did [Beloved] know,” but “how would [Denver] know?” (287). Denver is the one at the center of the question, because it is her movement into the wider world, into her fears of unknown places and a reality beyond the porch, that will engender the final motions of the novel.

There is something to be done here, but who will be Denver’s “guide,” given Beloved’s antagonistic presence? Both times Denver finds herself isolated, a ghost follows. The object of the first one, though, was Sethe. In this moment, when Denver finds herself alone, unable to step off the porch, a different ghost appears and speaks directly to her: “Baby Suggs laughed, clear as anything” (287). Baby Suggs has been dead for the entirety of the novel, only coming to the forefront in flashbacks, and yet her presence weaves throughout the narrative in a different way than Beloved’s physical, demanding presence. Denver summons Baby Suggs by “remembering those conversations and her grandmother’s last and final words,” rather than her wishing for the “thrilling” anger of the baby ghost (15).  But Baby Suggs brings up her own memories as well. She speaks to the absence created by Sethe’s refusal to speak too much of her own past to Denver: “You mean I never told you nothing about Carolina? About your daddy?” (287). Like when Paul D and Sethe spoke of him, Halle is “your daddy,” but not in a way that robs Denver of his absence; Baby Suggs makes it Denver’s absence once more and tells her what to do with the indefensible – the absence, the weight, the memories laden into every corner of the outside world: “Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on” (288). Denver does not wonder how this ghost knows, but instead receives a demand that will not consume her – Baby Suggs’ demand is for the future, for a knowledge that is not complete, but is enough to move out and move on.

Baby Suggs guides Denver’s journey outside 124 Bluestone in another way as well – it is her connection to the women in the community that eases Denver’s way. Denver, now, can pull on a different set of memories – not what people remember about Sethe, but what they remember about Baby Suggs. The more Denver ventures out to return baskets or bowls, the more she learns that “all of them knew her grandmother and some had even danced with her in the Clearing” (293). This, in conjunction with the offerings of food, reveals a way to conceptualize memory without necessarily invoking haunting. Baby Suggs does not have to come back and devour the living, but her memory creates a point of contact between Denver and the rest of the community where real food can be shared and eaten. Beloved is a hunger that will not be satisfied, while Denver has a hunger that Baby Suggs’ legacy and the world around her can meet. 

Of course, this connection alone will not solve the problem of Sethe wasting away under Beloved’s demanding presence. Denver recognizes the implacability of this haunting, but she also knows something else about the situation – “she came to realize that her presence in that house had no influence on what either woman did. She kept them alive and they ignored her” (296). Instead of worrying about her place in a group of three, Denver now has “a self to look out for and preserve,” in contrast to her mother’s own fading self (297). This realization brings with it the understanding that giving oneself over to the weight of the past causes just as many problems as beating it back – nothing can be changed or explained away about Beloved’s death, about Sweet Home, about the mother who went into the sea. Sethe switches from one extreme to the other, but Denver sees a way to acknowledge that history without being consumed by it.

The answer lies in the telling. Denver’s revelation that she must be the one to save whoever there is to save at 124 Bluestone arrives just moments before another, deeper insight: “Nobody was going to help her unless she told it – told all of it” (298). What has been unspeakable for so long is, on some level, speakable once more. Once Denver opens the line of communication, the information spreads around to the other women in town, and we see a shift in the weight of the action. Denver leaves the Bodwin’s home after speaking to Janey about a job, after telling her “all of it,” and her place as our witness to events ends; it is Janey’s spreading the news that takes hold, and we move instead to the reactions of the rest of the women. Once the story is out in the community, it is not up to Denver herself, but how the community receives it and what they do with it. 

One woman in particular, Ella, epitomizes the community response to this haunting while bringing back certain aspects of it in a new way. Though she disagrees with the outcome, she “understood Sethe’s rage in the shed twenty years ago,” and no matter how she feels about the murder, she reacts viscerally to the ghost: 

There was also something very personal in her fury. Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present… As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place – shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such – Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot. She didn’t mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion. (302)

The “rage” that we see in Sethe and the baby in the beginning of the novel now takes shape as a “fury” in the living. Ella lays out the line between trauma and haunting practically. There is a difference between being pained by the past and being swallowed whole by it, and the idea of the past possessing – literally, taking possession of – the present, when “daily life took as much as she had” already, is untenable (302). She sees what Gordon notes in the haunting, that something-to-be-done, and so she is the catalyst for the “rescue” to take place (301). “Taking flesh” is both literal and figurative here, as Beloved “takes flesh” by becoming a physical being and also “takes flesh” from Sethe – as one grows, the other shrinks. Ella allows a place for the ghostly, for history to make itself known at the edges of reality, but the complete imposition of one upon the other is too much to bear. 

V. Into the Woods

And so, the end of the novel becomes a kind of reworking of the parts of the original event. The crowd gathers, but rather than the hypothetical “cape of sound” and “humming,” there is prayer, hollering, and singing. There is the approach of another cart coming down the road, and another white man coming to take Sethe’s daughter – unintentionally, Denver has recreated this moment, but now instead of forming a rupture, there is a chance to bridge one. As the pieces fall into place, they summon not one, but two other stories. Gordon’s image of the palimpsest becomes clear as both Sethe and Beloved relive separate traumatic moments. Layered on top of each other are Sethe’s “little hummingbirds” and “Nonono” and Beloved’s “hill of black people, falling” and “the man without skin, looking” (309). The house and the yard become the physical meeting point of different moments in time, and the addition of the singing women outside pushes the moment to its breaking point, makes a different use of excess – a ghost will not be created this time, but expelled, pushed out, removed from 124 Bluestone. 

In creating one connection, the opportunity for another occurs. Paul D arrives after Beloved flees into the woods, and it is with him that we see Sethe in her new state. He’s already passed Denver on the way, so there will not be a repeat of her earlier wish for the baby ghost to appear, just a warning to “be careful how you talk to my ma’am, hear?” (314). Beloved’s absence creates a space for Paul D and Sethe to reconnect in a way that does not enrage that demanding presence. Instead of stories fighting to reconcile and their layers tearing under the stress, Paul D “wants to put his story next to hers,” and he is, must be the one to tell Sethe “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (321). Only now that the immediate threat of the past is gone can Sethe begin to conceptualize a future – or perhaps even recall Gordon’s “utopian dimension” – but even here, it isn’t promised. 

Once again, we find ourselves at a moment where things could be wrapped up simply or explained easily. But as with Beloved’s myriad identities, there is always more at the end, something wider speaking from the periphery. Morrison will not allow us to think that the haunting has been remedied just because the ghost ran off into the woods. There will always remain a part of Beloved that is unknowable, because there will always be pieces of the past that are unknowable. Denver still does not know all there is to know about Sweet Home. Sethe does not know all there is to know about her mother. So, in response to the questions that arise – “where or why she crouched, or whose was the underwater face she needed like that” – there is only one response: “It was not a story to pass on” (324). Not a beating back of the past, but an attempt at forgetting, one that still allows for “the rustle of a skirt…knuckles brushing a cheek in sleep” (324). Though the novel tries to convince us, as the community tries to convince itself, that “by and by all trace is gone,” the text ends on that name which recalls all of it, on just one word and nothing else: “Beloved” (324). The move from “this was” to “this is” signals the fact that the story is ongoing, rather than a fixed point in societal memory. She has not been exorcised, and there is not the catharsis of exorcism, of being sure that the ghost is gone. Instead, her absence itself becomes a source of excess – the space created by her loss and all of the other stories it summons lurks still at the edges of reality, in photographs and in footprints. 

What was to-be-done has been done, but the text belies something deeper about the haunting that cannot be contained in one ghost story. “Deliberately,” they forget her, but there is still something there that “they can touch,” even though they “know things will never be the same if they do” (324). It is Beloved, but it is also what lies beyond, behind, beneath and before her. The supernatural becomes ordinary matter – “just weather.” Beloved is once again an “unspeakable thing,” but her excessive demand has, for a time, been expelled. Morrison does not leave us with the promise that it will not return; instead, we are left with what pours out of the text and into our own reality, what faces us as “immediately incomprehensible.” There is no way to recover all of the history that haunting demands, and so the ghosts are inevitable. But there is a way to not be devoured by it, to see the excesses of reality and live with them instead of against them – to feel the weight of history and memory and still allow the possibility of a tomorrow. 

Works Cited

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