Literary Devices Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
Slavery’s Destruction of Identity
Beloved explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual devastation wrought by slavery, a
devastation that continues to haunt those characters who are former slaves even in
freedom. The most dangerous of slavery’s effects is its negative impact on the former
slaves’ senses of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Paul
D, for instance, is so alienated from himself that at one point he cannot tell whether the
screaming he hears is his own or someone else’s. Slaves were told they were subhuman
and were traded as commodities whose worth could be expressed in dollars.
Consequently, Paul D is very insecure about whether or not he could possibly be a real
“man,” and he frequently wonders about his value as a person. Sethe, also, was treated
as a subhuman. She once walked in on schoolteacher giving his pupils a lesson on her
“animal characteristics.” She, too, seems to be alienated from herself and filled with self-
loathing. Thus, she sees the best part of herself as her children. Yet her children also
have volatile, unstable identities. Denver conflates her identity with Beloved’s, and
Beloved feels herself actually beginning to physically disintegrate. Slavery has also
limited Baby Suggs’s self-conception by shattering her family and denying her the
opportunity to be a true wife, sister, daughter, or loving mother. As a result of their
inability to believe in their own existences, both Baby Suggs and Paul D become
depressed and tired. Baby Suggs’s fatigue is spiritual, while Paul D’s is emotional. While
a slave, Paul D developed self-defeating coping strategies to protect him from the
emotional pain he was forced to endure. Any feelings he had were locked away in the
rusted “tobacco tin” of his heart, and he concluded that one should love nothing too
intensely. Other slaves—Jackson Till, Aunt Phyllis, and Halle—went insane and thus
suffered a complete loss of self. Sethe fears that she, too, will end her days in madness.
Indeed, she does prove to be mad when she kills her own daughter. Yet Sethe’s act of
infanticide illuminates the perverse forces of the institution of slavery: under slavery, a
mother best expresses her love for her children by murdering them and thus protecting
them from the more gradual destruction wrought by slavery. Stamp Paid muses that
slavery’s negative consequences are not limited to the slaves: he notes that slavery
causes whites to become “changed and altered . . . made . . . bloody, silly, worse than
they ever wanted to be.” The insidious effects of the institution affect not only the
identities of its black victims but those of the whites who perpetrate it and the collective
identity of Americans. Where slavery exists, everyone suffers a loss of humanity and
compassion. For this reason, Morrison suggests that our nation’s identity, like the
novel’s characters, must be healed. America’s future depends on its understanding of
the past: just as Sethe must come to terms with her past before she can secure a future
with Denver and Paul D, before we can address slavery’s legacy in the contemporary
problems of racial discrimination and discord, we must confront the dark and hidden
corners of our history. Crucially, in Beloved, we learn about the history and legacy of
slavery not from schoolteacher’s or even from the Bodwins’ point of view but rather from
Sethe’s, Paul D’s, Stamp Paid’s, and Baby Suggs’s. Morrison writes history with the
voices of a people historically denied the power of language, and Beloved recuperates a
history that had been lost—either due to willed forgetfulness (as in Sethe’s repression of
her memories) or to forced silence (as in the case of Paul D’s iron bit).
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The Importance of Community Solidarity
Beloved demonstrates the extent to which individuals need the support of their
communities in order to survive. Sethe first begins to develop her sense of self during
her twenty-eight days of freedom, when she becomes a part of the Cincinnati community.
Similarly, Denver discovers herself and grows up when she leaves 124 and becomes a
part of society. Paul D and his fellow prison inmates in Georgia prove able to escape only
by working together. They are literally chained to one another, and Paul D recalls that “if
one lost, all lost.” Lastly, it is the community that saves Sethe from mistakenly killing Mr.
Bodwin and casting the shadow of another sin across her and her family’s life.
Cincinnati’s black community plays a pivotal role in the events of 124. The community’s
failure to alert Sethe to schoolteacher’s approach implicates it in the death of Sethe’s
daughter. Baby Suggs feels the slight as a grave betrayal from which she never fully
recovers. At the end of the novel, the black community makes up for its past misbehavior
by gathering at 124 to collectively exorcise Beloved. By driving Beloved away, the
community secures Sethe’s, and its own, release from the past.
The Powers and Limits of Language
When Sixo turns schoolteacher’s reasoning around to justify having broken the rules,
schoolteacher whips him to demonstrate that “definitions belong to the definers,” not to
the defined. The slaves eventually come to realize the illegitimacy of many of the white
definitions. Mr. Garner, for example, claims to have allowed his slaves to live as “real
men,” but Paul D questions just how manly they actually are. So, too, does Paul D finally
come to realize with bitter irony the fallacy of the name “Sweet Home.” Although Sixo
eventually reacts to the hypocrisy of the rhetoric of slavery by abandoning English
altogether, other characters use English to redefine the world on their own terms. Baby
Suggs and Stamp Paid, for example, rename themselves. Beloved may be read as
Morrison’s effort to transform those who have always been the defined into the definers.
While slaves, the characters manipulate language and transcend its standard limits.
Their command of language allows them to adjust its meanings and to make themselves
indecipherable to the white slave owners who watch them. For example, Paul D and the
Georgia prison inmates sing together about their dreams and memories by “garbling . . .
[and] tricking the words.” The title of the novel alludes to what is ultimately the product
of a linguistic misunderstanding. At her daughter’s funeral, Sethe interpreted the
minister’s address to the “Dearly Beloved” as referring to the dead rather than the living.
All literature is indebted to this “slippery,” shifting quality of language: the power of
metaphor, simile, metonymy, irony, and wordplay all result from the ability of words to
attach and detach themselves from various possible meanings.
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The Trauma and Memory of Slavery
The key theme of the novel is the need for people, particularly ex-slaves, to deal with their
painful pasts in order to heal themselves. To develop this theme, Morrison tells the story of
Sethe, a female ex-slave, who kills her child in order to save her from the misery of slavery that
she has endured. Although she does not spend much time in jail for her crime, she spends most
of her life paying for the murder. She is ostracized by the community, haunted by the ghost of
her dead daughter, and driven by the painful memories of what she has endured as a slave and
inflicted on her children.
Following the abolishment of slavery, the trauma of enslavement still follows Sethe and
Paul D as their relationship
forces them both to remember the horrors of their pasts. This trauma persists in various
hauntings—from the haint
possessing house 124 to the sudden appearance of Beloved. Each haunting reminds the
formerly enslaved
characters of the residual trauma they grapple with even long after slavery’s
abolishment. Both Sethe and Paul D
struggle with their coping mechanisms at the start of the novel, moving between
repression and silence.
For Sethe, her isolation from the townspeople has enabled her to avoid confronting the
horrors of her past,
particularly her violent actions toward her own children. However, the temperamental
haint of 124 physically
articulates the anger and pain that Sethe has repressed by shaking the house and
tossing its furniture. The haint, the
spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter, imbues the house with “baby’s venom” (3), and it is also
a constant reminder of
Sethe’s fear of being enslaved once again.
Paul D has coped with his enslavement and subsequent imprisonment by moving from
place to place. House 124 is
one of the first places he has settled in a while. His growing intimacy with Sethe, a
woman he has desired since they
were enslaved together at Sweet Home, compels him to speak about his traumas for the
first time. However, the
process of narrating his traumatic experiences is not easy, as he is practiced in keeping
his past to himself. He has
placed his feelings in a “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be”
(86). Like Sethe, he has been
desensitized by the rapidity of his traumatic experiences during his enslavement and
imprisonment. The only viable
way of coping he has had all these years is not to feel. Throughout the novel, Sethe and
Paul D heal from their
traumatic pasts and reconcile with their painful memories of enslavement.
The Destruction of Black Identity
Long after the abolishment of slavery, white people enact control over black people
through the destruction of black
identity. The most violent example of this harm is the schoolteacher’s methods of
controlling and punishing the
enslaved black people at Sweet Home. His cruel punishments include burning Sixo alive
and whipping Sethe when
she informs him that his nephews raped her. He is able to justify his dehumanization of
them by assigning white
superiority over their black identity. As an educator, he practices eugenics, a science
rooted in biological racism, and
studies the bodies and practices of his black slaves, establishing ideas about black
inferiority. To the schoolteacher,
the ownership and control of black slaves is the same as taming animals. When he finds
Sethe in the shed with her
injured and murdered children, he does not express any emotion over the scene but
rather calculates his own loses in
labor and property value. He determines that Sethe has “gone wild” (176) as horses do
when they reach their
threshold for physical punishment.
Slavery’s psychic and physical harms also have a detrimental impact upon kinship
among the black townspeople in
the novel. While Grandma Baby Suggs labors to produce a sense of community and
healing for the townspeople,
they betray her family by neglecting to inform her of the slave catchers’ arrival. While
they have all benefitted from
Grandma Baby Suggs’ words of wisdom over the years, they also grow increasingly
jealous of her life when her family
slowly rejoins her. Grandma Baby Suggs is so heartbroken by this betrayal from her
black community that she
becomes sick shortly after and passes away. To her, the betrayal is the fault of
whiteness, leading her to proclaim,
The Intimacy of Mother-Daughter Relationships
While there are different forms of intimate relationships throughout the novel, the most
prominent ones are between
mothers and daughters. For Sethe, the trauma of motherhood begins with her own
mother, who killed every one of
her children but Sethe. While Sethe cannot comprehend the meaning behind her
mother’s actions when she is
younger, she will go on to repeat her mother’s violent actions against her own children to
prevent them from being
captured into slavery. In both incidents, the mother permits the survival of one daughter
who will live to either break
the cycle of intergenerational trauma or sustain the pain for another generation.
For Sethe, this tension is exemplified through her two daughters, Denver and Beloved.
Whereas Denver stands for the
future of growth and healing from trauma, Beloved represents the inability to let go of the
past. Denver grows from
protecting Beloved to shielding her mother from her dead sister’s possession. Despite
being afraid of her mother’s
capacity for violence, Denver also realizes from witnessing Beloved’s possession that “if
Sethe [doesn’t] wake up one
morning and pick up a knife, Beloved might” (285). Denver witnesses her mother’s pain
over time and understands
Beloved’s possession for what it is. Meanwhile, Beloved’s possession represents an
unwillingness to heal. Sethe
nurses this possession by providing motherly love in excess, spoiling Beloved and
feeding her own guilt over killing
her child. Realizing this is not sustainable, Denver seeks outside help, disrupting the
abusive pattern of mother and
daughter relationships by being open to new forms of kinship that might heal them.
Characters
Sethe
Sethe is the protagonist of the novel. Her traumatic past comes back to haunt her at house 124.
She grows up as a
slave, separated from a mother who killed all her children but Sethe. Her mother gives Sethe
her birth father’s male
name, but this story is relayed to her by another enslaved woman, as her mother is killed before
she has the chance
to explain. Years later, Sethe repeats her mother’s tragic actions against her own children. After
running away from
Sweet Home where she was enslaved, Sethe lives in hiding at her mother-in-law Grandma
Baby Suggs’ house with her
four children. When her former master finds her, she tries to kill her children and herself,
succeeding in killing only her
oldest daughter.
Sethe was thirteen
when she came to Sweet Home and already iron-eyed. She was a timely
present for Mrs. Garner who had lost Baby Suggs to her husband’s high
principles. The five Sweet Home men looked at the new girl and decided to
let her be. They were young and so sick with the absence of women they had
taken to calves. Yet they let the iron-eyed girl be, so she could choose in spite
of the fact that each one would have beaten the others to mush to have her.17
Beloved
Beloved’s identity is mysterious. The novel provides evidence that she could be an ordinary
woman traumatized by years of captivity, the ghost of Sethe’s mother, or, most convincingly, the
embodied spirit of Sethe’s murdered daughter.
“What might your name be?” asked Paul D.
“Beloved,” she said, and her voice was so low and rough each one looked
at the other two. They heard the voice first—later the name.
“Beloved. You use a last name, Beloved?” Paul D asked her.
“Last?” She seemed puzzled. Then “No,” and she spelled it for them,
slowly as though the letters were being formed as she spoke them.54
Denver
As Sethe’s youngest and only surviving daughter, Denver has spent much of her life burdened
by the knowledge of
her mother’s violence. As the only one of Sethe’s living children to reside at 124, Denver grows
up sullen, petulant,
and isolated.
Paul D
Paul D began his enslavement alongside four other men and Sethe at Sweet Home under the
ownership of the
Garners. When Mr. Garner passes away, leaving the schoolteacher in charge, Paul D is sold to
another slaveowner
named Brandywine. When Paul D attacks Brandywine, he is sent to a prison farm in Alfred,
Georgia, where the white
guards sexually and physically abuse him. He is fortunately able to escape with the other
inmates during a flood. In
the years following, he serves as a soldier on both the Union and Confederate sides of the Civil
War, as he does not
have many other employment options available to him as a former slave. After the war ends, he
wanders on his own
and takes employment wherever it is available.
After slavery is abolished, he encounters Sethe again in Ohio.
Baby Suggs
After Halle buys his mother, Baby Suggs, her freedom, she travels to Cincinnati, where she
becomes a source of emotional and spiritual inspiration for the city’s black residents. Baby
Suggs holds religious gatherings at a place called the Clearing, where she teaches her followers
to love their voices, bodies, and minds. However, after Sethe’s act of infanticide, Baby Suggs
stops preaching and retreats to a sickbed to die. Even so, Baby Suggs continues to be a source
of inspiration long after her death: in Part Three, her memory motivates Denver to leave 124
and find help. It is partially out of respect for Baby Suggs that the community responds to
Denver’s requests for support.
Read an in-depth analysis of Baby Suggs.
Stamp Paid
Like Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid is considered by the community to be a figure of salvation, and
he is welcomed at every door in town. An agent of the Underground Railroad, he helps Sethe to
freedom and later saves Denver’s life. A grave sacrifice he made during his enslavement has
caused him to consider his emotional and moral debts to be paid off for the rest of his life, which
is why he decided to rename himself “Stamp Paid.” Yet by the end of the book, he realizes that
he may still owe protection and care to the residents of 124. Angered by the community’s
neglect of Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, Stamp begins to question the nature of a community’s
obligations to its members.
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schoolteacher
Following Mr. Garner’s death, schoolteacher takes charge of Sweet Home. Cold, sadistic, and
vehemently racist, schoolteacher replaces what he views as Garner’s too-soft approach with an
oppressive regime of rigid rules and punishment on the plantation. Schoolteacher’s own habits
are extremely ascetic: he eats little, sleeps less, and works hard. His most insidious form of
oppression is his “scientific” scrutiny of the slaves, which involves asking questions, taking
physical measurements, and teaching lessons to his white pupils on the slaves’ “animal
characteristics.” The lower-case "s" of schoolteacher’s appellation may have an ironic meaning:
although he enjoys a position of extreme power over the slaves, they attribute no worth to him.
Halle
Sethe’s husband and Baby Suggs’s son, Halle is generous, kind, and sincere. He is very much
alert to the hypocrisies of the Garners’ “benevolent” form of slaveholding. Halle eventually goes
mad, presumably after witnessing schoolteacher’s nephews’ violation of Sethe.
The prickly, mean-eyed Sweet Home girl he knew
as Halle’s girl was obedient (like Halle), shy (like Halle), and work-crazy
(like Halle).
Lady Jones
Lady Jones, a light-skinned black woman who loathes her blond hair, is convinced that
everyone despises her for being a woman of mixed race. Despite her feelings of alienation, she
maintains a strong sense of community obligation and teaches the underprivileged children of
Cincinnati in her home. She is skeptical of the supernatural dimensions of Denver’s plea for
assistance, but she nevertheless helps to organize the community’s delivery of food to Sethe’s
plagued household.
Lady Jones was mixed. Gray eyes and yellow woolly hair, every strand of
which she hated—though whether it was the color or the texture even she
didn’t know. She had married the blackest man she could find, had five
rainbow-colored children and sent them all to Wilberforce, after teaching
them all she knew right along with the others who sat in her parlor.226
Ella
Ella worked with Stamp Paid on the Underground Railroad. Traumatized by the sexual brutality
of a white father and son who once held her captive, she believes, like Sethe, that the past is
best left buried. When it surfaces in the form of Beloved, Ella organizes the women of the
community to exorcise Beloved from 124.
She knelt and emptied the sack. “My name’s Ella,” she said, taking a wool
blanket, cotton cloth, two baked sweet potatoes and a pair of men’s shoes
from the sack. “My husband, John, is out yonder a ways. Where you
heading?”91
Mr. and Mrs. Garner
Mr. and Mrs. Garner are the comparatively benevolent owners of Sweet Home. The events at
Sweet Home reveal, however, that the idea of benevolent slavery is a contradiction in terms.
The Garners’ paternalism and condescension are simply watered-down versions of
schoolteacher’s vicious racism.
A newspaper clipping in The Black
Book summarized the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who, having
escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill
the others) rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation. 7
Mr. and Miss Bodwin
Siblings Mr. and Miss Bodwin are white abolitionists who have played an active role in winning
Sethe’s freedom. Yet there is something disconcerting about the Bodwins’ politics. Mr. Bodwin
longs a little too eagerly for the “heady days” of abolitionism, and Miss Bodwin demonstrates a
condescending desire to “experiment” on Denver by sending her to Oberlin College. The
distasteful figurine Denver sees in the Bodwins’ house, portraying a slave and displaying the
message “At Yo’ Service,” marks the limits and ironies of white involvement in the struggle for
racial equality. Nevertheless, the siblings are motivated by good intentions, believing that
“human life is holy, all of it.”
garden, pulling
vegetables, cooking, washing, she plotted what to do and how. The Bodwins
were most likely to help since they had done it twice. Once for Baby Suggs
and once for her mother. Why not the third generation as well?230
Amy Denver
A nurturing and compassionate girl who works as an indentured servant, Amy is young, flighty,
talkative, and idealistic. She helps Sethe when she is ill during her escape from Sweet Home,
and when she sees Sethe’s wounds from being whipped, Amy says that they resemble a tree.
She later delivers baby Denver, whom Sethe names after her.
Her name was Amy and she needed beef and pot liquor like nobody in this
world. Arms like cane stalks and enough hair for four or five heads. Slow-
moving eyes. She didn’t look at anything quick. Talked so much it wasn’t
clear how she could breathe at the same time. And those cane-stalk arms, as it
turned out, were as strong as iron.36
Paul A, Paul F, and Sixo
Paul A and Paul F are the brothers of Paul D. They were slaves at Sweet Home with him, Halle,
Sethe, and, earlier, Baby Suggs. Sixo is another fellow slave. Sixo and Paul A die during the
escape from the plantation.
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Spatial Setting
Cincinnati
Beloved mainly takes place in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the year 1873, though the novel also features
numerous flashbacks to the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky and to a prison camp in Alfred,
Georgia.
It was in front of that 124 that Sethe climbed off a wagon, her newborn tied
to her chest, and felt for the first time the wide arms of her mother-in-law,
who had made it to Cincinnati.
“You pick any house, any house where colored live. In all of Cincinnati.
Pick any one and you welcome to stay there. (B:212)
Kentucky
“That lady I worked for in Kentucky gave them to me when I got married.
What they called married back there and back then. (B:61)
Georgia
Prison Camp in Alfred , Georgia
The prisoners from Alfred, Georgia, sat down in semicircle near the
encampment. No one came and still they sat. Finally a woman stuck her head out of her house.
Night came and
nothing happened. At dawn two men with barnacles covering their beautiful
skin approached them. No one spoke for a moment, then Hi Man raised his
hand. The Cherokee saw the chains and went away. When they returned each
carried a handful of small axes. Two children followed with a pot of mush
cooling and thinning in the rain.,(B:109)
Temporal Setting
The crickets were screaming on Thursday and the sky, stripped of blue, was
white hot at eleven in the morning. Sethe was badly dressed for the heat, but
this being her first social outing in eighteen years, she felt obliged to wear her
one good dress, heavy as it was, and a hat. Certainly a hat. She didn’t want to
meet Lady Jones or Ella with her head wrapped like she was going to work.
The dress, a good-wool castoff, was a Christmas present to Baby Suggs from
Miss Bodwin, the whitewoman who loved her.50
“Anyhow, Mrs. Garner must have seen me in it. I thought I was stealing
smart, and she knew everything I did. Even our honeymoon: going down to
the cornfield with Halle. That’s where we went first. A Saturday afternoon it
was. He begged sick so he wouldn’t have to go work in town that day.
Usually he worked Saturdays and Sundays to pay off Baby Suggs’ freedom.62
In the heat of every Saturday
afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.
After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her
head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They
knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, “Let the
children come!” and they ran from the trees toward her.
They came
when the shift changed on Saturday when the men got paid and worked behind fences ,
back the outhouse189
