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Beloved Toni Morrison
Part One: Chapters 7–8
Summary: Chapter 7
He would keep the rest [of what he had
to tell Sethe] where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in
his chest where a red heart used to be.
Beloved's presence—especially what is described as her
“shining” sexuality—disturbs Paul D. He anxiously interrogates her
about her past until Sethe, sensing Beloved's agitation, interrupts
him. Afterward, Sethe chastises Paul D for pressing Beloved so cruelly,
and during their argument Halle's name comes up. Paul D then tells Sethe
the reason Halle didn't meet her during the escape as planned. Halle
was in the loft of the barn when Sethe was violated by schoolteacher's
nephews. Afterward, he found himself unable to leave. When Sethe
realizes that Halle saw everything that schoolteacher and his nephews
did to her, she is initially furious that he did not intervene.
But Paul D explains that Halle was shattered by the experience:
afterward, Paul D saw him sitting blankly by a butter churn; he
had smeared butter all over his face. At the time, Paul D was ignorant
of the events in the barn and thus wondered what had caused this
breakdown in Halle. However, Paul D could not physically form the
words to ask him because he had an iron bit in his mouth. Outside,
Sethe and Paul D discuss the shame of wearing the bit. Paul D says
that the worst part of the punishment was seeing the farm's rooster,
named Mister, watch him and walk around more freely than himself.
It is thoughts like these that Paul D keeps locked within the rusted
“tobacco tin” of his heart.
Summary: Chapter 8
While Sethe and Paul D sit on the porch, Beloved and Denver
dance together inside the house. Denver asks Beloved how she got
her name, and Beloved replies that it is her name “in the dark.”
Denver asks what it is like in the dark place from which Beloved
came. Beloved says that when she was there she was small and curled
up. It was hot and crowded with lots of other people, and some of
them were dead. She describes a bridge and water. When Denver asks
her why she came back, Beloved mentions Sethe, saying she wanted
to see “her face.” Denver feels slighted that she was not the main
reason for Beloved's return.
Denver asks Beloved not to tell Sethe who she really is.
Beloved becomes angry and tells Denver never to tell her what to
do. She reminds Denver that she doesn't need her—Sethe is the one
she needs. The two girls sit in uncomfortable silence until Beloved
asks Denver to narrate the story of Denver's birth. As Denver watches
the way Beloved eagerly drinks in every detail, she is able to envision
the story she narrates.
Denver tells Beloved about how Amy Denver found Sethe
and discerned the image of a chokecherry tree in Sethe's bleeding
scars. After Amy cleaned the wounds, the two women spent the night
in a lean-to shelter. The next morning, Amy helped Sethe limp down
to the river, where they found a leaky boat with one oar. It was
upon stepping into the boat that Sethe's water broke. It seemed
as though the newborn Denver might die, but Amy finally coaxed a
whimper out of her. Later that evening, Amy left Sethe waiting by
the riverbank for a chance to cross the river to Ohio.
Analysis: Chapters 7–8
Beloved incites the narration of history time and again.
Often, she directly questions Denver and Sethe about the past, but
Beloved also has an indirect influence, which the scene between
Sethe and Paul D illustrates. It is the couple's argument over Beloved
that sparks Paul D's revelation of Halle's fate to Sethe.
Once Beloved has kindled the storytelling process, Sethe
and Paul D devote their own energies to it, despite the pain that
is involved. For as Amy says to Sethe in Chapter 3 about
Sethe's throbbing feet, “Anything dead coming back to life
hurts.” On a certain level, both Sethe and Paul D realize that it
is worth the pain to bring their memories back to life, back into
the open. In releasing these memories, they themselves can come
back to life and live again without fear. Aware of the pain it will
cause, Sethe and Paul D nevertheless proceed to fill in the gaps
in each other's knowledge of the past. For both characters, forming
a coherent identity involves weaving together the fragments of their
past into a coherent narrative.
These chapters focus on Paul D's identity in particular.
Mr. Garner always bragged that he raised his slaves as “men,” and
Paul D had always considered himself a man in his own right. But
schoolteacher proved to him that his claim to manhood was not inherent and
that it depended upon the will of another. After wearing a bit as an
animal would, a portion of Paul D's identity was shattered. His relationship
with Sethe prompts him to try to find a way to reclaim his humanity,
and the process of narration that Beloved inspires proves integral
to his attempt.
Beloved also counters the more general forces of silence
that recur throughout the novel. According to Sethe and Baby Suggs,
one should withhold all talk of the past. Once, when Sethe did speak,
she almost lost her life: her report to Mrs. Garner about the theft
of her milk caused her to be whipped nearly to death. Because speech
is one of the most important differences between humans and animals,
white slave owners did everything they could to control the speech
of their slaves. Those who rebelled or did not speak with a suitably
deferential tone often had their tongues cut out. Thus, the mere
act of speaking about a dehumanizing experience
is a way of reclaiming one's humanity.
For slaves and former slaves, such speech often takes
the form of song or metaphor. For a long while, Paul D was unable
to talk about his degrading experiences, but he could describe them
through songs. Sethe uses similar circumlocution when she refers
to the violation and beating she suffered using the images of stolen
milk and of a chokecherry tree. Stylized expression is historically
a means of secretly venting anger or criticizing. Thus, for the
oppressed, including slaves, artistic expression becomes a matter
of survival, because explicit language could be punished with death.
Paradoxically, although Beloved incites the narratives
of others, she remains quite cryptic about her own past. What we
do hear of her previous experiences suggests that she may be above
all a symbolic figure who represents the history of a people. In
her interchange with Denver, Beloved's memories of the “dark place”
from which she came can be taken as those of a deceased infant girl,
but they also greatly resemble an African woman's memories of the “Middle
Passage,” the crossing of the Atlantic on the way to America. Beloved
recalls dark, hot, cramped quarters, a pile of dead bodies, and
water. Additionally, the “bridge” she talks about could be the bridge
of a ship. These uncanny images will resurface in Beloved's monologue
in Chapter 22.
Part One: Chapters 9–11
Summary: Chapter 9
Disturbed by Paul D's information about Halle and missing
the soothing presence that Baby Suggs once provided, Sethe seeks
comfort in a place called the Clearing. She takes Denver and Beloved with
her. Before Baby Suggs fell into a depression, for which Sethe blames
herself, the older woman used to preach to the black community of
Cincinnati in the Clearing. She would begin by having the people
participate in a cathartic mixture of crying, laughter, and dance,
and she would then preach self-love. She would instruct them to
love their hands that had been bound, their mouths that had been silenced,
and, most of all, their hearts.
Sethe recalls the day she arrived at 124 and
met Baby Suggs for the first time. After Denver's birth and Amy
Denver's departure, she came across a black man fishing with two
boys. The man, Stamp Paid, wrapped Denver in a jacket and poled
Sethe across the Ohio. On shore, he left a signal for Ella, another
organizer of the Underground Railroad, which alerted her to the
presence of a “passenger” who needed help. When Ella arrived, Sethe
explained that she was heading to Baby Suggs's house on Bluestone
Road. Ella, noting Sethe's attachment to Denver, voiced her opinion
that one shouldn't love anything too much.
When Sethe got to 124, Baby Suggs
welcomed and bathed her before allowing her to see her two boys
and her “crawling already? girl.” To amuse her daughter, Sethe jingled
the earrings that Mrs. Garner had given her. During the twenty-eight
days she spent in Cincinnati before her daughter's death, Sethe
enjoyed being a part of the community. In the Clearing, she had
felt for the first time as though she owned herself.
As she sits on Baby Suggs's old rock in the Clearing,
Sethe calls silently for the calming fingers of her deceased mother-in-law.
She begins to feel Baby Suggs massaging her neck, but the touch
turns suddenly violent and Sethe realizes she is being strangled.
Denver reacts with alarm, and Beloved caresses and kisses the bruises
on Sethe's neck. Beloved's breath smells like milk to Sethe, and
her touch feels like that of the baby's ghost. Alarmed, Sethe pushes Beloved
away, saying, “You too old for that.” Later, Denver accuses Beloved
of strangling Sethe. Beloved runs away in anger, insisting that
Sethe was being choked by the “circle of iron,” not by her.
We learn that as a seven-year-old Denver attended school
lessons with other black children at the home of a woman they called
Lady Jones. Denver had been studying there for a year when her classmate Nelson
Lord upset her by asking, “Didn't your mother get locked away for
murder?” Denver repeated the question to her mother, but she went
“deaf” before she could hear an answer. This deafness was cured
by the sound of the baby ghost climbing the stairs. It was the first
time the ghost had appeared. But after this first innocuous manifestation,
the ghost proceeded to become spiteful, angry, and deliberately
abusive. Thinking back to these acts of rage, Denver wonders what
havoc Beloved might now wreak on Sethe. Yet she believes she has
no power to stop her, especially since she so often feels captivated by
the girl. When she goes to Beloved to seek forgiveness for fighting with
her, she sees Beloved watching two turtles mate.
Summary: Chapter 10
Paul D was sent to prison in Alfred, Georgia, because
he tried to kill Brandywine, the man to whom schoolteacher sold
him. The prison had forty-six inmates, all of them black men. They
were locked in small boxes in the ground at night and were subject
to sexual abuse and chain gang work during the day. During this
time Paul D began to tremble chronically, and his trembling only
subsided when he was actively working and singing in the chain gang.
Once, during a long rainstorm, the ground turned to mud, which allowed
the prisoners to work together and escape. Linked together with
one chain, they walked to a camp of ailing Cherokees, who broke
their chains. They directed Paul D northward by telling him that
he should follow the blooms of the flowers as the warm spring temperatures
spread from south to north. In Delaware he met a weaver woman with
whom he proceeded to live for eighteen months. As time went on,
he locked all his painful memories of the prison and Sweet Home
into “the tobacco tin lodged in his chest.”
Summary: Chapter 11
At 124 Bluestone Road,
Paul D feels inexplicably restless and uncomfortable in every room.
Eventually, he is only able to sleep outside the house. He realizes
that Beloved is moving him around the house like a rag doll. One
night, Beloved comes to Paul D in the cold house, where he now sleeps,
and says, “I want you to touch me on the inside part. . . . And
you have to call me my name.” Paul D tries to resist her strange power,
but he has sex with her, and the tin tobacco box breaks open. He repeats
the phrase “red heart” over and over.
Analysis: Chapters 9–11
Chapter 9 contrasts two philosophies of dealing with pain.
One is represented by Baby Suggs; Paul D and Ella espouse the other. Through
her preaching, Baby Suggs hoped to help her fellow former slaves
reclaim themselves, to “love their mouths” and express their feelings.
While still in bondage, love was an emotional liability, but outside
of slavery a person can have more trust that the object of his love
will not be taken away. Yet, even when one is no longer a slave, one
must deal with a certain amount of loss. Having already known more
loss than they feel they can bear, Paul D and Ella have decided they
would forego all real love for the rest of their lives rather than feel
any more pain. When Baby Suggs tells her listeners to love their hearts most
of all, she responds to Paul D's “tin heart” philosophy. Baby Suggs's
message is that a sacrifice such as Paul D's is not worth undertaking,
because love is part of being human, and humanity should not be
sacrificed for the sake of emotional survival. It is questionable
whether life without love constitutes “survival” at all.
Sethe's reaction to the news of Halle's fate reveals her
strategy for coping with pain and love. She wavers and is tempted
to suppress her feelings as Paul D does. Ultimately, though, she
supports Baby Suggs's wise words. Having loved Halle so deeply,
the news of his psychological breakdown causes Sethe great pain.
Yet facing his pain and her own allows her to heal and move on.
Instead of moving to a new, unhaunted house, Sethe had stayed at 124 in
the hope that her husband would join her someday. As she begins
to reexamine the past, Sethe contemplates constructing a new family
and life with Paul D. Her decision to stay with him suggests that
she is ready to confront the other painful accounts that Paul D
still has yet to tell her, and to tell her own stories as well.
She has taken another step toward reclaiming her identity and healing
her spirit.
Similarly, the sexual encounter between Beloved and Paul
D causes Paul D to act against his philosophy, which suggests that
it is weak in relation to that of Baby Suggs. Paul D's engagement
with Beloved may be representative of the intense encounter with
his past that he is undertaking in the novel. Somehow, the encounter
loosens the lid of Paul D's “tobacco tin” heart: his pulsating chant,
“red heart, red heart,” reflects the sudden overflow of passion
he feels as his tin box bursts and his past pours out.
The scene between Beloved and Paul D raises many questions. Beloved's
sexuality complicates the characters' (and the reader's) perception
of her as the embodiment of the dead baby's spirit. Her interaction
with Paul D seems to prove her power over him, but it also manifests
a more vulnerable, plaintive, childlike aspect of her nature. Her
insistence that Paul D call her by her name communicates her insecurity
about who she is as well as her neediness. If Beloved is representative
of history or the past, her actions seem to suggest that although
the past has power over us, it is also in a position of dependency.
If we do not care for it, acknowledge it, call it by name, it may
fade and weaken, but it may also resort to a state of spiteful vengeance,
keeping us captive until we bow to its demands.
Part One: Chapters 12–14
Summary: Chapter 12
Denver's attachment to Beloved intensifies. Beloved's
gaze sustains and completes Denver, and Denver fears that she has
no self apart from Beloved. Meanwhile, Sethe, ignoring her earlier
sense that Beloved is her daughter's reincarnation, decides that
Beloved must have recently escaped from years of captivity. She
knows Ella to have endured such an experience: a white man and his
son locked her up and raped her repeatedly.
Denver often feels lonely and rejected by Beloved. When
she isn't directly stimulated, Beloved lapses into a dreamy silence,
and she never interacts as much with Denver as she does with Sethe.
Denver, interested only in the present, does not care for the stories
about the past that Sethe narrates in response to Beloved's questions.
Denver also knows about Beloved's attentions to Paul D because she
has noted her nighttime trips to the cold house where he sleeps.
One day, Denver and Beloved go into the cold house to
get cider. Suddenly, Beloved disappears into the darkness. Denver
is certain that Beloved has gone forever and begins to cry, only
to find Beloved in front of her, smiling. Beloved reassures Denver
by telling her, “This the place I am.” Beloved then drops to the
ground where she curls up and moans softly. Her eyes focus on a
spot in the darkness where she claims to see “her face.” When Denver
asks her to clarify, she says mysteriously, “It's me.”
Summary: Chapter 13
Thinking about schoolteacher's arrival at Sweet Home makes
Paul D again question the legitimacy of his manhood in the way that schoolteacher
used to force him to do. He likens Beloved's current manipulation
of him to schoolteacher's abuse and decides that the only way he
can hope to stop Beloved is to tell Sethe what has been happening.
He meets her outside the restaurant where she works, but he cannot
muster up enough courage to confess that he is “not a man.” He surprises
himself—and Sethe, who thinks he is about to tell her he is leaving—by
asking her to have a baby with him. It begins to snow, and they
laugh and flirt on the walk home. Beloved, who has been waiting
for Sethe, meets them outside and absorbs Sethe's attention, leaving
Paul D feeling cold and resentful. Sethe, however, breaks Beloved's
spell by insisting that Paul D resume sleeping with her at night.
Sethe decides she cannot have a baby with Paul D because “[u]nless
carefree, motherlove was a killer.” She begins to question Paul
D's intentions: perhaps, she thinks, he is jealous of Denver and
Beloved and wants his own family. Ultimately, Sethe recognizes that
she is just trying to justify her decision to not have any more
children.
Summary: Chapter 14
After Sethe takes Paul D upstairs, Beloved begs Denver
to drive Paul D away, but Denver replies that Sethe will be angry
at Beloved if Paul D leaves. One of Beloved's teeth falls out, and
she wonders fearfully if her entire body will begin to fall apart.
She finds it difficult to feel complete and unified when Sethe is
away. Beloved begins to cry, and Denver takes her in her arms, while
the snow gathering outside 124 piles higher
and higher.
Analysis: Chapters 12–14
The language used to describe Denver's relationship with
Beloved is loaded with the vocabulary of need and desire. Denver
feels that Beloved's interested gaze sends her to a place “beyond
appetite” and that looking at Beloved is “food enough.” Beloved
provides emotional sustenance for Denver in a way that Sethe never
could, because Denver is simultaneously responsible for and dependent upon
Beloved. Beloved's constant neediness is most like an infant's desire
for its mother; when Sethe is not there for Beloved, Denver becomes
a sort of surrogate mother figure. She is forced out of her role
as a daughter and into a more adult role that involves working in
the interest of another's welfare.
Indeed, both need and desire recur in Beloved as
forces active in the shaping of human relationships. Indulging desire
seems to affirm life. At the same time, repressing desire is self-destructive.
Thus, Paul D's attempts to reject his desire for Beloved are ultimately
detrimental and inhibit him from constructing a complete identity.
When Beloved curls up into a ball and rocks herself back
and forth in the shed, her behavior recalls her description of life
in the “other place”—whether womb, grave, or slave ship—where she
lay curled up and hot. In this scene, Beloved points to a spot in
the darkness where she sees “her face.” “Me. It's me,” she tells
Denver. Beloved may be conflating her identity with Sethe's, possibly because
her premature death prevented her from forming an independent sense
of self. She could also be pointing to the spot in the shed where
she was murdered. Alternatively, if we understand much of Beloved's
speech as voicing the thoughts of the slaves during the Middle Passage,
her words here may refer not to her own situation but to that of
the slaves. Perhaps they refer specifically to the circumstances
of her grandmother, Sethe's mother. Thus, when Beloved identifies
“her” face with “me,” she may be speaking in the voice of Sethe's
mother.
Paul D's proposal that he get Sethe pregnant reveals his
desire to redirect his attention from the past to the future. He
has been worrying about his manhood and has been tormented by the
curse Beloved seems to have cast over him. When he surprises himself
by telling Sethe that he wants her to have a baby with him, he decides retroactively
that a baby would be the perfect “solution: a way to hold on to
her, document his manhood and break out of the girl's spell—all
in one.” But Sethe feels she has already paid too high a price for
motherhood. She has already lost three children and does not want
to have another, only to see it, too, run away or be taken from
her. Sethe further demonstrates her reluctance to engage with her
past when she ignores her earlier sense that Beloved is her daughter.
Sethe does not feel ready to face up to the horrible fact that she
killed her own daughter, a mother's worst crime. Willfully rejecting
her own instinct, Sethe convinces herself that Beloved must be an
ordinary girl who has escaped from some sort of captivity.
Part One: Chapters 15–18
Summary: Chapter 15
After Sethe first arrived at 124,
Stamp Paid brought over two pails of rare, deliciously sweet, blackberries.
Baby Suggs decided to bake some pies, and before long the celebration
had transformed into a feast for ninety people. The community celebrated
long into the night but grew jealous and angry as the feast wore
on: to them, the excess of the feast was a measure of Baby Suggs's
unwarranted pride. Baby Suggs sensed a “dark and coming thing” in
the distance, but the atmosphere of jealousy created by the townspeople
clouded her perception.
From Sethe's arrival at 124, the
narration goes even further back in time to Sweet Home. Although
it meant leaving behind the only child she had been able to see
grow to adulthood, Baby Suggs allowed Halle to buy her freedom because
it mattered so much to him. Once she left Sweet Home, Baby
Suggs realized how sweet freedom could be. While Mr. Garner drove
her to Cincinnati, she asked him why he and Mrs. Garner called her
Jenny. He told her that Jenny Whitlow was the name on her bill-of-sale.
She explains the origin of her real name—Suggs was her husband's
name, and he called her “Baby.” Mr. Garner tells her that Baby Suggs
is “no name for a freed Negro.” He takes Baby Suggs to Ohio to meet
the Bodwins, two white abolitionist siblings who allow Baby Suggs
to live at 124 Bluestone Road in exchange
for domestic work. Baby Suggs is unable to learn anything about
the whereabouts of her lost children.
Summary: Chapter 16
One day, about a month after Sethe arrived at 124,
schoolteacher showed up at the house with one of his nephews, the
sheriff, and a slave catcher. In the woodshed, they found Sethe's
sons, Howard and Buglar, lying in the sawdust, bleeding. Sethe was
holding her bleeding “crawling already?” daughter, whose throat
she had cut with a saw. Stamp Paid rushed in and grabbed Denver
before Sethe could dash her brains out against the wall. Because
none of the children could ever be of any use as a slave, schoolteacher
concluded that there was nothing worth claiming at 124 and
left in disgust. Sethe's older daughter was dead, but Baby Suggs
bound the boys' wounds and struggled with Sethe over Denver. Denver
nursed at Sethe's breast, ingesting her dead sister's blood along
with her mother's milk. The sheriff took Sethe, with Denver in her
arms, to jail.
Summary: Chapter 17
Stamp Paid shows Paul D a newspaper clipping with a drawing
of Sethe, but Paul D, refusing to believe that the woman depicted
is Sethe, insists, “That ain't her mouth.” Paul D can't read, so
Stamp Paid tells him the story of Sethe's tragedy. Stamp Paid leaves
some parts of the story out, though. He doesn't tell how Sethe grabbed
her children and flew with them to the woodshed “like a hawk on
the wing,” nor does he mention that, out of jealous spite, the community
neglected to warn Sethe about schoolteacher's approach.
Summary: Chapter 18
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 . . . away, over
there where no one could hurt them.
When Paul D confronts Sethe with the newspaper clipping,
she begins to circle frantically around the room in a manner that
parallels the circular manner in which she unravels her story for
him. She tells Paul D how, at 124, she began
to love her children with renewed force, because she knew finally
that they were fully hers to love. When she recognized schoolteacher's
hat outside the house one day, she felt hummingbird wings beating
around her head and could think only, “No. No. Nono. Nonono.” Killing
her children was a way of protecting them from the horrors of slavery
she had herself endured, a way to secure their safety.
Paul D tells her that her love is “too thick.” He feels
distanced from Sethe and condemns her act, saying, “You got two
feet, Sethe, not four,” by which he suggests that she acted like
a beast in attempting to murder her own children. His anxiety increases
when he sees Beloved standing on the staircase. He leaves 124,
and Sethe simply says, “So long.” Although he does not say so, Sethe
knows that Paul D isn't coming back.
Analysis: Chapters 15–18
When, after many years of service, Baby Suggs asks the
Garners why they call her Jenny Whitlow, she reveals a gap in her
self-knowledge. However, this gap is quickly closed and surpassed.
By choosing to keep the name she knows as her own despite Mr. Garner's
protestations, Baby Suggs closes the gap and asserts her independence.
She takes this further in her preaching, as it enables her to spread
her messages of self-love and independence to the community. In preaching,
Baby Suggs takes her community as her family and finds a sense of
purpose to her life as a freed person.
But the community is fickle. Although it allows Baby Suggs
to rebuild for herself a sense of belonging, it does great harm
to Baby Suggs's family. The community is implicated in the infanticide because
their jealousy and mistrust weighs on the feast so palpably that
it hinders Baby Suggs's perception of the “dark and coming thing.”
More obviously incriminating is that, out of spite, the community
deliberately fails to warn Sethe of schoolteacher's approach. Even
after Sethe murders her daughter, the community members feel Sethe
is behaving too proudly, a crime for which they will continue to
shun her until Denver turns to them for help in Part Three.
Morrison's indictment of the black community in Sethe's
crime exemplifies the moral ambiguity that pervades Beloved. Like
Baby Suggs, Morrison does not seem to “approve or condemn” Sethe's act.
Because Morrison centers the novel's narrative around Sethe, and
because she portrays Sethe as strong, sane, courageous, and a loving
mother, we tend to sympathize with Sethe—even as she explains the
circumstances of the murder. At the other extreme is the community,
which completely shuns Sethe and her family after she murders her
daughter. Thus, while Paul D's initial, horrified reaction to Stamp
Paid's story is justified and understandable, it seems out of place
to us because the text locates Sethe's act outside the bounds of
ethical evaluation in a way that the community does not. The text
shifts the focus of the reader's criticism from Sethe herself to
the perverse circumstances that have worked upon her to transform
her “too thick” motherly love into infanticide.
The book's moral ambiguity extends beyond its central
conflict to all aspects of the story. Good and evil are not split
along a racial divide—we see whites performing good acts along with
the bad and blacks performing bad acts along with the good. By complexly intertwining
virtue and vice, Morrison makes her characters seem realistic and
human, so that they rise above being simple allegorical figures.
Even Beloved, the only expressly allegorical figure in the book,
is an elusive character. The novel's sole definitive moral judgment
is its condemnation of all forms of slavery. Most prominently, the
terror and despair slavery represents to Sethe is portrayed as the indirect
cause of her act of infanticide. Even the “softer” form of slavery
practiced by the Garners does not escape criticism.
The “four horsemen”—schoolteacher, schoolteacher's
nephew, a slave catcher, and the sheriff—reference the description
of the Apocalypse that is detailed in the Book of Revelations. In
the biblical text, the four horsemen—famine, plague, war, and death—herald
the coming of the end of human existence. The horsemen in Beloved announce
the end of the peaceful world that was 124.
Before their arrival, Sethe lived in harmony with her family, with
her community, and, for the first time, with herself. After Sethe's
attempt to murder all of her children, Baby Suggs sinks into a deep
depression and never preaches again, while the community shuns 124 and
its inhabitants. Sethe's surviving children will never again trust
her in the same way, and Sethe is haunted for the rest of her life—literally
by her daughter's ghost, figuratively by her deed. In a sense, schoolteacher
and his posse also herald the end of coherent meaning for the book's
main characters: Sethe's incomprehensible act ushers in an era of
moral and existential doubt in the book. Paul D, who has difficulty
understanding his feelings, his motives, his manhood, and his actions,
is most explicitly plagued by doubt.
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