Study Questions &
Essay Topics
Study Questions
1. How does Beloved function as an alter
ego for Sethe?
In Beloved, Sethe persistently
conflates her identity with that of her child. Sethe inadvertently
named Beloved after herself. When the minister at her daughter’s
funeral addressed the living (including Sethe) as “Dearly Beloved,”
she believed he was referring to her dead daughter. Rather than
engraving her child’s real name on her tombstone, she engraved “Beloved,”
a name that now refers both to herself and to the baby. Sethe feels
debased and dehumanized by her experiences as a slave and thus cannot
love herself. Instead, she puts all the energy that should be spent
on loving herself into loving her children. Her own identity is
defined entirely in terms of motherhood. Sethe herself cannot conceive
of the word “beloved” as referring to herself but only to her child;
she regards her children as the “best part” of herself. Because
Beloved’s name refers to Sethe as well, and because Sethe defines
her children as part of herself, Beloved functions as a sort of
alter ego for Sethe.
Beloved also functions on a more general level as Sethe’s repressed
memories, as her personal past. As such, she is another sort of
alter ego. Beloved is the self that Sethe has tried to forget, to discard.
When Sethe finally learns to confront her memories, she rejoins
and comes to terms with her past self.
2. One could say that the community
judges Sethe harshly out of a desire to displace its own guilt.
What evidence would support such a conclusion?
The specific comments made by Sethe’s critics
help us to identify the underlying motivations of their harsh condemnations.
Ella, for example, accuses Sethe of excessive pride and labels Sethe’s
act of infanticide unjustified. However, Ella herself committed
infanticide, though in a more indirect manner: when she gave birth
to a child who was the result of repeated rape by a white man and
his son, Ella refused to care for it because she considered such
forced motherhood to be demeaning, and the baby died. It seems that
Ella’s condemnation of Sethe allows her to avoid confronting her
own feelings of guilt. Similarly, Paul D tells Sethe that she acted
like an “animal” when she killed her children. Yet we know that
Paul D’s most profound insecurity lies in his fear that he is less
than a man: he is haunted by the dehumanizing experiences of slavery,
during which he realized that Sweet Home’s rooster was allowed more
manhood than he, and during which he was forced to wear a horse’s
iron bit.
From these examples we can infer that the general community’s criticism
of Sethe may stem from the same sort of guilt. The townspeople certainly
have reason to feel guilty: their jealousy of Baby Suggs’s celebratory
feast led them to fail to warn Sethe or Baby Suggs that schoolteacher
had arrived to hunt down Sethe and her children. Judging Sethe for
killing her child allows them to avoid acknowledging the role they
played in the creation of the circumstances that drove Sethe to
murder.
3. How can Sethe and Paul D be seen
as perpetual fugitives?
Paul D spends years wandering from one place
to another. After his horrifying experiences with schoolteacher
and prison, he refuses to love anything strongly. In order to avoid
establishing long-term relationships, he wanders from place to place.
In symbolic terms, Paul D rejects his “red heart” and replaces it
with a tightly sealed “tin tobacco box.” In protecting himself from
further heartache, Paul D remains a fugitive from his own humanity.
At the beginning of the novel, Sethe says that she will
not leave 124 because she will never run
from another thing in her life. Nevertheless, she is always fleeing
her own memories. Instead of confronting her past, Sethe vigilantly
tries to keep always ahead of it, always above it. By turning and
engaging with her past, which Beloved’s appearance enables her to
do, Sethe is able finally to preempt and lessen its blows.
Suggested Essay Topics
1. How does Beloved help Denver
gain an independent identity? How might the dynamic between Beloved
and Denver represent the effect of history on subsequent generations?
2. Both Stamp Paid and Baby Suggs
have given themselves their own names: what is the significance
of this? What does the act of renaming signify? What does it say
about the characters who engage in it?
3. The novel is packed with supernatural
events. For example, Baby Suggs has premonitions, Stamp Paid hears
voices, and Beloved seems to be some sort of ghost. How do supernatural phenomena
refute schoolteacher’s “scientific” approach to the world? The text
suggests more than once that Beloved may be an ordinary woman recently
escaped from years of captivity. Why might the book make this move
to “explain” the supernatural? Significantly, Lady Jones, another,
though kindly, “schoolteacher” also refutes supernatural explanations.
She is skeptical of Denver’s story about Beloved and considers the
town ignorant for believing it. What effect does this have on the
reader’s own interpretation of the seemingly magical events in Beloved?
4. The novel is narrated from
the perspectives of former slaves and their families. At different
points we get Sethe’s, Paul D’s, Stamp Paid’s, Baby Suggs’s, Beloved’s,
Lady Jones’s, and Ella’s varying points of view. Yet the climax
of the novel—Sethe’s act of infanticide—is depicted according to
schoolteacher’s point of view. Why does Morrison choose to disclose
the circumstances of Sethe’s tragedy as they appeared to schoolteacher?
How does this influence the reader’s reaction to the story?
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