Escape

                Beloved is a book about a time period so earth-shattering that its effects resonate through history, up to the time of the events in the novel and further up to the present day. Events like these, because of how utterly they dehumanized and terrorized the people involved, often create some sort of distance between those who suffered them and the rest of the world, as a method of coping with the situation that is presented to them. In order to talk about slavery, Toni Morrison presented a chronology that takes place mostly removed from slavery, occurring after its end, but showing that the event has irreparably damaged the fabric of its main characters' lives by using Sethe's murder of her own child as a symbol for the horror of slavery.

                The novel opens with an idiosyncratic line: "124 was haunted." The reader has no idea what this means at the beginning of the book, but what slowly begins to emerge as the first chapter is read is that 124 is the house that all of the characters live in, and that it is haunted by the ghost of a dead child. This concept of haunting is important - this ghost ranges from benign acts such as handprints in cakes they make to quite malicious acts such as hitting a dog against a wall so hard that its leg breaks. Sethe's sons leave because of this ghost, and her family is ostracized from the community for reasons unknown at the time, so for the most part she lives in complete isolation with her daughter - she can avoid speaking of or dealing with her memories in slavery.

                However, things become more complicated with the arrival of Paul D, one of the men who lived on the plantation with her. Interestingly enough, the dead infant Beloved manifests herself physically as a young woman almost as soon as Paul D shows up, as if they are both reminders of the past that she has tried to avoid. As the novel progresses, it also becomes increasingly clear that Sethe is the one who killed her own daughter, and that this is the reason for the community's ostracization and the haunting of her house. It is not until Paul D confronts her that the reader learns the reason why: the slave-catcher had come from the plantation to return them, and she was so horrified of returning to slavery that she attempted to kill her children and then herself in order to avoid that fate. Disgusted, the slave-catcher left and her family sans one member stayed relatively uninterrupted in their house until the present.

                With this information, the family's situation becomes much more clear. The community stays clear of her both because they are horrified of the murder and because the murder represents everything horrible about their lives in slavery that they tried to escape. By rejecting her, they are attempting to distance themselves from the lives in slavery that they escaped. However, Sethe does not have this option. After the murder of her child, Sethe is perpetually haunted by the event, and by extension her awful history. Then, she is forced to relive and evaluate these moments with the arrival of Paul D. While he represents moving forward with a new husband, he is also inextricably tied to the past with the events that they both witnessed. Beloved, too, carries both of these sentiments. As a young woman, she carries on a new future as a family-like unit for Sethe, but she is also literally the physical manifestation of the most horrible thing that has ever happened to Sethe. She is caught between her desire to distance herself from slavery and the unignorable facts that she must deal with: she killed her own baby. This is the horror that she must deal with, and this is the horror of slavery that Morrison presents in Beloved.