Coming to Terms with Beloved and Sethe's Relationship

At first I was amazed that Sethe completely accepted Beloved to be the incarnation of the baby she killed so many years ago. Then I thought about it in the context of the story, and I suspended my disbelief a little bit further. After all, we are told on the very first page that 124 is haunted, and Sethe suspects that the ghost is her deceased child. Even Paul D senses the presence of ‘company’ when he enters the house (10). These characters all seem to believe in the paranormal. So I am just going to go with it: Beloved is the ghost of Sethe’s baby reincarnated in (or possessing) an adolescent female body.

However, I find it disturbing that Sethe now has so many experiences she wishes to share with her child. She wants to “plant carrots just so [Beloved] can see them” (237). She wants them to smell things with Beloved. She expresses her desire to “teach [Beloved] what a mother should” (237). I just don’t understand why she couldn’t have kept her baby in the first place allowing her to grow up doing these things in real life. Sethe explains that “if [she] hadn’t killed her she would have died” (236). This phrase really strikes a nerve with me. I understand that Sethe did not want her baby to have a life of slavery, but I still wonder if killing her baby was the best thing to do. When she did it, she had no way of knowing that the baby would ever come back again.

As readers, we do know that times were much more difficult for Sethe and the slaves when she was driven to attempt to murder her children. This was shortly after she was brutally attacked and her milk was stolen. In the present, times have changed. She is able to concentrate on being a mother. She feels that perhaps Baby Suggs saw an opportunity for Sethe and her child to be reunited so Baby Suggs helped from “the other side” (236). She mentions that now she can put her head down in peace like she longed to do when her baby was buried beneath the headstone that reads “Beloved” (241). So maybe I do understand her desire to create experiences to share with Beloved. Now, while Beloved is present, she can express the motherly love she had been holding back ever since her daughter’s tragic death.