Beloved  is a story about a former slave, Sethe, living with where daughter, Denver, in a house that is occupied by a ghost that is believed to be the soul of Sethe’s dead daughter, Beloved. When a man named Paul D comes along, a series of events take place and changes the dynamics of the family at 124. Paul D escaping from the Georgia chain gang played a huge part in the novel. Paul D plays a significant role in the lives of Sethe and Denver. If he hadn’t escaped, some of the major events of the story wouldn’t have happened.

There’s a lot of evidence that Paul D affected people’s lives through escaping, but I believe Paul D himself changed entirely after his escape and him being at 124. ”But this was not a normal woman in a normal house. As soon as he had stepped through the red light he knew that, compared to 124, the rest of the world was bald. After Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he could do those things–with a little work and a little sex thrown in–he asked for no more, for more required him to dwell on Halle’s face and Sixo laughing. To recall trembling in a box built into the ground. Grateful for the daylight spent doing mule work in a quarry because he did not tremble when he had a hammer in his hands. The box had done what Sweet Home had not, what working like an ass and living like a dog had not: drove him crazy so he would not lose his mind.”  During his time in slavery, he had a “walk, eat, sleep, sing” mentality. The state that he was in seemed robotic and nonhuman. Paul D leaving the plantation and reuniting with Sethe gave him a reason to live life and to better the lives close to him, which he did.

Before Paul D came, Sethe and Denver never had a good relationship with the community. Ever since word got around that there was a ghost at 124, they kept their distance from the family. This is one of the reasons that Denver befriended the ghost. Because no one in town would talk to her. Paul D used his social skils to change the way people viewed the family.  “Soothed by sugar, surrounded by a crowd of people who did not find her the main attraction, who, in fact, said, “Hey, Denver,” every now and then, pleased her enough to consider the possibility that Paul D wasn’t all that bad. In fact there was something about him– when the three of them stood together watching Midget dance–that made the stares of other Negroes kind, gentle, something Denver did not remember seeing in their faces. Several even nodded and smiled at her mother, no one, apparently, able to withstand sharing the pleasure Paul D. was having. He slapped his knees when Giant danced with Midget; when Two-Headed Man talked to himself. He bought everything Denver asked for and much she did not. He teased Sethe into tents she was reluctant to enter. Stuck pieces of candy she didn’t want between her lips. When Wild African Savage shook his bars and said wa wa, Paul D told everybody he knew him back in Roanoke. Paul D made a few acquaintances; spoke to them about what work he might find. Sethe returned the smiles she got. Denver was swaying with delight. And on the way home, although leading them now, the shadows of three people still held hands.” Paul D sort of reintroduced the community to Denver and Sethe.

In conclusion, Paul D played a significant role in the novel and the lives of Denver, Sethe and Beloved.  If this one event in the book, Paul D escaping from slavery, were to changed, the dynamic of the story would change greatly.

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This is a scene of a woman killing her baby girl at a woodshed. The woman can be assumed as Sethe because of her swollen foot. Behind by the open door, a young girl who is wearing a black dress with lace is Beloved with three vertical scratches on her forehead. Beloved, who is an embodied spirit of the murdered child, is watching her mother killing herself. Beloved is crying by the door but she cannot do anything about the murder because she is already dead. The point of view of this picture is Beloved, who is watching the scene in the back. Beloved in the back symbolizes that even though she knows she was killed by her mother, she does not know why Sethe killed her and how she felt when she was killing her own child, because she is looking from the back. Also in this picture, Sethe’s face is not fully shown, which also means that Beloved is not able to understand the feeling of Sethe when she was killing her child. Because Sethe killed her baby girl and the only thing that the murdered baby knows is the fact that she was killed by her mother, she comes back alive to her mother as Beloved with full of venom and anger.

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In a novel “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, Sethe is a black slavery woman who suffers from the memory of her killing her own daughter. The daughter comes back to Sethe as Beloved, embodied spirit of the murdered daughter with venom and anger toward her mother. The moment of Sethe killing her daughter has tragic ramifications throughout the entire novel. Because of the infanticide, Sethe lost her two sons, Baby Suggs, the people in the town and the daughter Beloved. Without the occurrence of infanticide, the story would be totally different from the original novel.

When Sethe escaped from Sweet Home with her children, the four horsemen – schoolteacher, nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff – came to the house on Bluestone Road where the runaway slaves were, including Sethe and her children. At first, the four horsemen thought they were too late to catch Sethe but they started to walk toward a shed when some other slave stared at the shed. “Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time … “(Morrison 175). After Mr. Garner’s death, Sethe knew that unlike Mr. Garner, schoolteacher was same as other majority of whites, who can make the slaves to work, kill them, or dirty them. As she thought that she does not want their children to go through what she had been went through, she decided rather to kill their children by herself than to let it happen to the children. So she took all her children to the woodshed and killed her “Crawling Already?” girl, Beloved.

The fact that Beloved was killed by her mother led the entire story tragic that Sethe lost her sons and other people in the town. First, the baby girl who was killed by Sethe came back to Sethe’s house as a ghost. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” (3) 124 is the house where Sethe and her alive daughter, Denver were living. Sethe’s sons, Howard and Buglar, left the house earlier “as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was the signal for Howard)” (3). Beloved was a baby when she was killed by her mother, so she returned to her mother as a ghost in the haunted house. If Sethe did not kill Beloved, the house would not be haunted with the baby’s venom. Because she killed her own daughter, people around her left her. For example, Howard and Buglar left the house not only because of the haunted house and the baby’s venom, but also because of the fact that their mother killed her own daughter and tried to kill them too. Also other black people in the town started to ignore the residents of 124.

Sethe killed her own child because she loved her and wanted to protect her from living as a black slave at Sweet Home – or anywhere in the world. In page 194, after Paul D found out that Sethe killed her child as she was escaping from Sweet Home, he said Sethe’s love is too thick. But Sethe replied to him that “Love is or it ain’t. Think love ain’t love at all … It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that.” She told Paul D that she had to kill the children to keep them away from being slave, but Paul D said that decision was wrong. He added that “’You got two feet, Sethe, not four …’” Even Paul D who loved Sethe deeply in his heart, could not accept the fact that Sethe killed her own baby, and made him leave her.

Because Sethe killed Beloved her only alive daughter, Baby Suggs and Denver had to go through hardships as well. When Stamp Paid kept trying to get to 124 to talk to Sethe, he realized that he understood Baby suggs’ feeling too late. “The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn’t prove or condemn Sethe’s rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed” (212). Baby Suggs used to say the Word at the Clearing every Saturdays, but she refused to preach after Sethe’s act of infanticide. Also when Denver used to go to Lady Jones to learn to spell and count, she had to stop going to Lady Jones because of her mother’s past. Nelson Lord was a smart classmate, “who put a stop to it; who asked her the question about her mother that put chalk, the little I and all the rest that those afternoons held, out of reach forever.” Nelson Lord asked Denver the question about her mother’s infanticide out of curiosity, and she could not just laugh about it because Denver was actually wondering what happened for what reason. After that, she stopped going to the class and she became deaf because she did not want to hear the answer from her mother. Baby Suggs and Denver are important families to Sethe but she made them have hard time because of her past.

Lastly, Sethe’s act of infanticide made the murdered daughter to bear a grudge against her mother and return to Sethe as Beloved, the embodied spirit of murdered child. After Sethe found out that Beloved was the embodied spirit of her own daughter, she tried hard to explain how much she had suffered for her children for her whole life, but Beloved never listened. “None of which made the impression it was supposed to. Beloved accused her of leaving her behind. Of not being nice to her, not smiling at her. She said they were the same, had the same face, how could she have left her? And Sethe cried, saying she never did, or meant to – that she had to get them out, away … that her plan was always that they would all be together on the other side, forever. Beloved wasn’t interested. She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat” (284). Even though Sethe tried to explain and make Beloved understand what she went through and what she meant, Beloved was too young to understand her mother and the murder. She already had inveteracy deep inside.

There are moments or occurrences that have ramifications throughout the story in novels like Beloved. In Beloved, the moment when Sethe killed her own daughter made the tragic of the entire story and if this did not happen the story would be totally different than the original story. Because the daughter was murdered by Sethe, people in the town ignored Sethe and her family for a long time, and Sethe lost her sons and grandmother Baby Suggs, and the most important person, Beloved.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.

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