Beloved Amy

“ ‘Anything dead coming back to life hurts’ ” (35). Toni Morrison’s Beloved focuses on the lives of three generations of African American women shortly after the demise of slavery. The main plot revolves around Sethe, who lives with her daughter Denver in a house known as 124. An old friend from her days as a slave, Paul D, comes to stay for a short time, dispelling the ghost of the baby girl she killed years ago when she thought she would be taken back into slavery. Shortly afterward, however, a strange girl appears who seems to have no family and no memory of her past, calling herself Beloved. Throughout the book, flashbacks tell the story of Sethe’s mother and time spent in slavery. This particular line was uttered in a flashback by Amy, a white woman. Amy tended an extremely pregnant Sethe during her flight to freedom. She said this as she rubbed Sethe’s badly damaged feet. While the statement applied to the feet, it also indicated a broader theme throughout the book. Amy’s words unknowingly foreshadowed the true nature of Beloved. Beloved eventually becomes identified as the daughter Sethe killed. Much evidence supports this. The only word carved on her tombstone was Beloved. She appears the same time the ghost leaves. She becomes …show more content…
Distancing herself from Denver, Beloved clings to Sethe and demands her presence to play with her. Eventually losing her job, Sethe buys ribbons and other things the family cannot afford while giving the best and sweetest food to Beloved. She keeps trying to explain to her daughter why she killed her while she withers away, and Beloved demands more, dominates her mother, and keeps getting fatter. If not for the eventual intervention of Denver and the neighborhood women, Sethe likely would have died. Even after Beloved has gone, Sethe shows signs of approaching death in the same way as her