Isolation In Beloved

When Paul D arrives, Sethe gives much of her time and energy to him, which makes Denver feel excluded. She treats Paul D callously because he threatens her individual hold on Sethe. Furthermore, he reminds Denver that there is a part of Sethe to which she will never have access. Denver’s fragile identity cannot handle the concept of a world that she is not a part of, so she becomes increasingly upset by Sethe’s and Paul D’s talk of Sweet Home. Denver describes the conversation by saying that Paul D and Sethe “were a twosome, saying ‘Your daddy’ and ‘Sweet Home’ in a way that made it clear both belonged to them and not to her” (Morrison 15). Denver lived her whole life in isolation, so Paul D’s sudden intrusion irritates her. Unlike Sethe, Denver does not hide from the past, for she desperately longs for a history. Her desire to know all the details of her birth reveals that she craves the sense of self that having a background can provide.
When Beloved comes to 124, Denver’s dependence shifts from Sethe to Beloved. She becomes convinced …show more content…
In his absence, the relationship develops until each of the three women is unable to define herself without the others. In the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second chapters, the reader is presented with a monologue from each of these characters. The fragmented nature of these chapters represents each woman’s disjointed and fractured identity. When their lines mingle in the twenty-third chapter, it is almost impossible to match each expression to its speaker because Denver, Beloved, and Sethe have muddled and conflated their separate identities. Each character yearns “to join” with or to have possession of the others, as exemplified by the repetition of “You are mine” at the end of the chapter (Morrison 253, 256). This confusion of identity even gets to the point where it is “difficult for Denver to tell who [is] who”