Analysis From the start of Sethe’s relationship with Paul D, she recognizes the difference between their passion and the brother-sister love that she and Halle shared. While Sethe and Paul D begin their relationship within a reality haunted by the pain of the past, Sethe and Halle’s relationship blossomed in […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Chapter 2Summary and Analysis Part 1: Chapter 1
Almost nine years after Baby Suggs’s death, Sethe and Denver’s isolation is ruptured by the unforeseen arrival of Paul D, a survivor of Sweet Home, the Kentucky slave farm where Sethe, her husband Halle, and their children were also enslaved. In conversation, Sethe and Paul D reveal memories of their […]
Read more Summary and Analysis Part 1: Chapter 1Character List
Beloved Sethe’s third child and oldest daughter who was killed at the age of two. Her restless spirit haunts the family first as a ghost and then as a flesh-and-blood woman. Denver Sethe’s fourth and youngest child. Traumatized as a young girl by what she discovers about her mother, she […]
Read more Character ListAbout Beloved
Morrison drew on a Cincinnati murder case arising from a woman’s sacrifice of her children to keep them out of the grasp of slave catchers. As Morrison saw it, slavery denied black mothers the right to feel maternal love and eventually made them ambivalent toward their own offspring, particularly those […]
Read more About BelovedBook Summary
Sethe, a 13-year-old child of unnamed slave parents, arrives at Sweet Home, an idyllic plantation in Kentucky operated by Garner, an unusually humane master, and his wife, Lillian. Within a year, Sethe selects Halle Suggs to be her mate and, by the time she is 18, bears him three children. […]
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