Synopsis: Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
"Anything dead coming back to life hurts"
'Beloved' was not what I expected. For one thing, I couldn't have been prepared for how devastating it was. It took me a while for me to gather my thoughts into something mildly coherent. Therefore this isn't really a review, just some of my reactions.
I was surprised by the 'magic realism' element, i.e. Beloved coming back to life (I know its ambiguous as to whether Beloved actually is that same child). I like ghost stories, not because I like being scared but because the appearance of a ghost is a good way for a writer to explore the living characters' relationships with the dead, and how the past connects to the future. In Rebecca, for example, Mrs. de Winter believing she hears Rebecca's ghost reflects her own anxiety about her predecessor. This quote from The Secret History sticks with me:
"There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that, and we believe them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious."
And memory is definitely a theme in 'Beloved'. How could it not be, with the narrative shifts between characters, times and places? This structure put me off at first, and I think its one of the main reasons people dislike the book. But if you're struggling with it, I'd say stick with it: the story comes together, and it makes sense for the narrative to be jumbled. Sethe talks about the concept of "rememory", which involves reliving the past. The past is unbearable for most of the characters,and they find various ways of repressing it, but it is never gone. Sethe warns her daughter Denver about "rememory" by telling her:
"if you go there--you who never was there-- if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there."
But part of Sethe's tragedy is that the past is undeniable. And Sethe does "go there" at the end of the novel, with catastrophic results which mirror the first tragedy.
Do you have any thoughts on 'Beloved'? I think its a very multi-layered novel, and I've only really touched on one element of that here, but if you have anything to add I'd be glad to hear it.
"Anything dead coming back to life hurts"
'Beloved' was not what I expected. For one thing, I couldn't have been prepared for how devastating it was. It took me a while for me to gather my thoughts into something mildly coherent. Therefore this isn't really a review, just some of my reactions.
I was surprised by the 'magic realism' element, i.e. Beloved coming back to life (I know its ambiguous as to whether Beloved actually is that same child). I like ghost stories, not because I like being scared but because the appearance of a ghost is a good way for a writer to explore the living characters' relationships with the dead, and how the past connects to the future. In Rebecca, for example, Mrs. de Winter believing she hears Rebecca's ghost reflects her own anxiety about her predecessor. This quote from The Secret History sticks with me:
"There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that, and we believe them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious."
And memory is definitely a theme in 'Beloved'. How could it not be, with the narrative shifts between characters, times and places? This structure put me off at first, and I think its one of the main reasons people dislike the book. But if you're struggling with it, I'd say stick with it: the story comes together, and it makes sense for the narrative to be jumbled. Sethe talks about the concept of "rememory", which involves reliving the past. The past is unbearable for most of the characters,and they find various ways of repressing it, but it is never gone. Sethe warns her daughter Denver about "rememory" by telling her:
"if you go there--you who never was there-- if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there."
But part of Sethe's tragedy is that the past is undeniable. And Sethe does "go there" at the end of the novel, with catastrophic results which mirror the first tragedy.
Do you have any thoughts on 'Beloved'? I think its a very multi-layered novel, and I've only really touched on one element of that here, but if you have anything to add I'd be glad to hear it.
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