Beloved

Introduction

Beloved begins with the house that is the centerpoint of the narrative, 124 Bluestone Road. This house outside of Cincinnati is the home of Sethe Garner and her family. The members of her family—her sons, Howard and Buglar, and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs—gradually leave the house or die. So by the beginning of the novel, the year 1873, Sethe and her daughter Denver are the sole occupants of the house.

The house is said to be spiteful and is, apparently, haunted. The haunting drives away Sethe's sons, who can no longer bear the fear and uncertainty of their home. Their grandmother on their father's side, Baby Suggs, died not long after the boys left. Baby Suggs, after a lifetime of hardship and agonizing personal traumas, gave up on life.Beloved, the spirit of Sethe's dead baby, returns as a woman of twenty to the house where Sethe and her daughter Denver live; taking her name from the word on her tombstone, Beloved demands compensation from Sethe for her missing childhood.

Thesis Statement

Sethe is demonstrated as a Lilith figure in the novel of Tim Morrison.

Discussion and Analysis

All the major tropes of the Lilith myth exist in Beloved.1 According to the legend, God brings Lilith to Eden to curtail Adam's coupling with the animals; however, Lilith is dismayed by Adam's insistence on continually assuming the dominant position during lovemaking and flees from Eden. God sends three angels to fetch Lilith back, but they are unsuccessful in their attempts. Lilith chooses demons as her sexual partners, bearing as a result of these couplings a hundred children a day, some of whom she eats. In response, God creates Eve as a more submissive mate to Adam, while Lilith's half-demon daughters continue to haunt earthly men, coming to them at night, squatting over them as they sleep to have sex with them. Lilith mythically has come to signify an aspect of the Great Mother Goddess, both creator and destroyer of all life; despite the former attribute, however, culture has traditionally regarded Lilith simply as a demon, as one who must be feared. It is she, legend tells us, who drank the blood of Abel after his murder by his brother.

The parallels between the legend and Morrison's novel are significant. We are told that the men of Sweet Home routinely have sex with the animals to ease their desire. Sethe is brought to Sweet Home from an unnamed other place, through no will of her own; she is not "always already" one of the Sweet Home slaves, as the six men are. Sethe's successive pregnancies and the recurring image of her breasts dripping with milk encode her mythically as a Great Mother Goddess figure. When she leaves Sweet Home, she flees on her own, pursued by the schoolteacher and two others (the three "angels" of God), who are later joined by the local sheriff, allowing for the apocalyptic image of "four horsemen" (148). Furthermore, in some versions of the Lilith myth, angels threaten to drown her in the sea ...