My book review: Beloved by Toni Morrison

I have enjoyed reading Morrison's book called Beloved.

In Beloved, the remarkable novel for which Toni Morrison won the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, “we three” represent Sethe, Denver, and Beloved and they make up an inverse Trinity in the book. The three women become a trinity of Mother, Daughter, and Daughter-Divinity. So, the triangle of the mother, the daughter, and the ghost is an inversion of the religious Trinity of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit.
In contrast to the religious trinity which represents the symbol of perfect love, the trio in the book represents an unstable trinity. “We three” make up an unhealthy trio for the living characters.

Denver thinks: “You are my sister”. Sethe thinks: “You are my daughter”. Beloved thinking of Sethe says, “You are my face; you are me." According to John Limon, “Morrison is drawing out the implications of a female trinitarianism: mother, daughter, holy ghost."

Sethe is living with her daughter Denver after her two sons “Howard and Buglar had run away by the time they were thirteen years old." The two sons have fled because the house was haunted. Therefore, Sethe and her reclusive eighteen years old daughter Denver were living by themselves in the haunted two-story house at 124 Bluestone Road outside of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Futhermore, this powerful unhealthy trio which consists of Sethe Suggs, Denver Suggs, and Beloved forms a trinity that drives Paul D Garner away. He was persuaded that Beloved was somehow preventing him from being able to sleep in Sethe’s bed. One night, Beloved seeks Paul D out and she asks him “to touch” her “on the inside part” and “to call her name."

Although she promises to leave after he calls her name, she instead forces herself on him. Paul D “trembled like Lot’s wife” and he realized the immorality of his act. He has not been able to resist to the temptation. He has betrayed Sethe and he has dissolved the bond between himself, Sethe, and Denver. Paul D who was trying to ease the tension by taking the two women to the carnival has coupled with Sethe’s unstable daughter. Thus, Toni Morrison reveals the ‘ghost strength’ by proving her ability to overpower a reluctant adult male.
The trinity is once more broken because Beloved is demanding constant attention from Sethe. Denver remarks that “it became clear that they were only interested in each other." But when “Sethe spit up something she had not eaten and it rocked Denver like gunshot”, now it was obvious for Denver “that her mother could die”. “Whatever was happening, it only worked with three-not two-…she knew she had to ask somebody for help". Beloved claimed to have come out of a yearning to reunite with her mother. But Sethe became obsessed with Beloved to the point that she looses her job. As a result, the healthiest character of the “we three” will leave the trio to seek for help. Finally, the ghost ‘has disintegrated into nothingness’ and “they forgot her like a bad dream."

Toni Morrison “experiments to voice the voiceless” ghost, giving “flesh to the long dead in the pages of her work."

According to Fultz, “in Beloved, slavery and its effects are too complex to render a linear, mimetic narrative, and so Morrison moves between past and present, between consciousness and unconsciousness” (Fultz 2003).