Race and the American Novel Project: Beloved Critical Commentary

In Elizabeth B. House’s criticism of Beloved, titled “Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved”, she makes the point that Beloved could not be a ghost, but is instead a confused orphan. House argues that Sethe is so hurt by her past that she is looking for anything to fill that void. When Beloved shows up, confused by the death of her parents and her traumatic past, she quickly latches onto Sethe and claims her to be her mother. House was brought to this conclusion by her own skepticism. She doesn’t believe that Toni Morrison would write a gothic book about a ghost coming back from the dead. To her that seems like an outlandish storyline, and Beloved being an abandoned orphan makes much more sense.

She makes a very compelling argument for her theory. She does believe the book is a ghost story, but not for the reasons one would think. As she says in her article, “Yes, it is a ghost story, but not because things move around in 124, not because strange lights invade rooms; it is a ghost story because of the history of the human heart, because of the inability of the human spirit to shrug off that which might be best forgotten” (House, 266). What she means is that Sethe’s inability to let go is what has created a ghost. She is the one that projects what she wants to see onto Beloved, therefore making her out to be the child she murdered.

Though this is a well thought out article, I cannot say that I agree with it. Obviously, there are many ways to interpret a fictional novel, but I do believe Beloved came from some otherworldly place. There are too many curious coincidences involving Beloved that at a certain point you have a hard time believing that they could be mere chance. When her character is first introduced and she says her name is Beloved, the same as the single word on the dead child’s tombstone, that just seems to be Morrison giving us a blatant hint as to what she was going for. It is interesting to consider the novel in different ways, but seeing that it is a work of fiction, I have no problem accepting that a character is the ghost of a dead child.

Source:

House, Elizabeth B. "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved." Studies in 

American Fiction 18.1 (Spring 1990): 17-26. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. 

Christopher Giroux and Brigham Narins. Vol. 87. Detroit: Gale, 1995. Contemporary Literary

Criticism Online. Web. 15 May 2015.