Beloved

Recovered Memory

The novel is dedicated to the more than 60 million people who perished in slavery, and Beloved embodies their voices. By making the untold history, which has been buried like the dead child, come to life, Morrison makes it the focal point of the novel. The novel rests upon the notion of recovered memory that can be entered even outside the mind of the individual. It makes the memory of slavery simultaneously individual and communal and allows it to be accessed and examined. Morrison wanted to draw attention to the period of American history that is often glossed over without profound examination of the toll it took on the entire society, and to pay tribute to its victims.

At the end of the novel, women from the community perform a ritual to exorcise Beloved and stop her from tormenting Sethe, who desperately tries to give Beloved all the love she was not able to give her in life and to justify her actions. Beloved's disappearance symbolizes the disappearance of memory of all the enslaved people who perished, but also of their continuing, even if unacknowledged presence. Her very name honors the love of all mothers in slavery for their children. It also illustrates the dualism of life [Page 335]and death, as it refers to the people gathered at Beloved's funeral and all who read the novel and thus participate in the transmission of the story. Beloved stops haunting the community once they face her and the guilt they feel over her death, the burden of their collective past, but the sad remnants linger even after she disappears.

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