Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include :Character Analysis of Beloved in the Novel by Toni Morrison  • Jazz by Toni Morrison : The Symbolic Significance of the Title  •  Slavery in America’s South : Implications and Effects

There is little room for doubt regarding the symbolic nature of Beloved’s character in the novel by Toni Morrison. The stories that emerge as a result of her questioning of main characters reveal a darkhistory of slavery for the characters themselves but more importantly, for the reader who has hitherto not known a story of slavery such as the one in Morrison’s novel. Being murdered and then reborn in the midst of a history that is already fragmented for both character and reader, Beloved helps character and reader alike tease apart history as well as attempt to piece it together. The cyclical nature of the story and the way important details are revealed without respect to chronology “marks, within the world of the story, the character’s inability to become adequate to a historical sense of themselves and thus to trace the social meanings behind their sufferings—a point made all too clearly when Paul D becomes frustrated with Sethe’s inability to offer a linear, rational account of herself’ (Spargo 114).

As the novel by Toni Morrison, “Beloved” continues, the reader begins to gain a deeper understanding of how Beloved as a character functions as a symbol rather than a mere character for the purpose of progressing the plot of “Beloved”. Through her presence, Beloved acts as an intervention as she forces characters to understand their history as individuals, generations and communities and in this way she is able to force out some of the symbolic meaning of community through her very presence in the novel. Naturally, as a result of the complex and layered character of Beloved the reader is part of this recreation of not only a history itself, but the process by which history is formed. No characters in the novel have an identity that is intact but through Beloved and her forcing of memory, these histories begin to develop into identities that can offer some hope for the future.

The rebirth of Beloved as a grown woman is symbolic of the way the past never dies and in fact, if left to its own devices, can grow larger than life and more intense than the present. The fact that by the end of the novel Sethe has grown weak while Beloved—a ghost of the past—has become healthy, vibrant and even pregnant during the act of rebirth itself (the epitome of health, vitality and productivity) is even more important because it symbolizes the draining nature of history and the past if allowed to suckle the life from the present during the symbolic process of Beloved’s rebirth. Even when Beloved makes her first mysterious appearance outside of Sethe’s home, it becomes immediately clear that she is being reborn and has come to address to past in some way. She emerges, fully dressed, out of the water and Sethe goes through a few moments where she cannot help the water flowing out of her, much as though her water was breaking with the arrival of a child.

 Although Beloved looks like an adult woman after her rebirth, “she had new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands” (61) and is much like a newborn child in many other ways as she spends her first several hours drinking and then falling into a deep sleep. As she begins to recover, Beloved takes great pleasure is sugar and when the narrator states, in one of the important quotes from “Beloved” by Toni Morrison that, “it was as though sweet things were what she was born for” (66) one cannot help but recall that Beloved was born in between a period of slavery and freedom before her other symbolic rebirth. With this is mind, this statement that she was living for sweet things can be interpreted as her living for sweet freedom but since this was something that she would not be able to have, in Sethe’s mind, her infant would be better off dead. In her rebirth Beloved is finally able to enjoy the sweet things; not just the sugar treats her mother brings her, but the freedom that Sethe so desperately wanted for her—so desperately in fact, that she would rather murder her than allow her to be subject to the horrors of slavery.

The inescapable and inevitable course of history is a main issue in the novel and the character of Beloved both evokes and embodies the most painful aspects of it while at the same time, albeit perhaps inadvertently, causes characters to attempt to reconcile some of this baggage. The many broken families, unknown and displaced mothers, fathers and siblings that still perpetuates in the current generation of characters in Beloved can be traced farther back to the original passage to America on the slave ships where women like Nan, women who were there from the beginning of the institution of slavery paid witness to the breaking apart of families and constant sense of loss. Throughout the novel, Beloved as a complex character with layered meaning acts as a sort of harbinger of a slow but intense catharsis. By evoking painful memories and encouraging her mother to talk about her life she extracts the horrible memories and purges them of at least some of their toxicity or, at the very least, forces her mother to confront her pain, which is something she is avoids for most of the novel.