Beloved Repulsion
In Tori Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the author explores the idea of the massive devastation that slavery has. The negative impact of no knowledge of self-worth and self-alienation, being very dangerous, is one that haunts slaves so far that it continues to reach those who are able to reach freedom. Morrison presents the haunting, taunting temperament of the novel through a child, a spirit of a slave’s daughter murdered by her own mother to avoid slavery but has a different kind of slavery; an eternal captivity. The child is the thought spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter but is the age she would have been if she was still alive. The child had no name so she bears the title on her tombstone; Beloved. Beloved unfolds to the reader as a young, dependent child, but as one takes a longer look at Beloved they begin to realize she becomes more and more malevolent, temperamental, and self-centered. Morrison uses Beloved to represent the inhumanity actions towards slaves from the past that return to haunt the present in a way to presents slavery as something that is not simply left behind or something that just goes away.
When Beloved first appears to her mother, Sethe, she have the familiar feelings of her water breaking all over again. Although Sethe does know it is the spirit of her dead daughter, Beloved is described as ”a fully dressed woman [walking] out of the water ” (Morrison, 50) soaking wet the way she would have been if she had just been born and bears the