Respond to anything that interested you in Part III of Beloved. Here are some specific prompts you might want to think about:
- What do you think is going on in the scene when the neighborhood women come to Sethe’s house? Why are they there? What do they hope to accomplish? What actually happens in this scene? How do things change after it?
- Look very carefully at the final two pages of the novel and provide a close reading of what you think is going on here. Some questions you might want to consider: Why does Morrison add these pages rather than ending on the more upbeat note of the exchange between Sethe and Paul D. which concludes the previous chapter? What does Morrison mean by the repeated phrase, “It was not a story to pass on”? If this is true, why is Morrison passing the story on by telling it to us? What is she saying about remembering and about forgetting here? Why the images of the photographs and footprints at the end?
At the end of the novel, the last two pages discuss how everyone within the community forgot Beloved as soon as she was banished, and while it took Sethe, Denver, and Paul D longer to forget, they also eventually forgot her face as well. I’d say that this is important because our society has done a very similar thing in reaction to the institution of slavery and racism in this country. Instead of ending on the positive exchange between Sethe and Paul D, Morrison ends Beloved with the statement, “This was not a story to pass on,” as a contradiction to most of the overarching theme within the novel, which is the importance of remembering the past in order to examine its effect on the preset, in order to finally abandon the pain attached with repressed trauma be able to create a better future. Throughout the whole novel, she works to convince readers of the importance of remembering, and the value in examination of the past, and the power one person or community has when they face it, however with the phrase “This is not a story to pass on,” Morrison reminds readers that the story of Beloved, and therefore the institution of slavery and racism, while important to analyze and critique in present day, is a horrifying story which must not be recreated or normalized or lessened in importance due to people’s desensitization.
I think the ending of the book speaks a lot to the stories of people that will never be known or spoken about. Slavery stripped people of their right to be remembered. Toni Morrison focuses a lot on memory. There are hundreds of thousands of people whose stories no one will ever know because of slavery. Even in this book, there are a bunch of people that we just don’t know what happened to. For instance, the men that were in prison with Paul D. or Sixo’s thirty-mile woman. So many people’s stories have just been lost with no name or face tied to them. Toni Morrison does such a good job of portraying that message while simultaneously telling the story of some. I wonder how many times the story of an enslaved person has “not been one to pass on”? That even goes back to what we were talking about last time in class. How many times has a story been too painful or even dangerous to pass on and talk about?
I love the transition Toni Morrison adds into Denver’s character. She starts out as a girl that only knows 124 and her family, afraid to leave home. Then, when Beloved starts to led to Sethe’s downfall, after 12 years of staying at home, Denver leaves the house becoming a woman. She goes to find help for her mother who has become extremely weak. She gets the townspeople to deliver food, she finds a job with the Bodwins, and she gets a group of people with Ella at the front of it to exorcise Beloved. When they come to the house, they start to sing which lures Beloved and Sethe out of the house. When Sethe sees Mr. Bodwin she mistakes him for schoolteacher the man who had her assaulted at Sweet Home and runs at him with an ice pick. Ella and the townspeople stop her from killing him and when they have calmed down they look back to find that Beloved has vanished. This is the start of Beloved’s fade from existence, making people question if she ever really existed in the first place.
I want to talk about the role of manhood within the novel and look at the phrase “nothing but a man”. As a slave, the status of manhood is reduced, causing a lack of self; for example, Baby Suggs not using her real name. At the beginning of the novel, while we learn about Baby Suggs’ backstory, a man is defined as “nothing but a man” (27), however when given a relationship to another, “somebody” emerges. Being an enslaved man or woman is not enough to characterize yourself as somebody. Later on in the novel, when Paul D and Beloved begin relations, Paul D’s manhood comes back into question. He prides his strength on knowing School Teacher was wrong, calling him a “trespasser among the human race” (148). However, he starts to question whether or not School Teacher was right. While Paul D was at Sweet Home, manhood held a different connotation than to the rest of society. It’s when Paul D violates Beloved (intentionally) where he feels like his manhood isn’t defined in the Sweet Home way but School Teacher’s way. In the middle of page 148, the word “he” is repeated three times referring to Paul D. Morrison is emphasizing Paul D’s sense of self even when he can’t characterize himself as a man.
As a couple of my classmates already noticed as well, Ella seemed to be leading role in the exorcism at the end of the novel. I think that Ella showed that she was a good friend to Sethe, by trying to help her even if it might not have been the best idea overall. She saved Sethe from killing an innocent man, as well as empathizing with the trauma she felt from Beloved dying. I think that Toni Morrison is trying to show to us at the end of the novel that the story of beloved likely won’t travel much further than within their small family, but they themselves will always remember. Much of Sethe’s life has been repressed due to trauma, but I think that she understand this story is one she has to remember.
Wow. Again, I have so many thoughts that I definitely will not be able to put into words right now. But as for the ending, I think Morrison included the last two pages because they answer the question of what happened to Beloved. She was still a memory–that’s all she ever was–but no one was giving her or her memory any power anymore. She haunted Sethe in the beginning because of Sethe’s grief, and was able to become corporeal through her guilt (and continued to gain strength and physical matter the more she “milked” Sethe of her guilt), but once people started to move on and forget her, she lost all power and matter. The second-to-last passage specifically, the one about footprints, makes Beloved seem so impermanent, almost as if she was just a figment of everyone’s imagination. Morrison writes, “Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there.” This draws the reader’s attention back to that, while Beloved may have been able to make footprints before, she is fading–a testament to memory once more, and the fragility of it. Lost individuals, like Beloved, can try to demand to be remembered (to step and make footprints), but unless the living continue to make a conscious choice to make their memory last, their footprints will eventually disappear, and the path will only belong to the living again.
When Ella and the other neighborhood women arrive on Sethe’s doorstep, they are trying to have an exorcism for Beloved. Ella recognizes the hardship that Sethe is going through because she has been in that same position before. She knows that feeling, and also knows how to get out of it, which is why she leads the exorcism and sees the harmfulness of Beloved’s resurrection. Ella’s goal was to rid Sethe and the community from the chains of the past and its sins. When Sethe mistakes Mr. Bodwin for a school teacher, it shows just how deeply she is clung to the past. She goes to attack him with an ice pick, and is thankfully stopped by Ella. This is seen as a new beginning for her and a release from the past, and also for the women who go to help her. Everyone benefits from the women going to perform the exorcism, and they were there at the perfect time to stop her from doing something she would later regret.
Sethe knew that her children were going to have a hard life as a slave, possibly tortured, raped, and obliged to work demanding jobs in harmful conditions. Therefore in an attempt to save her daughter, she murdered Beloved. The women in the neighborhood go to Sethe’s house in order to exorcise Beloved from 123. Ella stood out as one of the women leading the mission to exorcise Beloved because she empathized with Sethe and understood her actions because of her own trauma she experienced. Outside 123, the women in the neighborhood begin to sing outside their home, so Sethe and Beloved come out. During this time, Sethe sees Mr. Bodwin, who she tries to attack although he helped Baby Suggs, fought for Sethe’s release from jail and was trying to help her daughter find work. Ella and the women restrain Sethe from her attempts to attack Mr. Bodwin. After this scene, Beloved disappears.
I think Toni Morrison includes the last two pages of the book to remind the reader that the inhabitants of 124 Bluestone will always be reminded of beloved. The exchange between Sethe and Paul D. can not be left at just that. They will always remember the visit from Beloved in every place she went and everything she did. The footprints to the water, even if made by an actual person, will always remind them of Beloved’s arrival out of the water. I interpreted the line about the photographs to be like when you look at something for too long and it starts to fade into something else, that is what happens to the characters but they see Beloved in the blur. The point being that even though Beloved is no longer physically there the characters will never forget what happened when she was there. Toni Morrison could not leave the book on a upbeat note and pretend everything is all good after all that they just went through. The memory of Beloved is not something that will get passed on, but will live in the minds of Sethe, Paul D., and Denver for the rest of their lives, then hopefully it will fade away along with them.
Denver is her last remaining child at home and daughter that is alive, therefore she represents Sethe’s future. This is important because she is so reliant upon Sethe until the ending of Beloved, she starts to transform into a woman, leaving the house by herself and finding work and a source of food. This independence allows her to survive when Sethe was so weak. I admire her character because she works so hard to be a caring daughter. Sethe is very upset over Beloved’s leaving again, and I like how Paul D comforts her in her sadness. It is somewhat weird how the townspeople are ignorant enough to forget the existence of Beloved completely so fast, however when Denver, Sethe, and Paul D start to forget her it makes more sense. It is almost like she was a memory that was brought to life by their imagination – a figure of the past haunting their present.