The Massachusetts Medievalist on Sethe and Beloved, Dante and Virgil

As with last week, it seems almost impossible to write just a short blog post about half of Beloved and its relationship with Inferno - not to mention all the important points about the novel that are not immediately relevant to Dante connections!

Movie poster, Beloved, 1998

Last week, I noted that Sethe as the pilgrim is alone in her quest during part one - she has no Virgil to carry her, scare off the demons, summon an angel with the key to the city. This week I want to focus on Beloved as a version of Virgil, a guide through the hell of the past who forces Sethe to confront the past so she can move beyond it. Rather than a benevolent, protective guide, Beloved is insistent, violent, unpredictable, and dangerous. Like Virgil for Dante, however, she is essential to Sethe's journey.  In Inferno terms, Sethe journeys through all the circles of Hell and emerges alive. She's not like Dante, who is a "tourist" in Hell (Anthony Apesos's term from earlier this summer); she has lived the torture and the monsters, not simply observed them.

Morrison provides us with a logical explanation of Beloved's presence in the neighborhood - Stamp Paid tells Paul D that there "Was a girl locked up in the house with a whiteman over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that's her. Folks say he had her in there since she was a pup" (277). The "real" explanation, the one that Sethe and Denver and the neighbors believe, is that Beloved is the ghost of the dead baby, returned at the age she would have been if she'd lived. Beloved forces Sethe, Paul D, and Denver to confront the horror of the past, to become intimate with it (in Paul D's case, sexually intimate). 

The heart of the novel - the four sections of interior monologue (236-260) that are at first individuated and then merge into a unified trio of voice(s) -- reveals their desires as mothers, daughters, sisters. Sethe gets a chance to explain her love and maternal reasoning to Beloved as well as to Denver. Denver expresses her need for her lost sister, no longer lost. Beloved's voice takes us and them back to that moment of the Misery but also back to Sweet Home, back through the Middle Passage, back into West Africa.  These settings merge and flow into one another as Sethe's life becomes an exemplar of the enslaved African experience from its geographic beginnings on the west African coast to its post-Civil War devastation among the failures of Reconstruction.

Sethe's initial reaction to her revelation of Beloved's identity is joy, the joy of reunion and the chance to expiate her actions in the woodshed eighteen years before. Soon, however, the overwhelming horror begins to eat away at the three of them, and Denver's narrative begins to ascend as she grows into adulthood and assumes responsibility for the household, becoming a mother for her own mother.

The embodiment of the horror of the past, Beloved is exorcised by the power of the women of the community and by Sethe herself.  As the women pray and sing and Bodwin drives towards the house on Bluestone Road, Sethe thinks he is Schoolteacher returned yet again, but this time her anger and fear and violence focus on the correct target. With an icepick in her raised hand, she runs at the white man - and in doing so she achieves her own absolution, since Beloved simply disappears. Unlike Dante, who is literally carried out of Hell by Virgil, Sethe must do this last task completely on her own.

Paul D then at the end becomes a Virgil-like guide and protector, as Sethe has been almost completely broken by the second loss of her oldest daughter.  Paul D decides to take care of Sethe while Denver is at work, and he tells her that they need to move together beyond the past.  He says, "we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow" (322). 

When Lesley's senior seminar studied Beloved in pre-coronavirus spring 2020, my students were almost unanimous in their confidence that Sethe and Paul D were going to make a future together. Perhaps that confidence is the optimism of the young -- but I want to agree with them. With the love of those who know all her truth, Sethe will be able to agree with Paul D when he tells her that "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (322).

Possible items for discussion:

Why is the very short last chapter part of this novel? What is its function? How does attention to it complicate your understanding of the text as a whole?

Beloved contains a complex network of narratives, many of which could function as stand-alone texts in their own right. For example, Stamp Paid's story seems to me almost like one of those sections of the Iliad or Beowulf that we know existed as a separate narrative.  How does Morrison create textual unity with all these disparate strands running through her text? Or to put this query in another form: how would you draw a map of Beloved analogous to all those diagrams of Inferno?

Dante the Pilgrim seems to have no relationships in the real world beyond that with Beatrice, at least none that are important enough to mention during his journey through Hell. How do Sethe's various relationships in the novel's present affect her ability to journey through Hell/the past? How firm/definite is the division between the real and the supernatural in both of our core texts and why does that matter?

PS the Massachusetts Medievalist will be following comments, of course, but otherwise will be on break until after Labor Day!