Memory and Mother Love in Morrison's Beloved

The mother-infant dyad, the most elemental of all interpersonal bondings, is renowned for its ability to generate an outpouring of tender ecstasy matched only by the concomitant reverberations of anger and guilt. Infant need and maternal care reciprocate so intensely, many psychologists believe, that they blur the distinction between child and parent. Yet within the intimate web lurk terrors and traumas. Toni Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved, charts the explosive intricacies of the preoedipal bond from the simultaneous perspectives of mother and child. Morrison explores their mutual hunger for a loving union as well as the inevitable struggle for control. This powerful portrait, in turn, serves as the metaphor upon which Morrison grounds her meditation on personal memory and historical self-awareness. Still haunted by slavery, her African-American characters confront an overwhelming legacy of psychological scars. Morrison orchestrates maternal tensions and memory's pain so that each mirrors the other's anguish and ambivalence. A shared avenue for hope and growth emerges from this unlikely pairing.

At the novel's emotional climax, a former slave recognizes the re-embodied spirit of her dead baby daughter in the person of a mysterious visitor. Nineteen years earlier Sethe, the escaped slave, found herself pursued by the loathed master from whom she and her children had escaped. Cornered, Sethe slit the throat of her beloved daughter rather than see her returned to captivity. Now the baby's ghost has returned. In an extraordinary section which can best be described as a telepathic opera trio, the newly reunited women pour forth their rhapsodic responses to each other and to the events of past and present. Sethe, the spirit child Beloved, and Sethe's