Resurrected Baby?

Early in the novel it is apparent that there is a connection between the baby ghost that angrily haunts the house, 124, and the character who enters the novel shortly, named Beloved. 'Beloved', after all, is the one word inscribed on the baby's tombstone and the character Beloved's extreme attachment to Sethe, the mother of the dead baby, forges an obvious connection. Thus far the novel indicates that Beloved may be a reincarnation of the dead baby. When Denver asks Beloved, "'Why you call yourself Beloved,'" Beloved replies, "'In the dark my name is Beloved'" (75). Denver is also acutely aware of how Beloved asks questions she shouldn't have the context to be able to ask: "'Where your diamonds?' 'Your woman she never fix up your hair?' And most perplexing: Tell me your earrings. How did she know" (63). The implication being, possibly, that Beloved has been watching them for some time, has been around, though she has not physically manifested until now. 

The anger that the baby ghost is associated with does not seem to be quite so obviously manifested in Beloved. However, there is are also implications that Sethe may be involved in the death of the child from the question Nelson Lord asks Denver at school: "'Didn't your mother get locked away for murder? Wasn't you in there with her when she went'" (104) and the page 5 mention, "Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut...her knees, wide open as the grave, were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil." The blood being on her hands could work figuratively or literally in this instance but that it stains her hands and is like oil, extremely difficult to remove, could indicate some sort of guilt on Sethe's part. 

Though Beloved often seems devotedly loving towards Sethe the scene in the clearing where Denver swears, "I saw your face. You made her choke" (101). This scene is extremely powerful as the dialogue parallels what I am projecting as a mirror of Beloved's own feeling of betrayal: "'You told me you loved her.' 'I fixed it, didn't I? Didn't I fix her neck?' 'After. After you choked her neck.' 'I kissed her neck. I didn't choke it. The circle of iron choked it'" (101). What is so powerful in this scene is the distance between the action and the guilt. To say that the circle of iron choked the neck implies how mechanical and inhumane the death was. How there was not feeling to the act of murder, that it was dissociative.