What Should I Remember, What Do I Owe?

The themes of giving, ownership, remembrance and letting go become increasingly complex in the Third section of Beloved by Toni Morrison. As Denver begins to notice the power balance shifting in her house, as Beloved becomes her mother’s passive aggressive dictator, Denver realizes, “the job she started out with, protecting Beloved from Sethe, changed to protecting her mother from Beloved” (243). Sethe becomes so enamored with pleasing Beloved she forgets to do anything for herself, so caught up in the need to reconcile with Beloved and reach forgiveness that she effectively relies on Denver to take care of everything in their house, all of the practicalities; Sethe is so caught up in the tragedy and guilt and anger of her past that she becomes a slave to it and seems unable to move forward with her life.

The circularity of being needed as a child, becoming the provider as a parent, to being cared for as an elderly person echoes in multiple cases: the Bodwin’s changing from the people who provided the house to Sethe to being the people who need Denver to care for them on a nightshift, Mrs. Garner’s presence and relative generosity to Sethe eventually devolving into the need for Sethe night and day, Sethe, herself, carrying Denver, eventually becoming fully reliant on her as Beloved leaches away her sensibility, Beloved who opens Sethe’s old wounds and racks her with a guilt that Beloved will not forgive.

            This kind of dependability forms a deep embarrassment for Denver: “it shamed her to see her mother serving a girl not much older than herself” (242). Morrison expresses the humiliation of service, the inhumanity of endlessly holding guilt over ones head has to be let go of at a certain point when Morrison tells the reader that Ella, who has suffered what she describes as “the lowest of low,” thinks “Whatever Sethe had done, Ella didn’t like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present. Sethe’s crime was staggering and her pride outstripped even that…Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind” (256).

            Morrison seems to recognize that in order to move forward and actually make something of life one cannot dwell on the past for it can become the only focus of life itself at which point the act, for example Sethe’s murder of her child, not only arrests the person in the moment that it happens but becomes a permanent prison—Baby Suggs is always remembered as paraphrasing the concept of laying down sword and shield. However, the indication does not mean forgetting. As Ella puts it:

As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place—shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such—Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the shoe was on the other foot. She didn’t mind a little communication between the two worlds, but this was an invasion. (257)