From Victim to Parasite

At first, after finding out about the backstory of Beloved's death and arrival at Bluestone road, I felt extremely sorry for her. Though I'd suspected for a long time that Beloved was the dead baby girl, hearing the gory details of her death really drove the point home for me. No wonder she was so dependent on Sethe and helpless- and no wonder her ghost was so furious about her lot in life. A violent death like having one's throat cut is fodder for countless ghost stories, but the circumstances of this one are particularly tragic. I couldn't help but imagine how horrifying and confusing Beloved's death must have been for her, especially after reading the passage from her perspective. 

The problem with Beloved's return is that there is no good way to reconcile with the ghosts of her past and move on. 

Though Beloved may be in the body of a 19-year-old woman, she is stuck in the mindset of the toddler she died as. Her limited vocabulary and love of sweet things provide good examples for this, as well as the constant tantrums she throws whenever she doesn't get her way. Though Beloved is reunited with her family once more, she can't catch up on the eighteen years of life she missed while she was dead. There is no explaining to a toddler logic or excuses, and there's no room for any gray area in the mind of someone who views things in such a simplistic way. She only drags the rest of the family backwards, which is worse than if she just stayed dead.

Since neither Sethe nor Beloved can move on from the past, it creates an unhealthy dynamic where Sethe can never make up for her actions and Beloved will never accept her apologies. Beloved returning won't magically make anything okay again, since it just drags out an endless circular argument that should have been put to rest years ago. Traditionally, ghosts stay in the physical world because they have unfinished business to resolve, but resolving any of the trauma from Beloved's death is out of the question. The ghost of a dead infant can't cope with the past in a healthy way when babies don't know how to communicate or express their emotions in the first place, and Beloved will never age beyond the day of her death no matter how her family addresses it. 

The vicious cycle her whole family is trapped in leads to Beloved's takeover of the household, stagnating because there is nothing left for her to do. She got everything she wanted, so now what? Most ghosts would just disappear once their goal was accomplished, but Beloved can never regain the years of childhood she lost. Instead, she remains a parasite on her family and sticks around with no direction to her life. A returned ghost with the emotional intelligence of a 2-year-old does nothing but prevent closure from happening for anyone involved. 

I still feel sorry for Beloved at the end of the book, but in a different way. Some might think she truly is an evil spirit, but I think she was just the echo of a lost child. Her situation was deeply unhealthy for everyone involved, but she's not the root cause of it. I don't blame Beloved for her treatment Denver and Sethe, but I do blame Schoolteacher for setting such a brutal chain reaction of events in motion. This story reminded me of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in that stories about resurrection rarely, if ever, end well.