Dearly Beloved
... In Toni Morrison’s Beloved we see a young girl representing the collective pain and anguish of the souls lost to slavery. ... The need and desire for Sethe that Beloved exudes are also symbolic of Morrison’s own desire to know her foremothers, the writers of the slave narratives who traveled across seas in ships of death. ... On the tombstone of the Sethe’s slain daughter is the word “Beloved”. Sethe heard the preacher say “Dearly Beloved” at the baby’s burial and nothing else and chose for it to be the child’s headstone(5). ... Caroline Rody explains Morrison’s use of the Churches words to describe those who have passed: ‘Beloved’ names everyone, in the official, impersonal rhetoric of the Church and names everyone who is intimately loved, but does not name the forgotten. ... The name Beloved and the tombstone, bare but for that one simple word, seem to describe a blank face, a person who could be anyone’s dead relative, be they daughter, son, husband or grandmother. Morrison uses this name to give Sethe’s daughter “the distinct name everyone privately gives to their most beloved; it expresses at once the anonymity and the dearest specificity” (96). When Denver questions why she is called Beloved, the girl answers her with “in the dark my name is Beloved,” indicating that in death she has no identification other than her headstone. ... These side effects of the great weight she contains are explained by Rody: Part of Beloved’s strangeness derives, then, from the emotional burden she carries as a symbolic compression of innumerable forgotten people into one miraculously resurrected personality (96). Stamp Paid is the first to notice that Beloved is more than just the dead daughter of Sethe.