Searching for Stability

Beloved is a tale of outcasts being outcast by even outcasts. First there's Sethe, a black who lives in a home cursed by her dead baby that others (even other blacks) won't go near. It was once Baby Sugg's house, and once she dies, everybody abandons the place. Denver goes to school when she's seven, but stops going once Nelson Lord makes it clear that she's being avoided by the others with his questions. Paul D voluntarily enters the home, but before he gets there he finds help from some rogue Cherokee who refused to go with their brethren to Oklahoma, and they're sick with small pox. Because Paul D arrives, even Denver feels abandoned until the arrival of Beloved, the incarnation of the baby ghost that Paul D yells out of 124. Paul D eventually gets moved out toward the shed, where he sleeps out in the cold, unwilling to sleep in the house.

This pattern of abandonment and out-casting in Beloved is obviously a recurring theme, but I think the point Toni Morrison is making goes deeper. Halfway through the novel, we see several times where others are welcomed, too. Paul D is welcomed into 124, Beloved is welcomed, and even Sethe herself is welcomed into 124 by Baby Suggs, where she stays well after Baby Suggs dies.

Throughout the book, we've seen the phrase "Love nothing." Indeed, it seems that every time somebody is let in, something bad happens to that character. "However many times Baby tried to deny it, Sethe knew the trouble at 124 started when she jumped off the wagon." The recurrence of pushing others away either results in the characters becoming better or else having no effect. When Paul D is with the Cherokee, he ends up being the last of the buffalo men, and when he realizes that he takes off for the North under the chief's directions. When Denver shuts herself off from Paul D and Sethe, Beloved shows up. When Sethe runs off without Halle, she finds others to care for her.

I'm struggling to find something that will link this book together for me, or cause me to say, 'o, that's what this book is about!' I'm struggling to find solid themes, but the patterns of abandonment and welcoming-in I keep finding have to mean something. Perhaps I'll figure this out later tonight.

Here's something, though: the characters and their searches for stability. "Why now, with Paul D instead of the ghost, was she breaking up? getting scared? needing Baby? The worst was over, wasn't it? She had already got through, hadn't she? With the ghost in 124 she could bear, do, solve anything." Perhaps the reason for all of this is that with things constantly changing, she needed something steady. That baby's ghost, causing mischief even, had been that steady ground. Paul D comes in and messes everything up; the baby's gone, and Paul D, being human, makes life spontaneous and unsteady for Sethe again.