Painful Memories: A Beloved Analysis

            In Beloved, Toni Morrison plays with how a painful past can continue to injure a person in the present. When Sethe continues to spend time with the mysterious Beloved, she discovers how much Beloved delights in Sethe’s stories of her past. However, with every story she recounts, Sethe finds that “everything in it was painful or lost” (69).  The use of “painful” and “lost” briefly synopsize Sethe’s thoughts about her past. In addition, the length and simplicity of the words and the sentence they appear in possibly could reflect the amount of effort Sethe has committed to recalling and coping with her agonizing past, years after those events took place. Briefly stating, “everything in [her past] was painful” quickly deters any further questioning and subsequent emotional pains to a later time. The lengths to which Sethe goes to contain her past reflects in her choice of who can know of its events; she keeps the details of her past and the subsequent suffering the memories bring from her remaining immediate family. Sethe and Baby Suggs, “agreed that it was unspeakable,” and, “gave short replies or rambling reveries” to Denver whenever she asked about it (69). “Reveries,” is defined a state of being pleasantly lost in one's thoughts or daydreams. In other words, Sethe provides an unrealistic, insubstantial version of her past. Her “rambling” to Denver is likely an attempt to strengthen the weaker retelling of Sethe’s past. By casting Sethe’s past as a wholly painful experience and mentioning how Sethe keeps her past’s details from her family, Morrison shows how a painful past persists in harming a person years after the fact.