Who Is Beloved?
by Julie C. Roth
“Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,” Sethe’s mother-in-law says in Toni Morrison‘s book, Beloved. “We lucky this ghost is a baby.”
Lucky? Maybe. But babies are a moody species, and this one runs Sethe’s house. “It’s not evil,” Sethe says, “just sad.” True, when Paul D arrives out of Sethe’s past, he feels the ghost is a wave of grief. But in 18 years of living with this ghost, Sethe has seen it chase away two of her sons, hurl the family dog against a wall, and break more than its share of dishes. It’s a little more than “just sad.”
The year is 1873, post-Civil War America, and there are enough ghosts to go around. Sethe escaped slavery 18 years earlier and has endured horrific loss in her freedom. Paul D, who knew her on the plantation, has been walking nearly the whole time since. Broken and haunted by grief, neither one of them finds a ghost a strange occurrence. In fact, shortly after Paul D chases the baby ghost out of the house, their story gets stranger still. For this is when Beloved enters the scene.
Jonathan Demme‘s superb movie version of Beloved captures all the grief and strangeness of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. Unlike The Color Purple, in which Stephen Spielberg inserted clownishness to lighten up a tale of cruelty and transcendence, Jonathan Demme is not afraid of the story. In fact, Beloved is the most faithful translation of a novel to film I have ever seen. (At three hours, perhaps a little too much so.) Open the book afterwards and you’ll find that the dialogue, even the smallest of details, is lifted straight from Morrison’s prose. The color of Sethe’s house. The red light of the ghost in the hall.
And the actors do a magnificent job. Danny Glover as Paul D and Kimberly Elise as Sethe’s only remaining daughter are perfect. Even Oprah Winfrey, as Sethe, captures her character precisely. She carries the full weight of Sethe’s past on her brow throughout the film. Even when she smiles, even during love, she bears that weight. Sethe is a woman dulled to life. So if Winfrey’s acting range is less than broad, it makes her perfectly suited to a character whose soul is crushed under the weight of her grief.
WARNING: At This Point, I Give Away a Thing or Two
But the performance by Thandie Newton is nothing short of miraculous. She plays Beloved, a strange, otherworldly creature, barely able to speak or stand or to eat without stuffing half her hand into her mouth. She’s a beauty with wide eyes and the open face of a child. Not a single adult expression crosses her face in the course of the entire movie–it’s so unlined you could swear none ever had. So dependent, so innocent, so needy and demanding, she is a toddler in the body of a young woman. Beloved. The baby ghost come to life.
But is she really Sethe’s long-dead daughter?
Sethe comes to think so, and we’re clearly meant to agree. But I don’t. Instead I think she is Sethe’s overwhelming grief come to life. There is no “beloved” without a lover. A wave of grief implies a griever. And for Beloved, Sethe is “the one I can’t live without.” When the thirty women banish Beloved for good in the end, they do so by laying hands on Sethe. Beloved and the ghost are part of Sethe; they are her grief. Grief over the murder of her baby girl. Grief so large it will not be bound by the natural world, so virulent it must take form.
The question is whether Sethe can live without it. For 18 years she would not move away from it. She favors it over her living daughter. She allows it to chase her sons and her lover, her livelihood and her sanity, from the house. Both the book and the movie leave it an open question.
None of us will have to live through what Sethe does in Beloved. But her tale isn’t an unfamiliar one. We know what it is to love our grief. Though it crowds out everything else, we love it. Though it kills us, we can’t let it go. We think, like Sethe does, “She was our best thing.”
But we are wrong.
Julie is Executive Producer of NetGuide
(Cybergrrl originally posted this article on October 22, 1998.)
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