The Dangers of Repression

There seems to be a lot of psychological effects of various events present in the characters in this novel.  This is a very effective tool for Morrison to use in order to captivate the reader in a kind of twisted way, to get them wrapped up into the broken minds of these former slaves.  Sethe is a prime example, as a main character, of one who represses quite a lot of trauma from her past.  One would think that it would be obvious to not want to remember the horrible things she went through as a slave, let alone having to kill her own child and live with that trauma.  However, I believe that the presence of Beloved, while she welcomes having her baby back in her life, is a negative manifestation of her repression; she begins to depart from herself when Beloved is around.  She had learned to cope with her life after all the horror she went through, and her personality adjusted to repress those bad memories.  However, Beloved's presence almost splits Sethe's personality in two; the mother she never got to be to Beloved, and the vulnerable former slave who is having to face these memories she hid for so long.  Beloved acts as a tool to get her to remember these things and to refresh the guilt she had of killing her daughter.

Similarly, Paul D is affected by Beloved's presence in that he had also repressed many horrible memories, and that mere physical contact with Beloved draws out the pain in him and destroys his tobacco tin around his heart.  I believe that Beloved is a figment of their imaginations brought on by the high level of psychological repression, and that she is ultimately a danger to their psychological health, already damaged by the horrors they witnessed and experienced.