Parasitic Relationship

Parasitic Relationship

                Beloved is somehow the reincarnation of Sethe’s crawling already girl whom she killed.  That infant returns to Beloved in the form of a young woman yet Beloved still maintains many child-like qualities.  It is interesting to observe some of these characteristics particularly when one observes Beloved’s behavior toward the end of the novel.  Beloved speaks in broken sentences, not quite broken in the way an uneducated slave may speak, but rather more in the way of a child learning to speak.  In addition, Beloved is calmed and pleased by the taste of sweet things, similar to a young child.  There are also descriptions of Beloved having trouble walking as if she were a newborn baby; “She can hardly walk without holding on to something” (67).  These are just some of the ways in which we see subtle hints that Beloved is the ghost or reincarnation of Sethe’s crawling already girl.

                It is not until Sethe fully acknowledges Beloved as her dead daughter that the hold Beloved grasps on Sethe really becomes out of hand, almost parasitic.  Beloved begins to feed off of Sethe almost like a child feeding off the mother in the womb.  Morrison takes this concept even further by illustrating the drastic difference in body mass between Sethe and Beloved as this carries on.  Beloved is like a “devil-child,” feeding off her mother too much to the point where Sethe would have starved to death had it not been for Denver.  Sethe grows frail and weak while Beloved grows round and “pregnant” looking (308).    It is interesting that Morrison depicts Beloved in a pregnant way because she herself is acting like a child in the womb whilst outside of the womb, herself looking pregnant.  There are a lot of layers to this concept of mother-child relationship throughout the text.  The most interesting of all is that transference of power in the relationship near the end of the novel.  Mother’s are the ones to keep the child healthy and survive, but in the novel we see a vengeful reincarnated child twist that into a fatal parasitic relationship.