ad enslaved Sethes soul develops into the physical apparition that literally enslaves Sethe. Beloved bending over Sethe looked the mother, Sethe the teething child, for other than those times when Beloved needed her, Sethe confined herself to a corner chair. The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became; the brighter Beloveds eyes, the more those eyes that used never to look away became slits of sleeplessness. Sethe no longer combed her hair or splashed her face with water. She sat in the chair licking her lips like a chastised child while Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it. And the older woman yielded it up without a murmur. (250) Sethe is nave when she tries to rationalize Beloveds existence as an opportunity to start over, to erase eighteen years of guilt. Sethe has managed to suppress many of the memories of her past. Now with Beloveds presence, everything that originally made 124 a house of horror is resurrected. She is an invasion of two separate time periods, connecting all of the painful rememories. Thus, Morrison confronts her readers with several varying degrees of pain and guilt. From the late introduction of Sethes crime, the reader understands the circumstance of the situation. Sethe committed her crime out of a severe degree of love and fear of slavery that forced her to a crazed state. Such complicated issues and emotions are not easily transferable to those who have not directly experienced the gravity of these events. Sethe knowingly endures eighteen years of punishment, guilt, and ostracism for the death of her child. For this reason, she does not see Beloved as a phantom of vengeance, but rather as a second opportunity to be forgiven. Morrison essentially creates this sense of pardoning of Sethe by the destruction of Beloved at the end of the book, a minor tribute to all the pain and anguish Sethe endures over the years. Yet are these characters necessarily blameworthy for their...
