Models of Memory and Romance: The Dual Endings of Toni Morrison's Beloved

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Mary Paniccia Carden

Even without a "red heart" and

not even trying, he had become the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry. Because with him, in his presence, they could. There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep--to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other. (17)

Paul D's blessedness on the one hand facilitates relationships outside the power-inflected barriers raised between men and women, but on the other hand gives him a certain advantage because the telling is not reciprocal-- he keeps his secrets. His blessedness does, however, balance his walking off-- walking into houses, he gives women relief and outlet. Creating Paul D as "embodied kindness" (Fields 161), a man women are drawn to on an instinctual level, Morrison will not allow the reader to simply dismiss him when that understanding fails. As we will see, this move indicates the depth of the novel's investment in Paul D, the extent of its need for what he offers.

Paul D's blessedness also helps to justify his intervention into the dynamics of Sethe's household. Moments after his arrival, he drives the "baby ghost"--the presence of Sethe's dead daughter--out of her house. Breaking up with violence and "a loud male voice" (37) the family composed of Sethe, the baby ghost, and Sethe's living daughter Denver, Paul D assumes the male role of protector before he understands the nature of the haunting or whether Sethe wants or needs protection from it. He forces the baby ghost out and, "standing in the place he had made" (39), lays claim to Sethe and attempts to establish a more normative family structure.

As "the last of the Sweet Home men" (9), Paul D offers Sethe "a life" (46) through a romance that builds on and reshapes their shared past; with him to support her, he promises, she can "go as far inside as you need to, I'll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out" (46). For Sethe, who takes as her "day's serious work" the task of "beating back the past" (73), the prospect of remembering directed at the future is new. "Her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day" (70). Sethe's agonized history takes up all her psychic space: she is "full" of terrible memories, of "two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on [her] breast the other holding [her] down" while schoolteacher "watch[es] and writ[es] it up" (70), of schoolteacher's voice instructing his nephews to "line up" her "human characteristics" beside her "animal ones" (193) in their daily lessons. All memory, however, circulates around the moment she cut the throat of her infant daughter and attempted to kill her other children when schoolteacher appeared at 124 to reclaim them after their escape from Sweet Home. The unbearable weight of these memories is the measure of

what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body. (251)