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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Mary Paniccia Carden

This disruption and redirection is reflected in Paul D's steadily increasing sense of restless discomfort. Made uneasy by Beloved's "shining"--in his experience a sure sign of "arous[al]" (64)--he finds the stability of heterosexual romance increasingly compromised by her presence. Even though he knows that she is "moving" him (114) Out of the domestic spaces of 124, he remains strangely helpless to stop her as she "force[s]" (116) him into the cold house and unable to resist her when she comes in the night and says:

"You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name."... If he trembled like Lot's wife and felt some womanish need to see the nature of the sin behind him; feel a sympathy, perhaps, for the cursing cursed, or want to hold it in his arms out of respect for the connection between them, he too would be lost.

"Gall me my name."

"No."

"Please call it. I'll go if you call it."

"Beloved." He said it, but she did not go. She moved closer with a footfall he didn't hear and he didn't hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn't know it. What he knew was that when he reached the inside part he was saying, "Red heart. Red heart," over and over again. (117)

Although the nature of the "connection" between Paul D and Beloved, who actively dislike each other, is not specified, it emerges when Beloved's emptiness--caused by the dismemberment of her family in slavery--meets Paul D's emptiness--caused by a similar lacuna in identity. As this connection results from historical trauma, the sexual act seems to signify possibilities for reencountering the past. It pries open his tobacco tin to expose the red heart secreted within, performing a "bodily cure" (Smith 348) for the disease of history.

Later, Paul D remarks that Beloved "'reminds [him] of something... look like, [he is] supposed to remember'" (234), and equates his "coupling" with her with

a brainless urge to stay alive. Each time she came, pulled up her skirts, a life hunger overwhelmed him and he had no more control over it than over his lungs. And afterward, beached and gobbling air, in the midst of repulsion and personal shame, he was thankful too for having been escorted to some ocean-deep place he once belonged to. (264)

The repeated implications of a perilous but essential encounter with memory suggest that sex with Beloved stages Paul D's necessary engagement with his avoided history and therefore leads to the reanimation of his red heart. As the novel sets the task of confronting history for all its characters, the fact of his sexual relations with "a girl young enough to be his daughter" (126), a girl who in fact occupies the position of his daughter in Sethe's household, tends to become secondary, as a scan of critical responses will demonstrate.

However, because Beloved is more than embodied memory, this scene calls up possibilities for and losses of other encounters, as well. Beloved approaches Paul D out of her "hunger" to be "recognized," her need to be "known," as Barbara Schapiro suggests, "in [her] inner being or essential self" (201). But as she articulates this need in connection with hearing her name, it is clearly a need that cannot be met--Paul D cannot speak her name because he does not know it. "Beloved" was not the "crawling already?" baby's name, but the name Sethe had inscribed on her tombstone, the first words of the preacher's "Dearly Beloved" sermon at her grave. "Beloved" is not the African girl's name, but one of the names she was called by her white captors, "ghosts without skin," who "stuck their fingers in her and said beloved in the dark and bitch in the light" (241). When she lost her mother, she lost her name, along with her developing sense of self.