How Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” Redefined Memory

Photo by Harvard Mahindra Humanities Center.

What is Beloved to Toni Morrison, not just the novel but the character and the concept?

In my reading, the driving event of the novel is the arrival of Paul D, a long-forgotten (or suppressed?) reminder of slavery at Sweet Home. He inserts himself both domestically and sexually into 124, Sethe’s isolated shell. It’s only after this point that Beloved appears, physical and eventually all-consuming.

“The shadows of three people still [holding] hands” that Sethe sees after a day at the carnival is a watershed moment for her mental state. What we get with Paul D is a trigger of memories, painful and vivid and uncontrollable.

“Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”

Morrison creates a new word in Beloved: rememory. The way she uses it, rememory seems to be a noun rather than a verb. So my question is, what’s the difference between rememory and memory?

In a narrow sense, rememory can refer to traumatic memory. No matter how far Sethe goes, the ravaging effects of slavery will follow her. It exists in her day-to-day life, in the food she eats, in the people around her.

But if this is the only meaning of rememory, what is Beloved then? In a way, she’s also a form of traumatic memory for Sethe. Yet, what haunts Sethe is not the act of murdering baby Beloved, but what she could’ve become in a world without slavery, in a world where Sethe was able to fully be a mother to her. It’s because Sethe knows this world doesn’t exist that she murders Beloved.

However this doesn’t go far enough for me because it would only suggest that Sethe would prefer her children to be dead than subjects of slavery. I think it’s important to link the concept of rememory with Sethe’s sense of burden for raising the next generation.

Sethe knows that the fate of slaves is to be forgotten. If you are treated no better than a cow, than who will remember you? Where, in death, will you live on?

“Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s…