Beloved – Creepiest “Baby” I’ve Ever Encountered

I have not really liked Beloved from the start. From her weird reptilian emergence from the stream, with her baby-soft skin and weird jerking neck movements, something about her was just so incredibly off-putting. This feeling only got more intense as the novel has progressed. I’ve been trying to piece together some sort of idea as to who (what?) Beloved is and why she’s here, but I’ve been unsuccessful in gathering a cohesive thought, so most of these points are going to end as questions. If you have thoughts, please let me know, because I’m freaked out, and I would love to know what people interpreted the situation as.

So to start, I think we’ve all put together that the adult Beloved is a some version of the baby Beloved that was killed by Sethe. Putting aside the whole “how is this possible”, I was thinking about the why of the situation. Because the more you think about it, the less it makes sense. She doesn’t seem to have a motive at all except to get Sethe’s attention, at all costs. She doesn’t seem to enjoy anything besides Sethe, and all the things she does somehow circle back around to Sethe. If she has come to get Sethe’s attention, it seems like she has definitely gotten it, so does she ever plan on leaving?

And outside of all of this, the notion that she would even want to come back is confusing to me. To put it bluntly, Sethe was the one that killed her. If she were to come back at all, I would have expected something much more vengeful, especially towards Sethe, and probably more malicious towards Denver, who was the surviving baby. Instead, she focuses her jealousy on Paul D for some reason, despite the fact that he isn’t really competition for Sethe’s motherly attention.  

Putting that thought aside, I was thinking about the things she does at 124, and how it all seems to be motivated by jealousy. As I said earlier, it seems like getting Sethe’s attention is her goal, and she will do just about anything to make that a reality. This starts off pretty mildly, just talking to Sethe a lot and asking her questions, but towards the end of the latest readings, she got much more drastic. One example is driving Paul D out of the house when he starts being too intimate with Sethe. Strangely enough, Paul D ends up sleeping in the shed, presumably the same one Beloved was killed in, a thought I found weird and concerning. In addition, Beloved goes as far as to harm Sethe. When Sethe diverts her attention to Paul D in her prayer in Baby Suggs’ prayer clearance, she somehow causes Sethe to choke. I think it’s interesting that Beloved only choked Sethe when she began thinking about Paul D, not while she was thinking about Baby Suggs in that scene. It is concerning that to Beloved, Sethe’s physical well-being could be sacrificed in order to get attention, and I don’t want to imagine what this could manifest into as the novel progresses.

We also know that there is something supernatural about Beloved. She chokes Sethe without touching her, and drives Paul D out of the house using sheer willpower. She knows things nobody else knows (such as about Sethe’s diamond earrings), and overall just seems to be somehow omniscient. No other character (not even Baby Suggs, who is a spiritual leader) has this kind of power, and the fact that we know Beloved can do things but we don’t really know the limits of what she can and can’t do is scary.

All these things together just reinforce the idea that she is the spirit baby but in an adult body. Her behavior is childlike, she has a sweet tooth not unlike a 2-year-old, and her focus on Sethe makes sense, since babies love their mothers above all else. In addition, the ghost baby clearly had supernatural abilities, so maybe coming back as a human with “powers” is one of them. I’m interested to read how this situation resolves – will she ever return to ghost form? Will she somehow leave forever and pass into the next world properly? What will cause a change? Or will she just remain a part of the family for ever?

Let me know in the comments what you thought about Beloved – is she as creepy as I make her out to be, or does she have positive traits I overlooked?