Trauma, motherhood, and guilt in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a haunting, darkly beautiful and intensely moving novel that depicts the profound traumatic reality of slavery and its repercussions on one woman's life, her mental stability and psychological well-being, her ideas of and abilities in motherhood, her entire sense of self, even her basic humanity. Beloved tells the story of an escaped slave woman who, when faced with capture, slipped into a state of psychosis and made the horrifying decision to murder her children rather than allow them to be subjected to a lifetime of the horrors of slavery. Three of her four children survived. The title refers to the two-year-old girl whom was actually killed and subsequently returns, as a vengeful, spiteful, angry and lonely baby ghost, to the mother who took her life.

In Part II, the characters are dealing with various feelings of loss, regret, guilt and shame, and the intense anger that comes with being a survivor of something like slavery. The main character is called Sethe, the former slave woman, and at this point in the story she is trying to cope with a young girl's sudden arrival into her home and her life, this girl's strange behavior, and the growing realization that this person is the ethereal appearance of her lost child; the loss of her friend, Paul D., a man Sethe knew from her days as a slave and who left her when he found out about the murder and attempted murder of her children; and the confusion, fear, and unrealized hostility of Denver, Sethe's twelve-year-old daughter and the only one of her children who still lives at home with her.

On pages 199 to 203, we find Stamp Paid, the character who made the decision to tell Paul D. about Sethe's haunted history, agonizing over his choice. He has been reflecting on his reasons for telling Paul D. about Sethe and her babies, which was primarily the feeling that a man has a right to know about an event that - in Stamp Paid's opinion - reflects the personality of the woman he is living with.