Beloved where is sweet home

For Sethe, birth occurs somewhere on a southern plantation, where her unnamed mother bends into the watery fields among a host of maternal ma'ams and slaves who dance the antelope. Maturity nets Sethe separation and resettlement in Kentucky, where she works in a white woman's kitchen and nightly rests atop a mattress on her cabin's dirt floor. Sweet Home, haunted by a "headless bride" and young men lynched in its luxuriant trees one of which is named Brother , has its own peculiar beauty that is captured in nature, especially the small cornfield where Halle couples with Sethe, making the stalks wave, flaunting the lovers' private first-time tryst.

In the one spot Halle expected togetherness, the wrecked rows of new corn evolve into the ruptured maidenhead edged with youthful pubic hair. Morrison, developing the image with lavish grace, stresses the youth of an enslaved virgin still clad in silk that is "fine and loose and free.

Eighteen years later, the scene shifts to Bluestone Road and a spiteful, gray and white two-storied house with shed, keeping room, storeroom, privy, cold house, and porch. Limited in its outreach, it has only one door, through which journeying blacks pass from way station back to the plank road, which leads them on a perplexing odyssey toward scattered loved ones. The front of the lot sweeps past a field and circular boxwoods into the glade as though the house, unprotected from Beloved's spite, must fend for itself in the open.

In Cincinnati, far from the misshapen Mrs. Garner, the atavistic savagery of the "mossy teeth," and schoolteacher's sadism, Sethe sinks into the masochism of a fruitless emotional duel with her dead child's ghost. These emotional battles are virulent enough to rock the house on its foundations, smashing glass and rending a table leg.

Only the steadying male hand of Paul D forces Beloved to abate her attacks and leave Sethe temporarily in peace. The memory of his desire affects how he looks at her eighteen years later.

It's almost as if he's having sex with his memory of her. His desire is fueled by his memory of her. Memory 4: Sethe explains to Denver the power of memories and how they are immortal. Memories have an effect on the present because they change the way we look at the world around us. The power of some experiences can be so strong that it seems that even the memory of it is enough to make the horrible incident happen again.

Remembering what happened at a place generations before, if the event was powerful enough, can bring back the horror of what happened. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Because even though it's all over -- over and done with -- it's going to always be there waiting for you.

Memory 5: Paul D tells Sethe about how Halle went crazy after he saw schoolteacher and his nephews nursing milk from Sethe's breasts. Although she has no memory of this event, the picture of it becomes like a memory in her mind from which she can't get escape.

The image she conjures up is just as haunting as her memories of Sweet Home. No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept?

I don't want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love. But 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. Memory 6: Paul D thinks about how survival means not thinking about the past. It means to lock away all the memories; he decides to put them all away and keep the lid closed tightly.

Remembering the pain of Sweet Home and his past would only bring him lower; he must forget to survive in the harsh and degrading conditions of Alfred, Georgia. Paul D's memories are significant because he must lock them away and forget about them in order to survive each day without going crazy. Memory 7: Paul D unwittingly opens the box of his memories when he has sex with Beloved. He now must face the horror of the past, fight with it, and bury it again before he can move on.

Memory 8: Beloved remembers her life before arriving at in fragmented pictures. The strongest of these pictures is her reaching for a woman's face.

She believes this picture signifies a memory of Sethe leaving her. These memories are the basis for her anger and accusations of Sethe's abandonment. Some of the memories she sees aren't her own, though, because she was locked away in a closet for most of her life. Some of the pictures she describes signify memories of other slaves before her. She seems to be a sort of medium for the memories of other lost souls to channel through.

JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. Beloved may cover a lot of emotional ground, but it also covers a lot of honest-to-goodness physical ground. Sure, most of the novel is set within one tiny house at the end of a country road, but its characters have taken very long and, sometimes, very strange paths to get there. Place isn't something to take lightly in this novel.

For one thing, it wasn't too long ago when the state in which a black person lived determined whether or not he or she was a slave or a free person.

Ohio where Bluestone Road sits was a free state. And, as you can guess, there's a world of difference between the two. Here you go.

Before we get carried away, let's start small. And since the novel opens at Bluestone Road, we'll do the same. Well, at least it's at the edge of Cincinnati; but it sure feels like the edge of the world. The house is located at the end of the road, without any other houses around it. Bates Motel , anyone? As if its location weren't spooky enough, it's also kind of a living thing.

Sort of Amityville-ish, only without so many murders. Think about it. Each section of the novel begins with some personified description of the house. You can almost track the course of the novel—and the characters in it—just by knowing what's going on with the house itself.

Why is the house such a good barometer for the novel? Well, it's a bit more than just a shack alongside the road. When Baby Suggs moves to , it already has a decent amount of history of its own.

Bodwin, who owns , remembers that "women died there: his mother, grandmother, an aunt and an older sister before he was born" That means we've got a house that's especially tuned to female vibes. In fact, you can argue that the house is more or less female, animated as it is by all the women who have lived there.

And in case that's not enough, don't forget that one specific female possesses the house: the ghost of Sethe's first daughter, a. And it does seem like the house's moods follow the arc of Beloved's presence at from the "spiteful" baby ghost who likes to get Poltergeist -y on the house; to the "loud" fighting between Sethe and Beloved; to the "quiet" absence after Beloved leaves.

But as Toni Morrison points out in an interview with NPR, "haunted" doesn't have to mean "spooky"; in fact, to her, a haunting can be a "pleasant haunting," a state of "being alert. If you are really alert, then you see the life that exists beyond the life that exists on top" source. So maybe the attraction of is that it puts its inhabitants in touch with a more super natural world.

It is flanked by the woods, which seem to be both a place of mystery it's where Beloved's spirit is supposed to be located at the end of the novel and a place of earthly, spiritual refuge remember the sylvan gatherings at the Clearing?

Plus, as Denver tells Paul D, the ghost that resides at feels merely "[l]onely and rebuked" 1. Nothing to be scared of.