Sethe

Sethe, a fugitive slave woman. She killed one of her four children eighteen years earlier, when she saw her former owner come to capture them. This happened a month after she escaped to Ohio, where her mother-in-law resided. After the incident, she alienated herself in the community while living with her youngest child in a house occupied by a ghost spirit. the dead daughter, Beloved, returns as a ghost. Sethe enjoys their reunion and responds to all of her demands. When Beloved’s demands increase, she exhausts herself physically and psychologically.

Beloved

Beloved, a bodily ghost of Sethe’s baby. Having died at the age of two, her throat cut with a handsaw by Sethe, she reappears as a woman of twenty. She calls herself Beloved, the only word carved on her tombstone. She is eager to listen to Sethe’s stories, demands her attention, and accuses Sethe of forsaking her. She disappears with the singing of thirty women in the community.

Denver

Denver, Sethe’s youngest child. Denver was born in a river while Sethe was escaping to Ohio as a runaway slave. She was named for a white woman who helped Sethe’s delivery. When Beloved appears, Denver soon recognizes that she is the ghost whom she had seen as a child and welcomes her company. Witnessing her mother’s exhaustion from meeting Beloved’s demands, she asks for help from the community, from which she and Sethe had been isolated since Sethe’s murder of her child. Eventually, she is offered a job working for a white family.

Paul D

Paul D, a former slave. He comes to Cincinnati to look for Sethe and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, after eighteen years of absence. He used to belong to the plantation where Sethe was enslaved. the last time he had seen Sethe was during a failed escape attempt. After his sale to a new plantation, he was moved to a camp, joined the army, stayed with a woman, and continued his journey north. Upon their reunion, Paul D and Sethe rejoice, but he is soon chased away by Beloved and informed of Sethe’s actions. Following that revelation, he avoids her. Later, he reconsiders and assures Sethe that he wants to spend his life with her.

Baby Suggs

Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law. Her son, Halle, earned her freedom in return for years of his extra labor. She had seven other children, fathered by different men, and did not know where they were sold. As soon as she arrives in Ohio, she enjoys a sense of possessing her own body. She preaches to the community that they too should love their own bodies. Sethe’s murder of Beloved occurs on the following day, when Baby Suggs provides a huge banquet for the community, an action that invites their anger. She dies after pondering colors for her last eight years.

The novel takes its name from the character Beloved, a ghost. Beloved was killed by her mother, Sethe, as a baby to keep her from being returned to slavery by her owner, schoolteacher, who has come to Ohio to reclaim his slave property. As a result, the opening lines of the novel state that the house where Sethe, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and her daughter, Denver, live is spiteful and full of a baby’s venom. The frightful atmosphere caused by the antics of the baby ghost causes Beloved’s brothers, Howard and Buglar, to run away by the time they are thirteen.

Subsequently, Beloved walks out of the water a fully dressed woman of twenty, the age the murdered baby would have been if she had lived. The author reveals the character of Beloved through the thoughts, emotions, and reactions of Sethe, Denver, and Paul D (Beloved’s uncle and Sethe’s lover). Sethe is at first flattered by Beloved’s quiet devotion and adoration, which pleases her. Denver is devoted to the care and protection of her ghostly sister, but Paul D is suspicious of Beloved. He notices that she is “shining” and questions her closely concerning her origins. Sethe notices that Beloved vexes Paul D, and he is eventually run out of the house and seduced by Beloved. Moreover, Denver notices “how greedy” Beloved is to hear Sethe talk, and that the questions Beloved asks—such as “where are your diamonds?”—are perplexing since she did not understand how Beloved could know of such things. As a result of her murder, Beloved has a need for retribution, which she seeks by literally using up her mother with her constant and insistent demands for time and nurturing.

Beloved’s murder is the cause of Sethe’s constant state of guilt and Denver’s alienation from the community. The efforts of Sethe to provide unity and support for herself and her daughters after Beloved’s return are dramatically revealed in the ice-skating scene. Beloved, Denver, and Sethe skate on a frozen pond holding hands and bracing one another. The three cannot stay upright for long, however, and the author states that “nobody saw them falling.”

Sethe’s inability to hold out physically or mentally against Beloved’s need for vengeance and constant attention eventually leaves her jobless and confined to the house. Beloved takes the best of everything. Denver is forced out into the community to provide for the family; moreover, the community is forced to come to the family’s home to rid it of the invasion of the ghost. A replay of the scene that caused her murder causes Beloved to disappear, and Sethe takes to Baby Suggs’s dying bed with “no plans at all.”

Ironically, Sethe’s wasting away is paralleled by Denver’s emergence, thus allowing the rounding out of Denver’s personality. As a result of Beloved’s disruption of the household, Denver becomes acquainted with her community, and that community gives Denver the help and support that she and her family need to survive. Denver’s shyness is overcome, and she finds a job to provide for her family; however, this job brings her white employer to her home, an episode that in turn causes the flight of Beloved and allows Denver’s emergence into full maturity. Denver’s thoughts are revealed through a stream-of-consciousness technique, and she is the first to recognize that Beloved is “the white dress that had knelt with her mother in the keeping room, the true-to-life presence of the baby that had kept her company for most of her life.” In fact, Denver begins to come alive in the novel when Beloved enters the household, for her mind begins to work fervently trying to understand the acts and desires of the spiritual presence that has entered her life.

Morrison, therefore, uses a variety of literary techniques to develop well-rounded principal characters in Beloved. The use of flashbacks, which reveal the background of each primary character as well as the perceptions of the minor characters, allows the author to delineate character in an effective and artful manner.

Most characters in Beloved are former slaves, depicted with respect and compassion as victims of oppression. In contrast, the few white characters in the novel are generally portrayed as malicious. This is evident in the passive malevolence of characters like the Garners and the restaurant owner for whom Sethe works, and the active cruelty of Schoolteacher. An exception to this is the Bodwin family, who supported abolition and contributed to the Underground Railroad. Ironically, during the second exorcism of Beloved, Sethe mistakes Mr. Bodwin—who has come to give Denver a ride to work—for Schoolteacher coming to reclaim her family into slavery, and she attacks him, in a sense reliving the past to escape it. Another exception is Amy Denver, who assists the fugitive slave Sethe in delivering Denver. However, Amy's language reveals that she, like Twain's Huck Finn, must overcome her ingrained prejudices to treat Sethe decently. The ex-slaves are defined by their resilience against the trauma inflicted by slave culture, but like Stamp Paid, who informs Paul D about Sethe's killing of Beloved, they must also accept moral responsibility for their actions.

Aside from Sethe, Paul D, and Denver, many of the novel's most significant characters do not appear as living entities but exist in the memories of others. Sethe's husband, Halle, symbolizes a heroic ideal; he was a slave of great moral courage who worked extra Sundays to buy his mother's freedom and learned to read and count to avoid being cheated by the owners. Baby Suggs taught Denver to remember the father she never knew as an "angel man" who would one day return to liberate the family. While Denver must eventually relinquish that hope, and Sethe accepts her life with Paul D as an acknowledgment that Halle cannot return, Paul D recalls Halle as the best of the Sweet Home Men. He ultimately tells Sethe about seeing Halle smearing himself with clabber, expressing his humiliation at being unable to save Sethe from the nephews' abuse. Halle, therefore, embodies the destructive power of racism, capable of breaking even the bravest and noblest spirit.

The same applies to his mother, whom the narrator refers to as "Baby Suggs holy." Broken and crippled by slavery, Baby Suggs dedicates herself to healing other ex-slaves. In "the Clearing," she preaches not about Christian submission, but about self-acceptance. She urges them to love their flesh, dance, cry, and pray because "[y]onder they [white people] do not love your flesh. They despise it." However, Baby Suggs's fervent optimism falters after the Misery (Stamp Paid's term for Sethe's act of killing her child). She retreats to her room, focusing on individual colors and avoiding the more intense ones until her death. It is only through the process of rememory that Sethe and Stamp Paid understand the depth of Baby Suggs's despair: "Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed, ... and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in this world but white folks." Baby Suggs's character illustrates that even a holy, life-affirming individual can be driven to despair by racism and hatred.

Regarding the novel's central mystery, Beloved, it is difficult to determine whether she is a character or a presence, a ghost made flesh or a succubus. After Paul D expels the "venomous ghost" from 124, a young woman with memories specific to Sethe's lost daughter, as well as memories of "the other place" — both the realm of death and the hold of a slave trader's ship — moves in with Sethe. Gradually, Sethe recognizes this young woman as her daughter, an identification Denver had made earlier. As Beloved grows into the identity that Sethe and Denver create for her, she bonds with Denver, attempts to harm Sethe in the Clearing, drives Paul D away from Sethe's bed, and eventually seduces him. By the novel's conclusion, she is draining Sethe's life force and is ultimately exorcised by Ella and the community.

Even if she appears in the flesh, there is no denying that Beloved is an otherworldly presence, though her nature remains ambiguous. By intertwining memories of the trader-ship with Beloved's brief life experiences, Morrison suggests that she represents the countless victims destroyed by racism. Despite the sympathy one might feel for Beloved as a victim of slavery and Sethe's spontaneous decision, an inescapable malice remains, something Sethe must confront to forgive herself and live her life. As Sethe's victim and a product of her culture, Beloved yearns to possess her mother; yet in seeking possession, Beloved nearly destroys what she loves and wishes to become.