Beloved Paper: Supernatural

Beloved Essay: Supernatural A major part of the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison is the case of someone being haunted. The supernatural element pervades the novel. The characters are haunted by the past, because of the choices they’ve made and the things they’ve done. All of the characters were affected by slavery, but Sethe, Denver, and Paul D are haunted by the past that stretches and grasps them in 124. Beloved’s character is an obvious use of the supernatural. She’s like a vampire that sucks the soul, the heart, and the mind of her mother while draining the relationships that exists between Denver with Sethe and Sethe with Paul D. Sethe is the most dramatically haunted in the book. She is the one whose past is so horrible that it is inescapable. How can she escape the past when it is physically apart of her? She is the one who was permanently scarred by slavery both literally and figuratively. She has scars left from being whipped that she calls a “tree”. She describes it as “A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all I know” (pg. 16). She is the one went through slavery and escaped it. She decided to murder her own child rather than allow her to be forced into slavery, because she had suffered so much from it.
It is inclined that her past is represented on her back, meaning that it is something that is behind her, something she cannot see but knows that is there. Sethe knows that the past has attached itself to her but the haunting of it has not stopped growing. Sethe doesn’t seem to recognize that the haunting is physically with her the whole time, because it drains the life out of her. When Paul D enters Sethe’s life, he discovers a haunting of Sethe almost immediately. He walks into 124 and notices that there is an unwanted spirit in the house, “It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry” (pg.