BELOVED: A ghost story
To this day, I still have no idea what Beloved truly is (even though that's the whole point of her character). Most people write her off as just the ghost of Sethe's daughter, but in actuality, it's way, way more complicated than that. Morrison said once that Beloved represented every beloved person lost during the middle passage or due to the violence of slavery. This shows very well in Beloved's characterization. Yes, her core person is Sethe's daughter but there's also a lot of vindictiveness in her being. At first, she's mentally just a little girl wanting the warmth of her mother but then she turns mean and cruel, upset at being mercy-killed. Beloved's obsession with sugar kinda baffled me, but I guess many of the spirits within her used to work sugar plantations in the West Indies and since they weren't allowed to partake in the crop they grew, they're demanding it now through Beloved.
For the sake of discussion, let's settle on Beloved being the manifestation of every person forced to endure the trauma of slavery. Beloved craves. They crave the life denied them and crave some kind of compensation. They're angry, upset, restless, vengeful. Ghosts are theorized to be imprints left by the living and Beloved is all the imprints of African slaves rolled into one. She demands love from Sethe, sex from Paul D, companionship from Denver. In the end, she becomes a void sucking away at Sethe, a reminder that the past is easy to get trapped in and haunted by.
My personal theory on Beloved is that when Paul D drove her spirit out the house, she went to the afterlife and came back with the thoughts and memories of the other black people she interacted with down there. This is why her personality shifts dramatically as the book progresses. She's a revenant, poltergeist, wraith, dybbuk. She doesn't haunt the white people who perpetuated slavery, but those affected by it on a personal level. She is the past & trauma incarnate.
