In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the past, specifically slavery, is depicted as a destructive force that people are forced to deal with in order to move on. This is illustrated by the interactions that the characters have with Beloved who is seen as both the physical representation of the past and Sethe’s dead baby. Beloved mostly directly affects her family especially her mom and her sister, Denver. Denver’s initial disconnect and yearn to the past to her realization that the Beloved and the past are a destructive force enables her to leave 124 in order to become a representation of the future.
Denver is seen at first yearning for a connection to the past and is soon given the opportunity to do so through the baby ghost. We see Denver as a lonely child living with her mother and the baby ghost in a house called 124. She is seen with a lack of friendship since her brothers both left her and no one in the community wants to have any relationship with those living in 124. This loneliness causes Denver to find the baby ghost appealing as a friend and becomes so in need for this friendship that she “long, downright long, for a sign” (15).
This repetition of long shows the intensity of Denver’s yearn for the baby ghost’s companionship. Denver is also seen being excluded and feels disconnected from Paul D and Sethe conversations of the past because she was not apart of it. She instead tries to find a connection which she believes she can find with the baby ghost which is why “its anger” was “thrilling her” and she “wished for the baby ghost” again (16).
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The fact that her being worn out from the anger turned into a thrill for her shows just how much this companionship means to her which is also why she keeps wishing for the ghost. This however changes when Paul D chases the ghost away which causes Denver to “silence” and wander “slowly, methodically, miserably” representing how this connection really meant alot to her and once it disappears she feels alone again. Eventually, this will change since Denver will try to find an even stronger connection with the past which will also leave her disappointed.
As the baby ghost returns physically as Beloved, Denver sees an opportunity to gain a stronger connection to the past than she ever did before by nurturing Beloved to health. When the baby returns as Beloved, Denver begins to nurture her and it becomes her priority so much that “she forgot to eat of visit the emerald closet” (64). Denver not eating shows how much she is able to give up, including her present life, in order to have a connection to the past. This over protectiveness is also a sign of how much she wants the connection with the past because she never had it as intense before, Denver for a brief moment achieves this but once Beloved is nursed back to health Denver begins to realize that she is the baby ghost.
Denver tries to protect Beloved by telling her not to tell her mother about who she really is. However, Beloved rejects Denver’s help and instead says that “[Denver] is the one…. You can go, but she is the one I have to have”(89). After Beloved said this Denver begins to realize that the connection she had with Beloved was false and that Beloved is here for her mother not her. She also realizes that Beloved does not care for her making her feel disconnected from the past once more.
This realization causes Denver to become desperate and tell Beloved her own birth story “like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved” (92). Denver is trying to hold Beloved as long as she can which means she is also trying to hold on to the small connection she has with the past since she wants to pleasure her and even tries to hard because she is overfeeding Beloved. However, this is an unrealistic goal since Beloved is here for Sethe and Denver is slowly beginning to realize this but is, for now, blinded by her own desire for a connection to the past.
Once Beloved begins to slowly cause harm to Sethe, Denver realizes the destructive power that the past has and begins to slowly dissociate herself from it. Denver first begins to question Beloved’s intentions when she chokes Sethe in the clearing. She confronts Beloved, “You made her choke….you told me you loved her….you choked her neck”(119). The fact that she is repeating “You” shows the shock that Denver has from witnessing what Beloved has done and the fact that she can’t believe it was her who choked her because she believed Beloved was good.
Beloved then slowly begins to consume Sethe which Sethe enables by putting all her attention on Beloved. Soon they are all out of food but Denver notices that “neither Sethe nor Beloved knew or cared about it”(281) and Sethe “eyes bright but dead” (281). The fact that they don’t care about something as essential as food shows how Sethe has been lost to the past since she is not worried about her well being in the present causing her to become dangerously thin and her eyes dead which Denver notices.Denver sees that her mom is giving up her well being to give everything she can to Beloved which she knows is consuming her mom.
Denver realizes that she needs to “to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help” (286). She realizes that she needs to go out into the world and leave them behind in order to move on so she can help them. Denver is beginning to realize that she has to leave the past and make something of herself which in return will give her the ability to help her mom.
While Denver successfully pulls away from the past and 124 she becomes the manifestation of the future by integrating herself back into society which allows herself to move forward into a better life. After Denver realized that “unless [she] got work, there would be no one to save, no one to come home to, and no [her] either” (296) she went to look for help from Lady Jones. Denver began to understand that in order to save herself and her mom she needs to take the initiative to move on and save herself first or else she will have to suffer the same fate as her mom. Once Denver began to integrate herself into the community “her outside life improved” and “her home life deteriorated”(294).
The fact that her outside life is improving shows how successful she is in moving into the future and the deterioration of her home life represents how she is moving on and creating her own story that does not rely on that of 124 or her mother. This was all a “new thought” to Denver “having a self to look out for and preserve”(296). The fact that this was new to Denver shows how she has never seen or heard about working on yourself and moving yourself forward because the people around her were so stuck in the past. She learned by herself that she needed to look out for herself and move herself onward in order to create a better life for herself first then her mother.
This realization led her to get the Community to help fight Beloved and chase her away freeing her mother from the past. Her accomplishment shows her new ability to look onward and be affected by the past illustrating how she is a representation of the future. She moved on when it was hard to do so and when everyone else couldn’t which in return brought in good things which is what the future is suppose to do.
Denver portrayal as the future is seen through her interaction with the past and her ability to move onward in order to move other onward. Denver begins with a need for a connection with the past and gets sucked into this need like everyone else. However, she is able to break free and see the harm of the past in order to move onward and build her independence. She begins to create her own story and new past by interacting with the community and soon helps the rest of the community and her mother move forward by bring them together to get rid of the past which is Beloved. These actions enables her to become the representation of the future since she is able to provide a future and hope for those that are still stuck in the past which Tony Morrison argues is extremely hard but necessary to live a full and happy life.
