Beloved Summary

Overview Summary

Summary of the Novel



















Estimated Reading Time

Part One will take half this time with the following breakdown:
pages 3–42—one hour
pages 43–85—one hour
pages 86–113—45 minutes
pages 114–147—45 minutes
pages 148–165—half an hour

Part Two will take two and a half hours:
pages 169–199—one hour
pages 200–217—45 minutes
pages 218–235—also 45 minutes

Part Three will need the remaining hour and a half:
pages 236–262—one hour
pages 263–275—half an hour


The Life and Work of Toni Morrison





Beloved Summary (Literary Essentials: African American Literature)


Sethe once belonged to Mr. Garner, a humane master who treats his slaves well. Mr. Garner purchases Sethe at the age of thirteen to replace the recently freed Baby Suggs. Sethe marries Halle Suggs, Baby Suggs’s son, who fathers every one of her four children; such monogamy was the exception rather than the rule in slavery. With the death of Mr. Garner, and the coming of his brother, “schoolteacher,” and his nephews, Sethe and the other slaves experience the full degradation and inhumanity of slavery. Schoolteacher beats the male slaves and deprives them of their guns. He treats his brother’s slaves as property, keeping a record of their behavior as part of his scientific experimentation with them. Schoolteacher measures their heads and numbers their teeth. When Sethe learns that schoolteacher’s intentions may also include the eventual selling of her children, she resolves to escape North to freedom.

Sethe and Halle make plans to take the Underground Railroad to Ohio to join Baby Suggs. Sethe succeeds in getting her children on the Underground Railroad, but before she can join them, she is violated by schoolteacher’s nephews, who brutally beat her while she is pregnant with her fourth child. Pregnant, barefoot, and mutilated, Sethe escapes to Ohio to join her mother-in-law and her already crawling baby girl, Beloved. She arrives in Cincinnati with Denver, her fourth child, who was born en route. Halle, her husband, fails to escape and is driven crazy from having witnessed the crime against Sethe, which he could not prevent.

Because schoolteacher values Sethe for her childbearing capabilities, he decides to capture her and return her and her four children to slavery. Sethe is nursed back to health by her mother-in-law before schoolteacher finds her. Sethe, rather than allow her children to be returned to slavery, kills Beloved and attempts to kill her other children as well.

After the killing of Beloved and the appearance of the baby ghost, Baby Suggs takes to her bed to die, and Sethe’s sons, Buglar and Howard, leave the house, driven away by the ghost.

Eight years later, Paul D, another former slave from the Garner plantation, arrives at Sethe’s house seeking Sethe and Baby Suggs. He drives out the spirit of the baby ghost, striking it with a table and ordering it to get out. The baby ghost returns later as a twenty-year-old spirit that succeeds in taking over Sethe’s mind, body, and heart. Beloved follows Sethe everywhere, questions her, and feeds on her until Sethe deteriorates physically and mentally. Meanwhile, Beloved grows fat and appears in this guise to the women of the community, who come to drive her out.

When Denver finds Sethe is no longer able to provide for the family, she ventures out of the house to find food. Denver has once attended a school taught by Lady Jones, and she knows only two places to go, her mother’s former place of work and the house of the lady who once taught her. Lady Jones offers Denver food and relays the plight of Denver’s family to the neighbors, who join in leaving food where Denver can find it. Denver, by returning the bowls and plates to their respective owners, is able gradually to rejoin the community and find a job to provide for her family. The community of women, led by Ella, who had helped Sethe when she first came to Ohio, is incensed upon learning of the intrusion of the ghost into the lives of Sethe and Denver and its debilitating effect on the family. The women converge upon Sethe’s house, singing songs and bringing all the magic and charms they know of in order to rid the house of the vengeful spirit. When Denver’s employer approaches the house to pick up Denver for work, Sethe relives the visit of schoolteacher, and she picks up an ice pick with murderous intentions. Beloved thus vanishes.

Paul D, who had previously been seduced by Beloved and who had left after hearing about Sethe’s murder of the baby girl, returns to the house and finds that Sethe has taken to the “keeping room” and given up on life. As the novel ends, he attempts to infuse a will to live into Sethe by endeavoring to make her realize her own self-worth.

Beloved Summary (Society and Self, Critical Representations in Literature)


A pregnant Sethe flees on foot to Cincinnati, Ohio, sending her children ahead by way of the Underground Railroad. Her overwhelming concern is to join her baby daughter, who needs her milk. On the bank of the Ohio River she goes into labor, her delivery aided by a white girl who is herself fleeing mistreatment. The new baby is named Denver. Although Sethe reaches her destination, slave-catchers soon follow to return her to Kentucky. Frantic, she tries to kill her children rather than submit them to slavery, but she succeeds only with the older baby. “Beloved” is carved on the child’s tombstone.

Sethe accepts her identity of black woman, escaped slave, wife, mother. Her antagonist is life, which has taken so much from her. She and Paul D, the man who becomes her lover, are the last survivors of Sweet Home, the Kentucky farm that was neither sweet nor home to them. Their charge is to endure memory and accept the unforgivable past.

A vengeful spirit, that of the dead baby, invades Sethe’s house. After Paul D drives it away, a strange young woman appears in the yard, and they take her in. Her name is Beloved. She is the ghost of Sethe’s dead child. She is also, less clearly, a ghost from the slave ships and an African river spirit. She alters relationships in the household, exerting control over the two adults and Denver. Denver hovers over Beloved; Beloved dotes on Sethe. Once Sethe recognizes Beloved as her daughter, she struggles to make amends while Beloved grows plump and cruel.

Denver develops a new identity. At eighteen, she is self-centered, jealous, and lonely. Beloved becomes her dear companion. Gradually, Denver grows aware that Beloved’s presence is destroying Sethe, who loses her job along with her meager income and begins to waste away. Denver, who has rarely ventured past her own yard because of the neighbors’ hostility, realizes that only she can save her mother. Terrified, she walks down the road to seek work from strangers and, by accepting this responsibility, becomes a woman.

Morrison expected this painful, fiercely beautiful novel to be controversial. Instead, it was widely praised, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988.

Beloved Summary (Critical Survey of Literature for Students)


Mr. Garner dies in 1853, and his financially strapped, cancer-ridden widow sells Paul F and then brings her cruel brother-in-law, “schoolteacher,” and his equally cruel nephews to Sweet Home as overseers. Fearful that schoolteacher might sell them all, the remaining Sweet Home slaves begin planning an escape in 1855. Before the plan can be effected, the pregnant Sethe is attacked by schoolteacher’s two nephews. One holds her down while the other sucks the milk from her breasts. Schoolteacher watches and takes notes. Unknown to Sethe, her helpless husband sees the entire “mammary rape” from the hayloft, and the event destroys his sanity. Determined to escape, Sethe sends her three children (Howard, age five; Buglar, age four; and Beloved, age nine months) to join the emancipated Baby Suggs in Cincinnati, planning to follow the next day. The four Sweet Home men fail to escape. Sixo is captured and burned alive, Paul A is hanged, Paul D is sold, and the broken Halle, who dies soon after, loses the will to escape. Only Sethe stumbles into the woods toward freedom.

Sethe nearly dies of exposure, but she is found by a runaway white girl, Amy Denver, who doctors her torn feet and helps her to the Ohio River, where they find an abandoned, leaking boat. Before they can cross, Sethe’s water breaks and with Amy as midwife she gives birth prematurely to her second daughter, Denver, in the nearly swamped boat. Amy, also on the run, abandons Sethe and Denver. Stamp Paid, a black riverman, finds mother and daughter and ferries them across the Ohio to the Bodwins, Quaker conductors on the Underground Railroad. The Bodwins deliver Sethe and Denver to Baby Suggs’s house on Bluestone Road outside Cincinnati, where Sethe is reunited with Howard, Buglar, and Beloved.

Sethe enjoys twenty-eight glorious days of freedom before the slave catchers track her down. When the slave catchers approach, Sethe tries to kill her children rather than allow them to be returned to slavery. Three miraculously survive, but Beloved dies. Sethe is arrested and sentenced to hang, but the Bodwins obtain a pardon for her and she is allowed to return to Bluestone Road. The ghost of the murdered Beloved also returns and haunts the house for eighteen years, during which it keeps away all visitors, drives away Howard and Buglar in 1865, and breaks the spirit of Baby Suggs, who takes to her bed and dies just months before the Civil War ends. Paul D, after escaping from a Georgia chain gang and wandering through much of the eastern United States, finds Sethe on Bluestone Road in 1873. He drives out the ghost and moves in with Sethe.

Just as Paul D, Sethe, and Denver begin to bond into a family, a young black woman, calling herself Beloved, appears from nowhere, seeking sanctuary. Sethe takes her in, and Beloved begins disrupting the new family by insinuating herself into the affections of Sethe and Denver and seducing Paul D. In 1874, Stamp Paid tells Paul D about Sethe’s murder of her child nineteen years before, and Paul D leaves Sethe. Shunned by all as they had been since the murder in 1855, Sethe and Denver form a family with Beloved.

The following year Sethe comes to believe that Beloved is her own murdered child and gradually becomes obsessed with her, neglecting Denver as she tries desperately to make up for the murder. The diabolical Beloved soon consumes Sethe entirely. Sethe loses her job, and the starving Denver goes begging for work. Through Denver the community learns of Beloved’s presence and determines to help the Bodwins, who had rescued Sethe in 1855, rescue Denver from Sethe and Beloved. The women of the community begin praying outside the house just as the elderly Mr. Bodwin arrives for Denver. The deranged Sethe, mistaking Mr. Bodwin for a slave catcher, tries to stab him with an ice pick. Denver and the other women stop her, and Beloved disappears. Broken in spirit by losing Beloved again, the twice-bereaved Sethe takes to her bed as the broken Baby Suggs had done in 1865. At the end of the novel Paul D, who has loved Sethe since she first arrived at Sweet Home twenty-five years before, returns to her. He refuses to let Sethe die and begins trying to heal her wounded heart.

Beloved Summary (Masterpieces of American Literature)


When Paul D, who along with Sethe was a former slave at a plantation known as Sweet Home, comes to Sethe’s house on 124 Bluestone Road and quickly becomes her lover, the ghost disappears. Very shortly thereafter, however, a well-dressed young woman about the age that Sethe’s daughter would have been had she lived appears on the doorstep and introduces herself as “Beloved”—which is the only word on the gravestone that Sethe placed over her dead infant.

Paul D’s reappearance and Beloved’s sudden appearance force Sethe to confront the past locked away in what she calls her “rememory.” She tells Paul D the story of spotting Schoolteacher, the cruel master of Sweet Home, and determining to put her babies “where they’d be safe”—that is, to death. What frightens Paul D more than anything else is her continued defense of her actions years later. Paul D is also forced by his meeting with Sethe to confront his own past. When he tells her, “You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” to upbraid her for her infanticide, he is accusing her of acting like an animal. The comment seems to relate also to Paul D’s past and his own struggle to retain his human dignity despite having been a slave and treated as a beast of burden for much of his life.

Beloved herself is presented as childlike and self-centered, very much like the petulant ghost that had haunted the house for years. Even when the narrative goes inside her head, it is not clear to what extent she is supposed to be literally the ghost of Sethe’s daughter. Stamp Paid, a local black man, suggests that she might be the young woman who was kept locked up as a sex slave in a nearby town. Her own interior dialogue seems to suggest two separate minds at work, and perhaps the explanation most consistent with everything the novel contains is that Beloved is the escaped sex slave possessed by the ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter. To see this explanation as a resolution to the puzzle presented by Beloved, however, would be to miss the force of Morrison’s careful ambiguity. Beloved is a ghost, and, as Denver tells Paul D toward the end, something more; she is a person and something more. That something more is the key to unlocking the past to release the future.

As events draw to a climax—as Paul D becomes Beloved’s lover and then moves out, as the household on 124 Bluestone becomes more removed from the outside community, and as Beloved demands almost obsessive attention—it is Denver, the daughter Sethe gave birth to while racing to freedom, whose future seems the most to be a prisoner to the past. It is unexpectedly Denver who finds the way to unlock the future for all of them, by getting a job that takes her outside her home. By working in the community, Denver reawakens in the community a sense of responsibility for Sethe, and they come together to try to exorcise Beloved—who is fat and maybe pregnant by now—from the house.

When members of the black community are gathered around the house at 124 Bluestone, Sethe sees Mr. Bodwin, her white landlord and Denver’s employer, appear on horseback, looking a bit like Schoolteacher had two decades earlier when he had come for her. She tries to attack him with an ice pick but is intercepted. In the confusion, Beloved runs into the forest; later, there are reports of a madwoman having been spotted running naked. When it ends, Sethe seems finally to have given in to the despair that she had repressed for twenty years. Paul D tries to comfort her, however, and there is a strong suggestion that she is better off for being able to feel her despair.

In many ways, Beloved is a meditation on the ownership of human beings. Ironically, when Sethe kills her infant daughter to save her from slavery, she is committing the ultimate act of ownership—deciding that it is better for another person to die than live. She cannot help but repeat some of the sins of slavery, even in her reaction against it. The point is that slavery is so destructive that ending it is merely one step in healing the wounds it creates. Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, who lived with Sethe for a while, seems to summarize the novel’s theme early in the book when she says, “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to the rafters with some dead Negro’s grief.” Beloved is a novel about healing such grief.

Beloved Chapter Summary and Analysis

Pages 1–19: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:
Sethe: the protagonist of the novel






(The entire section is 679 words.)

Pages 20-42: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:





Sethe and Paul D retire to the...

(The entire section is 629 words.)

Pages 43–64: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:




(The entire section is 636 words.)

Pages 64–85: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:



(The entire section is 388 words.)

Pages 86–113: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:





(The entire section is 522 words.)

Pages 114–147: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:
John: Ella’s husband and also a part of the Underground Railroad



(The entire section is 401 words.)

Pages 148–165: Summary and Analysis

New Character:


(The entire section is 431 words.)

Pages 169–199: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:


Sawyer: Sethe’s employer at the restaurant


(The entire section is 591 words.)

Pages 200–217: Summary and Analysis



(The entire section is 539 words.)

Pages 218–235: Summary and Analysis

New Characters:
Vashti: Stamp Paid’s now-deceased wife

Joshua: Stamp Paid’s former slave name


(The entire section is 433 words.)

Pages 239–262: Summary and Analysis



(The entire section is 448 words.)

Pages 263–275: Summary and Analysis



(The entire section is 364 words.)