In Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, we are presented with characters who are driven to the most passionate and desperate means because of love. In both stories there is romantic love, self-love and familial love. However, love is a powerful force in each work that drives the characters, sometimes in positive ways but more often in violent and negative ways.
In Beloved, the main character Sethe is haunted by a ghost who appears as a teenager. The ghost symbolizes the daughter she killed, Beloved, because she loved her child too much to bare the though of her being subjected to the tortures and brutality of slavery. The child wishes to make hr mother pay for killing her as a child, but Sethe understands her physical manifestation provides her with an opportunity to seek forgiveness and understanding for the act. The killing of Beloved was the end product of slavery. When Sethe was a slave she was unable to form a bond with hr children since they were officially the “property” of the slave owners (even when in her belly which is why the owner digs a hole to stick her swollen belly in before he whips her in the late stages of pregnancy). Once she develops this deep bond with her children she would rather see them dead than have to be subjected to the horrors of slavery. As she muses, “Look like I loved em more after I got her. Or maybe I couldn’t love ‘em in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love” (Morrison 162).
Where Sethe is concerned she would rather destroy the children she loves rather than see the white man do it anyway (in a long, slow torturous process). Sethe is unable to break free of the horrific memories of the past, which suffuse her with incredible guilt and depression, even though she is full of maternal love. Sethe is unable to love herself because she was raised in the grasp of powerful whites who associated black with every form of evil and...