Rape in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Pamela Barnett argues that Beloved is haunted specifically by the history and memory of rape (Barnett, 418). Thus, although Morrison depicts innumerable abuses of slavery, the depictions of and allusions to rape are of primary importance to the novel's central theme that sexual relationships are more akin to violent, dehumanizing, power struggles than they are to romantic love and intimacy.

In Beloved, the memories of sexual abuse and exploitation haunt each of the characters (Barnett, 418). For example, Paul D. must hide rape's traumatic effects in "that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be" (Morrison, 89) and Denver is a hostage in her own home and mind for fear of sexual violation if she opens either. Nonetheless, the novel's recounting of incidences of sexual exploitation, which is accomplished through a dual structure of memory and live telling, serves primarily to situate the novel's main action, which is Sethe's murder of her own child to save her from violation by white slave owners and the apparent return of that child to seek retribution. Sethe killed the two-year-old child so that no white man would ever dirty her as did the young men who violated Sethe, "one sucking on [her] breast the other holding [her] down" (Morrison, 86). But now Beloved's return forces each of the main characters to face the dehumanizing effects of the innumerable incidents of sexual violation so that each character can reclaim his- or herself as an independent

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ing "the rape of black women and black men by white enslavers" (Barnett, 420). She is revising the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the significance of sexual violation over any other experience of brutality and, consequently, Beloved, the character, embodies the recurrent experience of a past that the community of women in the novel wants to forget (Barnett, 420). When Beloved opens, Sethe is living with Denver, her one remaining child, and a ghost believed to be that of the two-year-old daughter Sethe murdered eighteen years earlier. Then Beloved appears and proceeds to nearly destroy each of the three central characters. As an apparent physical manifestation of Sethe's murdered daughter, Beloved is seeking retribution from her mother (Deck, 959). However, the novel demonstrates that although Sethe murdered Beloved to save her from the destructive memory of rape, each of the characters must let go of Beloved's ghost to save him- or herself from the destructive memory of rape. As they each deal with Beloved and the problematic situations that she initiates, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D learn to face truths about their individual and collective past (Barnett, 421). Beloved transforms from a forlorn, devoted child-like

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