[(essay date January 1993) In the following essay, Stave expounds on Morrison's use of the myth of Lilith in her exploration of motherhood in Beloved.]

Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, like her earlier novels, resonates with mythic overtones. Predictably, Morrison incorporates biblical myth, which she characteristically re-visions to empower those marginalized by society. However, as one considers the critical reception of the novel, one finds that little attention has been paid to the novel's use of myth, which allows the work to treat the concept of motherhood in a universal sense. Instead, most of the critical work has focused narrowly on the issue of race, and if motherhood enters the discussion at all, it is most often in the context of slavery. For example, Elizabeth House discusses the work as "illustrat[ing] the destruction of family ties brought by slavery" (17) and goes on to argue that the character Beloved is literally a young woman, unrelated to Sethe, who was imprisoned in a house by a neighboring slave master. Similarly, Deborah Horvitz claims that Beloved "represents the spirit of all women dragged onto slave ships in Africa and also all the Black women in America trying to trace their ancestry back to the mother on the ship attached to them" (157). While I do not wish to suggest that slavery is not a significant issue in the book and while I do not go quite as far as Karen E. Fields, who claims the book is "no more about Afro-Americans in mid-nineteenth-century America than Romeo and Juliet is about Renaissance Veronese" (163), I do believe what the book claims about motherhood and the rite of passage into adulthood bespeaks a human condition that transcends the parameters of a specific time and place. In Beloved, Morrison explores the issue of motherhood, using the myth of Lilith, Adam's first wife, to inform her text. Her use of the Lilith material articulates the tremendous power that women draw from giving birth. At the same time, it foregrounds motherhood's darker side, the loss of the self to the all-consuming child. While the novel celebrates motherhood, it speaks of the need to celebrate other aspects of womanhood as well. In giving voice to Lilith, a far more empowering archetype for women than Eve, Morrison provides a cultural critique of the patriarchal obsession with and limited understanding of motherhood.

The novel tells the story of Sethe, a former slave on Sweet Home, a plantation owned by Mr. Garner and his ailing wife. The Garners, who are portrayed as kind if short-sighted, treat their slaves well and even encourage their independence within limits. Halle, one of the male slaves, is allowed to purchase freedom for his mother, Baby Suggs, by hiring himself out for pay on his one day off each week. Sethe is not forced to breed but is allowed to choose Halle as her "husband" and to live with him and their three children as a family. However, when Mr. Garner dies unexpectedly, Mrs. Garner, who is by then very near death herself, invites a relative, the schoolteacher, to run the farm, and the slaves, subjected to intense cruelty, decide to flee. The plot is foiled and the only one to make it to freedom according to plan is Sethe, whose children have earlier been smuggled out to Ohio, where Baby Suggs now lives. Along the way, Sethe, badly wounded from a severe whipping and nine months pregnant, goes into labor and is assisted in giving birth to her youngest child, Denver, by a mysterious white girl, Amy Denver, who herself is fleeing from a life as an indentured servant. Sethe and the new baby arrive at Baby Suggs's home, where the young woman is reunited with her other children and lives for one blissful month before the schoolteacher and his henchmen show up to reclaim her and them. Rather than have her children live as slaves, Sethe cuts the throat of her elder daughter and attempts to bash out the brains of her two sons. The girl dies but the other children survive. Sethe serves some time in prison but then lives isolated on the edge of the community for over a decade with only Denver and Beloved's ghost for company until Paul D., the only remaining one of the male slaves from Sweet Home, arrives for an extended visit. Sethe and Paul D. become lovers, and Paul D. banishes the spirit of Beloved from the house. Shortly after, a disconcerted young woman, with new shoes and no lines on her hands, appears by the edge of the river. Sethe takes the young woman in against the wishes of Paul D., and a power struggle begins that alienates all the members of the household from each other. Eventually, Paul D., after having engaged in sex with the young woman, leaves the house in disgust upon learning of Sethe's murder of her own child. Denver is alienated as Sethe and the mysterious woman live out a bitter love/hate relationship that diminishes Sethe and empowers the other woman. Eventually the community comes together to banish the mysterious woman and Paul D. returns to begin a new life with Sethe.

All the major tropes of the Lilith myth exist in Beloved.¹ According to the legend, God brings Lilith to Eden to curtail Adam's coupling with the animals; however, Lilith is dismayed by Adam's insistence on continually assuming the dominant position during lovemaking and flees from Eden. God sends three angels to fetch Lilith back, but they are unsuccessful in their attempts. Lilith chooses demons as her sexual partners, bearing as a result of these couplings a hundred children a day, some of whom she eats. In response, God creates Eve as a more submissive mate to Adam, while Lilith's half-demon daughters continue to haunt earthly men, coming to them at night, squatting over them as they sleep to have sex with them. Lilith mythically has come to signify an aspect of the Great Mother Goddess, both creator and destroyer of all life; despite the former attribute, however, culture has traditionally regarded Lilith simply as a demon, as one who must be feared. It is she, legend tells us, who drank the blood of Abel after his murder by his brother.

The parallels between the legend and Morrison's novel are significant. We are told that the men of Sweet Home routinely have sex with the animals to ease their desire. Sethe is brought to Sweet Home from an unnamed other place, through no will of her own; she is not "always already" one of the Sweet Home slaves, as the six men are. Sethe's successive pregnancies and the recurring image of her breasts dripping with milk encode her mythically as a Great Mother Goddess figure. When she leaves Sweet Home, she flees on her own, pursued by the schoolteacher and two others (the three "angels" of God), who are later joined by the local sheriff, allowing for the apocalyptic image of "four horsemen" (148). Furthermore, in some versions of the Lilith myth, angels threaten to drown her in the sea if she will not return to Adam in Eden (Patai 224). Here, while the schoolteacher is not directly responsible for Sethe's giving birth in a boat on a river, nevertheless both Sethe and her baby, already described as "drowning in its mother's blood" (84), risk drowning as a result of their flight. Once Sethe is found, she does not return to Sweet Home but remains in freedom. Her daughter, the ghost Beloved, at once child and woman, visits Paul D. nocturnally and renders him powerless to resist her over-the-shoulder glance, her hoisted skirts, and her entreaty to "touch me on the inside part" (116). But the act that most strongly marks Sethe as a Lilith figure is the killing of her child, although here, the sacrifice of the child and the drinking of the blood are divided between two aspects of a single self: Sethe commits the sacrifice, and Denver, the daughter/child-self, drinks the blood of Beloved at Sethe's breast.

However, Morrison's novel not only encodes the cabalistic story of Lilith, but also treats the more familiar biblical account of Eden, using it as a way of commenting on slavery as an institution. The God of Genesis makes a man and a woman, provides a home for them, requires work of them, imposes injunctions on them, and then punishes them for attempting to acquire the kinds of knowledge he has. Garner here functions as that God who believes he has the power "to make and call his own niggers men" (11). Although he is not portrayed as a vicious being, he is made to look naive; he "acted like the world was a toy he was supposed to have fun with" (139). His naiveté becomes dangerous, however, when he assumes, mistakenly, that he can impose a nature on the beings he believes he owns. Although he enjoys his "making and calling," he refuses to take responsibility for the beings whom he makes dependent on him, whom he puts into a hostile world. Furthermore, the restrictions he imposes on Sweet Home are cruel and unnatural. For example, Baby Suggs notices that Garner keeps five young men on the farm, none of whom he "studs" for breeding purposes. She ponders, "Would he pick women for them or what did he think was going to happen when those boys ran smack into their nature?" (140). Garner, the God-figure here, is himself asexual (he has no children and his wife is portrayed as frail and unimpassioned); he has no understanding of the human need for sexual intimacy. Although he is outside a human context, his authority allows him to impose his values on the human, with no regard for consequences.

Significantly, Garner does not "make and call" Sethe woman, just as God does not create Lilith but brings her to Adam from some other unnamed place. Sethe's recollections of her life before Sweet Home focus exclusively on women, specifically on her mother, who herself is portrayed as both creator and destroyer, the Ur-Lilith. This mother, we are told, birthed other children besides Sethe, but "threw away" the others without naming them. Significantly, the text is never narratively "present" at Sethe's earliest home; we only catch fleeting images of it through Sethe's memories. In this respect, Morrison's text again echoes the Bible, which only gives recorded evidence of Eden's existence. Lilith, and the world from which God brought her to Adam, exists as myth, as non-canonical, as a story that is passed on but not written. Sethe's pattern involves moving from a "pre-Edenic" world peopled by women to an "Edenic" existence under the control of a man to a "post-Edenic" world articulated as a matriarchy, a nonhierarchical world (hierarchy being an attribute of patriarchy) that has no "owner" and in which all are free, but in which Baby Suggs figures as shaman/prophet, as she who feeds the masses with her turkeys and watermelon punch and blackberry pies. But while the God of Genesis found it necessary to post an armed angel at the gates of Eden to prevent Adam and Eve's return to paradise, in Morrison's world, none of those who leave have any desire to return, in spite of the labor demanded of them in a free world in which fruit cannot simply be plucked from the tree but must be gathered with great effort and at great risk:

[Stamp Paid] walked six miles to the riverbank; did a slide-run-slide down into a ravine made almost inaccessible by brush. [To pick berries, Stamp Paid] reached through brambles lined with blood-drawing thorns thick as knives that cut through his shirt sleeves and trousers. All the while suffering mosquitoes, bees, hornets, wasps and the meanest lady spiders in the state.(136)

In spite of its annoyances, Sethe's home in freedom is a world of celebration, where children laugh, men dance, and women cry, where the laughter, the dancing, and the tears are affirmations of the human, where Baby Suggs encourages her people to celebrate their flesh and to "Love it. Love it hard" (88). Here, there is no sense of sin or a need for redemption. Baby Suggs's message to them is that "the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it" (88). Here, womanhood is seen as a "sweet thorny place" (248), a rich blackberry patch that will at times hurt and tear but that will also offer lush fruit and sweet sensation. Just as the affirmation of the flesh posits this world in opposition to Sweet Home/Eden, where flesh is "owned," so the recognition and celebration of womanhood marks this world as antithetical to any patriarchal world, where the feminine is either unacknowledged or is hated.

Morrison encodes her text with many allusions to the Bible, but shifts the narrative perspective to allow a radical revision of its story. The way the snake of Eden is treated is one recurring example of Morrison's variation of the familiar story. A side narrative in the novel involves Sixo, the one Sweet Home man besides Halle who has a mate. Sixo has found a woman, a slave at a plantation thirty miles away, and he spends his free day walking continually so that they can spend a few minutes together. Eventually, each walks part of the way so they can spend still more time making love; at one such meeting, he cuts her leg with his knife so that she can claim a snake has bitten her to account for her coming home late. That this couple chooses such an overdetermined cultural icon as a snake for their fiction is telling. For this couple, their own myth of the snake is redemptive, allowing for the possibility of sexual love, while from the perspective of the Thirty-Mile Woman's white owner, the snake--either the literal creature or their fictional creation of a snake--is evil, reducing the slave woman's productivity and allowing for an unsanctioned union, the sexuality of a female slave being the domain of the slave master. (The parallels with patriarchal culture in general are too obvious to state.) In this instance, as in Genesis, the snake embodies sexuality but how snake/phallus/sexual act is read is determined by one's discursive position. For Sixo and his lover, their own fiction of the snake enables their lovemaking, and therefore the snake becomes associated with beauty and empowerment, while for the white slave master, the same fiction of the snake is subversive and destructive. When the snake reappears, in the world outside Sweet Home/Eden, it takes on a new signification. In the narration of Denver's birth, Sethe hears someone in the bushes and wants to devour whoever it is to stave off her hunger: "I was hungry to do it. Like a snake. All jaws and hungry" (31). In aligning herself with the snake, Sethe deconstructs the conventional image of the snake as an evil creature, unravels it as symbol, and returns it to the natural world simply as a creature that must kill to live. But since she herself, as the Lilith figure, is associated with the evil of the snake (another instance of evil in Eden), her act of deconstruction disallows a reading of her own character as evil, suggesting rather that her acts (including the act of slitting the throat of her child) are natural, governed by circumstance.

Another of Morrison's biblical allusions, Eden's tree of knowledge, blooms again in this text, this time etched on Sethe's back by the whip of the schoolteacher. It is with this whipping that Sethe comes to know most vividly the power dynamics of her Eden, presided over now, after the death of Garner, by his alter-ego, the vengeful schoolteacher. Just as the Old Testament God at times is kind and loving to the children of Israel and at other times is petty and vindictive, so the master of Sweet Home switches character, sometimes nurturing his possessions and at other times beating them mercilessly. Having tasted of the knowledge of what slavery truly means, Sethe can never be free of it, since it is inscribed in her flesh. Her only recourse is to physically remove herself from a world in which she exists only as a slave; hence, she leaves Eden for the pagan world of Baby Suggs.

After the "sin" of rebellion in Sweet Home/Eden, when the illusion of the idyllic world is for all time destroyed, the flood recorded in Genesis recurs in Morrison's text, while Paul D., along with other rebellious slaves, is forced onto the chain gang. Significantly, the act that triggers Jahweh's fury with humankind throughout the Old Testament--sodomy--is reenacted as well, as the white guards force the prisoners to perform fellatio on them each morning. When the flood comes, death appears inevitable for the men locked underground in their cages, which are rapidly filling with water and with cottonmouths. Hope seems beyond them: even "the doves were nowhere in sight" (109). But redemption comes, not in the deus ex machina of an ark, of a deity intervening in human affairs, but rather when the men move and think as one, and together, "[l]ike the unshriven dead, zombies on the loose, holding the chains in their hands, they trusted the rain and the dark, yes, but mostly Hi Man and each other" (110). What is crucial about this salvation is that each person is his own savior and the savior of his brothers--no hierarchy is imposed on them; no one of them is less or more significant than the others. If they do not rise as a group, they will all die. Furthermore, the men must give themselves over to the rain and the dark, not rejecting as evil those aspects of the whole that some read as negative, but rather embracing them as part of the whole.

In Morrison's re-visioning of the Genesis account, Paul D. stands in opposition to Halle, the Adam figure here, the husband of Sethe/Lilith. Halle is described as being "too good for the world" (208), the dutiful son, the loving husband, the loyal servant, not one who rebels and flees. In fact, when he encounters the blinding vision of Sethe's tree, formed by the bloody whipmarks on her back, and of the schoolteacher's nephews holding her down and nursing from her flowing breasts, essentially raping her, he is destroyed by it and can no longer act. But from Sethe's perspective, Halle's problems begin earlier. The Lilith account reveals that Lilith brought down the wrath of God--and Adam--by wishing to assume the dominant position during the act of sex. The subsequent legends of Lilith reveal her to be sexually voracious, eager and demanding of her lovers, constantly challenging taboos on sexual activity. Sethe's narration reveals a lack of satisfaction at Halle's lovemaking, again aligning her with Lilith and her fierce sexuality when she recalls that "Halle was more like a brother than a husband. His care suggested a family relationship rather than a man's laying claim" (25). For this reason, it is appropriate that he stay in Eden and that Paul D., as defiant as the woman who is his soulmate, finds Sethe in the other, pagan world and joins her there.

That matriarchal, pagan world contains no God, no Garner, as in the world Sethe leaves behind; rather, as befits its matriarchal, pagan nature, there is the Goddess, made up of all the major women in the narrative. In her mythology, the Goddess frequently appears in three aspects--maiden, mother, and crone--although she is one deity. The triune nature of the Goddess is evident in Beloved as well. Baby Suggs clearly represents the Goddess in her crone aspect, past child-bearing, freed to be the wise woman to her people. Equally obviously, Sethe functions as the mother. The maiden aspect is filled by Amy Denver, the mysterious young white woman who materializes when Sethe needs help to deliver her baby. Amy, eternally virgin ("I been bleeding for four years now but I ain't having nobody's baby. Won't catch me sweating milk" [83]), is as magical as Baby Suggs. Her voice can still the child within Sethe's womb, while her fingers bring Sethe's dead feet back to life; she manages to keep the whipped, exhausted Sethe alive, because, as she explains, "'I'm good at sick things'" (82). After the child is safely delivered, in spite of its being stuck "[f]ace up and drowning in its mother's blood" (84), Amy Denver disappears, replaced by the child who bears her name, who goes on to fulfill the role of virgin in the text. Amy's appearance in the text is significant in light of the racial dynamics at work. For the most part, white is here associated with evil, with danger, with destruction. Even Garner, who may perhaps mean well, is seen not only as misguided but as exploitative, self-seeking, and, ultimately, as dangerous. Mrs. Garner may initially be judged more leniently, but her weakness makes her equally dangerous--it is she who writes to the schoolteacher asking him to come help her run Sweet Home. Amy, however, is seen as unambiguously good--and as undifferentiated from Sethe. Her speech patterns are similar to Sethe's and their experiences are shared (down to the beating and the running away). By making one aspect of the triune Goddess white, Morrison allows for a community of women, allows for a sense of oppression that transcends race, without mitigating the horrors of the institution of slavery.

However, while Amy Denver functions as the virgin aspect of the Goddess, she also partakes of Lilith's nature, which should come as no surprise given her identification with Sethe. Raphael Patai cites ancient Hebrew texts referring to Lilith as "O you who are wrapped in velvet" (234). Readers of Beloved may see in this attribute an intriguing association with Amy's seemingly random obsession with velvet. Even more significantly, however, Lilith is a figure specifically associated with the act of childbirth. Traditionally, Lilith is seen as particularly dangerous to women giving birth, but in some early texts, two Liliths appear, one good and one evil (Patai 239, 249). The archetype of the Good Mother/Terrible Mother immediately comes to mind, which allows a reading of Amy as an aspect of Sethe, who both loves and nurtures her child and destroys it.

In this novel, the Goddess is given the power of creation, which is undifferentiated from the power of narration. Co-opting the power of the word, women here tell their stories and the stories of other women, and in their telling, make the world new. "[T]he world ... just born" (33) is how Amy describes the velvet that she bespeaks and that is her speech, the narration that soothes the broken and bloody Sethe, that calms the child Denver still in the womb. Speaking the velvet and causing the velvet to be created are one and the same act, just as narration (the power of the word) is creation. Furthermore, as Amy Denver births Denver, we see the Goddess birthing herself, the woman in and by her narration creating all that is and, significantly, creating her own identity as well. This act of creation replaces the Edenic one in which the power of birthing is given to the male, specifically to a male God who creates all that exists without the benefit of a woman. Later, Denver recounts with authority the story of her own birth in the boat, a story she knows because she, one with Amy Denver, was her own midwife, as is every woman here in that she must tell, must invent and by inventing create her life, her fiction, her narrative, if she is to have her/story. The male version of the genesis of humankind, the biblical text, treats woman as image, as symbol, as never more than Eve, with the result that women cannot use that text to enable their own identity-formation. Woman's story needs to be told in woman's words--hence Lilith's version of what happened in the garden. She who was completely excluded from the text (if Eve has been given short shrift, Lilith has it worse--many people in Western culture have no idea who she is) now births her story.

But to know of Lilith is to know of her terrifying power, as Paul D. discovers in his encounter with Sethe/Lilith. For Paul D. to come to his own definition of what it is to be a man, rather than to accept Garner/God's definition, he must acknowledge Sethe's power without fear. Initially, Paul D. is horrified and repulsed at Sethe's narration--not, he realizes, by the act of murder itself, but rather by the power Sethe assumes:

The prickly, mean-eyed Sweet Home girl he knew as Halle's girl was obedient (like Halle), shy (like Halle), and work-crazy (like Halle). He was wrong. This here Sethe was new. The ghost in her house didn't bother her for the very same reason a room-and-board witch with new shoes was welcome. This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a hacksaw. This here new Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she had claimed. It scared him.(164)

Significantly, this scene also resonates with the traditional Lilith material. Patai discusses Lilith as one who is initially alluring to her lovers, but who then becomes terrifying and menacing to them; and he cites an ancient text which describes the post-coital Lilith: "She stands before him clothed in garments of flaming fire, inspiring terror and making body and soul tremble, full of frightening eyes, in her hand a drawn sword dripping bitter drops" (234). To reach manhood, Paul D. must confront his fear of Sethe's articulateness as well as his assumptions about what woman is; he must learn that there is no space between the world and Sethe, that the space she occupies is the world, that her claims are justified.

But what is gained by giving Lilith a voice? What need is there to retell a sacred story, to deliberately reweave a biblical narrative, to recast its terms? In giving voice to Sethe/Lilith, Morrison valorizes defiance; in rejecting Eden with its seeming perfection--and rejecting its God as well--Sethe/Lilith arrives at an identity created through self and community rather than one imposed by some other being. Her narrative becomes a critique of the hierarchical system that developed out of that Edenic consciousness. She herself becomes archetypally constitutive of the fusion of the disabling Good Mother/Terrible Mother duality. Patriarchal culture has privileged motherhood to the point of apotheosis, but that privilege is predicated upon its fear of and subsequent desire to control the mother. Motherhood--and patriarchal fictions about it--has traditionally been imposed upon women, who were allowed no other discourse; however, the patriarchal definition of motherhood is articulated in such a way that no woman could ever live up to the expectations it imposes. In the narration of Sethe's self-definition as the culturally mandated icon of mother, the totality of the woman Sethe is fragmented. The "adult" Sethe becomes possessed by the demonic, all-consuming "child" Sethe, figured in the character of Beloved. In this context, the need for the "sacrifice" of the child takes on new meaning and the concept of womanhood is reconstituted.

Sethe's privileging of her mother-self at the cost of her total identity is apparent in her narration of her final days at Sweet Home. When she tells Paul D. about the whipping that disfigures her for life, one so severe that she bites off a part of her tongue in pain, she focuses her narration not on the physical anguish she suffered but rather on the sense of loss she experienced when the two young men hold her down and nurse from her. For her the whipping, her own physical pain, is insignificant; her identity lies solely in her breasts, the demarcation of her motherhood. Furthermore, she does not address her own sense of violation at their act but rather emphasizes that the milk belonging to her baby has been stolen. Her reading of this act, her narration of the body, in these terms articulates culture's fetishism of the mother while it points to the latent obscenity of such self-definition.

However, Sethe's neurotic love of the child masks an equally deep hatred of the child. We note the epigraph of the novel: "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved." While the first line of the passage most logically must be read in the context of slavery, the second clearly has to do with the daughter, Beloved. Implicit in it is the hostility toward the child for being what she indeed proves to be, all-consuming and destructive, a vampire who drains Sethe's life-blood as well as her breasts. However, one might argue that Morrison distrusts love in and of itself, apart from any specific configuration of lover-beloved; the lover in her texts often uses love as the justification for acting upon the beloved, for scripting the beloved purely within the narrative of the lover, for denying the integral self of the beloved. This erasure of the other recurs in the Sethe-Beloved relationship, as each reciprocally undertakes the destruction of the other, each out of her consuming need to be with, understand, join with, that which she is not. Morrison articulates this distrust of love also in her earlier novel The Bluest Eye, in which love becomes the impetus behind Cholly Breedlove's rape of his daughter.

But in choosing to unravel mother-daughter love in Beloved, Morrison challenges a cultural icon far more sacred than father-daughter love. In its fetishization of the biological process of giving birth, culture has imposed the notion that mothering, not merely the act of giving birth, is "natural" to women, that it is instinctual behavior, refusing to consider all evidence (post-partum depression, abandoned children, battered children) to the contrary. In Morrison's text, although Sethe is encoded as the eternal mother, even she reveals that mothering was a learned process for her, that she desired other women to be her teachers:

I wish I'd a known more, but, like I say, there wasn't nobody to talk to. Woman, I mean. So I tried to recollect what I'd seen back where I was before Sweet Home. How the women did there. Oh they knew all about it. How to make that thing you use to hang the babies in the trees--so you could see them out of harm's way while you worked the fields. Was a leaf thing too they gave em to chew on. Mint, I believe, or sassafras. Comfrey, maybe. ... I could have used that.(160)

Furthermore, when Paul D. asks her to bear his child, she resists, "frightened," she says, at what the process entails. The Lilith myth challenges culture's short-sightedness, suggesting that if nurturing is instinctual to the human, it is equally instinctual to destroy (Koltuv 81).

The conflict between Sethe and Beloved is called into being by the appearance of Paul D., who awakens Sethe's dormant sexuality, opening up a space where Sethe can exist as more than simply a mother. Since the birth of her first child, Sethe has predicated her identity exclusively on her role as mother. Her response to the possibility of redefinition is predictable; she is frightened. She acknowledges the fear, but not the cause: "Alone with her daughter in a haunted house she managed every damn thing. Why now, with Paul D. instead of the ghost, was she breaking up? getting scared: needing Baby? The worst was over, wasn't it?" (97). By way of response, Beloved, textually marked as an eternal child by her inordinate fondness for sweets and bright colors as well as by her behavior, manifests in human form, emerging from the river as a beautiful young woman with new shoes and no lines on her hands. She materializes on the evening of the day of Sethe's greatest happiness with Paul D., when the mother for the first time in years has let the child within her gain ascendancy, when she has allowed herself to be carefree and at play, possibilities proscribed for the mother. While part of Sethe embraces her own youth once again, part of her experiences guilt at her actions, specifically her delight in sexual love. Significantly, the ghost Beloved, in her human form, observes Sethe and Paul D. making love. To read the scene adequately, we must comprehend the complexity of the apparatus of signification that is Beloved. She is the eternal child who would impose eternal motherhood on Sethe because she is Sethe's own child-self, a manifestation of Sethe's need, the fragmentation of self that disallows existence beyond this informing dualism. In her rage at being excluded from their act, and threatened by the loss of Sethe, Beloved becomes Paul D.'s seducer and tormentor, driving him out of Sethe's bed, out of the house to the shed where she confronts him nightly. In appropriating the sexuality of the mother, Beloved forces Sethe back into the restricted role of mother, for part of the fetishization of the mother involves the repression of her sexuality, which is allowed expression only in an initial act of conception and ideally, not even then, as in the case of the Virgin Mary, for instance. Beloved denies Sethe any role outside that of mother and, vampirelike, feeds off the nurturance of the older woman until Sethe is completely drained and on her deathbed. Sethe's vitality and life-giving qualities flow into Beloved, who grows as if she is pregnant, herself ready to become the mother of her infantile parent. The fluidity with which the two can switch roles points to the essence of the mother-child relationship. Having been for a while one being, undifferentiated in body during the pregnancy of the mother, mother and child are both one and not one, the same and different. Furthermore, Barbara Offutt Mathieson points out that many psychologists believe that "[i]nfant need and maternal care reciprocate so intensely ... that they blur the distinction between child and parent" (1). Beloved, as eternal child, cannot move beyond this oneness or recognize any distinction from Sethe. Having experienced the terror of separation, she above all desires reunion with the mother. However, since no possibility of returning to the womb, the original site of undifferentiation, exists, Beloved must find reunion through death. In Beloved's attempts to murder Sethe, we see Sethe's suicidal impulses acted out. Confronted with a challenge to her identity and forced to face a freedom terrifying in its possibilities, Sethe desires the obliteration of individual consciousness and a return to primordial oneness/nothingness.

However, while Sethe risks self-destruction from the encounter with the eternal child within, ultimately the experience is transformative for her, as Barbara Black Koltuv points out is often the case when women consciously acknowledge their Lilith aspect (49). Koltuv goes on to point out how the Lilith figure gains ascendancy for women during the second half of their lives (52), which is of course the time of Sethe's crisis. Only when her daughter Denver's incipient adulthood marks the end of Sethe's active motherhood, and when Paul D. offers the possibility of a new relationship, must Sethe confront the need for a redefinition of self. For Sethe, the encounter is ultimately redemptive; she chooses community and, with that choice, frees the child to enter adulthood, as Denver does, sending the shadow-child Beloved, the manifestation of her fears, back to the grave. To attempt to hold the daughter, to arrive at stasis, is to die. In this context, the psychological significance of the archetype of Lilith the child-killer becomes clear; the woman must destroy the infantile needs that hinder her from achieving adulthood, a murder that must be ritually repeated because those needs surface repeatedly.

If mother and child can be textually read as one and not one, Sethe and Denver also partake of the unity/difference, and Beloved figures as the shadow aspect of Denver as well. From its own perspective, the child is both part of the mother, in that the child perceives the mother as merely an extension of itself, and separate from her, in that the child perceives itself as independent. While the mother must simultaneously let go of her own infantilism and let her child come to adulthood, the child must also strive for adulthood herself, though it is tempting to remain the infantile self, as Denver initially does. When, as a little girl at school she is confronted with questions about Sethe's murder of the baby, Denver, traumatized by the potential for violence within the adult world, never leaves her home again; she has no friends and no sense of responsibility. Even as a teen-ager, Denver cannot care for herself. Sethe, who works mornings in a restaurant, sacrifices her youth and vitality to nurture the child who chooses to remain fixed in an infantile state of helplessness. The threat to the girl's existence as eternal child comes with Paul D.'s arrival on the scene. Denver is immediately aware that Sethe is engaging in nonmaternal behavior in her interactions with Paul D., and intuitively understands that Sethe is tempted to forego motherhood for wifehood and selfhood:

Now here was this woman with the presence of mind to repair a dog gone savage with pain rocking her crossed ankles and looking away from her own daughter's body. As though the size of it was more than vision could bear. And neither she nor he had on shoes. Hot, shy, now Denver was lonely. All that leaving: first her brothers, then her grandmother--serious losses. ... None of that had mattered as long as her mother did not look away as she was doing now. ...(12)

Denver's anxiety here parallels Beloved's anxiety at encountering Sethe and Paul D. making love--in both cases, the daughter experiences separation from the mother and is made vulnerable by her fear. Thus both Sethe and Denver need the infantile self in order to maintain the moribund stasis they have arrived at and to avoid confronting new possibilities for existence. Once Paul D.'s arrival disrupts their balance and forces each of them to take on additional roles, Sethe as host and lover, Denver as independent young woman, their combined fears result in Beloved's manifestation and Paul D.'s banishment. The system works to maintain itself.

Morrison has developed striking parallels between Beloved and Denver. The blood they share by virtue of being born of the same parents becomes the same blood when Denver drinks Beloved's blood at Sethe's breast immediately after the murder. In other words, the same blood is in the body of both beings, making them one. As such, Denver is the aspect of the self that is almost completely passive, while Beloved is the agent who acts out the self's rage and love. Therefore, it is Beloved who is demanding and rude and eventually violent to Sethe, but it is also Beloved who caresses and fondles the mother in a way Denver cannot.

Denver's feelings toward Sethe are the typical fusion of love, hate, and fear that children are said to feel for their mothers. The love stems from Sethe's having birthed and nurtured her, a story Denver loves hearing retold. The hate stems from her knowledge of her dependence on Sethe, her awareness of her own refusal to mature. And the fear stems from her awareness of Sethe's power over her, the power every child knows her mother can wield. Denver thinks, "I love my mother but I know she killed one of her own daughters, and tender as she is with me, I'm scared of her because of it" (205). However, once Denver allows her repressed feelings expression through Beloved, she is repulsed and terrified by what she has set into motion. Seeing Sethe made powerless, Denver faces the possibility of her mother's death (a possibility every human moving into adulthood must confront) and understands that, to survive, she must leave her home and enter community: "She would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help" (243).

Denver's first move toward adulthood comes when she understands the terror that can exist in the world but chooses to enter the world in spite of it. This knowledge comes to her in the form of Baby Suggs, the crone aspect of the Goddess, the wise woman within. When Baby Suggs gently mocks Denver for her fear, Denver speaks:

But you said there was no defense."There ain't."Then what do I do?"Know it, and go on out the yard. Go on."(244)

Having rejected false pride, Denver seeks help from the women of the community, who willingly take in the lonely girl, and in that sense of sharing, Denver moves nearer to adulthood, specifically womanhood. When Denver asks Lady Jones for food for Sethe, the older woman responds, "Oh, baby." Morrison tells us: "Denver looked up at her. She did not know it then, but it was the word 'baby,' said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman" (248). Womanhood, "that sweet thorny place" (248), not to be confused with Sweet Home (where there are no thorns because there are no possibilities for being a woman, no possibilities for true adulthood), is not a place to which Sethe can take Denver. The mother cannot initiate her own daughter into the community of women--that must be done by other women, by community, since the initiation involves the rejection of the mother as nurturer. As Mathieson points out, "Denver rediscovers what is perhaps the most successful strategy for adult development: she replaces the solitary maternal bond with a larger community of adults and opens herself to an empathetic network of fellows" (15-16). Thus, this girl/woman is led to recognize her own potential, her own sacredness, and her own wisdom, transmitted here through the word "baby," the name of her mystical, powerful grandmother. In that naming, the cycle is completed, and maiden and crone fuse into one entity. Denver passes her initiation, as revealed by her new understanding of her mother's life and actions:

Sethe was trying to make up for the handsaw; Beloved was making her pay for it. But there would never be an end to that, and seeing her mother diminished shamed and infuriated her. Yet she knew Sethe's greatest fear was the same one Denver had in the beginning--that Beloved might leave. That before Sethe could make her understand what it meant--what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood pump like oil in her hands; to hold her face so her head would stay on; to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that shot through that adored body, plump and sweet with life--Beloved might leave. Leave before Sethe could make her realize that worse than that--far worse--was what Baby Suggs died of, what Ella knew, what Stamp Paid saw and what made Paul D. tremble.(251)

Denver now discovers what it is like "having a self to look out for and preserve" (252); at this point, Beloved's presence is no longer necessary to Denver, and the demon-child is exorcised. Denver has passed into the world of adulthood, and has left Sethe with no one to mother. The daughter no longer feels compelled to thwart the sexuality of the mother--when Denver encounters Paul D. her smile "had welcome in it" (266); furthermore, she has found love for herself. Paul D. notices that, as Denver turns to a young man who calls out to her, "her face [looked] like someone had turned up the gas jet" (267). Having accepted "that sweet thorny place" that is womanhood, Denver, like Baby Suggs before her, is ready to let the cycle continue, to become the mother herself, and then the crone.

Sethe, however, cannot let go. Although she participates in the exorcism, she mourns the loss of her child-self and her child, Beloved/Denver. Rejecting the possibility of any role other than that of mother, with no possibility remaining but death, she moves into Baby Suggs's room to die. In both of her brief attempts at the role of lover rather than mother, she is betrayed, first when Halle does not come to her defense, but is instead destroyed by his vision, and next when Paul D. rejects her as bestial for her actions toward the baby Beloved. Paul D., however--no Adam but a man struggling to define morality in terms of his own world rather than of Garner's toy, Sweet Home/Eden--understands finally the complexity of Sethe's nature. He realizes the injustice of attempting to impose either identity or behavior on her, and chooses instead to love her and accept her for the woman she is. Hierarchy is behind him now, a remnant of Sweet Home, where the God/Adam hierarchy is the paradigm for all relationships and where Lilith's story is given no space because Lilith herself is permitted no existence. Rather than imposing his story on hers, Paul D. now "wants to put his story next to hers" (273), accepting their equality, no longer needing to occupy the dominant position in love or in narrative, as Adam did with Lilith. Therefore, when Sethe mourns the loss of her child as her "best thing," Paul D. responds with true vision, "You your best thing, Sethe" (273). In choosing to believe his words, Sethe/Lilith is released from the imposition of motherhood and becomes free at last.

Morrison's use of the Lilith material, then, sanctions female defiance of patriarchal authority at the same time that it allows an unsentimentalized view of motherhood and the psychological complexities that accompany it. Only when the demon mother is deconstructed can mothers and children interact as full human beings, free of mythologies that would limit and damage them.

Note

1. For the purpose of this article, I primarily used Barbara Walker's The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets for a basic recounting of the Lilith myth and Barbara Black Koltuv's The Book of Lilith for a feminist psychological interpretation of the myth.

Works Cited

Fields, Karen E. "To Embrace Dead Strangers: Toni Morrison's Beloved." Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Mickey Perlman. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1989. 159-69.

Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 18 (1990): 157-67.

House, Elizabeth. "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved Who Is Not Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 18 (1990): 17-26.

Koltuv, Barbara Black. The Book of Lilith. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 1986.

Mathieson, Barbara Offutt. "Memory and Mother Love in Morrison's Beloved." American Imago 47 (1990): 1-21.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit: Wayne State, 1967.

Walker, Barbara. The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: Harper, 1983.