The image of Beloved as an emblematic victim correlates Sethe’s personal story with the collective history of the African Americans. Half-human, half non-human, she acts the perplexing figure of the resurrected heroine who comes to relive the past and reshape the others’ present. Mae Henderson shows that “the return of the repressed” may be seen as the central theme of the novel (1991 a, 74). Beloved’s delirious words do not recall only her actual murder, but also the psychological murder committed on more than sixty million Africans who were forcefully taken away from their native lands and had to undertake a self-erasing Transatlantic journey.³⁷ Giving voice to her grief, Beloved speaks in the place of every slave woman who suffered the most unimaginable atrocities during the Middle Passage, when the white masters (“the men without skin”) placed them like cattle in a ship, where there is no boundary between the human and the nonhuman, between the living and the dead: “She said when she cried there was no one. That dead men lay on top of her. That she had nothing to eat. Ghosts without skins stuck their fingers in her” (212).³⁸ Morrison herself speaks about the overwhelming task of writing about these nameless sufferers:

Beloved was also—and it got to be very exciting for me then—those black slaves whom we don’t know, who did not survive that passage, who amounted to a nation, who simply left one place, disappeared and didn’t show up on the other shores. I had to be dragged, I suppose by them, kicking and screaming, into this book, because it is just too much (Morrison, in Amanda Smith 1987, 51).

Coming from nowhere, having no relatives, and mostly having no name, Beloved is an anonymous (non)presence. Her portrait is mirrored differently by the others, in accordance with their own needs and feelings:³⁹ Sethe is touched by her name and remembers its sad story, while gradually identifying her with her lost daughter; Paul D is both puzzled and attracted to her; Denver is completely rapt with Beloved, being happy that there is someone upon whom she could project her love, whereas later she understands Beloved’s destructive love toward their mother whom she strives to protect.

Significantly, Beloved appears on a carnival day, when the limit between the world of the living and that of the dead is surpassed. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s view, the carnival turns the world upside down and reverses the hierarchic spatial and temporal order (1981, 81). Uncontrollable and mysterious, Beloved ignores the whole notion of chronology, of everydayness, as she keeps away from the external world. Her definition of her contradictory nature (akin to both the sunlit cracks and the darkness) implies two metaphors that suggest her dual relationship with the world of the living and that of the dead.

Beloved’s lack of mobility in space is opposed to her eagerness to move in time. Hearing or telling stories about the past, she steps freely into the “watertime” condition in which temporal boundaries are transcended.⁴⁰ In this sense, the episode of Beloved’s appearance is interconnected with Denver’s birth through the symbol of water signifying life and death, extinction and regeneration. When Sethe approaches the Ohio River, accompanied by the white girl, “it looked like home to her, and the baby (not dead in the least) must have thought so too” (83). When Sethe gives birth to Denver, she enters the “watertime” condition that abolishes temporality, making it cyclical, sacred, and repetitive. In her turn, Beloved surfaces from the river, she sits on its bank for a whole day, unable to move, trying to get used to her new condition; the first thing she does when she arrives at Sethe’s house is to drink cup after cup of water, as thirsty as if she had crossed a desert.

In the floating fragments of the novel’s interrupted narrative thread, Sethe’s biography resurfaces. Beloved’s (lack of) ontological status is defined in this way via negativa: a “non-self” who consumes the others’ stories in order to become herself (Matus 1998, 115). Out of these scattered fragments, the reader constructs the image of Beloved’s multiple identity as a strange mixture between a child and a fully-grown woman, a sister and a daughter, a soothing presence and a voracious vampire:

                                  Beloved                                     

You are my sister

You are my daughter

You are my face; you are me

I have found you again; you have come back to me

You are my Beloved

You are mine (216).

Beloved’s contradictory subjectivity is suggested by the inter-play between sadness and desire. On the one hand, her sadness should be linked with her unuttered longing to be or become something or somebody; hence, her striving to absorb the presence of others, especially the presence of her mother whom she desperately needs. On the other hand, her sexual desire is expressed in her love-hatred relationship with Paul D, as well as in her “shining” and “burning:” “No given chore was enough to put out the licking fire that seemed always to burn in her” (120).⁴¹