Beloved's Inner-Workings

“I am beloved and she is mine. I see her take flowers/ away from leaves/ she puts them in a round basket/ the leaves are not for her/ she fills the basket/ she opens the grass/ I would help her but the clouds are in the way/ how can I say things that are pictures/ I am not separate from her/ there is no place where I stop/ her face is my own and I want to be in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too/ a hot thing/”

In this passage from Beloved, by Toni Morrison on page 248, Beloved is speaking for the first time in the book through her own internal monologue. We as readers are finally opened up to her mind and its conscious stream of thought instead of just listening to her words narrated by another character in the story. In this passage itself, Beloved is speaking of the memory she has of Sethe’s mother in Africa and how she remembers her picking flowers away from leaves as if she is harvesting them, and putting them into a basket. Beloved’s writing style is very short and choppy, as if she is still a child mentally that has not developed a correctly formal and adult way of speaking, even if compared just beside Denver’s and Sethe’s way of speaking, but especially Denver’s since she is her sister and though Beloved is older than her, Denver still speaks better than Beloved. This is even furthered in the line where she says, “How can I say things that are pictures.” In this line she is showing that she does not yet have the mental capacity to describe in vivid detail what she is seeing because she has not yet developed that way of speaking, much like a child who cannot yet speak only sees in pictures, not words, because they have not yet learned them.

Through this passage, Morrison is developing Beloved’s character further from what we’ve just seen told through other characters, and through this passage we finally get a slight grasp on who Beloved is as a person, through her own mind. Without this entire chapter, we would not know first hand what Beloved’s inner workings entail, and through this passage we can understand her underdevelopment compared to her younger sister, Denver.