1Critical approach

Psychoanalytic Approach

The Psychoanalytic Theory is the personality theory, which is based on the notion that an individual gets
motivated more by unseen forces that are controlled by the conscious and the rational thought.

Sethe is the central character in the novel , she was influenced by her actions, especially killing her
innocent daughter. It was evident that she had experienced a harsh treatment in her past. She suffers from
slavery, oppression and raping in Mr.Garner Sweet Home in Kentucky. Trauma, hysteria, Oedipal
complex are very clear she signs as psychological symptoms in Beloved.

2.Plot

The story of Beloved start with Baby Suggs, Halle's mother and Sethe's mother-in-law is born a slave.
Baby Suggs gave birth to Halle while she was still a slave.

The same year Sethe is born to "Ma'am," the only name given to her mother.

In 1838 The Garners purchase Baby Suggs and Halle to work at Sweet Home in Kentucky. Halle and his
mother the Garners as slaves but after some time Halle obtained his freedom.

In 1848 Halle buys the freedom of Baby Suggs by doing extra work, the same year Sethe arrives at Sweet
Home as a replacement for Baby Suggs.

1849 Sethe marries Halle; they consummate their marriage in the cornfield, after a year Sethe gives birth
to Howard his first son, the following year she
gives birth to Buglar.

1853 Mrs. Garner hires Schoolteacher to run Sweet Home after the death of her husband. Schoolteacher
who was Mrs Garner nephew is hired in order to help Mrs Garner but he treats slaves as animals.

In 1854 Sethe gives birth to Beloved her third child. In1855 Sethe sends Buglar, Howard, and Beloved to
live with Baby Suggs, for she is afraid they will be sold away from her; Paul D, Sixo, Halle, and Seth plan
to escape from Sweet Home; Sethe, pregnant with her fourth child, is attacked by the nephews of
Schoolteacher, who suck the milk from her swollen breasts; Sethe is beaten by the nephews when she
tells Mrs. Garner about the attack; Schoolteacher kills Sixo and Paul A; Sethe leaves Sweet Home; Sethe
gives birth to Denver with the help of Amy;and named her daughter Amy Denver.

Sethe goes to 124 Bluestone to find Baby Suggs; Sethe tries to kill her children to save them from
slavery; Beloved dies, but Buglar, Howard, and Beloved survive; Sethe is taken to jail for murder, and
Denver is with her; Sethe and Denver are released from prison; Beloved ghost's takes up residence at 124
Bluestone.

1856 Paul D is captured and locked up in Albert, Georgia.Meanwhile Sethe takes a job at Sawyer's
Restaurant.

1862-1863 Denver attends Lady Jones' school; she is dismissed when it is learned that she and Sethe
spent time in jail.

In 1865 Buglar and Howard leave home; Baby Suggs dies.

1873 Paul D escaped Alfred Prison and comes to Sethe's house in Cincinnati Paul D, the last of the
Sweet Home men. And although she could never
mistake his face for another’s, she said, “Is that you?”
“What’s left.” He stood up and smiled. “How you been, girl, besides
barefoot?”
When she laughed it came out loose and young. “Messed up my legs back
yonder. Chamomile. ”Beloved who is the ghost of the late Seth's daughter arrives at 124 Bluestone and try
to seduce Paul D.

When Paul D learns that Sethe killed her child and that child has taken the form of Beloved he decided to
leave sethe.

1875 Sethe tries to stab Edwin Bodwin with an ice pick when he tries to take Denver from her; Beloved
vanishes; Paul D returns.

Setting

Setting is the time and the place in which the events of the story take place. Talib (2004:5) states that the
setting of a narrative is the materials pertaining to characters and events .

Spatial Setting

The spatial Setting refers to the places where most events of the story occur . The story of Beloved is set
in many places but only the important ones are going to be selected.

4.1 Cincinnati

Beloved mainly takes place in Cincinnati, Ohio, in the year 1873, though the novel also features
numerous flashbacks to the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky and to a prison camp in Alfred, Georgia.

4.1.1. 124
124 is located in Cincinnati it is the place Where Sethe decided to go live in after she left Sweet Home ,
where she was a slave:
It was in front of that 124 that Sethe climbed off a wagon, her newborn tied to her chest, and felt for the
first time the wide arms of her mother-in-law,who had made it to Cincinnati.

An another excerpt is seen below as Sethe is asked to choose a house :

“You pick any house, any house where colored live. In all of Cincinnati.Pick any one and you welcome to
stay there. (B:212)

Kentucky( Sweet Home)

Kentucky is an other place where the story take place , it is actually the place where Sethe was a slave,
this can be seen in the following excerpt:
But, as she began telling about the earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it. Perhaps it was
Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or her thirst for hearing it—in any case it was an unexpected
pleasure. Above the patter of the pea sorting and the sharp odor of cooking rutabaga, Sethe explained the
crystal that once hung from her ears. “That lady I worked for in Kentucky gave them to me when I got
married.
What they called married back there and back then. (B:61)

Georgia

Prison Camp in Alfred , Georgia

Prison camp is another place where the story takes place ,in fact ,it is the place where Paul D and other
slaves were imprisoned:

The prisoners from Alfred, Georgia, sat down in semicircle near the encampment. No one came and still
they sat. Finally a woman stuck her head out of her house. Night came and nothing happened. At dawn
two men with barnacles covering their beautiful skin approached them. No one spoke for a moment, then
Hi Man raised his
hand. The Cherokee saw the chains and went away. When they returned each carried a handful of small
axes. Two children followed with a pot of mush cooling and thinning in the rain.,(B:109)

Temporal Setting

Temporal Setting refers to the moment during which the events of the story take place. The events of I
Shall Walk Alone occurs in so many spots but the most important are listed below.

Saturday

Saturday is seen as the day Halle and Sethe went on their honeymoon. Saturdays are also described as
days Halle worked to pay off his mother's freedom.
“Anyhow, Mrs. Garner must have seen me in it. I thought I was stealing smart, and she knew everything I
did. Even our honeymoon: going down to the cornfield with Halle. That’s where we went first. A Saturday
afternoon it was. He begged sick so he wouldn’t have to go work in town that day. Usually he worked
Saturdays and Sundays to pay off Baby Suggs’ freedom.(B:62)

Saturday is also seen as the day Babby suggs used to perform her ritual.

In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.
After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The
company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she
shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the trees toward her. They came when the shift
changed on Saturday when the men got paid and worked behind fences , back the outhouse (B:189)

Themes

The theme is the idea or the central message the writer wishes to stress in the story.It is usually not
explicit by the writer but portray through the action of the characters and the resolution of the problem.

Slavery’s Destruction of Identity

Beloved explores devastation brought by slavery, a devastation that continues to haunt those characters
who are former slaves even in freedom. The most dangerous of slavery’s effects is its negative impact on
the former slaves’ senses of self, and the novel contains multiple examples of self-alienation. Paul D, for
instance, is so alienated from himself that at one point he cannot tell whether the screaming he hears is his
own or someone else’s. Slaves were told they were subhuman and were traded as commodities whose
worth could be expressed in dollars. Consequently, Paul D is very insecure about whether or not he could
possibly be a real “man,” and he frequently wonders about his value as a person. Sethe, also, was treated
as a subhuman. She once walked in on schoolteacher giving his pupils a lesson on her “animal
characteristics.” She, too, seems to be alienated from herself and filled with self-loathing.

Solidarity

Beloved demonstrates the extent to which individuals need the support of their communities in order to
survive. Sethe first begins to develop her sense of self during her twenty-eight days of freedom, when she
becomes a part of the Cincinnati community.

The Powers and Limits of Language

When Sixo turns schoolteacher’s reasoning around to justify having broken the rules, schoolteacher whips
him to demonstrate that “definitions belong to the definers,” not to the defined. “ As it can be read in the
following excerpt :Sixo plant rye to give the high piece a better chance. Sixo take and feed
the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo give you more work.”Clever, but schoolteacher beat
him anyway to show him that definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined.(B:178)
The Destruction of Black Identity

Long after the abolishment of slavery, white people try to take control over black people through the
destruction of black identity. The most violent example of this harm is the schoolteacher’s methods of
controlling and punishing the enslaved black people at Sweet Home. His cruel punishments include
burning Sixo alive and whipping Sethe when she informs him that his nephews raped her. He is able to
justify his dehumanization of them by assigning white superiority over their black identity.

Bad way of protection

While there are different forms of intimate relationships throughout the novel, the most prominent ones
are between mothers and daughters. For Sethe, the trauma of motherhood begins with her own mother,
who killed every one of her children but Sethe. While Sethe cannot comprehend the meaning behind her
mother’s actions when she is younger, she will go on to repeat her mother’s violent actions against her
own children to prevent them from being captured into slavery. In both incidents, the mother permits the
survival of one daughter who will live to either break the cycle of intergenerational trauma or sustain the
pain for another generation.

Characters

Sethe

Sethe is the protagonist of the novel. Her traumatic past comes back to haunt her at house 124. She grows
up as aslave, separated from a mother who killed all her children but Sethe. Her mother gives Sethe her
birth father’s male name, but this story is relayed to her by another enslaved woman, as her mother is
killed before she has the chance
to explain. Years later, Sethe repeats her mother’s tragic actions against her own children. After running
away from
Sweet Home where she was enslaved, Sethe lives in hiding at her mother-in-law Grandma Baby Suggs’
house with her
four children. When her former master finds her, she tries to kill her children and herself, succeeding in
killing only her
oldest daughter.

Sethe was thirteen

when she came to Sweet Home and already iron-eyed. She was a timely
present for Mrs. Garner who had lost Baby Suggs to her husband’s high
principles. The five Sweet Home men looked at the new girl and decided to
let her be. They were young and so sick with the absence of women they had
taken to calves. Yet they let the iron-eyed girl be, so she could choose in spite
of the fact that each one would have beaten the others to mush to have her.(B:17)

Beloved
Beloved’s identity is mysterious. The novel provides evidence that she could be an ordinary woman
traumatized by years of captivity, the ghost of Sethe’s mother, or, most convincingly, the embodied spirit
of Sethe’s murdered daughter.

“What might your name be?” asked Paul D.

“Beloved,” she said, and her voice was so low and rough each one looked
at the other two. They heard the voice first—later the name.
“Beloved. You use a last name, Beloved?” Paul D asked her.
“Last?” She seemed puzzled. Then “No,” and she spelled it for them,
slowly as though the letters were being formed as she spoke them.(B:54)

Denver

As Sethe’s youngest and only surviving daughter, Denver has spent much of her life burdened by the
knowledge of her mother’s violence. As the only one of Sethe’s living children to reside at 124, Denver
grows up sullen, petulant,and isolated.

Paul D

Paul D began his enslavement alongside four other men and Sethe at Sweet Home under the ownership of
the Garners. When Mr. Garner passes away, leaving the schoolteacher in charge, Paul D is sold to another
slave owner named Brandywine. When Paul D attacks Brandywine, he is sent to a prison farm in Alfred,
Georgia, where the white guards sexually and physically abuse him. He is fortunately able to escape with
the other inmates during a flood. In the years following, he serves as a soldier on both the Union and
Confederate sides of the Civil War, as he does not have many other employment options available to him
as a former slave. After the war ends, he wanders on his own and takes employment wherever it is
available. After slavery is abolished, he encounters Sethe again in Ohio.

Baby Suggs

After Halle buys his mother, Baby Suggs, her freedom, she travels to Cincinnati, where she becomes a
source of emotional and spiritual inspiration for the city’s black residents. Baby Suggs holds religious
gatherings at a place called the Clearing, where she teaches her followers to love their voices, bodies, and
minds. However, after Sethe’s act of infanticide, Baby Suggs stops preaching and retreats to a sickbed to
die. Even so, Baby Suggs continues to be a source of inspiration long after her death: in Part Three, her
memory motivates Denver to leave 124 and find help. It is partially out of respect for Baby Suggs that the
community responds to Denver’s requests for support.

Schoolteacher

Following Mr. Garner’s death, schoolteacher takes charge of Sweet Home. Cold, sadistic, and vehemently
racist, schoolteacher replaces what he views as Garner’s too-soft approach with an oppressive regime of
rigid rules and punishment on the plantation. Schoolteacher’s own habits are extremely ascetic: he eats
little, sleeps less, and works hard. His most insidious form of oppression is his “scientific” scrutiny of the
slaves, which involves asking questions, taking physical measurements, and teaching lessons to his white
pupils on the slaves’ “animal characteristics.”

Halle

Sethe’s husband and Baby Suggs’s son, Halle is generous, kind, and sincere. He is very much alert to the
hypocrisies of the Garners’ “benevolent” form of slaveholding. Halle eventually goes mad, after
witnessing schoolteacher’s nephews’ violation of Sethe.
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).

Lady Jones

Lady Jones, a light-skinned black woman who loathes her blond hair, is convinced that everyone despises
her for being a woman of mixed race.Lady Jones was mixed. Gray eyes and yellow woolly hair, every
strand of
which she hated—though whether it was the color or the texture even she
didn’t know. She had married the blackest man she could find, had five
rainbow-colored children and sent them all to Wilberforce, after teaching
them all she knew right along with the others who sat in her parlor.(B:226)

Ella

Ella worked with Stamp Paid on the Underground Railroad. Traumatized by the sexual brutality of a
white father and son who once held her captive, she believes, like Sethe, that the past is best left buried.
She knelt and emptied the sack. “My name’s Ella,” she said, taking a wool blanket, cotton cloth, two
baked sweet potatoes and a pair of men’s shoes
from the sack. “My husband, John, is out yonder a ways. Where you heading?”(B:91)

Mr. and Mrs. Garner

Mr. and Mrs. Garner are the comparatively benevolent owners of Sweet Home. The events at Sweet
Home reveal, however, that the idea of benevolent slavery is a contradiction in terms. The Garners’
paternalism and condescension are simply watered-down versions of schoolteacher’s vicious racism.

Mr. and Miss Bodwin

Siblings Mr. and Miss Bodwin are white abolitionists who have played an active role in winning Sethe’s
freedom. The siblings are motivated by good intentions, believing that “human life is holy, all of it.”
garden, pulling vegetables, cooking, washing, she plotted what to do and how. The Bodwins
were most likely to help since they had done it twice. Once for Baby Suggs
and once for her mother. Why not the third generation as well?((B:230)

Amy Denver

A nurturing and compassionate girl who works as an indentured servant, Amy is young, flighty, talkative,
and idealistic. She helps Sethe when she is ill during her escape from Sweet Home, and when she sees
Sethe’s wounds from being whipped, Amy says that they resemble a tree. She later delivers baby Denver,
whom Sethe names after her.
Her name was Amy and she needed beef and pot liquor like nobody in this
world. Arms like cane stalks and enough hair for four or five heads. Slow-
moving eyes. She didn’t look at anything quick. Talked so much it wasn’t
clear how she could breathe at the same time. And those cane-stalk arms, as it
turned out, were as strong as iron.(B:36)

Paul A, Paul F, and Sixo

Paul A and Paul F are the brothers of Paul D. They were slaves at Sweet Home with him, Halle, Sethe,
and, earlier, Baby Suggs. Sixo is another fellow slave. Sixo and Paul A die during the escape from the
plantation.

Greimas Actantial Scheme

actantial model, developed by A.J. Greimas, allows us to break an action down into six facets, or actants:
(1) The subject (for example, the Prince) is what wants or does not want to be joined to (2) an object (the
rescued Princess, for example). (3) The sender (for example, the King) is what instigates the action, while
the (4) receiver (for example, the King, the Princess, the Prince) is what benefits from it. Lastly, (5) a
helper (for example, the magic sword, the horse, the Prince's courage) helps to accomplish the action,
while (6) an opponent (the witch, the dragon, the Prince's fatigue or a suspicion of terror) hinders it.

http://www.signosemio.com/greimas/actantial-model.asp.

2.1 ORIGINS AND FUNCTION

During the sixties, A. J. Greimas (1966, 174-185 and 192-212) proposed the actantial model, which is
based on Propp's theories (1970). The actantial model is a device that can theoretically be used to analyse
any real or thematized action, but particularly those depicted in literary texts or images. In the actantial
model, an action may be broken down into six components, called actants. Actantial analysis consists of
assigning each element of the action being described to the various actantial classes.

2.2 SIX ACTANTS AND THREE AXES

The six actants are divided into three oppositions, each of which forms an axis of the description:
The axis of desire: (1) subject / (2) object. The subject is what is directed toward an object. The
relationship established between the subject and the object is called a junction, and can be further
classified as a conjunction (for example, the Prince wants the Princess) or a disjunction (for example, a
murderer succeeds in getting rid of his victim's body).
The axis of power: (3) helper / (4) opponent. The helper assists in achieving the desired junction between
the subject and object; the opponent hinders the same (for example, the sword, the horse, courage, and the
wise man help the Prince; the witch, the dragon, the far-off castle, and fear hinder him).

The axis of transmission (the axis of knowledge, according to Greimas): (5) sender / (6) receiver. The
sender is the element requesting the establishment of the junction between subject and object (for
example, the King asks the Prince to rescue the Princess). The receiver is the element for which the quest
is being undertaken. To simplify, let us interpret the receiver (or positive receiver) as that which benefits
from achieving the junction between subject and object (for example, the King, the kingdom, the
Princess, the Prince, etc.). Sender elements are often receiver elements as
well.http://www.signosemio.com/greimas/actantial-model.asp

The Greimas Actantial scheme for Beloved is represented in the chart below:
The axis of Desire

The subject

The subject in Beloved is Sethe since she wants to get rid of her past life that still haunt her.

Object

The object are healing. Being former slaves Sethe and some other characters are trying to find healing and
get rid of the trauma of being slaves.

Axis of power

The Helper

To succeed in getting the object Sethe is looking for help. Among the helpers there are Paul D, Babby
suggs, and her daughter Denver.

The opponent

An opponent is the one that hinder the action of the subject. In this novel the opponents in this novel are
Beloved, Schoolteacher.

Axis of transmission

The sender

The sender is what pushes the subject to look for the object. It what pushes the protagonist to look for a
solution. As far as this novel is concerned the sender is the past of Sethe , that takes the form of Beloved.

The receiver

The receiver is the one who benefits from the subject's action. In this Novel the receiver is Sethe her self
and her daughter Amy Denver.