The mother-daughter Aje relationship in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Aside from Sethe's reaction, Paul D's inquiry about the newspaper and his counting Sethe's feet make it clear that he is simply not ready, and he does not become prepared until the novel's end, to be the complement that Sethe needs. Paul D is the primary male force in the novel, and it is in his Westernized masculinity--his acts of violence, his audacious attempts to query and judge, his revision of his tender Sethe song, and his refusal to accept Sethe's "thick" love--that his unpreparedness is apparent. Consequently, he is moved out of the sphere and cannot move anything in it.

With the male aspect exorcised, Sethe and Denver harness all their power to re-member Beloved, and with the latter's physical-spiritual reality, the three women become a trinity of Mother, Daughter, and Daughter-Divinity similar to the cosmic matriarchal trinity that Audre Lorde describes in Zami. But rather than the shared signifying "I," a possessive "mine" flows among the women: "Beloved, she my daughter. She mine"; "Beloved is my sister"; "I am Beloved and she [Sethe] is mine" (200, 205, 211). Rather than the customary narrative style, to accommodate the space and the unspoken language of love of this trinity of Aje Morrison uses open-ended lyric free verse:

   You are my face; I am you. Why did
      you leave me who am you?
   I will never leave you again
   Don't ever leave me again
   You will never leave me again
   You went in the water
   I drank your blood
   I brought your milk
   You forgot to smile
   I loved you
   You hurt me
   You came back to me
   You left me
   I waited for you
   You are mine
   You are mine
   You are mine (216-17)

More clearly here, Morrison expands English syntax to accommodate Beloved and to provide space for lost-found souls and intended audience members to enter. (9) With the first line of the passage, Beloved becomes a mirror. The fathomless depths of the black ink encompass, absorb, and reflect every communal member, the pages provide reflection and refraction, the margins seem to radiate with unseen but impending revelations. But the glimpse of eternity Morrison offers her reader glints with a different light for Sethe.

Within the rhythms, de-riddling, and reunion of Beloved, Sethe, and Denver are accusations, gatherings-up of pain, demands of ownership, and reminders of debts impossible to pay. Sethe's enikeji would ordinarily texture her existence and consciousness from the sacred realm. But in having equated her best self with her children, making the decision to save that precious sell and summoning the self for a discussion, Sethe comes face to face with her spirit, her embodied conscience, and her own (and all her people's) past. As any good mother would, Sethe is resolved to nourish her own and our own "best thing," but she doesn't have the balance, discretion, or distance of the elder in "My Mother," and she may not need it.

Sethe has recognized and become enamored by the living presence of her exquisite self, and she seeks to feed that self: