In Morrison’s novel, the titular character Beloved shines. “That’s how Beloved looked – gilded and shining” (Morrison 76), and though Paul D expressed his wariness towards the mysterious young woman that shows up on the doorstep, the two women of 124, Sethe and her daughter Denver, immediately take it upon themselves to become caretakers in ways they’ve never been before. The distinction between humanness and motherhood continually weaves through the timelines and characters of this novel, but in the beginning of the novel, Sethe’s past trauma and its relation to Denver and Beloved walks the dividing line. Beloved is a thing almost entirely other; constantly referred to by her newness and confusing presence, after a month of staying with Sethe, they still had not “gotten used to her gravelly voice, and the song that seemed to lie in it,” “for just outside music it lay” (72) and Sethe, Denver, and Paul D remain enclosed in a vicinity outside of her foreign presence. Denver, entranced by her newness, cares for her as if she were Beloved’s mother, but Beloved is only satisfied when hearing stories of Sethe’s past.
Sethe was amazed at Beloved’s desire to hear the stories “because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost…Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or her thirst for hearing it – in any case it was an unexpected pleasure” (69). At this point in the novel, Sethe has not questioned if Beloved is connected to her now departed child, but telling Beloved these stories of her past at Sweet Home enacts a caretaking she deliberately avoids with Denver, as the memories are too painful if the distance does not exist between them. Beloved exists in the “gleaming, powerful world” of Sethe’s memory that is “made more so by Denver’s absence from it” (79). Sethe’s “remembrance of glittering headstone” (63), marked only by the name Beloved, establishes Beloved’s belonging inside this past life, as they both shimmer in the light of remembrance, and remembrance is how Beloved asks to be cared for. Though Denver is Sethe’s only daughter still alive, she cannot exist inside the world of memory because she exists in the present moment, and cannot be cared for in this way. Sethe then divides Denver and Beloved through remembrance, or deliberate avoidance, as an act of motherhood.