When reading the first 100 pages of Beloved, I was struck by how resentful Denver is to anyone and everyone she perceives to have abandoned her. This sense of abandonment threads throughout this first portion, extending to her brothers, her grandmother, and even her mother when Paul D shows up and they begin to talk about their lives at Sweet Home. It excludes her, something she can’t stand, evidenced by the later quote “This was the party of the story she [Denver] loved. She was coming to it now, and she loved it because it was all about herself…” (91). Denver is not a person who can easily accept the kind of change that people leaving and entering her life creates. At the beginning of the novel, she is described as being “ten and still mad at Baby Suggs for dying” (4). Her anger towards her grandmother is irrational, but it is consistent. She feels that sense of resentment and betrayal towards her brothers, too, for running away, something their own mother seems to understand and accept. When Paul D and then Beloved enter their lives, she’s forced to fight for her mother’s attention in a way she hasn’t had to for years. There are now parts to her mother’s life that she is not an insider to, and it frustrates her and invokes a deep sense of jealousy. Curiously, the only person she doesn’t seem to hold anger towards for abandoning her in some way is Halle, her father, perhaps because no one really knows for sure what happened to him.
As Beloved’s personality and reason for showing up at 124 become clearer, it is also clear that Beloved and Denver truly are sisters. Only the two of them know what/who Beloved really is. More importantly, they share the same desire for Sethe’s attention. Denver delights in the thought of having a sister, someone her age to talk to and spend time with, but when Beloved makes it clear that she’s only there for their mother, Denver becomes defensive, hurt, and jealous. Beloved’s conviction threatens Denver’s place in her own home, when Denver asks what her plans are and Beloved says she’s staying because she belongs there. “I belong here too,” Denver insists, sensing that her sister’s ghost intends to make room for herself, even if it costs Denver in the process (89).
Both young women are deeply resentful. Denver’s dominant nature stood out in the first half of this section, but she has met her match in Beloved, the sister she wanted but perhaps shouldn’t. Beloved, evidently, comes to 124 on account of unfinished business and wants to take in all the knowledge she can about her mother, compelling Denver to tell her the story of Denver’s birth. She is greedy in a way that Denver recognizes, because she behaves similarly about her and Sethe’s status quo when Paul D shows up and she has to accept that her mother had a life before her. After all the people who have left her, Sethe is all she has left and so Denver takes her time coming around to Paul D. Beloved is reckoning with the opposite—the life her mother had after her—and so the two sisters stand in a uniquely similar yet disparate position.