Water in Beloved

      Hello there, blog. Today in class, we got into our jigsaw groups of four. My group chose "water" as our motif because we saw some connections. On page 60, there's a quote about how Beloved came to 124 Bluestone Road. “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water. She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree…..Nobody saw her emerge or came accidentally by” (60). This is when Beloved came out of the water. Beloved was killed by her mother, Sethe, to save her from a life of slavery. She engraves "Beloved" on her tombstone. This unknown woman, Beloved, is reborn out of the water on the night Paul D, Sethe and Denver come back from the carnival. Water equals baptism ( from How to Read Literature Like a Professor). Believers in Christ are also reborn when they are  baptized. Becasue she was just born (again), she's baby-like. On page sixty, it says, “Exhausted again, she sat down on the first handy place- a stump not far from the steps of 124. By then  keeping her eyes open was less of an effort. Her neck, it’s circumference no wider than a parlor-service saucer, kept bending and her chin brushed the bit of lace edging her dress” (60).  And "she had new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands” (61). You can tell that she is being described as a newborn. Something weird I noticed while reading Beloved the first time was that Sethe had to use the restroom all of a sudden, "for some reason she could not immediately account for, the moment she got close enough to the face [Beloved’s], Sethe’s bladder filled to capacity” (61). I wondered why Morrison put that in, it seemed unnecesary. But in fact, it's part of the symbolism. It symbolizes the breaking of water before a baby is born. Sethe's urine was “ like flooding the boat when Denver was born. So much water Amy said, ‘Hold on, Lu. You are going to sink us you keep that up.’ But there was no stopping water breaking from a breaking womb and there was no stopping now” (61). Beloved was very thirsty when she arrived. "Four times Denver filled it [cup] and four times the woman drank as though she had crossed a desert" (62). On slave ships, the "pre-slaves" being shipped to America were crammed and weren't given water or food. Beloved was a pre-slave, in a way, because she died before she got to become one. She represents the thirsty passengers of the slave ships. Now that's one complex symbol!