Why does Paul D show Sethe the clipping?

Paul D tells her that her love is “too thick.” He feels distanced from Sethe and condemns her act, saying, “You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” by which he suggests that she acted like a beast in attempting to murder her own children.

This relationship has a stabilizing effect for both. Paul D’s caring manner rejuvenates Sethe, and Sethe’s affection returns to Paul D and his lost sense of manhood. However, Paul D also incites conflict. His presence makes Denver jealous, and Beloved eventually targets Paul D, driving him out of the house.

Returning to the present, Stamp Paid offers Paul D proof that Sethe was jailed for murdering Beloved. He shows Paul D Sethe’s pencil-drawn portrait in a newspaper clipping that describes the murder.

Inexplicably, he decides not to confess his relations with Beloved, instead proposing that he and Sethe conceive a child. Paul D’s proposal surprises him with its threefold application: A pregnancy would return him to Sethe, salvage his manhood, and break Beloved’s hold on him. Sethe cuddles with him on the way home.

Paul D is horrified. He finally realizes what Stamp Paid was trying to tell him. It wasn’t just that Sethe killed her baby—it was that she didn’t know the difference between safety and killing her daughter with a handsaw.

Here, the narrator explains that Paul D returns to Sethe because he realizes she has a special quality: She makes him feel better about himself. Sethe sees Paul D for who is, and just as importantly, helps him see the real Paul D, not the man debased by slavery.

How can Sethe and Paul D be seen as perpetual fugitives? Paul D spends years wandering from one place to another. … At the beginning of the novel, Sethe says that she will not leave 124 because she will never run from another thing in her life. Nevertheless, she is always fleeing her own memories.

The obvious answer: Sethe killed her baby girl in Baby Suggs’s shed. Because of that day, Baby Suggs loses the will to live like before; she shuts her house to the townspeople and stops going to the Clearing.

Paul D’s seduction by Beloved is juxtaposed against the narration of his past. The most obvious implication is that Paul D, in being seduced by Beloved, is somehow confronting his own past. … Beloved’s desire to seduce Paul D can be seen in two ways. On the surface, she is forcing him to betray Sethe.

Paul D’s arrival is not comforting to Denver because Paul D threatens Denver’s exclusive hold on Sethe’s affections. He also reminds Denver about the existence of a part of Sethe that she has never been able to access.

When Stamp Paid hears that Paul D has left 124, he feels guilty for having told Paul D about Sethe’s crime without considering her family’s welfare. … Sethe takes Beloved and Denver ice-skating, partly to show that she has not been devastated by Paul D’s departure.

Baby Suggs Timeline and Summary Baby Suggs (a.k.a. Jenny) is born into slavery. She has nine children, but every one of them except for her last one, Halle, is taken from her. By the time she and Halle get to Sweet Home, she’s old and a bit lame. That’s why Halle offers to buy her freedom from Mr.

At one point, Beloved seduces Paul D. After learning that Sethe killed her daughter, he leaves. The situation at 124 Bluestone worsens, as Sethe loses her job and becomes completely fixated on Beloved, who is soon revealed to be pregnant. … The other women restrain her, and during the commotion Beloved disappears.

She sits down on a stump outside of 124, where Sethe, Denver, and Paul D find her upon returning from the carnival. Immediately upon seeing the woman, Sethe feels as though she has to urinate and runs around to the outhouse. … Sethe tries to talk to Beloved, but Beloved falls asleep, exhausted.

Paul D resolves to tell Sethe about what’s been happening and goes to meet her at the restaurant where she works. He finds her and prepares to tell her but changes his mind at the last second and tells her that he wants to have a child with her. Sethe thinks the idea is ridiculous. … Sethe and Paul D walk back to 124.

Stamp Paid shows Paul D an article about Sethe killing her daughter, which leads Paul D to confront Sethe. By the end of the fight, Paul D moves out.

Like Odysseus, Paul D enters a troubled home and does battle with the troubling forces. … Paul D himself is not quite sure that he is Odysseus—whether he adequately fills out the form of heroic manhood embodied by other Sweet Home men like Halle or Sixo.

Psychological Effects Of Slavery Through The Character Paul D Paul D like every other character in the novel, toiled under the grim and bitter conditions of slavery. He suffered serious psychological calamities that has forced him to go into a state of repressiveness. It doesn’t allow him to heal properly.

One night, Beloved comes to Paul D in the cold house, where he now sleeps, and says, “I want you to touch me on the inside part. . . . And you have to call me my name.” Paul D tries to resist her strange power, but he has sex with her, and the tin tobacco box breaks open.

• A sudden loss of hearing and sight.
• Fatigue from the previous night’s party.
• Lack of cooperation from the black community.
• Her rejection of religion.

Paul D relives the savage treatment that he endured while shackled to ten other slaves and transported to a brutal prison for the crime of threatening to kill Brandywine, the man who bought him from schoolteacher after the attempted escape from Sweet Home.

Sethe, a 13-year-old child of unnamed slave parents, arrives at Sweet Home, an idyllic plantation in Kentucky operated by Garner, an unusually humane master, and his wife, Lillian. Within a year, Sethe selects Halle Suggs to be her mate and, by the time she is 18, bears him three children.

Baby Suggs is the mother of Halle, which makes her Sethe’s mother-in-law. She was born into slavery, and she in turn gave birth to nine children. All of her children except for Halle were taken from her and sold to other slaveowners, and in the novel’s present time all of them are presumed dead.

Garner gave Sethe as a wedding gift to mark the union that had no proper ceremony or celebration. Sethe describes how she pilfered fabrics to fashion a wedding dress, which she topped off with a wool shawl that “kept [her] from looking like a haint peddling.” Following the Saturday honeymoon in the cornfield, Mrs.

Freedom, according to these excerpts from Beloved, means not having to ask anyone if it is okay to love one’s own children. … In effect, Morrison’s message about freedom, as Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Paul D all explain, meaning being allowed to love your own children–that is a postmodern element in this text.

The process begins one night when he sleeps in a rocking chair rather than upstairs with Sethe. … He recognizes that he has felt the urge to leave a home before, but this is different, since he still loves Sethe and wants to stay. Once tired of the storeroom, he begins sleeping outside in the cold house.

Back in the Clearing (in the present), Sethe thinks that she’d be better if she could just feel Baby Suggs’s fingers on her back one more time. All of a sudden, she does feel fingers on her back. … Denver sees Sethe choking and cries out. Immediately, the strangling stops.

After Paul D’s tobacco tin collapses, he experiences emotions untested since his escape from slavery. When he has sex with Beloved, he “[says] ‘Red Heart. Red Heart,’ over and over again. … While red mainly symbolizes lustful love for Paul D, red represents motherly love in his fellow former slave, Sethe.

Upon Sethe’s back is a maze of scars, referred to by Paul D as a “chokecherry tree.” It is the remains of an operation schoolteacher performed upon her back in an effort to determine how much she resembled an animal. The tree, which is ever-present but can never be seen, is symbolic of the burden which Sethe carries.

Garner, crying like a baby, had sold his brother to pay off the debts that surfaced the minute she was widowed. Then schoolteacher arrived to put things in order. But what he did broke three more Sweet Home men and punched the glittering iron out of Sethe’s eyes, leaving two open wells that did not reflect firelight.

Invigorated by the recent capture, schoolteacher’s nephews seize Sethe in the barn and violate her, stealing the milk her body is storing for her infant daughter.

When he has a sexual encounter with Beloved, this opens up his box, revealing his red heart and opening him up to feeling again. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.

Sethe has four children with Halle: Howard, Buglar, a baby girl, and Denver. She’s pregnant with Denver when Mr. Garner dies and schoolteacher comes to Sweet Home. Sethe agrees to escape Sweet Home with Halle and the other slaves, but their plan fails.

Schoolteacher beats Paul A—a first for the group, who’ve had it pretty good at Sweet Home up until schoolteacher replaces Mr. Garner. And Paul A becomes one of the casualties of the big escape. He never shows up at the designated spot, and Sethe suggests that he was hanged, with his head and feet cut off (19.198).

Garner always said about his slaves. Other slaveowners have “boys” who they infantilize and distrust, but Garner treats his slaves with respect. For instance, Halle earns money to buy his mother’s freedom, the men use guns, and slaves can learn to read. In reality, Garner’s unique version of slavery is unsustainable.

While Sethe believes she is an abused young woman, Denver is certain that Beloved is the reincarnation of her dead sister’s ghost. … In the cold house, however, Beloved momentarily disappears and Denver panics, distressed over the loss of the one thing that has given her life meaning.

But these traits could also support the theory that is held by most of the characters in the novel, as well as most readers: Beloved is the embodied spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter. Beloved is the age the baby would have been had it lived, and she bears the name printed on the baby’s tombstone.

Does Beloved consider Paul D a threat? … Why does Paul D feel unable to control his own actions around Beloved? He is insecure and questions his own manhood. Why doesn’t Paul D want to ask Sethe for help?