Nearly the same age as Telemachus and, like him, on the cusp of adulthood but stunted in an artificially prolonged childhood, Denver must leave home in order to bring about a change. If readers have often failed to see Paul D as a version of Odysseus, that may be because Paul D himself fails to do so.Īs in Homer, the suitors cannot be vanquished without the maturation and heroism of Telemachus, so in Beloved a crucial turn occurs when Denver takes action. It troubled him that, concerning his own manhood, he could not satisfy himself on that point.” Paul D compares himself constantly and invidiously to Halle and Sixo: “t was always clear to Paul D that those two were men whether Garner said so or not. “Now there was a man,” Paul D reflects post-coitally next to Sethe, thinking of Sixo “Himself lying in the bed … didn’t compare.” Shattered by his own Odyssean wanderings and trials, Paul D lacks the arrogant self-assurance (and, one might add, the ready supernatural assistance of Athena) that underlies Odysseus’ “spirit tempered to endure” (all Odyssey quotations are from Robert Fagles’s 1996 translation). 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. The suitors troop down to the underworld, apparently never to trouble Odysseus and his family again, but in Beloved the ghost is back, in stronger form, just a few chapters later. Unlike Odysseus, however, Paul D has indeed won only a battle, not the war. Like Odysseus reuniting with his long-lost wife after dispatching the suitors, Paul D goes to bed with Sethe (who has a chokecherry tree of scars on her back instead of Penelope’s olive-tree-rooted bed) after winning the battle with the ghost of 124. “God damn it! Hush up! … Leave the place alone! Get the hell out!” he yells, engaging in his own slaughter in the hall as he smashes the ghost into retreat with a table. So is Halle Suggs the Odysseus of Beloved-a father and hero who, unlike Odysseus, never returns home? Or is it one of the other “Sweet Home Men,” Paul D, who shows up at 124 Bluestone Road in the first chapter of Beloved? Like Odysseus, Paul D enters a troubled home and does battle with the troubling forces. Both works begin in media res-after the father’s mother (Anticleia in the Odyssey, Baby Suggs in Beloved) has already died of grief-and, in fact, chronologically near the end of the period of time that their stories will cover. Denver, like Telemachus, lives a lonely existence in this troubled household, waiting with uncertain hope for the return of a father she has never met and who may in fact be dead. Sethe has been cut off from her community and eventually falls into a despair as deep if not deeper than Penelope’s. Sethe and Denver’s house, similarly, is tormented by a jealous ghost driven by a parasitic desire for Sethe.
Penelope and Telemachus are haunted by parasitic suitors who lay waste their home in jealous pursuit of the woman of the house, who languishes in torment up in her chambers. Like the Odyssey, Beloved begins in a haunted house. Nevertheless, from its opening chapter Morrison’s novel makes clear that its story ought to be placed next to Homer’s. Perhaps the interpretive omission can be attributed to the apparent absence, in Beloved, of a central Odysseus figure-a journeying hero in the mold of Ulysses Everett McGill, W. Yet little has been written about how Beloved makes use of Homer’s epic poem-more sneakily than Joyce does in Ulysses or the Coen brothers do in O Brother, but arguably more profoundly than other texts that have received more notice for doing so. The most celebrated novel by America’s most recent Nobel laureate, Beloved has itself been turned into a feature film, in addition to being heavily scrutinized by the academy. In the era of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Cold Mountain, it is puzzling that more attention has not been paid to the extensive parallels to The Odyssey in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.