SOURCE: "To Embrace Dead Strangers: Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, Greenwood Press, 1989, pp. 159-69.

In the following essay, Fields explores Morrison's emphasis on "the nature of love," focusing primarily on the personal relationships between Sethe, Beloved, Paul D., and Denver.

The most obvious feature of Toni Morrison's Beloved has been least noted that, whatever else, it profoundly is a meditation on the nature of love. The meditation begins as a love story about a man and a woman. In it Paul D and Sethe meet again after many years and redeem one another. Paul D redeems Sethe from her entrapment in a haunted present; and Sethe, Paul D from his fate of continual wandering. At the time of meeting both are afloat on the surface of the present, set adrift by pasts that have burned away...