Third Time's A Charm

     In the novel A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, the old and troubled Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come. On the night of Christmas Eve he is warned by these ghosts of the severe consequences of his cold bitterness that could potentially lead to not only the death of ones around him, but death of himself. Similarly, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe comes in the presence of Paul D, Denver, and Beloved to be saved from the long, suffering life she would have lived had she continued to put up with the haunting of her past.

     On the night of Christmas Eve, Scrooge returns home from work to be visited by Marley’s ghost, the ghost of his former business partner who died seven years before. Marley’s ghost carries a load of heavy chains, representing the consequences of greed and selfishness. This ghost parallels with Sethe’s baby ghost that haunts 124 in the beginning of the novel. The presence of the vengeful baby disrupts 124 and constantly reminds Sethe of her murder, which the child believes to be a greedy and selfish action.

     Soon after, the Ghost of Christmas Past haunts Scrooge. The ghost takes him back to his youth, when he was kinder and more innocent. Scrooge also sees his neglected fiancée who ended their relationship because she knew that he could never love her more than he loves money. In Beloved, Paul D represents the “ghost” of the past. He is the first character that brings her into a different state of mind. Paul D brings back good and bad memories of Sethe’s past, including her relationship with him. This sparks her desire to want to go back to feeling that love for him. Paul D convinces Sethe to stop restricting herself to the house. He also tells her to never love one thing a lot, but love a lot of things a little. Comparably, the Ghost of Christmas Past convinces Scrooge to stop restricting himself to only work and money.

     Unlike every other character in Beloved, Denver lives in the present instead of the past. She is aware of what will happen as the course of events changes and tries to keep Sethe grounded, just as the Ghost of Christmas Present tries to show Scrooge. 124 remains separated from the entire community until Denver takes action and changes that. After Denver seeks help, 124 becomes a part of the community and lives up to the present day, no longer stuck in the black hole of the past.

     Ghosts are typically known to be dead people looking for vengeance, or are omens to death. Beloved, although she is a figure of the past, brings out what was determined to come for Sethe: death. Therefore, Beloved’s character mirrors the third ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Sethe was going to let the spirit of 124 and her past eat away at her soul if she didn’t let it go. Beloved returns to surface that guilt which lets Sethe see what her future would be if she wasn’t saved from the past by Paul D and reminded of the present by Denver. If Beloved had not come in human form, Sethe could have died of guilt and loneliness. If the ghost of the future had not come to Scrooge, he could have died for the same reasons. The ghost shows Scrooge his name on a gravestone, which haunts him, just as the name “Beloved” on the baby’s gravestone haunts Sethe. Scrooge’s gravestone is the final straw that brings him to a new state of mind, like Beloved does to Sethe.

     Without Paul D, Denver, and Beloved, Sethe would have never been saved from the haunting of her past, in the same way as Scrooge had the three ghosts to bring him to a present state. In his book “Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination” addressed in the article “How To Do Things With Ghosts” http://www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/ghostlit/howto.htm , Avery Gordon claims that “being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.” This reinforces my point of how Scrooge and Sethe both come to recognize the consequences of falling in to what haunts them.