Deaf Until Acceptance: Close Reading

"Even when she did muster the courage to ask Nelson Lord's question, she could not hear the courage to ask Nelson Lord's question, she could not hear Sethe's answer, nor Baby Suggs' words, nor anything at all thereafter. Fro two years she walked in silence too solid for penetration but which gave her eyes a power even she found hard to believe...For two years she head nothing at all and then she heard close thunder crawling up the stairs...The return of Denver's hearing, cut off by an answer she could not bear to hear, cut on by the sound of her dead sister trying to climb the stairs, signaled another shift in the fortunes of the people of 124. From then on the presence was full of spite." (122)


Before she lost her hearing, a fellow pupil in her class named Nelson Lord asks her "the question about her mother that put chalk...out of reach forever" (121). Toni Morrison does not choose to include the actual question Nelson Lord asks Denver - but I can infer that he asked her something about her family's past (and specifically where her mother came from), a topic that she doesn't feel comfortable talking about. Denver perceives the question to be racially motivated and mocking. She doesn't have any friends or companions at school after she is insulted by this remark from one of her peers - and the "deafness" follows. However, she explains that she "should have laughed when he said it", acknowledging Nelson's innocent and curious intentions. Denver physical change reveals the influence her family's past has had on her inner insecurities and identity. She doesn't want to accept the comments that her classmates made, and her ears symbolically "blocks out the words" as a way of protecting herself from truths she doesn't want to hear.

The noises of the ghost are the first things Denver hears after two years of silence. Once Denver finally accepts her mother's past, her body allows her to hear the noises the baby ghost is making. This "physical" alteration from a past event shows the overall theme in Beloved that an individual's past still has the power to infiltrate and affect the present, especially in such an extreme and violent past like Sethe's. Even though Denver was not ever brought into the environment of slavery, affects of that time are everywhere. She sees it socially when she goes to school. She sees it within her family because of the obvious impacts they are still having on Sethe and even Paul D.

Earlier in the novel, when the baby ghosts' presence is noticeable, Denver is always either ignorant or annoyed by the spirit. Symbolically, this is Denver's way of ignoring her family's reality. When Denver is finally ready to accept these facts, she is not bothered by the spirit's haunting. It can even be argued that Denver finds companionship with the baby ghost, which similarly affects the "sister"- like relationship Denver has with Beloved.